The Lipstick Republican

It all starts... with a choice -

2010-07-03T07:40:00.004-04:00

- again to turn a formerly political blog into a movie review one: yes, Eclipse is out, yes, I saw it at its opening at midnight a couple of nights ago, yes, I saw it again alone yesterday, and yes, I'm going to talk about it herein.

First let me say that Roger Ebert is a big whiner. His review, which I saw described elsewhere as having "richly" detailed the plot of the entire Twilight series, was full of - let's call it "baloney": it was so rife with misstatements and chortling over his and his audience's sophistication (of course as contrasted with the Twilight girls' silly naivete) that it was hard for me to read seriously.

Because that, I think, is where you have to start with these movies: in order to do justice to the experience of those same Twilight girls, of whom I represent a piece of the upper end of the bell curve, the movies have to be in earnest. There's plenty of room for teenage repartee, but the object of the game is suspension of disbelief - Bella really is, for some reason, the target of deadly supernatural forces; she really is the love of Edward's, um, existence; she really does have to choose between Edward's overprotective, jealous, but very sincere adoration and Jacob's more normal plane of devotion.

Or, as the Eclipse screenplay makes clear to the relief of moms of tweens and romantic teens everywhere, she has to choose between who she ought to (implied: "wishes she could") be and who she is. Finally, an attempt to explain why she sticks with the vampire! Melissa Whosis (sorry, I don't google before my first cup of coffee), who wrote the screenplay, either on her own or by direction gives Bella one speech in which she explains that since discovering that the vampires' "world" exists, she's been more comfortable, more self-actualized if you will, whenever she's been in or interacting with that world than she ever was while "literally stumbling through [her] life." Great move! I've been Team Edward all along, but - more on this point later - it's awfully nice to have a reason for it beyond, "He's smokin'!" (Especially since young Taylor Lautner has now just about achieved parity in that regard, much as it oogs me out to admit it.)

All righty then: this is the best of the Twilight franchise. Partly that distinction was handed to it on a platter, because of the books, Eclipse is also the best - most "happening" plot, best character interactions, best theme to move it along. But it's also an earned distinction, as the secondary characters have a chance in Eclipse to do something - one scene in which Jasper tells the story of his bloody life before becoming a Cullen finally gives Jackson Rathbone something worthwhile to say, and he and Ashley Greene/Alice have a nice little moment at its end, for instance. Rosalie finally gets a backstory for why she's so darn mad all the time (that's in the book, but Nikki Reed does a good job with it). The Lesser Wolves, for lack of a better term, get to strut a little of their stuff, albeit mostly silently, hanging onto their endearing teen-boy goofiness where it makes sense but going alert, wary, and all business when they're around vampires.

And Jacob and Edward? Well, I've always given Robert Pattinson credit for being a better actor than his pretty face allows him to be for many critics. The big challenge for him in these movies is indeed to overcome that face: can we feel sympathy for him in spite of the fact (yes, fact) that Jacob really is the better choice by pretty much any light? And Taylor Lautner - can he be believable as the underdog love-interest? Can he generate enough romantic chemistry with Bella (they had plenty of buddy-buddy chemistry in New Moon) to make their climactic kiss make sense?

A scene in which Jacob and Edward actually talk with one another, awkward in the book because it has to take place as Bella, the narrator, drifts in and out of sleep (lots of references to "what a strange dream I'm having, all this whispering," etc.), works better in the movie because the movie is able to suspend its already less determined first-person-ness temporarily and have that conversation while Bella's actually out like a light. Edward's very reluctant resignation to the necessity of Jacob's keeping Bella warm is clear; Jacob's smug satisfaction in that role is just as clear. Each of them moves from belligerence to a tentative understanding, even acceptance, of one another's importance to Bella, while in Edward's case never ceding his primacy, and in Jacob's case never ending his rivalry. Edward is smoother, more measured in his emotions, either because of his much longer life (or whatever) or because Robert Pattinson's just that way; who knows? Jacob lapses back into uncertain-sixteen-year-old as he asks how Edward felt when he thought he'd lost Bella forever back in the New Moon days; it was a credible moment. In other words, the boys did good.

As for their interactions with Bella now. Edward has fewer "Twilight" moments now, in which he seems to be orbiting Bella, anticipating her, weirdly cautious with her - I'm thinking of the scene in Twilight when he helps her off with her jacket the first time she visits his family, when she's just trying to shrug it off and he's getting in the way trying to take it, touching her while trying not to touch her too much; that little bit was a nice illustration of the dual differences of era and species between them. Instead, Edward finally acts mostly human with Bella in Eclipse - true, the most perfectly devoted (and chaste) beau a high school senior ever had in her most fevered dreams, but at least not strange. They're very sweet together.

Jacob and Bella? Trickier. Jacob, appropriately, seems to feel time flying by, all through the film; he rushes everything he says and does with Bella. There's the sense that he'd have better luck with Bella if he took more time with her, and that he knows it, too. His desperation is pretty palpable. His first, unwelcome kiss got lots of squees from the girls (I restrained myself, cognizant that better was on the way); the second, which he approached with a small smile that I thought was just about the perfect balance between joy and triumph, got more, followed by that sighing silence that meant, "OK, now I understand that 'Team Jacob' thing." Also very sweet. Taylor Lautner had some heavy lifting to do in this role, in this film - as heavy as this genre gets, anyway; I thought he carried it off well.

As for the cinematography: we were back to the Twilight blues in many places, cold sharp drama, but overall effectively used; the special effects were, I thought, graceful and not too intrusive, so that's a big plus. There was a LOT less sparkling, such that when it did occur, its subtlety was a subtext rather than a "Hey! Look at me sparkling!" moment.

So now is the time in Sprockets when I diss the critics. Their problem, most of 'em, is that they insist on reviewing these movies as if they stand alone, not just separate from one another but separate from the canon of the four books. I use "canon" here advisedly, not just with regard to the details of the books' world, but also with regard to the attitude of those who read and enjoy them. I've never deluded myself that these books are lit'rature - they're an escape into the world teenage girls like me (I'm still well in touch with that girl I used to be) wished existed. Not a world of vampires and werewolves, although as long as we're making a world, why not make it an interesting one? But a world in which those things that seemed absolutely vital, or absolutely clear, or absolutely unbearable, to my absolutist thirteen-to-nineteen-year-old self, really were that absolute. A world in which my first love really was the love of my life, in which his leaving me felt like my death, in which every decision I made felt as if it had lifelong consequences. It's adolescence in its purest form, and when it's examined from a position of adult judgment and experience (I won't call it "wisdom" since I don't give a lot of movie critics credit for that), it looks jejune.

My church just put on Our Town. At one point in the second act, "Love and Marriage," the Stage Manager urges the audience to remember what young love was like, to put themselves into that faraway place in order to appreciate the scene to come. That attitude is what the Twilight series, books or movies, also requires: a willingness to forget what you've learned over time, to ignore the constant pull of popular culture to be more and more cynical, and simply to open oneself to a kind of distilled, self-perceived purity that doesn't actually exist in ground truth. I can do that. I don't often get the chance, which is why I've enjoyed these books and movies so much.

Sherlock Holmes, steampunk, and canon

2010-01-17T17:47:00.003-05:00

How this sorta-politics blog keeps turning into a movie review blog, I don't know... but it keeps happening.

I finally saw Sherlock Holmes today, having wanted to catch its Christmas opening but being far too busy living actual life with my actual loved ones to indulge in vicarious life with the ever-crushworthy detective. (More about that in a moment.) I was... bemused. Because I liked it QUITE a lot, in spite of a convoluted and hard-to-follow plot (which, like my darling Twilight movies, relies pretty heavily on an informed audience, of which I'm definitely one - but it was still hard to follow), weird casting in the parts of Irene Adler (about whom I say "meh") and John Watson (about whom I say, "FINALLY, a movie where I can like Jude Law!" even while acknowledging how little like the traditionally understood Watson he is), and heavy application of steampunk.

Actually, that last point turns out to be a big reason why I liked it, I think, to my surprise: I thought the steampunk stuff was distracting me until I suddenly realized that I was looking for it eagerly in every scene.

So anyway, what was to like? STRICT ADHERENCE TO CANON on points that don't usually benefit from that attention. I've read six or seven critics' reviews now, and (I love when this happens) except about Downey's performance as Holmes, they don't agree about much. However, one point on which they do seem to agree is that this movie is, like, totally revisionist. I argue that it's Basil Rathbone that's the revisionist (but great in his own way, I'm sure - though it occurs to me that I've never seen any Holmes movie until this one). Go back and read the stories: Holmes isn't fastidious, he's messy. (Tobacco in a slipper?) He isn't prissy, he's blasé about moral lapses. (King of Bohemia has ill-advised affair with Adler; Holmes doesn't bat an eyelash, just goes to work recovering the evidence.) He is a bare-knuckles fighter, as well as an adept of "baritsu." He is likely to appear in disreputable costumes at unexpected moments. He doesn't eat, live, or entertain himself as a Victorian British gentleman of independent means would; he's described by his creator (or is it "his biographer"? Who can say?) as "bohemian" and "eccentric." So when I first saw trailers for this movie, I thought, "Robert Downey, Jr.? Really?" But I quickly came around to, "Swoon!"

Because I've had a crush on Holmes forEVer. My parents had a copy of The Seven Per Cent Solution lying around; I fell into it when I was, oh, twelve, and the allure of the moody druggy Holmes led me to the "trad" Holmes of Doyle - wherein the moody druggy Holmes was visible at the edges of the stories - and those two together led me to the Laurie King Holmes-in-"retirement," the most crushworthy of all, because finally we no longer have to guess at and hope for clues to his emotional climate. Holmes: the best bad boy ever, because he's not really bad, just inscrutable and untouchable.

I also decided, eventually, that I liked the direction and the cinematography a lot: there was not one scene of a sunny London, which makes great sense in the time-context: the sun had a tough row to how in coal-heated London. Ritchie's overcranked and undercranked scenes were disconcerting but effective; perhaps if I watched 24 I'd not be so whipsawed by them, but even though I had to mentally reset myself each time the speed of action changed, I dug the way it looked.

And the Holmes-Watson bromance? First, never say that word again; it's stupid. Second, you know, there was no "gay" there for me, though just about every reviewer seemed to find it. (Please see the paragraph a few up, about how dreamy Holmes is, and then see "projection" in the dictionary, I'm thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Obviously I'm employing it myself, incorporating my own bias.) The scene (SPOILER!) in which Adler, Holmes, and Watson are arrayed in that order along the side of a building that explodes toward them was, I thought, terrific: Holmes, caught between his best friend and the newly returned woman he won't quite admit he loves, makes a typical Holmes snap decision, turns toward one, looks back toward the other, and races for the one - all in slow-motion, and shot confusingly on purpose (I think) so that until he reaches his destination we can't tell which one he's running toward, which one he's wishing he could also save. How is that evidence of Holmes's sexual orientation? He loves both; he can only get to one. The rest of the Holmes-Watson interaction is exactly like the conversations my husband has with his brother - occasional uncomfortable references to an affection they don't want to talk about, lots of ribbing, quarrelling, and punching. What?

And the steampunk. Brass clockworks. A waistcoat lying dusty in the road (you know that thing that appears sometimes in catalogues and women's mags as a "weskit"? A tailored vest? Well, that's a waistcoat. It's how it's pronounced. Silly catalogues and mags). The Tower Bridge under construction - it's ultramodern! It's ultra-retro! It's an engineering marvel rendered with slide rules and a preponderance of hand tools with steam power (hence the "steam" of steampunk) for the heavy lifting. Whoa. It's all so beautiful, so soot-soiled, so romantic, so gritty, so full of portents, manners, cruelty, and quick double-entendre.

I give the movie a big analog 9 or so, cast in brass and tarnished by the sulfurous "fog" of Victorian London. Fun!

Global warmi - I mean "climate change"

2009-11-24T08:55:00.002-05:00

Megan McArdle, writing here in The Atlantic, criticizes the "scientists" (scare quotes rendered necessary by their alleged reprehensible behavior) involved in the CRU anthropogenic-global-warming email collusion/data fudging/destroying-fest. That's good; she should. She says that

...I have yet to see the makings of a grand conspiracy, rather than the petty bullying of the powerful over the weak, the insider of the outsider. I'll take the statements of this particular group of scientists with a little more salt in the future. But as far as I can tell, the weight of the evidence--and what we know about the history of the planet, and carbon dioxide--still seems to be on their side.

But here's the problem: what is the "weight of the evidence"? This group's original data set was destroyed. Inadvertantly? Possibly... but considering that they were discussing destroying it in the event of a freedom-of-information request, that too is questionable. As one of McArdle's commenters said, "One notes that, in both law and common sense, when a person destroys evidence, you are allowed to presume that it supported his opponent's case."

Sure, it's not the only evidence. But there have been problems with every data set I've heard of: new urban heat-sinks where temperature stations used to be rural, cherry-picked tree ring data, glaciers growing where not measured for an AGW paper, shrinking where the AGW boosters measured, inability to explain the mechanism behind either an ice age or a warming period, pre-1960s temperature data that dramatically smooths out temperature variance graphs, Mars warming up in the absence of coal-fired power plants and SUVs... With all this uncertainty out there - uncertainty noticed only by "skeptics" (another McArdle commenter noted that skepticism used to be considered a virtue in science, not a vice) - one could be forgiven for believing that the really bad acting on the part of these CRU folks calls their findings into question.

I used to be a geologist. In the summer before I graduated, I worked for a gold mining company, collecting rock samples from a very steep hunk of the Sierra Nevada. Here's how you collect a rock sample: you locate yourself on a map, find a rock where you're standing, whack it with a rock hammer until you can collect enough pieces of it to fill a bag about the size of a quart of milk. Mark the location on your map with a unique identifier, mark the bag the same way, stick the bag in your backpack, take it to a lab. The first step - locate yourself on a map - is VITALLY important, because if you don't know where your sample came from, you can't draw any conclusions about where the most gold is. (Samples A, B, and C, in an east-west line, show increasing gold concentrations to the west; perhaps you could put a mine toward the western extent of your sampling area; you certainly wouldn't put it to the east. But say you mislabel your bag - I did that ONCE - or you can't find yourself on the map; where do you dig?)

My map, the best one available for my field area, had 40-foot contours. Think of contour lines as the "bathtub ring" around an object - put a big irregular rock in a tub, fill the tub exactly an inch deep, and look down on it from above. The "bathtub ring" around the rock would be exactly level at one inch, and would show the shape of that rock at a height above ground (the bottom of the tub) of one inch. Now fill the tub two inches high and look down on THAT bathtub ring to see the shape of the rock at two inches above ground. Et cetera. Draw those bathtub rings and you have a contour map of the rock, with bathtub rings closer together where the rock's side is steep, farther apart where it's more gently slanted down. Now scale up: a field area five miles square or so, with the "bathtub rings" at 40-foot intervals. It's mountainous - but most of the outcrops of rock, ridges, cliffs, are shorter than 40 feet. So the map, friends, is nearly useless: you can't tell where you are from it. I could be standing next to a thirty-foot ridge of rock as steep as the side of a building, and it'd be nowhere on my map if it happened to fall between, say, the 5,000- and 5,040-foot contours.

So I had to start from a known point (say, the end of the high-center dirt road I drove to get to the area), tie off a 200-foot nylon tape measure, take a bearing with my trusty compass, and walk to the end of my tape. Mark that spot, on the ground and on the map. Go back and untie my measure, return to new known spot. Tie off measure, take a bearing, walk (or sometimes, essentially rappel, using my tape measure as a line - though the steep slopes naturally mess up the horizontal measurement)... until I could get to the area from which I was to collect a sample. Oh, and sketch in those 20- and 30-foot cliffs and ridges, for the next schmuck. Took a long time.

The point is, my model - my map - was missing a LOT of data, and in fact bore next to no resemblance to reality. I had to fill in those data as best I could, and I had to do it with an eye to the next baby geologist who would be sampling there - he or she would need to know where things were, just as I had. So I had to be (a) careful and (b) transparent. But even so, my map at the end of summer was only a little better than the one I started with, because it only improved where I was sampling; to look at my map, the next baby geologist might think, "Wow, this area here where Jamie was working sure had a lot of cliffs and ridges; luckily it evens out over here in the part she didn't get to. I'll start there!" And that baby geologist would find him- or herself rappelling down scree slopes hanging onto a 200-foot tape for dear life, just as I had.

The dangers of relying on a model, that's what I'm talking about. And when you throw in incomplete reality checks, reality checks in only the convenient or hypothesis-confirming places, and deletion of reality checks that either do not or might not agree with your model, well, the best face you can put on that is that, poor you, you're going to get all wrapped up in the model and lose the ground truth, ending up looking like a fool; the worst face is that you're trying deliberately to deceive.

And just to clarify...

2009-11-22T11:43:00.003-05:00

I've spent too much time today, as I did after seeing Twilight, reading movie reviews. The reviewers, almost to a wo/man, hate New Moon* - and who can blame them? It's not a movie for movie fans. It's a movie adaptation of - not even a book for book fans, but a book for fans of a specific mythos.

I am not a fool (she insists uneasily). At no time have I ever had even the sneakiest secret thought that Stephenie Meyers is a good writer**. I've had a free sample of her post-Twilight-series novel The Host on my Kindle since I finished the T-series, but haven't even been able to slog my way through its few pages; Meyers simply writes like a halfway decent fanfic "author." (I've read too much fanfiction; most writers in the genre really suck wind.) And of course I've dealt with Bella as Mary Sue, last year after reading Twilight.

In other words, it's not the writing.

As for plot, well, I wouldn't be the first to point out that there isn't much that makes sense, has any kind of inevitability, or appears to be moving forward in any of the four Twilight books. It isn't the plot.

Characterization: in short, all characters in Meyers' books appear to have come out of either a Harlequin romance or an iconography - a bad one. I remember a quote from the VERY funny Jean Kerr in Penny Candy, in which she describes her lengthy convalescence after a bad cold; she talks about how she wants to use this enforced bedrest to read a "good" book, and keeps trying to pick up some giant worthy tome - but reverts again and again to a trashy novel, even though she knows it's trashy. I don't have Penny Candy, to my sorrow, but she says something like this: "What is it with the way these characters are portrayed? If he has 'crisp black hair,' then she simply can't have 'moist red lips'; things like that just don't happen in real life. She should have 'dry pale lips,' or he should have 'limp gray hair.'" And so, no, it's not the characterization.

As I've said too many times now, it's seventeen, that's what it is: for someone like me, much older than seventeen, it's a grasping for what once seemed like a possibility, now revealed to be a fever dream - not just impossible but not even really desirable once the fever cools. For the kids of the right approximate age, I have to speak from memory, but it seems to me to be an affirmation that that bruised and battered sense of possibility, so alive in the ultra-romantic anti-cynics who think they're world-weary, could indeed be real... somewhere.

* I do find it interesting that they hate it for such varying reasons: the split between those who think Stewart is brilliant but hampered by the screenplay and those who think she's a one-trick pony and in this movie the screenplay asks her to do another trick that she's just not up to is particularly clear. Lautner gets kudos for being the "only" member of the young cast who can act, or emote, or smile naturally, or make you care what happens to him; he also gets slammed for posing, reading lines, being utterly unbelievable, etc., etc. Pattinson is a minor character, really, but because he was so important in the first movie, HE gets roundly slammed for being all emo and stuff. Dakota Fanning gets oddly enthused reviews considering how little she had to do - and honestly, put me in red contact lenses and I could smile enigmatically as well as she does. Across the board, they all seem to love Michael Sheen, whom I've never even heard of but who is evidently a "serious" actor - apparently you can be totally embarrassingly over-the-top and all the reviewers around will say you're being "deliciously campy" if you were a "serious" actor before. Some loved the soundtrack; some hated it. (I hated it.) Many, but not all, liked the cinematography. Weitz's direction was generally noted as a step up from Hardwicke's - but not in every case; some reviewers thought Hardwicke, as opposed to Weitz, really understood her subject matter, whereas Weitz is just out to make a buck. Whatever.

** But at least the Twilight books do explicitly encourage the reading of good stuff. Bella's a big booster of classical romance.

As the kids say, zomg!

2009-11-22T11:30:00.003-05:00

For a both hilarious and oogy take on the whole Twilight series, go here. But brace yourself: while everybody who's paid the slightest attention to the books knows that Stephenie Meyers, a Mormon, pays a certain homage to her faith throughout the series, the link seeks to explore JUST HOW MUCH homage.

F'rinstance: Edward Cullen, from the books' descriptions, looks a whoooole lot like Joseph Smith. Yeesh!

Seeing New Moon

2009-11-20T20:00:00.003-05:00

It's November, and that means it's Twilight time! The breathlessly-awaited Part Deux, New Moon, came out today; I saw it with my oldest kid at 12:30 in the morning, all the midnight showings at our local theater being sold out.

So I'm tired. But here's the thing: I'd see it again this minute if I could, and not just because I find Robert Pattinson to be what the fangirlz call "a hot mess." (Though I do.) I went in Team Edward; I remain Team Edward, but only because it's fantasy, where it costs nothing to say, "You love who you love": in reality, who couldn't see that Jacob is better for Bella? Even my son was whispering that undeniable truth to me at almost three in the morning. I'd see it again for the same reason that I saw Twilight as many times as I could get to a theater, then squee'ed like those fangirlz again when my children got me the DVD for Christmas: because there's nothing like an utterly unreal romance.

The premise, set up by Stephenie Meyers, is perfect: vampires live forever, or near enough, because they simply no longer change physically; similarly, they change mentally or emotionally only with great difficulty, and any change of that sort that they undergo is for all intents and purposes permanent. So when Edward, a 109-year-old vampire, falls in love - for whatever reason! though I appreciate the bootlegged Midnight Sun's Edward-voiced explanation, on which maybe more later - with human Bella, it's a true endless love. And Bella, who's set up in the books more effectively than in the movies as a sort of vampire-lite even as a human - pale though she's grown up in Phoenix, standoffish, super-constant, readily accepting of the vampires' world - reciprocates that love in every measure including its permanence.

Of course, anyone who fell in love at seventeen knows that the love of a seventeen-year-old is like an old-fashioned sparkler: white-hot and exciting, quickly fading, and suddenly gone. Some few seventeen-year-olds find that their loves evolve into something deeper and longer-lasting; a couple of friends of mine who started dating at that age are happily and solidly married now, twenty years later, on that account. But the dastardly appeal of Edward and Bella's romance is that the white-hot excitement never has to fade. And who, as they put yet another load of laundry into the washing machine and read yet another story to the children who have resulted from a different species of love, wouldn't want to believe in that possibility?

My favorite moments: the collective gasp through the theater when cute little TOTALLY hunky (and recently legal) Taylor Lautner gratuitously whips off his shirt to stanch Bella's bleeding head wound; even though we'd all seen bazillions of pictures of Lautner's buffing-up, it was jolly good fun to see it all together with our (mostly) commadres on the big screen. The latter third of the movie, wherein they finally let Edward ditch the red lipstick and look absolutely haggard and awful in his grief. And, even though it didn't have the *whoo-ee* of the first kiss in Twilight, the few kisses in New Moon focused less on Edward's giddy triumph at managing to kiss Bella without killing her and more on his pain and difficulty in kissing her; one kiss in particular, I can't recall which, stood out because he gives a little whimper at the end. And I'd be lying if I said that the scene in which Edward leaves Bella in the woods, when he's trying to convince her that he's leaving because he doesn't want her any more rather than because he's desperately afraid that he'll end up either killing her or not being able to protect her from his own family, didn't make me turn cold all over.

Pattinson was, I thought, spot-on as a man with no more will to live, and then, finally, after Edward and Bella's reunion, a man who's decided to live again but is terrified of the price; I've seen some reviews call him wooden or mopey, and I disagree wholeheartedly. He struck me as hopeless, which is exactly what Edward's supposed to be. Stewart's sometimes near-suicidal, sometimes inappropriate-affect Bella is harder for me to feel sorry for - probably because I actually was an eighteen-year-old human girl in love with the wrong guy once, and I lived not only to tell the tale, but to love the right guy and build a life with him. And so we get to Lautner: the right guy. He did a fantastic job making me, die-hard Team Edward as I am, wish that there were some Star Trek-esque alternative reality scenario in which he gets the girl. I bled for him in a way that I couldn't for Bella or Edward - who, after all, were going to end up together; all poor Jacob gets, in the end, is an awkward imprinting on Bella and Edward's baby daughter, a way to heal a mythic breach but hardly more than a consolation prize for a guy whose devotion never flagged.

Wonder when I can get away to see it again...

A useful illustration

2009-11-09T17:31:00.003-05:00

Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, made the case that the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (today!) should be more noteworthy than it is. He said that "For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb....Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared."

One commenter, a popular guy (his comment recommended by 252 readers as I write) who likes the word "specious," responded thusly:

That is utter nonsense. More like the chaff of fear that Mr. Douthat's ilk uses to obfuscate the truth. Douthat needs to go back to school and study history. It was Mikail Gorbachov that in 1988 announced that the Soviet Union would abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine and allow the Eastern bloc nations to freely determine their own internal affairs.

It was Gorbachev that ended the cold war. Not Günther Schabowski and not Ronald Reagan. It was the insightful courage of Mikail Gorbachev that ended it.

After a not so veiled dig at President Obama for not attending a 9 November ceremony in Germany, Mr. Douthat delivers this false paean:

"Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle."

Balderdash, Mr. Douthat. Why is it that it was Mikail Gorbachev who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace and not Günther Schabowski (and never Reagn)? Why does Mr. Douthat ignore the facts of history? Because he cannot make his specious point if he adheres to the truth.

The final nail in the coffin of Mr. Douthat's specious treatise comes in a statement from his last paragraph: "Maybe we miss living with the possibility of real defeat." The problem, Mr. Douthat, is that the rise and fall of a great nation has its lesson even today. Great nations don't fall from forces arrayed against them from without. They fall from the corrupt forces that rot them from within.

Yes, America is in danger of defeat but not from external enemies. We are on the road to defeat because of the naysayers in our Congress and the hatemongers who cannot abide Barack Obama's Presidency.

And that, as Edith Ann was wont to say, is the truth.

I've reproduced virtually the entire comment, because of two things: first, the commenter's contention that Gorbachev's winning of the Nobel Prize for Peace is evidence of some kind (please see my prior post - oh please, if you're one of the few who really do believe that Pres. Obama "earned" that prize! - for how I and many others feel about the anointing of somebody or other by a few Scandihoovians - of whom, two generations removed, I'm one in part). Sheesh.

And second, gosh, I agree with his third-to-last paragraph - the one where he says a grave danger to the United States is rot from within. But in the penultimate paragraph, wherein he says that the rot emanates from "hatemongers cannot abide Barack Obama's Presidency" - that's where I think it's obvious I disagree. I believe, and I believe that I have actual history on my side, that it's the push to increase government control of individuals that is the "rot from within" we should dread. Not the people who are against increased government control; the people actually fighting to bring it about.

The commenter doesn't have history to back him up; he doesn't even have white-sheeted midnight bonfires to back him up. He has his feelings. And he signs himself "Cmdr" - that is, "Commander." Of what?

Going feckless into that dark night

2009-10-10T14:44:00.003-04:00

The President's unexpected winning of the Nobel Prize for peace, and his inexplicable acceptance of it, beggars my ability to be sanguine... I didn't froth at the mouth when I heard, as some people did; I didn't laugh or cry about it. But I can't be sanguine.

The only explanation for it is that Oslo, at any rate (I'd assume they represent a big whomp of Europe, though clearly not our again-friends the French, nor the truly heroic Lech Walesa, whose ideology I disagree with but whose courage and persistence earned him what used to be this honor), hopes to influence American foreign policy - and just as discomfiting, that they believe they can do it, with this president. Why reward a chief executive for doing nothing except to be a different president from the previous one? Why? Because they want him to continue doing nothing. Doing something, and worse yet, urging allies to do something along with us, is so distasteful, so risky at the ballot box.

That this desire is freaking short-sighted, stupid, and transitory (wait until Norway gets into hot water; we'll see how long the "America as unexceptional parvenu" thing lasts) is beside the point. The point is that Pres. Obama was a fool to accept. He either tied his own hands or presented the near-certainty that he'll have to "betray" his neo-Viking BFFs sometime soon, squandering his presidential credibility overseas as he's squandering it at home.

I say again, as I said in election season: Why on earth THIS man? Who anointed this naif?

Charles Krauthammer looks deeper:

The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We--whom Lincoln once called God's "almost chosen people"--did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world's co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon--and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.

Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States--controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture--has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.

...

In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.

In other words, our president considers himself elected to preside over our decline.

I am not ready to decline.

Physical decline, our culture of youth notwithstanding, is the right and proper condition for the elder whose grandchildren are old enough to fetch and carry, responsible enough to want to be helpful; it's a well-deserved rest after a lifetime of striving. Whether it's the right and proper condition for a nation, I can't say - but certainly, when decline overtakes a nation as it overtakes an otherwise vigorous person stricken with a wasting disease (like France, with its life-sapping repeated revolutions focusing on egalite at the expense of liberte) or a sudden double-amputation (like Britain, losing so many of its people and God knows how much of its treasure to war twice in two generations - with Churchill's speeches still echoing down the rubbled streets of London, Britain no longer had legs to stand on), it's a tragedy, not something to be sought. What's the deal with the neo-Vikings? Have they utterly forgotten themselves? Or are they so envious of the vigor of those who are still vigorous that they have to do their best, in grand Leftist style, to even the field at their low level?

Not that Vikings were like us. Vikings took what they wanted; we keep trying to give back what's thrust upon us. We're the perfect hegemon, not, as Krauthammer says, just the accidental one: we're the hegemon who never wanted the job, who is terribly uncomfortable with it, who, while repeatedly and sometimes wearily stepping up to fulfill the responsibilities of it, is constantly on guard against the nation-state equivalent of the droit de seigneur that goes along with it.

Be careful what you wish for, Europe.

Illustration of expediency

2009-10-07T08:30:00.002-04:00

No children, please. I use some inappropriate language below.

I've avoided writing about the Polanski horribleness because it all seemed so rarified to me - how could anyone in his right mind believe the ridiculous celebrity "defenses" of Polanski's actions? They can't even really believe it themselves, can they? Goldberg's "not rape-rape," all the "but he's so GIFTED" junk, coupled with the "and now he's old, and it was a long time ago, and anyway the victim - um, I mean the woman in her forties he... um... had unspecified (by me) relations with three decades ago, anyway, she wants to drop it, right?" All that. It's all, to my mind, veddy veddy P!ss Christ: we the hoi polloi are simply not sophisticated enough to understand the art (of the p!ss, or of the defenses). All we know is that it stinks.

But now we get to this, in which Patterico quotes at length from a WaPo chat with Tom Shales, Columnist:

Tom Shales: Hello, Dunn Loring, I didn’t want to sign off without trying to answer your question. I didn’t realize I had written a column defending Roman Polanski and minimized his crime – are you sure it was me? I mean, I? There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.

It was, indeed, he, back in summer '08; he claimed that Polanski was never charged with rape. Goldberg believes this too, on the grounds that Polanski copped not to "rape by use of drugs," which was one of the charges, but to "unlawful sexual intercourse." ("Unlawful sexual intercourse" speaks to his iconoclastic artistic sensibilities, dunnit? After all, all genii make their own rules, including sexual mores; even Heinlein said so. Pfah.) But in the snippet Patterico reproduced and I re-reproduce here, Shales again minimizes the crime with his "I am not sure" statement about the nature of Hollywood 13-year-olds.

Now. I am not stupid. I know that Goldberg meant, "It was statutory, not violent." (Technically true but ABSOLUTELY false in that Polanski's 'luuding the kid up certainly diminished her capacity to fight back - so he didn't have to get violent with her. Smart man.) I know that Shales means, "A 13-year-old model in La-La Land is not exactly the same in her life experience as a Kansas small-town 13-year-old; look at Drew Barrymore, after all." But for God's sake, is either of these observations ANY kind of defense?

From Patterico's comment thread:

35. When twenty year old street thugs go to war over drug turf that’s ‘children dying from gun violence.’

When an ideologically select forty year old rapes a thirteen year old ’she’s not really a child.’

Orwellian doesn’t begin to describe Shales and his ilk..

Comment by ThomasD — 10/6/2009 @ 11:22 pm

And that, in a nutshell, is expediency in the service of ideology and tribal (celebrity, that is) identity. It's... well, like P!ss Christ, no matter how often and how passionately you put it forth as Great Art, at root it's gross. And everybody knows it.

Executive != Diplomat

2009-10-03T16:19:00.002-04:00

What was he thinking?

Once I was my company's representative in a civil trial; I sat beside our outside counsel for three days listening to testimony on a matter of no importance herein, but of great important to my company both at that moment and in future, with regard to the precedent the judge's decision would set, and tried my darnedest to help our counsel interpret that testimony. She was very very smart, well versed in the law and in the particular subject of the trial, and a terrific presenter and cross-examiner; she did not need my help. But it's part of the process, I gather, to have a company rep present, and I was it.

So one guy was on the stand, and suddenly something he said set off big alarm bells in my head. I scribbled a question for our counsel to ask on my notepad and pushed it across to her, and on cross, she asked it. The guy answered - but it had been a while since I'd heard the alarm bells and jotted the question, and frankly his answer meant nothing to me - I hadn't written down the ramifications of what I expected his answer to be, because in the heat of the moment I was sure they'd be obvious. So there stood our counsel, thrown off by a meaningless answer to a question she hadn't planned to ask.

Fortunately she was no rookie; she shook herself a little, shook it off, and continued with the line of questioning she'd had planned. But after we finished for the day, she spoke sternly to me. The gist: Never ask a question unless you KNOW THE ANSWER FIRST. Court is not discovery.

And a President, the Chief Executive of the United States, is not a diplomat; he does not "do" diplomacy. In matters of high-level diplomacy (that is, matters that require the imprimatur of a head of state), the real diplomats do all the heavy lifting ahead of time, and the President shows up when the deal is done, to pretend that he or she is actually negotiating something but actually just to show how important this event is.

So what the heck, Mr. President? What on this earth could make you squander so much - so much time, credibility, resources, to risk your personal safety and that of your whole entourage, et cetera, et cetera - on the freaking Olympics? When you apparently didn't have them in the bag, so the perception would be a big V-for-Victory for the O-for-Obama team?

The Olympics? They were worth it? (I'd ask the same about the stupid global warming bash-the-Western-world-fest at the UN, but what's the point? To his side, nominally at least, "climate change" is indeed something requiring the attention of heads of state - even though none of them actually act as if they believe it.)

<rubbing temples>Oi veh.

You'd expect more from a supergroup

2009-09-24T19:29:00.002-04:00

I was ironing today, something I do once a month whether we need ironed clothes or not.

(Actually, at least twice a year I get to skip my monthly ironing day, because my priceless mother-in-law is visiting and does it for me - way better than I do it, too, ironing not just the things that have been crumpled like tissue paper but even the children's clothes, which is something I'll only do at Christmas and Easter.)

Anyway, I had my "epic win" playlist going on the old iPod, and "Wildest Dreams" came on. Asia... ah, Asia. Asia was the band that introduced me to (putative) hard rock, back in 1982. (Yes, I know it's prog.) My taste in music in my first two years of high school was heavily influenced by the fact that I was living, breathing, eating and drinking musical theater; then I moved to a much smaller school with a great drama teacher but a very small pool of performers. (We tried, in my junior year, to put on Stop the World, I Want To Get Off, but had to cancel the whole endeavor because the only guy to try out for the male lead was also instrumental to the football team's prospects, and his priorities were more with the team than the ensemble. A lucky thing, too, because I was cast in the female lead role, and I was NEVER going to get the difference between a German and a Russian accent, much less be able to do those AND British AND whatever-all other accents that part required. It's rather a silly show anyway...)

So, with only musical theater in my head, I tended to go for the bubble-gum pop in my radio listening. (Radio: that thing in the car that sometimes plays songs, often plays commercials, and too often plays happy talk.) But then a guy stuck his Walkman headphones over my ears and cranked up some Asia, and suddenly a new dawn... um, dawned: hard rock could be melodic! Who knew?

Back to my ironing. I'm singing along to "Wildest Dreams," and we (John Wetton and I) got to the part about "They recommended euthanasia for nonconformists anywhere." Now, this afternoon was not the first time this line had bugged me, but for some reason it bugged me especially today; recall that this was the Reagan era, and that the chorus of "Wildest Dreams" says, "They fight (they fight) for king (for king) and country," and the only king they might've been referring to was Reagan, the clown-king of "progressive" fantasy. And what struck me was this:

Who created reeducation camps? Who undertakes "diversity" and "sensitivity" training? Who spearheaded hate-speech rules on campuses and elsewhere? Who goes immediately, in these times, to accusations of racism when policy disagreements occur?

Hint: it ain't Reagan's side, no matter how far from Reagan the American Right might've come.

The monsters are the monsters

2009-09-17T17:54:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite blogs, NeoNeoCon, was discussing how one's political viewpoint can be changed (that's the story behind the first "neo" of NeoNeoCon's handle; she was raised on the Left and subscribed to that point of view until 9/11, whereupon the already-extant long slow erosion of her confidence in progressivism pretty much turned into a landslide). One of the commenters, who it appears was born a conservative and remains one today, said this:

I’m not a “changer”. However, an incident in 8th grade (1982) revealed to me that I viewed things differently than my teachers and couldn’t knuckle under like the other kids:

We were assigned to read “Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” (What I now know is some high-grade Rod Serling red-baiting agitprop.)

In it the aliens (the monsters) coerced, manipulated and used psychological warfare to turn ‘average racist gun-owning psycho Americans’ to turn on their neighbors so that the aliens could walk in without a beam fired.

In the class, the (now I know) sever lefty, feninist teacher sneered “Now who were the real monsters?” And all the little sheep dutifully said “the racist average gun-owning Americans were the real monsters!”

I raised my hand and stated: “No way, the monsters manipulated them. There were monsters. The monsters are the monsters!” Then the wrath of the class and teacher fell upon me. The teacher claimed I was juvenile and couldn’t understand the ‘nuance’ of the story. The class devolved into a shouting match with me yelling “The monsters are the monsters!”

It was ugly. It was a true learning experience. I got into fist-fights with the little bastards for a week after that; was constantly ridiculed, even by the teacher, and got a low grade in that class, but I stuck to it.

If you just keep your moral bearings and remember “the monsters are the monsters.”, liberal bullshit falls apart instantly.

Just don’t forget: The monsters are the monsters.

I've reproduced his or her comment (I'm pretty sure "his," but one wouldn't want to assume) in its entirety. Let's do remember. Because, remember how after every terrorist attack of any scale, we hear apologists tell us, sometimes in so many words, that the terrorists were driven to their action by our actions? In essence, that we are the monsters?

Please note that I am, and all should be, very cognizant of the difference between the story's scenario - monsters acting specifically to produce a crazed reaction from humans - and what we are repeatedly accused of: we are ourselves, products of many centuries of a particular sheaf of cultures and cultural practices. The simple fact of our difference from the terrorists, or perhaps the fact that we dare to act different from the terrorists in accordance with our differences from them, is said to be our sin.

No. The monsters are the monsters.

A simple plan

2009-08-06T08:07:00.002-04:00

So here is a story from KVAL in Eugene, OR, about a woman with terminal cancer. Her doctor "offered hope" (for more time, as I understand it, not for remission or recovery) in the form of an expensive chemo drug. The Oregon Health Plan denied her request for that drug, but offered "comfort care" including - of course, it being Oregon - assisted suicide.

Sigh.

Saha [the spokesperson for the plan] said state health officials do not consider whether it is cheaper for someone in the health plan to die than live. However, he admitted they must consider the state's limited dollars when dealing with a case such as Wagner's.

"If we invest thousands and thousands of dollars in one person's days to weeks, we are taking away those dollars from someone," Saha said.

Uh-huh. If they don't consider whether life or death is cheaper, on what basis are they making this decision? They prefer death, or opiate haze, to an extension of life? Saha says that if the woman believes they're only willing to cover her suicide, she's misinterpreted their letter. Clearly. The article says right there that they'll offer "comfort care" (that would be the pain pills Pres. Obama has gotten into such hot water over) too. But that spokesperson can't claim that the plan doesn't cover assisted suicide. And the woman appealed the plan's denial of the drug twice, losing both times, so obviously if they somehow misspoke, they did it three times.

(The drug company that makes the drug is offering it to her for free now. God bless 'em. I assume they've done so with some conditions, such as her allowing them to collect data on the progress of her cancer. It seems to me that they have every right to ask such a thing in return for the charity they're offering, and that she has every incentive to give it. I know I would...)

My question: How can anyone who knows about Oregon, who knows about Massachusetts, who knows about Canada, who knows about Great Britain, believe that this little story isn't a vision of the United States' future, if government becomes primary health care provider? Why is it that those on the Left insist that history doesn't repeat itself? It isn't as if what they're proposing hasn't been tried.

Oh, except in this one respect: if the US goes the way of Canada and Great Britain, there'll be no more US health system to rely on: no more hideously-expensive-to-develop US drugs that Canada can buy at a deep discount and crow about offering cheaply; no more new surgical techniques invented and tested in US operating rooms that can eventually be learned by foreign doctors; no more life extension research that can maintain a Stephen Hawking or a Robert Heinlein far beyond their "natural" span; no more super-NICU techniques that can sustain a baby weighing less than a pound, giving that baby a shot at not just life but normal life (and raising US infant mortality rates in the process, because a one-pound baby only has a shot at life, even here).

There is rationing in health care now, just as there's rationing in, say, real estate (in good times!) and hybrid cars (when gasoline gets expensive): demand exceeds supply. But who decides? What's better, a bureaucratic process far removed from the beneficiary, a bureaucratic process closer to the beneficiary (that would be private insurance, wherein individuals can decide how "Cadillac" a plan they want to pay for), a lottery? If Oregon objects to spending $4000 to add a month to this woman's life, but is happy enough to cover her $100 death (a prospect that makes me shudder even as the economics make plenty o' sense), what on earth gives anyone the idea that the Federal government won't offer the same care, or lack thereof?

Please, Texas, it's in your Constitution: pull the secession trigger before this horrible thing takes effect. I have two anchor children...

And now to answer the actual QUESTION...

2009-07-24T07:56:00.002-04:00

Sorry, Anonymous; I got onto my soapbox there. You asked about sustainability and I went on and on about the environmental movement, leaving out several areas you mentioned specifically.

Okay, here's the thing: conservatives do not, in principle, object to paying for necessary services, such as garbage collection and waste management, such as disposal fees for hazardous wastes, such as water and air quality monitoring. They expect that the costs for whatever filtering-style processing a business must do in order to meet reasonable and agreed-on standards will be passed on to them, the consumers. What they (we) take issue with is this type of situation:

"Save the spotted owl!" was an environmental rallying cry in the Pacific Northwest; logging was destroying the birds' habitat, it was claimed. When pressed, however, environmentalists taking up the owls' cause admitted that the owl itself was not so much the issue; it was that old-growth forests were being logged, and the owl was a convenient "face" for the forests. Human beings were going to lose their jobs, the price of wood was going to rise for all buyers, and all under the auspices of "saving" a critter.

Honesty would have been a policy behind which more conservatives could have rallied, if they agreed with the principle that we ought to seek our wood from places other than old growth. (Old growth, by the way, is not a static forest condition; like all conditions on the planet, it's transitory. By geologic standards, it's a flash in the pan.) But the more-regulation playbook seems to require certain tactics:

Appeal to the cute: children and animals sell.
When possible, use anecdote, not data, to make your point, and search as hard as you have to to find the anecdote that tugs hardest at the heartstrings.
When you must use statistics, present those with the most shock value. (Think "global warming" - oops, I mean "anthropogenic climate change" here.) Bury those that don't bear out your point.
People have short memories and little capacity for reasoning, take advantage of these facts.
Use the Watergate school of journalism to help you: journalists have seen the Promised Land of Changing History, and they want it bad. If you can pitch your story as an opportunity to let a journalist Change History, that journalist will probably go to the mat shouting your point and shouting down opposing ones.

Et cetera. It's not that conservatives "don't care" about sustainability; it's that they, like most humans, do have memories, they do have the ability to reason, and they resent and distrust organizations and people who seem to be trying to make an end run around them.

"Issues of Sustainability"

2009-07-22T07:59:00.003-04:00

Okay, you got me, Anonymous...

I was taking a stroll down Memory Lane this fine morning, rereading old posts of mine, and to my great surprise there's a post down there with FIVE comments! Two are from my old friend Kirbside, but three are from Anonymous, who says, "I'm curious to get your opinion on issues of sustainability." He or she goes on to add,

Sustainability doesn't seem to be a very popular topic among conservatives. There appears to be an attitude that "God will sort it all out", so we don't need to worry about carbon emissions, or resource depletion, or infrastructure renewal, or ecological impacts, or even garbage collection.

...

From what I gather, it goes something like this: existing business structures don't want to change their established methods, so they oppose sustainable technologies and deny deny deny environmental impacts. They then convince the God-wing of the party that it's all hogwash and that God is in control.

I -get- that. Nobody wants to be forced to do something that is costly. It's up to people to demand sustainable technologies from businesses, to essentially speak with their wallets. The thing I don't get is why Republican/Conservative leaders don't actively promote sustainability, rather than ignore the issue? Why don't they care?

First let me correct a misconception: the "God-wing" is not anti-environment; in fact, serious Christians (I won't speak for other sects) believe that humans are created by God, somehow (many, including me, believe that this creation took place in an incremental fashion - i.e., through evolution, a process likewise created by God), in God's image, with an inescapable duty to be stewards of the rest of Creation. What we conservatives (taking that subgroup of American humanity apart from any "God-wing" stuff) often object to is the contention that the environment is either coequal with or actively trumps human interests. We believe that the human sphere is the business of the human sphere, and that the environment is the backdrop against which we (religious reference coming up) live and move and have our being - a backdrop that adds great value and often beauty, without which the play is impossible to produce, and that must be maintained appropriately, but which is not as important as the actors.

That said, we who believe that God takes an active interest in God's creation do tend to believe that God looks after not just us but our environment (and all aspects of creation, whether or not they benefit or affect humans). But that's not exactly the same as "God will sort it all out," since Christians believe that we are God's hands. (We just don't believe we're God's only hands. We're not that arrogant.)

So - sustainability. Depending on your definition, businesses large and small are all about sustainability; none, except those absurd dot.com "businesses" that mistook an exit strategy for a business plan, intend to put themselves out of business. Therefore it makes no sense for them to kill whatever is their golden goose - to destroy that which makes their business possible. Sometimes it's more clear than others how to create sustained production - in timber, for instance, where it's pretty easy to see that planting trees to replace logged trees helps to maintain production, and a healthy environment for those trees one day to be logged themselves. And often, growth in both knowledge and technology leads to improvement in the area of sustainability; take timber again: hand-cutting used to be the only method available for logging, and trees could be chosen one by one for their grain, size, etc. Then, with mechanized logging, clearcutting was the only efficient means, and ALL trees fell - not pretty, and less sustainable, but necessary to meet demand. Now, it's again becoming possible to do selective logging, which improves the logged forest's health because it more closely mimics nature, but is still capable of meeting demand - partly because on the demand side, engineered wood products are in much wider use than ever before, since growing super-fast-maturing trees, loggable in ten years or so, in farmlike fields, and which are then chipped and made into strong building material, is another innovation of the last few decades.

In oil and gas, it used to be that only the oil that basically bubbled to the surface was produceable. Technology grew with demand, and deeper and deeper resources became reserves (a resource is something you know exists; "reserves" is a subset of resources that denotes produceable resources, and is very closely tied to price). Oil and gas drilling has a small footprint and a small ecological cost, compared with oil and gas refining - but even though refining technology hasn't been allowed to proceed very readily in this country, air quality, for instance, around refineries has drastically improved via technological advances. (Refinery footprints haven't shrunk; I assume this is because refineries know they'll never get land back if they relinquish it, and therefore keep on occupying it whether or not their processes have or could have decreased in size.)

Mining removes bulky material - ore - from often scenic places. That stinks, I say as a person who likes going to scenic places. But coal (for instance) is an overwhelmingly important energy source in this country and elsewhere; it's energy-dense, easy and safe to transport, easy to burn to create electricity. It will continue to be produced until a better thing comes along (and no, solar and wind aren't "better" in any respect that counts in this discussion). Mining companies strip-mine where that's the most efficient way to get at the ore. But erosion problems downstream as well as public relations concerns cause them to enter an area only with a rehabilitation plan in place. And miners' working conditions have dramatically improved as well. There is a societal cost to to mining; but it's not the same cost as it was even fifty years ago.

At this point, Anonymous is hopping up and down, waiting for a chance to point out that many of these changes wouldn't have taken place if not for tighter environmental regulations and collective bargaining and so forth. I think the timing would have been different - probably quite a lot different in some cases - but that these same changes would have taken hold in the absence of governmental and union involvement, if the marketplace had been allowed to work. Here's why:

The capitalist marketplace of the conservative is not just a place where things are bought and sold; it's - very importantly - a marketplace of ideas as well. Good ideas are not judged by some Idea Board; they're evaluated by the innumerable entities, individual and corporate, that make up the marketplace, and the winners are, tautologically, the ones that win. "Organic farming" is an old idea made new again, and in the Western marketplace of ideas, it's taking hold. (It'd be a recipe for global famine if its staunchest supporters got their way and it were implemented everywhere, but heck, what's affluence for if not to indulge your personal preferences? No harm in having organic food in the produce bins and on the shelves, as long as less expensive, high-quality "non-organic" options are available for those who can't afford or don't choose the "organic" stuff.)

Hybrid cars - finally, an option better than the plug-in one! It used to make me crazy that so many electric-car advocates seemed to believe that the magical stuff that comes out of outlets in their homes was free, both to them and to the environment.

And generally improved environmental conditions - this, again, is an idea of the marketplace that has resulted in, for instance, BP's "It's a start" campaign. Regulation has forced more stringent environmental standards (sometimes ridiculously more stringent, down to "below detection limits" for compounds never definitively shown to be harmful), but it's the marketplace that makes companies take the step of doing better than the regs.

If "environmentalists" embraced the idea marketplace (they use it, certainly) and largely abandoned regulation-seeking, there'd be many more conservatives who would join their ranks, working assiduously to bring those ideas to fruition. Who likes the thought of living in nineteenth-century London with its yellow-gray sulfurous fogs? But convince - don't force - and your ideas have sustainable force. Or else they're not worth implementing.

The juvies

2009-07-21T21:49:00.002-04:00

My brother-in-law steered me to this blog post about Heinlein's juveniles, presumably to tempt me into sharing my own thoughts. (He must be bored.) I have thoughts. Here they are:

Gosh. Which Heinlein juvie is my favorite? The blog post mentions several that I've enjoyed mightily through the years: Door Into Summer (though it has one creepy element), Have Space Suit, Will Travel (I still quote Shakespeare I learned first from that book), Farmer In the Sky (my mother, a science teacher and not a Heinlein fan, uses that book in an ecology unit she teaches), The Rolling Stones (first of the Heinlein red-headed twins, and my first introduction to twin-banter - great fun!), and Double Star, which I've never thought of as a juvenile. It left out Space Cadet, which I read over and over and over as I considered my eventually relinquished appointment to the Air Force Academy. And Podkayne of Mars, his earliest novel-length story in a girl's voice. And Tunnel In the Sky, and Between Planets. But which is my favorite?

Hmm. All I can say is, it varies. For fun, The Rolling Stones. For technology and sociology, Tunnel In the Sky. For heroism (which we all know by now is a big touchstone of mine), Between Planets. For foreshadowing of the infamous Three-Stage Heinlein Character, hmm, tie between Between Planets and Podkayne. For politics, Citizen of the Galaxy. For totally unrealized romance, Have Space Suit, Will Travel. For insight into an unfamiliar field (acting), Double Star, if juvie it is.

But if I had to pick a favorite Heinlein opus, it might be "If This Goes On...," a novella from his so-called "Future History" series that appeared in The Past Through Tomorrow. Johnny has it all: he's a first-stage Heinlein character with a second-stage buddy, he's Galahad with Lilith tempting him all the time (to mix my metaphors), he's no-nonsense competent but a complete doofus. He's great. And throw in a Moon Is A Harsh Mistress-style rebellion against a charismatic Stranger In a Strange Land-style pseudo-religious leader, and baby, you've got plot.

But what the non-Heinlein fan out there may be tumbling to is that Heinlein tended to stick to certain themes. Uh-huh. What of it? Joseph Bottum the blogger, referring to the ever-recurring theme of kinky sex (or maybe not kinky exactly, but certainly highly promiscuous) in Heinlein books, says, "As one commentator on Amazon notes: 'Robert Heinlein is a great author. But let’s face it. Sometimes you want to a read a good Heinlein book where characters do *not* spend most of their time having sex with their computers, children, mothers, and female clones of themselves.'" And here I depart from the Amazon commenter.

It's not that I want to read more promiscuous and/or kinky sex scenes, believe me. It's uncomfortable enough that it was my dad who introduced me to Heinlein! No, I disagree with the commenter's contention that Heinlein is a "great author." Heinlein himself, from what I gather (and I've gathered quite a lot about Heinlein over the years; his remarkable wife is the so-far-very-poorly-followed pattern for my life), would have laughed raucously at that statement. He considered himself to be a good storyteller - an artist, yes, because it was his aim and his craft to cause his readers to experience emotions of his choosing ("pity and terror," he said); that was how he defined "artist," scorning abstract forms of art as "pseudo-intellectual masturbation." Not sure I fully agree with him there, having just been pretty ooged-out by an O'Keefe exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA. But he saw himself not as "great," but as working.

If Heinlein has importance in any area other than science fiction, where his contributions are unquestioned, it should be in his values. He was a family man who couldn't have children, so he wrote (laughably ignorantly, but with great commitment and earnestness) about the centrality of the family to human society. He wrote characters who purported to be lazy but were only happy when they were working on something, and his life story indicates that he wrote from experience there; he was, by example if not by statement, a staunch advocate of a strong work ethic and (this by word and example) an unwillingness to accept charity or the dole. He believed - or I infer that he believed, based on his writing about it all the time, and on his very long marriage to his third wife after two brief youthful marriages - in commitment in relationships; even the most promiscuous sex in his books tends to result in marriage - lots of marriage. Marriage to lots of people. Almost nobody in a Heinlein book is fornicating, or not for long at any rate.

And he believed in our future. He talked boldly about humanity as the toughest, meanest, smartest critter in the universe - stated that if we were ever to meet our match, all right, we might die in the encounter, but we wouldn't die with our hands in our pockets. He believed that we should try, try as hard as we could, to spread ourselves around, to make the human race unkillable by undertaking a willing Diaspora that would scatter us too widely to be wiped out by anything. Technologically speaking, this goal is far out of reach. And frankly, I'm married to a man who wouldn't want to be a pioneer, so that even if it were possible today, I'm constrained to stay here on the cool green hills of Earth (that's a Heinleinism, for the unfamiliar). But what a goal: to defy the cold equations (not a Heinleinism but a science fiction staple) of natural law, to outlive our own extinction!

Last, I think Heinlein was an unwilling Deist. I infer the "unwilling" part, certainly. But his writing and his life seem to suggest that he wasn't like Houdini, looking for a "supernatural" survival of the spirit beyond the body; that he wasn't like Sagan, proudly declaring his atheism as he lay dying. Perhaps he was Christian; he did, in any case, appreciate the power of the Christianity story. But I think it's clear that he either did believe or couldn't help but believe that there was a watchmaker. I read my first Heinlein juvie when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, if memory serves; because I was exposed early, frequently, and comprehensively, I sometimes go back to the Watchmaker myself. Does it interfere with my Christianity? It sure does... but at least it means that even in my darkest valleys, while I may not perceive myself to be walking with my Brother Christ, I do perceive that the universe is on some level benign and purposeful. I hope that Heinlein died in at least that confidence.

I need a hero

2009-07-21T20:37:00.002-04:00

Via Omnivoracious, a review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

The first thing we see in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is the face of the hero (Daniel Radcliffe) filling the screen, looking grim. As a row of flashbulbs goes off, he flinches, like a criminal exposed. ... [W]hat of Harry? Well, he has committed no crime, so there’s no call for a brooding mug shot. And he’s long been a star of the wizard firmament, so there’s no reason to drape him in fresh celebrity. In short, we are left to ponder this dour and heavy style, and to wonder what sort of film—and what new trouble with Harry—it foretells.

Spoken like a man who knows nothing about the wizarding world. I mean nothing - including the last ten minutes of the previous Potter film. In short, we are left to ponder this puckish and condescending style, and to wonder what sort of reviewer of an installment in an unabashed film franchise fails to realize, or at any rate to note, the ways in which this installment fits with its predecessors.

I'm sure Mr. A. Lane has already been inundated with hate-mail from young teenagers on this point. But I ain't no teenager, I am a Potter fan, and in spite of my undoubted redundancy, I'd like to add my two cents.

Mr. Lane. Harry flinches because that scene comes on the heels of his godfather's (perhaps more accurately, his surrogate father's) violent death and his own brief possession by Voldemort. Harry was a "star of the wizard firmament"... until he witnessed, and testified to all and sundry, the rebirth of Voldemort at the end of Goblet of Fire, at which point he became an object of scorn to the Ministry of Magic and a lot of the wizarding public. Get your background straight, goofball. If you found the film unconvincing, say that - but don't review it as if it's intended to stand alone, because it's not. Even for first-timers, it's intended as an entree into the Potter collection, not as a one-off.

As for my own review, then: I looooved it. I saw it first at midnight on opening day with my twelve-year-old, who hadn't read the book; he was a little confused, but more by the adolescent romance stuff than by the plot twists. (Side note: I'm loving these midnight premieres! It's VERY fun indeed to get up in the middle of the night and go to a movie. And the frisson of post-midnight caffeine from the big old Diet Coke only adds to my ability to suspend my disbelief!) I came out of the theater declaring it the best Potter so far, and absolutely chomping at the bit for #7 and #8.

I saw it a second time a few days later with my midnight Twilight buddy, who had read the book at least as long ago as I did, and at last achieved a little distance. A little. The Potter universe is so fully realized by now that it's no effort at all for a fan like me (meaning, I've seen all the movies and own the last one, continue to re-watch the earlier ones at my parents' house - because my dad's a bigger fan than I am - and have read and reread the books, but not committed them to memory) to achieve that suspension of disbelief; Hogwarts is familiar territory, the Burrow a second home, Neville Longbottom (who has all of maybe two lines in this movie, but I'm glad they kept those two lines in) an old friend I'm just a little too busy to sit down with right now, Quidditch a game I seem to remember watching just last season - right?

So it's hard for me to be objective, because the Potterverse is a place I'd really like to be, even with the danger of persecution and death and all. But I'll say this: This movie found a way to reveal a great deal of the book's internal action. Compare it to the horror known as Dune, in which every thought (of course the thoughts in Dune were vital to the plot, so they had to be revealed somehow) was voiced over: Half-Blood Prince took some significant liberties with faithfulness to the book in order to move the viewer through plot points that otherwise happened only in, say, Harry's head. Oh, I know that this movie could take those liberties because the franchise is solid, and the Dune people knew that they were up against insane fans and had to stick as closely to the book as possible (just as the first Potter film, and Twilight too, had to), or else alienate those insane fans who were likely to be the film's biggest money. Suffice it to say I'm very glad that at this point in the Potter narrative, when so much in the books does happen either in thoughts or out of sight, the film franchise is strong enough to maintain enough creative control over how to bring out the most important points.

Another saving grace (that phrase overstates the case, but it's the best I can do) is that there's been enough time now since the publication of Half-Blood Prince (the book) that those of us who didn't reread the book in preparation for the movie are not all that clear on the details of those plot points. I came out of the theater both times contented that all necessary items had been hit, that all necessary setups had been set up - but not remembering for certain whether they'd been respectively hit and set up as they were in the book. It was all good; the next movie can begin with impunity.

[NOTE: Spoilers below, if there's such a thing as a Harry Potter spoiler.]

Things I loved: the kids had a chance to try out some fairly subtle acting chops, and they did well at it. The teenage angst stuff that confused my kid so much was spot-on: Hermione's pain at Ron's dalliance with Lavender, Cormac's overconfident vileness (oh my Lord, was he vile), Draco's terror and doubt warring with his pride and arrogance... And a point that I thought the movie actually did better than the book: Harry and Ginny repeatedly encounter one another here and there, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, and the viewer can see the attraction growing between them. More: at least twice, Ginny becomes the first one to break from the group (of course we all know that Harry stands alone a lot) to go to Harry at times of danger or distress. We start to see how it is that this minor character, Ginny, might actually be the love of his life - not a pretty feebly depicted cardboard cutout, as she is throughout the books (yes, including most of Half-Blood Prince), but the witch who's good enough, brave enough, interesting enough to ensnare Harry Potter.

There's scene between Harry and Ginny that's actually shocking. Harry's standing on a landing of one of the Burrow's many stairways, and Ginny, coming up the stairs, notices that one of his shoes is untied. She gestures at it and murmurs, "Shoelace," then, before Harry can do anything about it, kneels at his feet and ties his shoe. Watching it is almost like walking in on their wedding night - it's wrong somehow, too personal, to see her tenderness and his wonderment - even though they don't touch any inch of one another's skin, they don't even brush sleeves in passing, at any time in the scene.

So let's get to Harry. In this movie, Harry (who looks nothing like Daniel Radcliffe any more, oddly enough) takes up the mantle that's been waiting for him: he's the Chosen One, the only one who can destroy Voldemort; he knows it, he accepts it, and he actively participates in it. He has no idea how he's supposed to accomplish the impossible - and at the end of the movie his despair over that lack is palpable - but he's a real hero, not going forward without fear but going forward in spite of fear. Heroism, thrust upon Harry in the first four movies, reluctantly chosen in the fifth, is something he walks right into, bespectacled eyes wide open, in this movie.

Heroism is so rare in movies, especially Harry's brand: Mission Impossible without the deus ex machina, which is odd, considering that magic ought to be the ultimate deus ex machina. Harry faces killing odds without more than a brief physical flinch, because he understands (or believes he does) that the purpose of his life is to lay it down for his friends. (I certainly hope that phrase sounds familiar.) There's a similarity between Radcliffe's portrayal of Harry, which I find utterly true to Rowling's writing of him, and the My Sister's Keeper story: Harry believes in every cell of his body that he was spared death for just one purpose, to kill the creature who killed his parents and who threatens his world.

At the end of the movie, he's appalled to learn (or to think he's learned) that Dumbledore died in vain: the Horcrux is a fake. But what he doesn't yet know is that Dumbledore's death serves Dumbledore's own greater purposes, that ultimately the war can't be won without it. And that's also what Harry doesn't know about his own life: that it's not just the endgame that counts. His saving Ginny when he was twelve, she eleven, not only destroys Riddle's diary (and, we find in Half-Blood Prince, a Horcrux) but also, eventually, gives his life a new and happy meaning and focus. God writes in crooked lines.

I wish I could quit you, Lipstick...

2009-07-21T20:33:00.003-04:00

First, a wee post to acknowledge the fact that I'd planned to let this little blog slip into an obscurity even greater than it enjoyed even in its heyday, such as it was.

And now, for something (almost) completely different. Politics is depressing me; Pres. Obama is outdoing my most pessimistic expectations in both his ham-fistedness and his no-longer-masked socialist tendencies and policy prescriptions. And there's a new Harry Potter movie coming out, and New Moon, the first Twilight sequel, is in post-production. So on to pop culture!

How to stimulate an economy

2009-04-16T20:29:00.003-04:00

Again with the NPR. Today I was listening to a segment that was billed as a "report card" of sorts on how the "gigantic stimulus bill" was working out in the actual economy - "All Things Considered," I want to say. This report card focused on three areas of the economy: energy, health care, and government services - noting in passing that "stimulating" aid to the government services sector represented "one of the biggest" pieces of the pie. (I have to wonder - no, I mean I really have to wonder, since the information isn't public in this, the most transparent administration ever - just where in the Top Ten it sits.)

Let's start there, at the three sectors NPR chose to highlight. Energy: okay, that's possibly a good choice, since I gather that Americans spend somewhere between seven and ten percent of their household income, on average, on energy, and because the energy industry has undergone a ginormous runup followed by an even more ginormous crash (my family is living through said crash right now; it is indeed MORE ginormous than the runup). But NPR, in what I immediately and confidently assumed would be its tireless effort to promote the Obama "stimulus" plan as an actual source of help to the economy, chose to cover not the great bulk of the energy sector - traditional energy sources, that is - but the teeny-weeny wind-and-solar bit. Apparently wind and solar providers and facilitators are absolutely thrilled with the President's plan as well as the quick disbursement of funds therefrom.

Of course they are. Stimulating? Certainly - to the maybe three million people worldwide who work in renewable energy - directly or for suppliers. (Note: my source calls its "2.3 million" number, as of last July, "in all likelihood a conservative figure." It doesn't say why the figure's conservatism is likely. Seems to me it's just as likely that it'd be a rather optimistic number, especially considering that the figure includes "indirect" employment in renewable energy, meaning firms that might or might not actually provide renewable energy services if the market turned against them.)

NPR's grade for Obama so far? S for Stimulating. Let's move on to health care.

Datum (or, as some might call it, "anecdote"): a free clinic in Seattle's Pike Place Market. The stimulus money arrived just in time, according to the report, to keep the doors open - and what do you know, now they're hiring! Yes, it's true! Two doctors "and support staff" in unnumbered hordes (or possibly a horde of one, I'm thinking, since the horde was in fact unnumbered and referred to only as "support staff"). Why? Because they're seeing so much more walk-in traffic from people who have lost their jobs and, with them, their employer-provided health care. So the stimulus bill has "created" something in excess of two jobs in that clinic - jobs utterly unnecessary if the clientele of the clinic had jobs themselves sufficient to pay for their own health care. And those jobs will be, or at any rate, should be, in jeopardy when those clients do go back to work.

NPR's grade? An enthusiastic S for Stimulating. On to government services.

Is there really any need to discuss it? Naturally using tax money and horrific debt to create and support government jobs and jobs dependent on government, such as the much-touted roadwork and construction of federal buildings, will receive NPR's unironic S for Stimulating. But they did have a reason for choosing this economic sector. Even some NPR devotees must feel a little uncomfortable about the whole robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul nature of "stimulating" the economy by creating government makework, so NPR had to address the point somehow; the obvious way to do so was to present a case, at least one compelling case, that would either tug at the heartstrings or engage the common sense bone, wherever it is, to prove that these jobs aren't makework after all, but real, good, sustainable jobs. So their example was Chicago road maintenance.

They began by noting that Illinois hadn't had the money (read: tax base; can't imagine why that'd be short of what was needed) to do the necessary work on its potholed roads. The stimulus bill's money apparently results in projections of an OK construction season, which the newsreader was quick to point out stood out in sharp relief against the 20% unemployment in all types of construction (versus the 8-ish percent unemployment overall at present). Why the fellow thought it'd make his point better to emphasize the "all types of construction" bit, I don't know; seems to me it only undermines his argument. As if it needed undermining; it's, again, specious to say that only through the Obama plan could these roads be repaired. If Illinois simply had enough tax revenue - voila, the problem is (or could be, provided Illinois legislators had their priorities straight - not necessarily a slam dunk, I admit) solved. Real jobs for real people, real taxpayers - that's stimulating. Road jobs that will dry up as soon as the money does - possibly short-term relief for those folks, but the opportunity cost remains uncalculated.

And that's the rub. Opportunity cost: we'll never know what any alternative to the Obama wealth-redistribution/power grab could have accomplished, because all such are lost to us now.

Say again?

2009-02-25T11:54:00.002-05:00

So last night's speech on the state of the economy. First impression: We're going to do everything at once: recover from this downturn while simultaneously hitting every item on our wish list! And how will we pay for it? Well, defense will be cut a lot, and the rich people will pay for the rest. After all, they have an endless supply of money, so taking more from them in taxes won't in any way affect their expenditures elsewhere. (There's a little straw in my restatement, for the sake of illustration, but show me where else we were told the money's supposed to come from. When the President said that he and his advisors had already started going through the budget "line by line" and had found places to cut $2 trillion over the next ten years - by the way, always extend your time horizon too far to be checked, and don't say whether your cuts are cuts or simple lower increases than currently planned - the only places he mentioned were defense and "big agribusiness," if memory serves.)

In other words, typical (post-Cold War) Democrat.

But then Pres. Obama reached the part where he "challenged" every American to commit to at least one year of higher education, and I was brought up short. Who the bleeping bleep does he think he is, telling me I should seek more education?

It so happens that I want more education. But I want it for me, not to fulfill some putative "duty to my country," as an earlier generation's or a different nation's politicians might have told me it was my duty to produce more children.

If this nation was founded on anything at all, it was founded on the right of individuals to chart the course of their lives. My high school government teacher, the gifted and beloved Mr. Grover, may he rest in peace, illustrated it in time-tested fashion by swinging his arm and walking toward a student - demonstrating his right to swing his arm until the point where it intersected with the student's nose. Of course, the principle he was demonstrating was the limit of an individual's rights, but whether he intended it or not, he was also demonstrating the right to do something other people consider silly or stupid.

Unfortunately for interlocuters who might insist that education is an unalloyed good or that its lack is costly to society, Heinlein, in his late work Friday, posits an independent California in which the government has noted that college grads make a premium over non-college grads. The inequity is quickly corrected by awarding everyone a bachelor's degree, and there's great rejoicing. Except that now, it's being observed that people with master's degrees are making more than those with mere bachelor's degrees, so there's a ballot initiative in process to upgrade everybody to a master's, backdated some years. What's the purpose of "challenging" everyone to seek more education than they have at present? If they're adequately educated to do their current jobs, what's the plan? The newly unemployed aren't lacking education; they're lacking jobs because the jobs aren't there at present. Prior to this downturn, unemployment was below the level considered to be "full employment"; education doesn't seem to be the problem. So this "challenge" does nothing except up the ante for what's required for a given job. Why? To provide more jobs for teachers? Are they pounding the pavement in disproportionate numbers?

In other words, from both a practical and a philosophical standpoint, it's a stupid idea. Encouraging education - sure, why not? While we're at it, let's encourage fewer abortions and more fruits and vegetables in the diet. But either to mandate these things (which Obama stopped short of doing) or to present them as a "duty" (which he did imply) is overstepping government's proper bounds.

I agree with everything but the last bit

2009-02-17T22:34:00.002-05:00

Here, Charles Krauthammer discusses the recent (stunning, wondrous) provincial elections in Iraq. A summary:

There was no Election Day violence. Security was handled by Iraqi forces with little U.S. involvement. A fabulous bazaar of 14,400 candidates representing 400 parties participated, yielding results highly favorable to both Iraq and the United States.

Iraq moved away from religious sectarianism toward more secular nationalism. "All the parties that had the words 'Islamic' or 'Arab' in their names lost," noted Middle East expert Amir Taheri. "By contrast, all those that had the words 'Iraq' or 'Iraqi' gained."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went from leader of a small Islamic party to leader of the "State of Law Party," campaigning on security and secular nationalism. He won a smashing victory. His chief rival, a more sectarian and pro-Iranian Shiite religious party, was devastated. Another major Islamic party, the pro-Iranian Sadr faction, went from 11 percent of the vote to 3 percent, losing badly in its stronghold of Baghdad. The Islamic Fadhila party that had dominated Basra was almost wiped out.

The once-dominant Sunni party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the erstwhile insurgency was badly set back. New grass-roots tribal ("Awakening") and secular Sunni leaders emerged.

In other words, the garden we planted back in 2003, beset in times and places with marauding insects, hailstorms, thieves and ill-wishers, appears to be taking root. Krauthammer notes that - as always in the Middle East - Iraq is not out of danger; he points to three possible threats: military coup a la too much of the post-colonial world, strongman a la Chavez, and collapse due to a premature withdrawal of U.S. support. Iraqis, he reminds us, are responsible for ensuring that neither of the first two occurs; but we are responsible for ensuring that the third doesn't. Rather, President Obama, the will-o-the-wisp, the weathervane, is. Hurry up, Iraqis; you may not have much time to adjust to our absence.

Krauthammer ends his piece thus:

When you become president of the United States you inherit its history, even the parts you would have done differently. Obama might argue that American sacrifices in Iraq were not worth what we achieved. But for the purposes of current and future policy, that is entirely moot. Despite Obama's opposition, America went on to create a small miracle in the heart of the Arab Middle East. President Obama is now the custodian of that miracle. It is his duty as leader of the nation that gave birth to this fledgling democracy to ensure that he does nothing to undermine it.

The only part I take issue with is the "small miracle." American policy under Bush appears to have brought about an unprecedented miracle in Iraq, and in record time. I only hope that when the President is alone, he's both humble and sensible enough to realize the magnitude of what's happening there, and - his short public statement about the elections, "[Iraqis] should continue the process of Iraqis taking responsibility for their future," which Krauthammer correctly calls "ungenerous," notwithstanding - appreciates and accepts his responsibility for this child he didn't father.

Yes, I know I've grossly mixed my metaphors. Sue me.

Well, it's "change" at any rate...

2009-02-09T16:47:00.003-05:00

What's this about the census?

As required by the Constitution, every ten years the federal government undertakes a massive effort to count and gather information about Americans. The information impacts hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions about federal funding and policy. But most importantly, it will be the basis for the redistricting which determines Congressional representation.

The White House has proposed that the director of the Census, a Commerce Department employee, report to the White House. The White House contends this is no big deal.

"No big deal": the decision about whether to perform an actual count or use a sampling method, for instance. Mmm-hmm.

On the topic of sampling methods, I'm sure we're all familiar with the Lancet's excess-deaths study from 2006, now quite thoroughly discredited. This is the result of improper application of statistics, and particularly agenda-driven improper application of statistics. There are situations wherein it's impossible to perform an actual count of something or someones; where that's true (and I believe it was indeed true in Iraq), those hoping for true answers ought to be especially cautious in their methods, since the factors that make a real count impossible can also contribute to out-of-whack sampling error (as in the Lancet study - and this is giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt, as it seems that the misstatements in that report are all in support of the principal author's personal views).

This is the census. The basis for allocation of Congress representation. Should it be contained in the White House? Would Bush have been applauded for making this move - or vilified (more)?

Of means and ends

2009-02-04T07:27:00.003-05:00

I'm far from the first to suggest that the American Left takes a page from Marx. (Far from the first.) I do try to avoid histrionics about "Democrat==Commie" and so forth, but when evidence like this presents itself:

The health care crisis means we must have Daschle and make an exception to the new raised ethics bar. The financial meltdown means that we must have Geithner and make an exception to the new raised ethics bar. The war in Afghanistan and the comfortability level of Secretary Gates means we must make an exception to the new raised ethics bar and have Deputy Secretary Lynn. The vital need to restore the Constitution (Whoops! Renditions, FISA, the Patriot Act, and maybe Guantanmo are, well, still here.) means we must make an exception to the new raised ethics bar and have Attorney General Holder. So what happened to Bill Richardson? His value to the nation in times of crisis did not justify an exception?

Now, this is Victor Davis Hanson's interpretation of events in the Obama Administration, and so we can infer partisanship. But what reasonable interpretations are possible? Occam's Razor gives us, I think, two: that President Obama called on these people because he thought they were best for the jobs and was willing to overlook their ethics issues as long as they didn't reach the public eye, or that President Obama owed or felt he owed some plum positions to these people (and was willing to overlook their ethics issues as long as they didn't reach the public eye). Neither one is very admirable.

And then we have The New Editor's Tom Elia, who sums it all up thusly:

At the dawn of the Obama Administration we have witnessed: four high-level appointees blow up over various issues, tax and otherwise (Richardson, Daschel, and Killefer get axed; Geitner stays); the appointment of at least 12 lobbyists to positions in the Administration -- in direct contradiction of campaign promises; a pork-laden economic stimulus bill without precedent in US history; and the reversal of campaign positions concerning controversial policies like rendition.

Let me say that I don't believe President Obama and Congressional Democrats are the only guilty parties with regard to the ridiculous "stimulus" situation. Congressional Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for going along to get along.

But there are two points I want to make about these observations. First, the subtext Hanson sees is obvious: if so many Obama appointees have ethical "challenges," shall we say, then how many whose lives aren't in the spotlight must have them? And second, and this harks back to my post on functionalism, when one openly allows the end to justify the means by making decisions that clearly place ends ahead of all other considerations (this is giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt by assuming that he really did believe he was choosing the best people for these positions), one runs the risk of being reasonably accused of ruthless Marxist-like pragmatism.

(The difference I see between these appointee missteps and the Bush Administration's Patriot Act, or better I should say Democrat pundits' response to the Patriot Act - that it was stomping all over our civil liberties, etc., etc., using fear as a motivator to convince everybody that we needed to allow the end to justify the means - is that objectively, the Patriot Act hasn't actually stomped all over our civil liberties, whereas admitted tax cheats really have stomped all over the US Tax Code. For instance.)

UPDATE: But wait - there's more! From the LA Times (to my surprise): "In Washington's culture, unlike the lives of most normal obviously naive Americans, that's [that is, questions of right and wrong] hardly ever the issue. It's about what works. It's all about strategy."

Where is the whirlwind?

2009-02-03T13:46:00.002-05:00

This week is the seventh anniversary of Daniel Pearl's murder. (via Instapundit)

Do you remember when it happened? I should say, "when he was slowly beheaded on video," just in case the name rings a bell but the details escape you? I do. I felt suddenly numb; I said to my husband, "They've sown the wind now." As Mr. Pearl's father says in the Wall Street Journal editorial I'm linking,

Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

And yet even in the immediate aftermath, the signs were all there that there would be no lasting outrage, no repudiation of the fundamental error of placing Pearl's killers and, oh, let's just say Israel, or possibly Bush's America, on the same moral footing. The moral-equivalency trap. No sense that being poor and downtrodden was not an excuse for being terrorists. No acknowledgement that being Palestinian, for instance, doesn't afford tacit permission for a person to strap on a vest full of C4 and walk into a bus station. No whirlwind.

Instead, we got a little horror - how not? - followed by a lot of explanation and excuse: what other choice did Pearl's killers have, after all? They needed their message to be heard, and no one was listening, so in a sense Pearl is a martyr not for civilized humanity but to the inexplicable vagaries and far-too-explicable injustices of the global information marketplace. He died so that they could be heard. Terribly sad, but in this unbalanced world...

No. He died because we silly Westerners believe that really, down deep, everybody's basically nice; some people are "driven" to "acts" of evil, but to call the people evil is un-nuanced, simplistic, plebeian. My parents took this tack when I was a kid; even right before the spanking, the line was, "I love you but I dislike your behavior right now."

That hair-splitting was absolutely true when my parents used it. And parenting is perhaps a good place for it. In geopolitics - do we really have to mind the tender sensibilities of those bent on our destruction, either retail (like Pearl, one at a time) or wholesale (via violent jihad, as its proponents understand it)? Is it not appropriate, and a whole lot less patronizing, to assume that our enemies are grownups, capable of hearing and understanding our outrage, and then to evaluate their response at face value - that is, as if they are capable of saying what they mean and doing what they say? Is diplomacy always a game of metaphor and hyperbole?

We all know it isn't. But they, whoever they are in whatever era, know that we prefer to think that "We will bury you!" doesn't mean, "We want and intend to destroy you!" but rather, "We have chosen a different path and think yours is lame!" And they, whoever they are, have learned that they can use this sweet propensity of ours against us, by using the metaphor and the hyperbole to soften us up so that we won't react, or won't react in time, when they actually do what they say they're going to.

In other words, global diplomacy is a lot more complicated than the Left seems to think, because sometimes - not every time, but sometimes - there really is an enemy, there really is no common cause to which to appeal - or at least not without a cost too high to pay, there really is the will to do evil. And no amount of negotiation, no matter how "high-level," can change these facts. Daniel Pearl didn't "pay with his life" to bring this lesson home; his life was not what he was offering, so we could say he "paid" only in the sense that the victim of a robbery "pays" the robber. Daniel Pearl died, innocent and out of his time, and from his death we should have learned about enemies and evil. Did we?

New template - someday I'll customize!

2009-02-03T07:53:00.001-05:00

It's funny; I've built (let's see now) somewhere around a dozen websites for one organization or another, never using Frontpage or any other spawn of Satan like that... yet I just blindly accept Blogspot's templates. The fast food of layout.

Sigh. Someday I'll have time to dink around with it.

Turn back, O man...

2009-01-24T09:16:00.003-05:00

...as opposed to, "Go West, young man."

Chicago Boyz, a great economics blog, raises the question of whether California has passed an important tipping point:

I think a threshold or tipping point exists in the ratio between the political power of those who pay taxes and those who consume taxes directly. After that tipping point is reached, those who pay taxes become the economic slaves of those who consume taxes.

The power of unions is intrinsic to the question; a union aggregates the concerns as well as the influence of however many members it has toward particular political and economic aims. Shannon Love, one of the boyz, notes that

California has ~2.3 million unionized government workers and ~18.6 million civilians. With so many people organized with a laser-like focus on increasing taxes and spending, the private working citizens of California find it nearly impossible to prevent government workers from voting their own paychecks.

And more:

As far as the state government is concerned, people in the private sector work merely so that they can be taxed for the benefit of the tax consumers. They’ve entered a condition not unlike like that of pre-industrial serfs.

Of course no one is being whipped, but in effect an ordinary citizen of California cannot get their desires for reduced state spending implemented due to the disproportionate power of the State’s employees and allied interest. It appears now that the government unions will not accept any solution to California’s budget crisis except increased taxes in a declining economy. Ordinary citizens have no choice but to either emigrate or just lie there and take it.

I'm conflicted. On one hand, my family and my husband's all live in California; we'd love to return there if we could, not just so that we could see them all more often but so that we could stop spending so much money and vacation time on our too-short, too-infrequent visits. Furthermore, California really is just about the best place in the country for people like us: pleasant climate, beautiful scenery, cosmopolitan all the way down to many of the small towns but still with lots and lots of wilderness ranging from unspoiled to complete-with-cabins for those who want flush toilets, all kinds of outdoor and indoor recreation readily accessible. But on the other hand... I don't really want our household to work for (sorry, bro) my brother's. Real estate, though down from recent years, is still too expensive for us to consider committing income to a mortgage when we have so little control over how much of that income will never hit our pockets.

From the Sacramento Bee, I see that Schwartzeneggar's proposal to have all nonessential State workers take one day off every other week, accruing vacation time but not pay for that twice-monthly furlough, has been axed by the State Controller as being outside the Executive's authority. And here, the Bee speaks with a labor leader from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) about what's "on the table" for labor negotiations in California's current serious budget crisis:

So what's changed [that Ms. Walker sounds "upbeat" about upcoming negotiations]?
Well, we've been trying to be part of the solution all along. But having the controller validate that furloughing isn't legal helps. Maybe now the administration is ready to sit down and have the hard conversation.

...
And money will be part of the "hard conversation"?
It hasn't been so far, but it has to be (now).

What about furloughs?
That I don't know. Certainly you have to recognize it's not something we'd bring to the table, but we're not opposed to talking about it. People need to recognize that we're not just people who take from the general fund. We're taxpayers, too. We understand what's at stake.

So are you saying that holding the line in terms of pay would be considered a win, given the state's money troubles?
That would be good, wouldn't it?

Emphasis mine. I don't get how we reconcile the last two Q&As: "We're taxpayers too, not just feeding at the public trough," and "It'd be good if our pay can stay exactly the same."

This is a loooooong post. But I love California, and its condition today saddens and frustrates me. Sigh.

That which works

2009-01-23T18:20:00.002-05:00

Back in oh, freshman year of college or so, I had to do a paper on an important psychologist, with emphasis on his or her philosophy of treatment. Not wanting to go with the obvious, I chose William James, functionalist, who summed up his own therapeutic philosophy as "doing that which works." I'm a fan of that kind of thinking in many cases, but I do think it needs to be tempered by sane judgment and ethics. President Obama is taking a functionalist approach, it appears:

In practice, we know what this [Obama's statement was "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works"] means: Obama wants more federal spending, more federal regulation, more federal mandates, and more federal prohibitions. It means the president—like all presidents—wants more power.

And objecting that the Constitution limits his power, or that more federal or presidential power is inherently corrupting or destructive—that’s out of line. The only legitimate question to ask about the new powers the president wants is “whether it works.”

But that raises another question: Works for whom?

Tim Carney's question isn't the only one. Parents and schools could make a case for corporal punishment's "working" because yes, conditioning does actually "work" in terms of specific behavior change; does that make spanking, caning, hitting with a belt, ruler, or wooden spoon the right way to change a child's behavior? Or is it simply the expedient (and sometimes most satisfying) way, with possibly harmful longer-term consequences? (Not intending to get into a spanking debate; it was just the first example that springs to my mind. My parents spanked, wooden spoon method usually, and not frequently or as their first choice; they are kind and thoughtful people who believed with all their hearts that (a) they were acting in our best interests, and (b) they would do us worse psychological damage if they struck with a hand, because it'd personalize the action. My husband and I don't spank, which makes discipline of our children very challenging and repetitive sometimes, but we believe the research is in and have made our choice.)

So my question is not "Works for whom?" but "At what cost?" We've just been through seven years of argument about the cost of Bush's foreign policy decisions to our status in the world, our national identity, the Constitution... Are we supposed to pass on that question when the maker of the policy is not Bush?

2009-01-21T17:36:00.002-05:00

From a CBC News article, first one I found with an image worthy of the day. Congratulations, Mr. Obama, and God bless you and the United States. You're now entrusted with the hardest job in the world. All we can ask of you is that you wake up every day determined to do that job to the best of your ability.

Just a reminder...

2009-01-21T17:19:00.002-05:00

...which I sincerely hope will not be required by my side of the aisle: Andy Levy's To-Don't list. An excerpt:

DON’T make it personal. We don’t need another Derangement Syndrome. We don’t need people doing things like emphasizing Obama’s middle name in a derogatory fashion. How anyone would think that’s beneficial to their cause, or to the country as a whole, is beyond me. Also, it’s not even clever. Neither are smushwords like BusHitler, or sillywords like Rethuglicans and Dhimmicrats.
...
DON’T use the word “divisive.” At this point, all that word means is “You disagree with me,” and the English language gets mangled enough these days.
...[and finally:]...
And finally, DON’T use the fact that many on the left behaved abominably for the past eight years as an excuse to behave the same way. America needs adults. And if it bothered you when they did it, it’s a good sign that you shouldn’t do it.

The husband and I got into quite an argument last night about the outgoing administration, I maintaining that Bush had been treated so abominably by the "loyal opposition" and its enablers in the media that it was impossible to tell what the American public's independent opinion of his policies and actions at the end of his tenure would have been, and my husband correctly, but infuriatingly, pointing out that BDS, ridiculous and unjustified as it is, was nonetheless the card the Bush administration was dealt and that it would live forever in infamy for not having done better against it. In other words, my husband believes that the Republican party over the last eight years managed to lose everything - House, Senate, White House, conservatives, moderates, everybody but the quixotic such as myself - because Bush didn't effectively get the party's message out. I believe that no Republican could have done so. He believes that a reincarnated Reagan could have. I don't know whether that's true; Reagan's time was two decades ago and lots has changed, not least the average age (and therefore era) of the media folk who run the 24-hour news cycle (another difference between our time and Reagan's).

But Levy's point, and it's a better one than either mine or my husband's, is that all of it now is history, and that Republicans must remember to act like the grownups they are, no matter how much we'd like to give in to our inner child as the other side has been doing for eight years.

And that's all I have to say about that. Phthththbthh.

Maybe things ain't so bad after all...

2009-01-14T07:32:00.002-05:00

...if CBS thinks $35 is a "shoestring" budget for a home-cooked dinner.

The menu?

Menu
Beet Salad with Crushed Pistachios & Soft Goat Cheese
Lamb Ragu with Rigatoni and Fresh Ricotta
Greek Yogurt with Blood Oranges, Honey & Mint

Ahem. Let's start with the premise: that in a time of economic downturn, recession, financial catastrophe - take your pick - $35 constitutes an acceptably low dinner budget for a family of (I'm guessing, based on quantities) four. As several commenters in the (now closed) comment string point out, this dollar amount totals almost $13,000 a year - for dinners only. Whew! Some shoestring.

And next, the food choices: First let me say that I'd eat this dinner - oh, yes. It sounds delicious. But it doesn't sound like the way to train a palate, particularly a palate on a budget. When I say "train," I'm not talking about training someone to be a food critic, or an Epicure (God help us all if that horrible heresy is returning); I'm talking about raising children who will eat things. All kinds of things. This menu has, I freely admit, "all kinds of things" - and for every child I've ever known, would result in an awful dinner debacle and nonstop post-dinner begging for a "snack," because the child wouldn't eat half enough to feel satisfied until bedtime. Fights all night? Not my idea of a great evening, no matter how much this menu tries to promise that budget constraints needn't mean any kind of pain.

Here's a problem we have with our children: one "doesn't like bread." "It's too dry," he says, but won't use any kind of condiment or moist filling in a sandwich. Hence he rails against sandwiches for lunch. Of the three, only one eats macaroni and cheese in any form; the other two want, respectively, plain noodles with nothing on them and noodles with butter and grated Parmiggiano. All will eat lettuce and certain other salad veggies - but only one will eat only one kind of dressing. All will eat certain hot veggies - but none with any sauce whatsoever (except the butter their grandmother considers God's gift to all foods, no matter how often I tell her they actually like plain vegetables). The point: they all expect ALL food to be delicious, by their own standards, and have trouble downing anything they don't "love." What happens when they eat with a friend? Same thing that happens at our house when friends of theirs come over for dinner: as often as not, we have one of the Big Three, pizza, hot dogs, or chicken.

We are in a now two-year campaign to introduce them to the concept that you eat what you're given, always with the idea that a new palate-pleaser may be on your plate.

The way to accomplish this goal is NOT - repeat NOT - to give them an entire meal of "interesting" flavors. It's to give them a meal they can and will eat without complaint, with one or two twists. The CBS menu stinks for this purpose.

Furthermore. I was disappointed with some of the commenters because they proudly stated that they'd be happy with spaghetti and a can of tomato sauce, etc. - at which the CBS people will snort, roll their eyes, and immediately dismiss their underlying point, which is that CBS has no clue about a "budget" dinner. An alternative:

Make your own sauce. It's cheaper than jars, it's easy, a good tomato sauce can be made in the time it takes to cook the pasta, and if you have a windowsill for herbs you can really up the taste ante with those. A little olive oil, some crushed or whole plum tomatoes from a can, some crushed garlic, a little red wine if you have some that's been open, dried or fresh oregano and basil - I minced my summer basil and froze it in olive oil and now use that as the basis of any winter red sauce; dead easy.

If you're going to eat an expensive entree (or salad, or dessert), make the other courses simpler and cheaper. Spread that budget.

Don't eat dessert every night unless it's fruit (this one is, sort of). As for Greek yogurt? We referred to my hips as "tzatziki" for a good year after our long-ago trip to Crete because that's right where it went; I LOOOOOVE Greek yogurt. But lowfat yogurt, drained in a paper-towel-lined strainer, is a great substitute. And (everybody now) lots cheaper.

CBS, still bringing you quality stories... right?

Health care: a subtext

2008-12-15T18:41:00.002-05:00

I saw a billboard the other day, here in the sometimes-chilly western suburbs of Philadelphia, concerning PA CHIP - the Pennsylvania Children's Health Insurance Program. The ad proclaimed that now no uninsured child, no matter how much the family's income, can be denied CHIP coverage. My immediate thought was along lines of "misaligned incentives": taken at face value, this program would seem to disincent parents from insuring their children privately. I emphasize that I had no knowledge of premium costs, requirements that parents who had private insurance available actually use it, or any other details - just this ad, which says in essence, "Don't insure your child; Pennsylvania will take care of it for you."

So today I googled "Pennsylvania children's health insurance" - the search I performed is here. The first item that came up (and Google being what it is, it may not be the same one now) was this - the website the billboard sent people to, to learn more. Reasonable.

But the text accompanying the link on Google? That was interesting. I quote:

All wealthy uninsured children and teens not eligible for Medical Assistance have access to health insurance. It doesn't matter how much money your family...

I goggled. (At Google.) Surely they couldn't really have said "all wealthy uninsured children...", could they? I clicked the link. Here's what I read:

Don't assume that you earn too much to qualify.

All uninsured children and teens not eligible for Medical Assistance have access to health insurance.

In other words, somebody at CHIP had the same thought I did, and had access to the metatags. Interesting indeed.

Well, it's "change" at any rate...

2008-12-12T07:10:00.003-05:00

The whole Blagojevich thing, I mean. Such as here.
Because so far as even the most rabid of Bush-haters has been able to tell, W.'s gubernatorial seat was not on the auction block once he was president-elect.

Sigh.

You'd think that after this long, politicians on both sides of the aisle would be wary of speaking in absolutes. They have so much faith in our short attention span, though, that the never-to-be-fulfilled promises just keep coming (cf. "Most Ethical Congress Ever"...)

I don't fault a politician for making promises to try things that ultimately fail as long as he or she actually does try them; as everybody knows, the President does not control the pursestrings and so has limited influence over the budget (although in this case even less-rabid Bush-haters seem to believe W. is, again, both blindingly stupid and a malevolent genius), for instance. But when a politician promises to deliver on something that's in his or her basic control, such as how, ethically speaking, he or she will govern if elected, I do expect results.

Bush promised "compassionate conservatism." It's not an approach I think makes much sense, but he did indeed deliver on it. Obama promises "hope and change" (again, what kind of stupid idea is that? But it's what got him where he is); we'll see how well he does. So far the scandals and the Clinton-era appointees and so forth don't bode all that well. I'm willing to cut him a good bit of slack because he has to actually govern, not just pander to the nuttiest among those who voted for him, but I do expect to see something different. Bring it on, Mr. President-Elect.

Notice how I'm off politics?

2008-12-05T16:12:00.001-05:00

Yeah, me too. Burnout.

Things I Like, Pt. Deux

2008-12-05T15:22:00.002-05:00

But wait, there's more! Song lyrics. I like song lyrics.

Back in high school, I remember laughing over the lyrics of some song or other - "let's take a shower together," something like that. My sister, who I don't believe liked the actual song any better than I did, nevertheless thoughtfully noted that songs of that genre had more heart than the rock songs that were the staples of my social circle. At the time I had to agree. It's hard to argue that "If You See Kay" (that was April Wine) or "The Number of the Beast" (that was Iron Maiden) were as - for lack of a better term - makeout-worthy as, say, "Let's take a shower together," the name of which I can't remember if indeed I ever knew it.

And then I fell for and eventually married (and somewhat more eventually divorced) a young man for whom song lyrics were almost his preferred mode of communication, and I discovered a world to which I'd been blind and deaf before. After this long and a second marriage that's everything the unfortunate first one wasn't for either of us, I still thank him for giving me ears to hear:

I thought I loved you - it was just how you looked in the light. ("Hum Hallelujah," Fall Out Boy)
I feel the way you would. ("Afterimage," Rush)
I need to feel your heartbeat, so close it feels like mine - all mine. ("Heartbeat," King Crimson)
(Here's a whole verse from one of my favorite songs ever:)
I saw teenage girls like gaudy moths,
A classroom's shabby butterflies,
Flirt in the glow of stranded telephone boxes;
Planning white lace weddings from smeared hearts and token proclamations,
Rolled from stolen lipsticks across the razored webs of glass.
Sharing cigarettes with experience
With her giggling jealous confidantes,
She faithfully traces his name
With quick bitten fingernails
Through the tears of condensation
Thatll cry through the night
As the glancing headlights of the last bus
Kiss adolescence goodbye. ("Warm Wet Circles," Marillion)
I am the ticket, you the prize; when begins the winning? ("Girl With Grey Eyes," Big Country)
If I only could
I'd make a deal with God
And get Him to swap our places;
Be running up that road,
Be running up that hill,
With no problems. ("Running Up That Hill," Kate Bush)
(Another whole verse, and an uncharacteristic choice:)
Well I don't give a dang about nothing
When I'm singing and bling-blinging
While the girls are drinking
Long necks down!
And I wouldn't trade ol' Leroy
Or my Chevrolet for your Escalade
Or your freak parade
'Cause I'm the only John Wayne left in this town. ("Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy," Big & Rich - and it's a laff riot! I love this song)
And the man from the magazine wants another shot of you all curled up,
'Cause you look like an actor in a movie shot, but you're feeling like a wino in a parking lot. ("Heart of Lothian," Marillion)
(Another whole verse:)
The sky was Bible black in Lyon,
when I met the Magdalene.
She was paralyzed in a streetlight.
She refused to give her name.
And a ring of violet bruises,
They were pinned upon her arm.
Two hundred francs for sanctuary and she led me by the hand,
to a room of dancing shadows where all the heartache disappears
And from glowing tongues of candles I heard her whisper in my ear.
'J'entend ton coeur,'
'J'entend ton coeur':
I can hear your heart. ("Bitter Suite," Marillion - I think Marillion's former vocalist and lyricist, Fish, was one of the great prog poets)
(One more Marillion. The setting is children running through a sprinkler:)
Then I heard the children singing;
They were running through the rainbows.
They were singing a song for you -
Well, it seemed to be a song for you,
The one I wanted to write for you. ("Lavender," Marillion)
Show a little faith: there's magic in the night.
You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right. ("Thunder Road," Springsteen)

Things I like

2008-12-02T18:42:00.003-05:00

It's been brought to my attention by this and that person that my Twilight/Mrs. Robinson thing is kind of creeping them out. So I thought to myself, "Self, perhaps it's time - rather than withdrawing - to put a little more out there." Because, well, why not? So the following is some of the mishmash that constitutes my essence.

I like cloth napkins. We don't have paper napkins in my house; we have old and increasingly ratty cloth ones. (Sometimes we do use paper towels, but usually only because all the ratty cloth ones are waiting to be ironed.) We use napkin rings in their old sense: to mark the family's already-once-used napkins. I'd never use them for company.
I like tiny cute things, like really tricked-out dollhouses and those bitty glass animal figurines. I've never had these things; I just like them.
I like old-school Heinleinian science fiction. I do not like new-school "crystal singer" (which, yes, I know is already old) "science fiction." I like Card, Herbert (up through the third, MAYBE the fourth Dune book), Foster, some Asimov, some Niven, some Clarke, (in an odd departure) some Brin, a few others, in addition to Heinlein; but really my repertoire is limited. I'm actually not that fond of the genre, except for these folks. Not a woman in the mix. Women's science fiction has always disappointed me - the little I've made it through.
I like to read Shakespeare; I sometimes like seeing Shakespeare performed.
I like the men of my romantic fantasies to be young, not because they're at any sort of physical peak, but because they're at a certain kind of emotional peak: wherein they are idealistic, passionate about everything, sometimes thoughtlessly cruel in their black-and-whiteness, but when they realize the cruelty they're profoundly sorry. Probably I could chalk up this preference to the fact that a whole lot of me remains young in this sense.
I like good grammar. I also like messing around with grammar, knowing that I know what's good grammar.
I like Scotch, the dirtier-tasting the better. And lately I like Irish whiskey too; I drink both straight up. I don't care for bourbon, at least not to drink on its own. In other libations, I like Guinness very much indeed, most beers that are darker than (ahem) p*ss, most dry wines - though I steer clear of Merlot generally, because it's too wishy-washy, in my price range at any rate. I like very strong coffee, which I then turn into girly coffee with flavored creamer. I like Diet Coke and will stomach Diet Pepsi if I must. I do not like sugared sodas.
I like making things, usually the hardest way possible. My sister has commented on this fact. If equally tasty tomato sauce can be made by opening a jar or by peeling, seeding, and cooking tomatoes from my laboriously organic garden, mincing (garden) garlic by hand, sweetening with sauteed minced (garden) onion (not sugar), picking (garden) herbs and mincing them too, well, I'd be happiest if I also had an olive tree out back from which I could make my own olive oil. I don't actually have time for what I want to do.
I like knowing how to do lots of things, even if there's no conceivable way I'll ever need that knowledge. I know how to make a dovetail joint; at no time in my life will I ever make one. I know how to find water in the desert; I plan never to get into that kind of pickle.
I like reading on vacation. My idea of a perfect day in Paris has nothing to do with the Louvre or the Rive Gauche or anything like that; it'd be any obscure cafe´ with my well-stocked and charged-up Kindle in hand, weather irrelevant. My perfect day at the beach actively avoids being at the beach, but rather lounging around at the hotel with the Kindle. Actually, I like reading, and re-reading, more than just about anything.
I like being poorly paid. Don't ask me why. If you do ask, I'll probably have to say it's because that way (a) I don't have to feel too guilty about whatever level of effort I make, and (b) people are astonished at how committed I am, considering how poorly I'm paid. Contradictory but true.
I like winning games but I don't like people to know that.
I like confession. Does it show?
I like making lists. Sometimes I even use them as tools to help organize my overly committed life. It seldom works very well, because I make too many of them.

That's some of it. The great wonder of it all is that my dear husband married me knowing my "bag of crazies," as some nearly-as-dear friends call it, and has stayed married to me for going on fifteen years so far, and assures me he'd do it all again. What a fella.

Happy V-I Day!

2008-11-22T16:38:00.002-05:00

Zombietime hath declared it so: Today is Victory in Iraq Day!

The nature of this conflict is such that there's no meeting where one general surrenders to another; all violence does not pass from the region; civil liberties do not blossom unchecked in the heart of the Middle East. But what we have is this:

No more Saddam Hussein, no more sons of Saddam Hussein, no more terror tactics aimed at Iraqi citizens by their own government.
A democratically elected government, we must add.
Constrained, we must add, by a constitution ratified by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis.
Civil society rises; illiberalism diminishes.
Violence falls to the point where it can no longer be considered a concerted effort on the part of Iraq's enemies, internal or external; they have been soundly defeated.
Trust in government's monopoly on the use of force - which means not only a sense that government should have that monopoly, but also that government will not abuse that monopoly, is now a majority opinion - and not a bare majority but a commanding one.

There is more. There's much more. But I have something to do - so go celebrate!

I saw the mooo-vee, I really liiiiked it...

2008-11-21T18:50:00.002-05:00

So I went to the midnight showing of Twilight last night with a non-Twilight-fan friend - loved it! It was pure lovely escape. I'm not blind to its flaws (not enough time spent on developing the relationship that's central to the story - to all four books' stories, in fact, special effects reveal the film's low budget, the detail of the book's plot doesn't come out in every instance in the movie), but boy, did I have a good time!

***************** SPOILER ALERT for anyone planning to see it ******************

Notes, faves, and observations:

1. I was fascinated by audience reaction to several scenes: nervous laughter. I'll have to see it again to pinpoint all of the scenes, but my middle-of-the-night recollection is that it was during the moments of greatest intensity, where we're supposed really to sense Edward's difference - his deadliness, the fact that, "vegetarian" or not, he's a vampire. The one I can recall for certain is the first scene in biology, when he first catches Bella's scent and is nearly overcome by a desire to kill her. The scene does a series of short cuts throughout biology class, in each one Edward glaring murderously at Bella as Bella, bewildered, surreptitiously sniffs her hair and clothes and otherwise tries to figure out how he could hate or be disgusted by her on sight. Edward... never... moves. You have the sense that if he were to move, it would be - well, terrible.

There were giggles from this corner, then that row, then a little ripple from over there, at each short cut - as if the audience was trying to defuse the horror of the scene. I say "nervous laughter" with confidence, because (a) I know what I was feeling during that scene - "don't move, Bella - don't move, Edward," (b) it didn't have that "OK, this is kind of funny, I guess..." sort of weariness to it, and (c) it never grew. It cropped up - it fizzled; over and over, in a number of scenes like that one. Veddy interesting.

2. The movie had one major drawback: given the constraints of the medium, it couldn't show enough relationship development for either the non-Twilight person (who might be left, as my friend was, a little puzzled as to what these two saw in one another) or the Twihard (who wanted EVERY LAST LINE of dialogue represented). As such, it had to rely very heavily on the much-discussed chemistry between Bella and Edward. And I thought they did a very workmanlike job: the wordless scene when they're lying in the meadow, just looking at one another, not even touching, is tender indeed. The scene in the treetop, where they circle around and around the trunk, clambering up and twisting between branches, was like watching them make out (no nervous laughter in the theater there, only utter silence) - the tree limbs were like surrogates for their own limbs, their motions around and through them like an awkward physical exploration they could not actually have with one another. They had, I thought, a next-to-impossible task in trying to portray their growing love, but at the very least they managed to portray their growing desire!

3. Favorite scenes: First kiss. The final trailer before the movie came out showed about half of it, and that was good enough - two fraught seconds of almost-contact, two seconds of kiss. But there's more: maybe three seconds of Bella losing her grip on the fact that she's supposed to be holding perfectly still, grabbing Edward's face and smooching him, and then the critical one second of Edward throwing her backwards and diving on her with something between groan and whimper, then rocketing away from her as he realizes how close to the edge he is. Tasty.

Prom kiss. Even knowing that Edward will not be biting Bella at this time (which is a paraphrase from The Princess Bride - "He doesn't kill Westley at this time. I say this because you looked nervous"), the moment when he bends over her neck, asking her if she's ready right now to be turned into a vampire, is - whew!

And venom-sucking-out. Bella is losing blood; Carlisle has tourniqueted her thigh, the femoral artery of which has been severed. So she's in and out, and her eyes are crossing both with the in-and-out-ness and with the pain of the venom and, though I didn't see the shot administered, with the morphine Carlisle is supposed to have given her. Because Carlisle is dealing with her injuries (and they should've made him have to do more, because my recollection is that he's just kind of sitting there watching as he tells Edward he has to be the one, though he, Carlisle, has the greatest control of any of them), Edward has to suck the venom out of the inside of her wrist (which is WAY hotter than her being bitten on the hand, as the book says). He spends precious seconds telling her he'll "make it go away" as he gathers his courage, shoots a desperate glance at Carlisle, and yanks her arm to his mouth. And drinks. And drinks, moaning. Bella, still in and out, eyes rolling back in her head - is she losing consciousness, or is she overcome (if you know what I mean)? Edward's eyes, vacillating between wide-open horror at what he's doing and half-closed pure ecstasy. The fire of James's destruction in the background. If the treetop scene was surrogate makeout, this is proxy sex. And it's so intense it was almost painful to watch. And I want to watch it over, and over, and over, because voyeurism is fun.

4. How did my non-Twilight friend like it? And why did I like it so much? Hmm. She enjoyed it and came out of it thinking she'd read the books, so even though some references were lost on her and some short scenes - obviously included for the Twihards and for the sequels - didn't make a lot of sense to her, that's a win for Stephenie Meyers. As for me... well, as previously discussed, I never actually got older than seventeen, so the books and now the movie enable me to relive, in safe vicarious fashion, the wild torments and unearthly joys of that age. An age, I should add, when I was very horribly in love with the wrong person, convinced that I would literally (and I almost do mean "literally" - not just in the teenage figurative sense of "literally") die if he left. Which, of course, he did, and I didn't die, so I was in good shape for meeting my husband eventually and being able to fall hard for him without fearing I was shortening my life. So in addition to my proclivity for peopling the landscape of my mind with younger men like the very pretty and rather scary Rob Pattinson, I loved all that intensity.

Funny. There's way more in my life today for me to feel intensely about; I wonder why I don't feel as intensely about all of it as I did about what, in the end, was a one-year hardly-worthy-of-the-name "relationship"?

Because seventeen, that's why.

The good won't be interred with his bones

2008-11-07T18:14:00.002-05:00

I Think Therefore I Err is having "I Love George W. Bush Day." I've taken a lot of heat even from my own husband about the fact that my support of President Bush has never wavered; I think it's high time the crosshairs moved off this man and onto someone who actually deserves the epithets, insults, sneering, and scorn he has received. (Maybe the news media. Wait - some members of the news media, like perhaps Chris "Tingles" Matthews.)

During Bush's eight years, the dot.com boom crashed into the basement (not his doing, as we all know); 9/11 was perpetrated on us (not his doing, ditto); Katrina tried to destroy New Orleans (not his doing, and the much-less-horrible-than-anticipated aftermath was largely the fault of the Mayor and Governor, but who took the fall? Uh-huh); and now the credit crisis has begun to ripple through the world's economy (the original bad idea was emphatically not his, and when his administration and Republicans in Congress tried repeatedly to make Fannie and Freddie behave as private lenders have to, they were stymied at every turn by Democrats with some foolish Republican help - but who'll be blamed? Uh-huh).

He's been called a chimp, a Hitler, a hick, a cowboy, a frat boy, a coward, a drunk, a criminal, a war criminal, the worst President ever, the stupidest President ever, a puppet of Halliburton or Big Oil, a puppet of Karl Rove, a puppet of the Religious Right.

And he's been gracious to those who have abused him, optimistic in the face of terrors and troubles, reasoned and reasonable in foreign policy (somebody out there is screaming, "No blood for oil!" or something; but if Bush were the bigoted trigger-happy whacko the Left would have us believe he is, we would've preemptively gone to war with the entire Muslim world, not just the country that was constantly violating its truce and apparently threatening our safety, while costing us lots of money keeping it ineffectively "contained"), compassionate in foreign aid, determined in pursuing and upholding America's interests overseas, steadfast to our old allies and our new ones. Has he made the correct decision every single time? No, but which President ever has?

Please. Give this man the credit he deserves. As I have and do.

A metaphor for the day after the election

2008-11-05T20:34:00.002-05:00

So today I was the mom who signed up to bring a "healthy snack" to my child's pre-K class. I brought clementines - juicy, sweet, no seeds, easy to peel (and I pre-peeled them because the rule is that the "healthy snack" should be entirely ready to eat, saving time at snacktime), child-sized, and above all, healthful. And the biggest Obama booster I know, who told me on the day before Election Day that "tomorrow is going to be the happiest day of my life!" (I glanced doubtfully at her daughter; she rolled her eyes and said, "Well, besides the day she was born, of course"), brought Election Cupcakes. Yummy, sweeter than the clementines, messy, not at all healthful.

I just suggested to the teacher that the children be offered the clementines first, so they wouldn't think they were sour if they tried them after the cupcakes. Nonetheless, more than half the clementines came home with my son. Sigh.

So as I see it, I offered the choice that was good for the children, and it was rejected by half the class. She offered the choice that was yummy but bad for them; it was, of course, embraced. And sigh, again.

Which One?

2008-10-30T07:27:00.003-04:00

And again I ask: Which Obama will show up on inauguration day: The One who's on the side of the poor, or the One who leaves his aunt in a slum and his half-brother in a hut in Kenya?

Update: Let me add that I don't advocate yanking people from their homes even "for their own good." But like Bob Krumm, whose post was the first I referenced, I think Obama's Auntie Zeituni was known to Obama's campaign and told not to talk until after the election... and that's shameful. Her freedom of speech ought not to be curtailed, or her silence coerced, no matter who she is.

So far I've seen nothing that is explicit about this woman and any contact Obama's campaign may have had with her. It's certainly possible that she's so fond of her nephew that she's muzzled herself until after the election; who wouldn't at least consider keeping quiet to avoid harming a loved one? So let me present another way to look at this story, that downplays the character attack aspect:

If Obama has however-many poor relatives who aren't benefiting from his good fortune, that points to two things in my mind: 1. A certain amount of hypocrisy, since he's running on compassion and family values as surely as on "Change" and "Hope"; and 2. A reliance on government programs first, family charity somewhere down the list, to care for loved ones. And while #1 is ugly enough, it's #2 that, policy-wise, should give us pause.

Having eaten my weight in potato chips...

2008-10-29T22:00:00.002-04:00

...I thought I'd comment briefly on that ridiculous hack Terry Gross. First let me say it ticks me off to no end that that station sees fit to call itself National Public Radio, while never giving so much as lip service to my side's points of view.

Second... Terry. When she sticks to pop culture, she's only annoying in her transparent desire to be the hippest hipster around; when she dips into politics, which she manages with disheartening regularity, I feel I need to cut caffeine out of my diet altogether. Today she had Seth Meyer from SNL on, talking at some length about the really funny Sarah Palin stuff last week. She tried and she tried to get him to say something bad about Palin, Republicans, the McCain campaign; Seth gave her a little assist toward the end of that piece of the interview, but overall her frustration was almost tangible as he had to admit that Sarah Palin was there to play, a great sport, and really nice.

Recreating one question from memory: "Were there a lot of ground rules, going in, about topics you had to stay away from?" Seth's response: "No, not really; the campaign was... pretty game. Actually we've found that Republicans tend to be more game than Democrats."

Terry: "Huh. Why do you think that is?"

Here's the assist, from Seth: "Well, I think it's because Democrats are afraid if they do certain things in a segment, Republicans will use them against them in a campaign, and Republicans know Democrats won't." End of segment - Terry got her soundbyte.

Excuse me? Have these people no self-awareness whatsoever?

Don't mind me; it's just the chips talking. Six days. Six days. Six days. I can hope that the wild variability in polling will enable a squeaker victory for McCain, but now is the time to keep my powder dry, I'd say - my taxes are about to go up-up-up. And my freedom to express myself in the public sphere, down-down-down. Thanks again, O.

You moderate Dems out there - exactly who do you think will show up to be inaugurated if Obama wins next week: the Obama you want, or the Obama who is? The One who says he's "post-racial," or the One who sat in Wright's church for two decades? The One who is measured in his responses, or the One whose campaign threw a hissy fit every time he was questioned with anything like vigor or determination? The One who will restore America's good name worldwide (because we've had that throughout our history, except since Bush took over - oh, and Reagan before him), or the One who has said he's willing to invade Pakistan, give Russia a pass over its aggression toward former SSRs, negotiate with state supporters of terror, and listen in that measured way of his to arguments about the legitimacy of Israel? The One who will "cut taxes for 95% of Americans," or the One who knows that the strikingly large percentage of Americans who don't pay the kinds of taxes he implies in that statement are counted in this number - and therefore the One whose little slip about "sharing the wealth" is a portrait-in-miniature?

Use your franchise wisely, and not after taking cold medicine or drinking that great new O!-flavored Kool-Aid.

Why conservatism doesn't just die, already

2008-10-17T17:11:00.003-04:00

This is really simple. Conservatism, frequently declared dead or dying by "progressives," is the equivalent of Darwinism in the natural world, functionalism ("Do that which works," in essence) in the world of psychology, and trial and error in the world we all inhabit day-to-day. It's the tautology "Survivors survive." It's the preferential preservation of that which has shown itself to be effective, versus the preferential throwing out of baby with bathwater in a sometimes inchoate desire for "change."

And this is also the source of that bit about "If you're not a liberal in your twenties, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative in your forties, you have no brain," that's variously attributed to Disraeli, Churchill, and probably others. What smart and humane young person doesn't believe that she could arrange the world better than it is right now? What person in her forties doesn't have a clearer picture of both her and the world's limitations than she did twenty years earlier?

And thus my hard-won relative conservatism, not "in spite of" but because of my desire to see people's prospects improve as continually as possible: radical change is revolution, revolution is by its nature a gamble, and even when it does succeed (cf. the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution), it takes on a life of its own. It has consequences beyond its planners' and supporters' intent, and not all of those consequences are a net positive to those the revolution was supposed to benefit.

But wait - we're not talking about revolution this November...

True. But we are talking about a candidate whose platform is based on "change," without much regard to which direction the change should take - or, more accurately, without much regard to what the American people believe about which direction change should take, since Obama's plans are for more confiscatory and redistributionist government policy, both of which fail miserably in the court of public opinion. And the other candidate, whose version of "change" involves a return to "that which works," particularly in hard economic times: tax minimally, regulate minimally, read the Constitution in an originalist fashion, respect States' rights by not arrogating to the Federal government powers not explicitly granted to it. The old guy is for the (former, or as I prefer to think of it, once-and-future) status quo; no surprises there. The young guy is for the long-discredited approach of the New Deal and the Great Society - which would come as a surprise to his most fervent followers if they knew anything about those eras; sadly, the best-funded education system in the world, as Shieffer pointed out in the final Presidential debate a few days ago, somehow fails to teach very well.

It's a great disappointment to me (I'm trying not to let it be more than that - I'll certainly keep my wits about me in a way Bush-enemies have not, but it is a little scary to consider what the next several years will bring, economically) that Obama may well end up as our next President, since I think his fiscal policy, especially now, will be a disaster. It's been almost a hundred years since the last Great Depression, but the market certainly seems to be anticipating that this is our moment. Thanks, O.

Check this out!

2008-09-30T18:28:00.004-04:00

Commenter SarahB has a cool site featuring lots of clothes and merchandise bearing my name! (Lipstick Republican, not Jamie.) (And naturally they're about Gov. Palin, not me, but still...) Check it out. For Lipstick Republican stuff particularly, go here: www.cafepress.com/papersalad/6025444.

But look, there's more at CafePress's GOPGirls.

Here's to beautiful conservative women! We know what we're about.

(And lest anyone wonder, there's no cognitive dissonance between this post and the Twilight one... really. Bella might be a seventeen-year-old in love with love, but she does what she believes is right and lets the chips fall where they may, she always pays the price for her decisions, and she doesn't press too hard to get into hanky-panky-ish trouble with Edward. Sounds like a conservative-in-training to me...)

Oh,swoon!

2008-09-30T16:43:00.003-04:00

My book club has been reading Twilight, heaven help me. If you don't know it, you may not have a teenage girl either in your life or in your head. It's the first in a four- (possibly one day five-, which has me all excited) book saga, which I shall try to summarize herein. Okay. Here we go.

We have Bella, a high school girl recently moved from Phoenix to Forks, Washington, a town so obscure that in our seven years in Seattle, even my geography-obsessed husband never made it there. Forks has the distinction of being one of the rainiest places in the country, which is intrinsic to the plot for reasons that will become clear.

We have Edward, a high school boy of strange and compelling mien - or so we think. (Dum-dum-daaaaaahhhh....)

Cutting to the chase, he's a vampire, she's not. He and his "family" of vampires, however, call themselves "vegetarians," having chosen to live more humanely than most of their kind, slaking their thirst with the blood of animals rather than humans. Edward likens it to tofu and soy milk, and throughout the whole series we're left with no doubt that animal blood is not NEARLY so tasty or satisfying as human - which I think is really funny, since when I was a vegetarian long ago, I tried hard to convince both myself and everyone around me that vegetarian fare was just as yummy as my formerly (and again, now) omnivorous diet. Back to our story: Bella's blood, for some reason, is terribly appealing to Edward; he can barely restrain himself from killing her when he's near her.

But he falls in love with her, and she with him. Trouble, and a lot of very G-rated yet heart-pounding non-sex, ensues. Lather, rinse, repeat, for four (maybe five!) books.

This is the real deal in the line of teenage-girl romance. There's minimal physical contact, but what there is is described in terms that conjure "seventeen" pretty much flawlessly - at least, my seventeen. There's loads of talk, loads of soul-baring. There's courage on both sides, and a commitment to one another that adults would call "obsession" but that seventeen-year-olds understand perfectly is just the hallmark of "true love." It's FABulous, if you (a) are seventeen, or (b) remember seventeen with any kind of fondness.

Why I remember seventeen with fondness is beyond me. My seventeenth year spanned two horrible "true loves": the year of my long-distance relationship with the very devout Catholic boy who said he loved me, took me to the brink of all kinds of sin (but never beyond), and then said he thought he wanted to be a priest; and the turbulent beginning of the ultimately monotonous hurricane whose passing marked the end of my brief first marriage. (Ultimately ~~monotomous~~ monotonous (sorry): a hurricane is a lot of wind and rain for a long time, right? Dangerous, destructive, but ultimately monotonous. That was my six years there.) Yet I read Twilight and its sequels in the space of about nine days, and have been rereading them ever since. Why?

Because I never got older than seventeen, of course. And I never stopped looking for the fairy tale of Edward, though I didn't know his name yet: the boy, or man, who couldn't resist me but never stopped trying, because he knew that being with him could destroy me. And this is Twilight's flaw, if you want to look at it that way: Bella says, and acts as if, she's in love with Edward, but what comes through most clearly is that she's overcome by his love for her. He really does love her, though his love is a little inexplicable (the fifth book, a retelling of Twilight itself from Edward's point of view - its draft first third or so was leaked, and now the author has released that manuscript because the cat's out of the bag - attempts to right this shortcoming). But Bella? She's just this girl, you know?

Except that the author, Stephenie Meyer, really really likes her. In this book, in this series, Bella is a giant Mary Sue. (I'm not linking to anything in this post because it's kind of embarrassing that I'm writing it at all, but I recommend to any reader unfamiliar with the term the enlightening Wikipedia entry on Mary Sues.) But here's the thing: I like Mary Sues, as long as they're sympathetic. So I don't mind. Bella's falling in love with either (a) Edward or (b) Edward's love for her (did you follow that?) makes perfect sense to me, and I've thoroughly enjoyed my foray into my own past.

Next question: how do I get back to my present? Final question: Why would I? Sigh.

The ONLY explanation?

2008-09-17T14:56:00.002-04:00

Ever since the "Palin effect" began to be measurable (which is to say about three hours after the announcement that Gov. Palin would be McCain's running mate), I've perceived an effort to frame a possible Obama loss. An effort, that is, on the part of the news media. We have NPR, in a piece entitled Does Race Matter in '08? The View From York, PA":

Most voters say they won't decide between Barack Obama and John McCain on the basis of race. But, in a question that is more subtle than the standard questions in a poll, can a decision be based on the racial experience of the voter?

There's Harvard's Randall Kennedy writing in the Washington Post:

If Obama loses, I personally will feel disappointed, frustrated, hurt. I'll conclude that a fabulous opportunity has been lost. I'll believe that American voters have made a huge mistake. And I'll think that an important ingredient of their error is racial prejudice -- not the hateful, snarling, open bigotry that terrorized my parents in their youth, but rather a vague, sophisticated, low-key prejudice that is chameleonlike in its ability to adapt to new surroundings and to hide even from those firmly in its grip.

There's Gov. Kathleen Sebelius's claim in an AP article initially entitled "Sebelius says GOP using racial code language" - self-evident, that claim. But an excerpt anyway:

"Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American?" Sebelius asked with sarcasm. "(Republicans) are not going to go lightly into the darkness."

And overall, a widespread sense that, with Pres. Bush's approval rating in the 30s, if Obama isn't up in the polls by at least a dozen points nationwide, something fishy must be going on, and by "fishy," I'm using GOP "code language" for "racist." (They give you a code book when you register Republican. Really. You know motor-voter registration at the DMV? If you register Republican, the person who takes down your information gives you a little wink and a head-jerk toward the restrooms. You go into the stall on the right - of course! - and a little door opens up in the back wall and there's a little book inside. Now that I've squealed, you can expect never to hear from me again.) I wish I could find the cite for an op-ed - I think it was an op-ed - I just heard quoted on the Limbaugh radio show, in which the writer, or the person being interviewed if it wasn't an op-ed, said again that the Democrat ticket ought to have taken this election in a walk; that it's a dead heat can only be explained, he said, by racism.

Really? ONLY by racism?

One question: why are the Democrats so sure that Bush's approval rating is "historically low" because he hasn't been acting left enough?

Yay! My moniker has meaning!

2008-09-10T13:35:00.003-04:00

So there I was, just letting this blog languish and perhaps quietly die so I don't have one more thing to feel guilty about not keeping up with, when Barack Obama decided to try his hand at stand-up. You've heard it by now:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig.” Followed by the wrapping-old-fish-in-newspaper comment, which pretty much makes mincemeat of the "argument" that Obama just "spoke hastily" or "was using folksy language." If it'd been just the pig-lipstick bit, it would've been technically possible that Obama didn't mean to reference Palin's Republican convention joke about hockey moms and pitbulls being identical except for the lipstick. But juxtapose it with a comment about an old (smelly) thing - and you've got the Republican ticket, presented in unsavory metaphor.

And now, the calls for response or lack of it. My favorite possible response, and I'm sorry that I can't recall where I read it this morning, was for the McCain campaign to release a statement along these lines: "We're pleased to note Sen. Obama's developing sense of humor, and we hope to see more of it over the next two months." Second choice: the entire McCain-Palin side rolls its collective eyes and gives that weak grin that parents give when their child announces loudly at a party or in a shop (as indeed our oldest did, on the named occasion), "I just went poopy in the potty!"

Dismissive. Indulgently dismissive. That's the tone this silliness calls for, and I trust that if Gov. Palin is allowed to play it her way, that'll be the tone that's taken. That there's been no demand for an apology from the McCain-Palin folks so far suggests to me that either Gov. Palin is being allowed to play it her way, or that her way and McCain's way are the same - and both are what I'd do, which is both personally gratifying and suggestive that maybe McCain won't be as nose-holding a President for me as I'd feared.

But the whole point (the blog world being as inwardly focused as it is) is this: a commenter to Roger Kimball's excellent piece of advice to the M-P campaign suggests:

I think the female constituents might do something subtly funny like t-shirts that say “lipstick republicans” or “read my lipstick” and just kind of own it.

(The commenter blogs at Argghhh!.)

Yippee! I knew it'd catch on... eventually.

Update: The McCain liptick ad? I thought it was funny, not affronted. Katie Couric commenting on sexism in politics, whether with regard to the Clinton-Obama contest or the Democrats' response to Palin's candidacy? Hahahahahahaha! Hoist on their own petard!

False equivalencies

2008-04-01T04:12:00.003-04:00

A good two weeks ago now, a friend with whom we were dining drew an analogy. I, unfortunately, was not in good shape to respond to it at the time (we were coming off an intense week of Disney and I'd been consuming wine at roughly the rate and volume I'd been hitting the water bottles for the past seven days), but since then I've been haunted, haunted I tell you, by a need to deconstruct it.

We were talking about the foreign policy platforms of the presidential hopefuls. (Read that as "Iraq," of course.) I maintained, as I always do, that "We shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place," is not a meaningful foreign policy position; we are in Iraq, and the question for these candidates and near-candidates is what we do there from this point forward. I should note that the original act is a settled question in both my mind and my friend's: I've never wavered from my belief that deposing Saddam Hussein made absolute good sense, and he's never accepted that it made any sense at all. But here's where the analogy came in: he countered that what I was saying - that the important statement from these hopefuls should focus on what next rather than on whether in the first place, and furthermore that a continual focus on the past paralyzed us from acting as wisely and decisively as possible now - was like telling an abused wife that she should discount all her husband's abuses because they happened in the past, after all - it'd all be different in the future, honey, or at any rate the future would render the past irrelevant.

This is a grotesque equivalency, and a fundamentally flawed one. Oh, I understand its root: as I said, the "whether" question is settled for my friend as "absolutely not," so I suppose it's natural, if that's the right word, for him to equate the U.S./coalition invasion of Iraq with domestic violence. And for what it's worth, I do believe that revisiting that question helps voters evaluate the presidential hopefuls' judgment and reasoning. (He and I reach different conclusions from that evaluation, of course.) But when the question being asked is "What would you do next?" a response of, "We shouldn't be there in the first place, so we should get out," is not a response at all. Or, at best, it's shallow and blind.

Moving on to the deconstruction part. First: the marital relationship in the analogy appears to marry the U.S. government to the people of the United States, with government as abuser and people as abused wife. All metaphors break down, but this one never even stands up. The U.S. government is in fact the people of the United States; the fact that not all the people agree with all the actions of the government doesn't reflect either an unequal marital partnership or (more close to reality, though sulkily put) "disenfranchisement" of some portion of the electorate; it reflects the compromise we call our republic, that's all. I've "suffered" through many years of government action against my preferences and will; it's not "abuse," but simply my side's inability to popularize its policies. The lack of government support for my point of view on this or that issue might be a result of its being wrong, or it might be a result of its being hard to sell or difficult to maintain; it certainly does not constitute an "abuse."

In practical terms, the "abuse" to which my friend referred might be the cost of the war rather than the "mental abuse" of having to slog through two terms' worth of presidential policies with which one disagrees. I hear a lot about this cost lately, all of which seems to begin from the assumption that whatever we're spending on the war (a) would have been spent elsewhere (that is, that we've lost an opportunity cost of some kind) and (b) would have been better spent elsewhere (that is, that government spending is an unreserved good, unless it's on a military venture). I can't accept either premise. Is this war worth its cost in money? Time will tell, and we're not yet to the point where time can tell. But taking down Saddam Hussein was, in my opinion, absolutely worth everything it cost at the time. What we've been doing since then is that uniquely American post-war activity called "reconstruction." It's our obligation to some extent, but beyond that extent it's just what we do: we try to rebuild and reform the damaged and destroyed so that it can join us in fruitful commerce (not just the financial kind) in time. This principle, which we've been doing for many years under many presidents, has become codified as the "Bush Doctrine," thanks to the now-explicit hypothesis that liberal transformation in the Middle East will be superior to realpolitik in stabilizing that volatile region. And the potential benefits of the action, if it works, are not being valued opposite the costs both real and hypothetical. There is an incremental cost associated with achieving those benefits - what is it? And can the benefits be monetized, and if so, what's their value? That's how you make a foreign policy decision about a war, if money is the main criterion. But was money the main criterion in our entering WWII?

Next: history is indeed a guide to future behavior when you're dealing with individuals, but the more appropriate analog would have been the "abused wife" who remarried every few years. Here my friend might say that the party affiliation of the "husband" was an important datum in gauging his likelihood to "abuse" her; I'd point to history as a refutation of that view, since it's been Democrats who tended to get the U.S. into foreign entanglements over the last century or so, since no party remains the same for more than a (political) generation, and since a party's leader can have a strong, if often temporary, effect on that party's philosophy.

Finally, the analogy was intended to illustrate something about the presidential candidates. But all it did was to restate the flawed premise - that the right question to ask and answer is, "Since we shouldn't be in Iraq at all, how do you propose we leave?" Drawing the question in terms of domestic abuse is a trick, like the one my side used against the other during the 2004 and 2006 election cycles, when Osama bin Laden's various taped statements seemed to be drawing on Democrat talking points. Remember it? We (not specifically I, that I recall, but my side) called our political opponents "objectively pro-terrorist." (My point of view was that if your country's enemy seemed to be echoing your own position, you might want to consider that position carefully.)

It's too obvious a trick, too, since it's just about identical to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Point is, rhetorical tricks can sometimes "win" debates, but they do not answer questions. (I've used plenty of tricks, won plenty of debates, and skirted plenty of questions in my time.) If the object of this year's election is to choose a leader for what is still THE world hyperpower, our focus needs to be on hearing and evaluating the substance, rather than the rhetoric, of our candidates. (In other words, after lo these many paragraphs, I wearily acknowledge that I won't un-settle the question of "whether" for my friend, just as he won't un-settle it for me; I'm looking for the candidate who will commit to staying in Iraq until circumstances clearly show one outcome or another - recalling that inadequate reconstruction after WWI spawned WWII, and reconstruction after WWII took decades. This is the long war, and the "hard work," Bush is vilified and ridiculed for talking about.)

My capacity for shock is taking a hit

2008-02-15T18:17:00.003-05:00

So Instapundit steered me to this:

Well, a Smith College professor found a way around that ["the gender gap in math and science" - I urge the reader to follow the link above for futher background links, because I'm a glass and a half of wine into this post] for getting women into engineering: Ignore the math. From the Chronicle:

[The curriculum] emphasizes context, ethics, and communication as much as formulas and equations.

Smith, the first women’s college to offer an engineering degree, graduated its first class of engineers in 2004, and since the program’s creation, in 1999, has attained a 90-percent retention rate[.]

Does this mean I have to ask for resumes and transcripts - with DNA testing to confirm gender - every time I step onto an airliner? Good gravy.

This is the problem, people, with setting different standards in order to bolster the self-esteem of the terminally sensitive. If the firefighter responsible for hefting my husband, overcome by smoke, out of my house is a 5'5" woman who can bench seventy pounds, well heck, leave my husband to me - I'm bigger and stronger. If the engineer designing my car studied "context, ethics, and communication" at the expense of loading and metal fatigue and tensile strength and so forth (not being an engineer, I'm just naming off some things I know matter), thankyouverymuch, I'll put my kids in the Amish wagon in the garage; my own lack of speed makes up for its lack of seat belts.

I was a geologist. I was pretty good at parts of it; I really stank at other parts. Upper-body strength wasn't an issue in my jobs, nor was geophysics (one of the things I stank at, along with optical mineralogy, like everyone in my class - thank goodness for the grading curve, but I never deceived myself that I understood the material despite the passing grade - and structural geology - so it's best that I stay far from faults), so I could perform as well as any man in the same job. Often better. But I would not have been hired to perform an assessment of the geologic conditions underlying a hospital site, because I didn't have the math - and that's absolutely correct. The stakes are generally higher than self-esteem, darn it.

Rrrrripped from the headlines

2008-02-12T06:59:00.001-05:00

Or somewhere in the body of the piece, anyway. From the front page of yesterday's WSJ:

...Barack Obama brainstormed with his top advisers on the fine points of his positions. Michelle Obama had dialed in to listen, but finally couldn't stay silent any longer.
"Barack," she interjected, "Feel - don't think!"

Holy cow. Really?

All right, the final point of her exhortation is that he use his heart and his head rather than "overthinking." And I'm sympathetic to the plight of a wife who must continually build up her husband, show tremendous confidence in him, lest he start to doubt himself in the midst of a grueling campaign (or project of any kind - I can think of times when my literal words in support of my husband might not have been exactly what I was thinking, but chosen in order to bolster his confidence instead). But. How utterly pathetic that the newspaper quote ended up as, "Feel - don't think!" rather than simply, "Barack, decide!" which is, I certainly hope, what she meant.

Of course, I give both of them the benefit of the doubt: that Michelle Obama purposely misspoke because my formulation could be confidence-shaking at a critical time, and that Barack Obama actually has the ability to decide. Sigh.

And then, same page:

[Clinton's campaign manager] was replaced by Maggie Williams... who served as her chief of staff when she was First Lady. ... Ms. Williams... is viewed by staffers as a long-time, loyal defender of Mrs. Clinton.

This sounds sadly like Bush's attempt to put Miers on the Supreme Court, the differences being (1) Bush (and Miers, I imagine), wisely, listened to the outcry that she was too lightweight for the job and the unfortunate plan went away, and (2) Bush's reasoning was to put a loyalist in a position of influence over something else, something that affected more than just his own administration, such that loyalty to his administration might have an effect - versus Clinton's putting a "loyal defender" of her own self in charge of - what? her own campaign. How many non-loyalists does she have working on her campaign, for heaven's sake?

Again I say, I'm just sick about the fact that the Democrats have punted the Presidency altogether by facing these two off against one another (there's no strong Democrat governor, or even a Democrat Senator or Rep with years of federal experience, available?), yet they may actually win. Social conservatives and other ideological purists, beware: if you decide to punish McCain for not being perfect for you, you (and your children, and mine) could be cleaning up the unholy mess for a generation. More. Be a purist in your own heart, mind, and life - certainly! But don't rejoice in your own purity to the point where you're willing to punt the Presidency just as utterly, and leave the nation in the hands of the "close your eyes and throw money at it" socialists.

Problems with the premises

2008-02-09T04:50:00.000-05:00

I was reading in Reason why Steve Chapman believes we should not worry about a potential nuclear strike from a terrorist organizations. In brief, it's really hard either to acquire or to build a nuclear device, and then delivery of said device is even harder. Okay, I grant all that. But there are several premises in this little op-ed that I can't get behind.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have had to live with the knowledge that the next time the terrorists strike, it could be not with airplanes capable of killing thousands but atomic bombs capable of killing hundreds of thousands.

What I glean from this paragraph is that we shouldn't worry about those airplanes any more. Hmm. Secondary is the implication (followed on in the next para) that American policy since 9/11 has been shaped predominantly by fear. It seems that the strawman of choice for a common variety of person-who-disagrees-with-me-and-my-ilk is the terrified right-winger, crouched in his walk-in closet with a roll of duct tape at the ready. But you don't (for instance) get your brakes checked because you live in terror that they'll fail and kill you; you don't even install an alarm system out of fear (television ads for alarm systems notwithstanding), except in a kind of abstract sense that it would be bad if your house were broken into with you and your sleeping children in it.

My husband's childhood home was, in fact, broken into with his single mom asleep therein; he, returning from a high school date, happened to drive around the block, passing his house (in which he saw a light on and a man inside and wondered why his mother was entertaining so late), because a favorite song was on the radio. When he finally pulled into the driveway and went inside, all lights were off, to his surprise, and his mom was fast asleep. The back door was ajar, though, and they later found Mom's purse out on the lawn. So if anyone would have had cause to fear such an event, it should've been this family. Yet Mom still lives in that house, and she sleeps soundly. She has an alarm system - no sense in ignoring reality - but she doesn't bite her nails wondering when the next intruder will defeat it and gain entry.

Prevention of the preventable has been the focus of American policy. Has it been effective? Well:

But remember: After Sept. 11, 2001, we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet Al Qaeda and its ideological kin have proved unable to mount a second strike.

So it would appear that for all its myriad faults, Homeland Security's efforts haven't been in vain. In fact, it's the victim of its own success, since we're now supposed to assume that since no attack has been successful, we should disable the alarm.

Moving on:

If terrorists were able to steal a Pakistani bomb...

I think I'll just let that stand, Pakistan being a nominal ally and all. And then:

Stealing some 100 pounds of bomb fuel would require help from rogue individuals inside some government who are prepared to jeopardize their own lives.

Which hundreds of terrorists have demonstrated their willingness to do. Could such a person reach high levels in some nuclear-enabled government? Are we prepared to claim that no such person ever could?

He does end with, "None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening." Unfortunately, he follows that sentence with this one:

But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen[,]

...which is the final premise with which I take issue. A nuclear strike by a terrorist organizations is not, in my opinion, the "worst eventuality." It might be the worst single casualty event, in the (I agree here) very unlikely case that it could be brought about, but it's hardly the worst thing. WWII: was the "worst eventuality" for Britons the possibility that Hitler could level London? He gave it a darn effective try - but no, the worst eventuality was that Britain could be defeated overall and that Germany could take over Britain. For Japan, was the worst eventuality that the Allies could drop A-bombs on two of their cities? It was horrible, it was unthinkably horrible for Japan - but what about the million Japanese casualties and the widespread destruction of infrastructure projected if the Allies had invaded Japan instead? And, for the Japanese at the time, what about the prospect of an Allied occupation following that invasion?

The "preventable" that American policy to date continues to try to prevent is not a terrorist strike per se. It's something much worse, but something that "multicultural awareness" dictates we can't talk about very clearly: it's Islamist aggression, whether by violence or by relentless use of our liberality against us, resulting in a loss of what makes liberal pluralist democracies the amazing force for good that they are. So (as always) I call for today's immigrants to follow the lead of yesterday's, including my own people, and embrace this place, not differentiate themselves from it. And furthermore, I call for those of us who have been here a while to continue to ask this level of assimilation from our newcomers, not facilitate their differentiation with patronizing observations about their Otherness.

Lileks, speaking for himself

2008-02-07T18:44:00.000-05:00

And as well as always. I love James Lileks. Today his "Bleat" was more of a rant - he seems to have removed the curmudgeonly section of his absolutely addictive website, so the Bleat must now do double duty. He's talking about the great idea they had at the Freakonomics blog on the NYT to have a "six-word motto for the U.S." contest, which (being the NYT) had many predictable results. (Also, to my surprise, some good 'uns, including "That hot girl who ignores you," my personal favorite of the selection I read.) Let me give you a little of my man James:

It doesn’t matter that these fascists-in-fetal-form [he refers here to these people: "Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed."] never quite seem to accomplish anything; it’s not like they drove the gay Teletubbies off the air or had Tony Kushner drawn and quartered in the public square. But they’re preventing something. Something wonderful. And they’re driving large cars to Wal-Mart and putting 18-roll packs of Charmin in the back and they have three kids. Earth has withstood a lot in its four billion years, but it cannot withstand them. And even if it does, who wants to live in a world where these people don’t care that they’re being mocked by small, underfunded theaters in honest, gritty neighborhoods? (Which are being gentrified by upwardly-mobile poseurs who have decided it’s a great place to live because the theater is good and the restaurants are cheap. F*#*$ing interlopers. But we’ll deal with them later.)

A slightly younger relative of mine, whom I adore for his great heart, his love of fun, his manner with the children in his life, and lots more, is a right git where it comes to economics; right now he lives in one of those honest, gritty neighborhoods, and he likes to visit honest, gritty countries where a hundred bucks a month is big money for the locals (and, in spite of his theoretical social-justice stance, he thinks that's terrific because it means cheap vacations for him and his buds), and the fashion lines he represents are both honest and gritty, and in addition far out of the reach of both those Wal-mart shoppers and the poor down-trodden pipples (sorry, that's a Zorro, the Gay Blade reference) for whom he feels so deeply. Now, he's not the snob that the elbow-patch crowd seems to be; he's sincerely egalitarian, but he just doesn't quite get what egalitarianism actually entails.

I have no time for the snobs.

Of Superbowls, underdogs, and politics

2008-02-07T04:56:00.000-05:00

Man, did you see that game? That incredible escape from the sack? That catch?!

I haven't enjoyed a Superbowl that much in years, and given that my Superbowl munchies consisted of clear broth and dry toast (thank you very much, ugly G-I bug that knocked down my family one by one), that's saying something. But though I, like the whole football-fan world, give the heavy credit to that last 2:39-or-so drive (I was hyperventilating, and I've got no allegiance to either team), I was most impressed with (a) the Giants' absolutely unstoppable defensive line and (b) the Giants rookie Bradshaw. How tall is he? Five-nine or so? Yet the Patriots repeatedly had to pile three or four ginormous men onto him to bring him down. He was a little bitty freight train.

I do love an upset. And funnily enough, whenever I hear about the current Pats' formidableness (is that even a word?), I think only of the Superbowl back in the '80s, when I was first interested in Superbowls, when they were smushed into the turf by the then-awesome Bears. I was pulling so hard for the tiny Patriots - they looked like children opposite the Bears' line. So I came into this Superbowl, in spite of the Pats' season record, with a visceral indecision about who represented the underdogs. My subconscious was saying "little Patriots versus Giant... um, bears?" But of course my conscious mind knew the truth, and that first quarter, when Manning converted four times, was when I realized this was going to be a Game after all - even though the Giants couldn't actually capitalize very much on their relentless drive. I admit to losing interest in the middle a bit, but that fourth quarter was something to stay awake for, wasn't it?

And onward. Deep into primary season, I've lost my candidate, it looks as if I'll lose the one governor I'd support, and McCain will end up with the Republican nomination. Obama and Clinton continue to snipe at one another and to play with their various physical characteristics as differentiators (and/or their campaigns do the playing, which has the same effect); bleah, still. As a woman and a staunch meritocrat, I have no issue whatsoever with the principle of an otherly-than-male-gendered or otherly-than-Caucasian-toned President; but my goodness, could we have a candidate, please? The Republican slate, lily-white and male-appendaged as it is, at least represents experience in high-level governance, and the lily-white maleness of it has, weirdly, an effect similar to the candidates' all wearing the same suits and ties during debates (I'll be so interested to see how they handle this newish tradition if Clinton is the Dem nominee): it removes a distraction and allows easier focus on the actually relevant.

Which means, I believe, that the Democrats had best watch themselves; to make the Presidency a figurehead, where it doesn't matter who's in the big chair as long as that person "looks like America" or some such nonsense (it would've been fascinating to see an America that looked like Lincoln, I think - gives whole new meaning to the term "ugly American"), implies the exact opposite of the Democrat policy platform: that strong central government is not an effective means of actually governing, that the King Log approach is in fact the preferable one. Because if anybody can do it (which is the lesson of the two Dem front-runners' resumes), then nobody actually has to do it.

All right, I think I'm overstating the case. Possibly the Dems have decided to kibosh the strong-Executive thing and return to a stronger Legislative branch. I wish them luck with that too, considering what seems to catch the attention of our legislators in Washington.

But in any event, yup, if McCain gets the nomination I'll vote for him over either Dem front-runner, because as the Captain (a Romney man) says,

I want to emphasize the point that I have no problem supporting John McCain in a general election against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama if he wins the nomination. Elections are about choices and reality, not fantasy.

That's where we are now. The art of the possible, the necessity of opposing the party and/or candidate who disagrees with one's principles eighty percent of the time and supporting the party and/or candidate who agrees with one's principles seventy percent of the time. McCain-Feingold is bad; McCain selecting Supreme Court justices and acting as CinC is better than Clinton or Obama doing the same, by my lights. He is not perfect - oh so far from it - but he's also not socialist, nor a fool.

Not even February yet, and I'm already tired of it all

2008-01-22T09:24:00.000-05:00

Yeah. The primaries and caucuses. Blech.

Turning first to the Democrats... for heaven's sake, are these the best they can field? Three Senators, one of whom hasn't even served a whole term yet and the other two of whom haven't served one and a half? What have they been doing for the past eight years? Not even a governor in the bunch - not a soul with executive experience. Sure, that's what I want: a President who's never presided over anything. (I have a very hard time voting for a Senator, regardless of party; the legislative skillset is entirely different from that required of an executive.)

And then the Republican side: I could get behind Thompson, from what I know of him, except that he doesn't seem to want the job very much. Now, personally I believe that's probably to his credit, a la Groucho Marx's not wanting to belong to any country club that'd have him as a member. But as for actually getting the job, it's not a help. Romney - here's a Republican (of sorts) governor of a militantly liberal State: that shows promise. But. Will he actually employ Republican principles unapologetically, like Reagan, or will he go all Schwartzeneggar and start by couching the right answers in the wrong terms ("We should make the Bush tax cuts permanent because, really, those primarily affected are no longer the richest Americans but the new middle class - and we don't want the embattled middle class to suffer disproportionately for their hard-won success" versus the right terms, "We should make the Bush tax cuts permanent because it's in the best interests of society and the American economy to allow Americans to keep as much of their earnings as possible"), then move toward embracing less and less Republican policy because his best friends are snubbing him at parties? I do believe Presidents are human, and subject to human folly; this is why they need hard-hearted handlers. (Think how much more dignified the Clinton Presidency would have been if Bill's handlers had been more effective.)

Moving on. McCain - again, there's the Senator near-disqualification, for me. There's McCain-Feingold - another blech. Mostly what he has going for him is that he understands the stakes in Iraq and, so far at any rate, seems unwilling to throw over our, and Iraq's, mounting successes for the sake of a demagogical point scored. Huckabee - honestly I know almost nothing about him; I don't like his name, so my visceral response is yet another blech. But besides that, I keep hearing that he's a government-interventionist, and that ain't Republican in my book. Giuliani - again, he's good on national security (which is sort of a proxy for foreign policy generally for me, at present, as fighting the ongoing battle against Islamism is my single-issue issue), but is being a mayor good enough? Maybe, if it's mayor of New York City... but as my husband points out, he's a New Yorker through and through; is he too regional? And of course there's this odd "going dark" strategy of his. We'll see what happens in Florida. Though that's problematic for me too, since I equate Florida with "New York al Sur": If he can appeal to Floridians, does that only mean there are a whole lot of New Yorkers in the sun?

Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online says The White House Is No House For a Woman - more pithily blurbed on NRO's front page as "I don't want a woman President." I predict that if this piece is noticed by anyone in the Leftosphere, it'll be taken as a sign - heck, it'll be trumpeted as proof - that Republican women are self-hating and that Republicans generally are sexist. (I don't doubt that Thomas Sowell's denouncement of the Clinton/Obama Populism Wars will similarly be cast as race treachery. Sigh.) But I completely agree with Ms. Lopez: I don't want a woman President either. Or a Mormon President. Or a differently abled President. Or any other kind of President.

I just want a President: a person who understands that the office is the important thing, not the person in it, and that any descriptor of "President" other than "dignified" detracts from the office. Bush, I believe, has done a great job of keeping himself out of the office: while there are those who might call him the "cowboy" President or worse, I've never heard "Bush, the Texan President," or "Bush, the Yalie President," or "Bush, the semi-evangelical Christian President." It's easy to see that he doesn't have a lot of identity-politics labels that could be applied to him, which makes it easier for him and his supporters to avoid imposing those labels on the office, and indeed this may be why we "get" yet another white male in November: because it shouldn't be about identity politics, it should be about convincing the voters that you have the experience, character, and determination to do the hardest job in the world. Which brings me again to Clinton and Obama: what are they offering? Is either the best candidate for this incredibly hard job, or is she just the woman with the most recognizable face and name, and he the African American with the greatest across-the-board appeal? (I actually commented on his DNC speech in 2004, saying with a story like his, I didn't understand why he wasn't a Republican - but besides one great speech, why him?)

I'm reminded (again) of an old Bloom County strip in which Binkley's dad has to have an intervention. He calls Oliver Wendell Jones's dad in tears to confess that, all his liberal bona fides notwithstanding, he "just doesn't like Jesse" (Jackson, of course). Mr. Jones pats him on the shoulder, tells him it's OK not to like Jesse, it doesn't actually affect his liberal status, and that the "first black president will be a conservative." Now, I don't necessarily agree with that cartoon assessment; the first "whatever" president doesn't have to be conservative. But he or she would have to be well qualified, I'd hope - at least as well qualified as every other candidate in the field.

Which, depressingly, does not serve to disqualify either Clinton or Obama, since they're pretty much right up there with Edwards. And that, friends, is called "damning with faint praise."

Not optional, Chapter TWo

2007-11-29T15:56:00.000-05:00

That's me, the once-a-month blogger... I'm burning the candle at both ends and at various places along its length, so this is the best I can do right now. But it's certainly got to be time to return to Mark Steyn.

When last we spoke of Mr. Steyn, the subject was the out-populating of western pluralist liberals such as myself by adamantly non-pluralist illiberal groups. Chapter Two, entitled "Going...Going....Gone," Steyn's argument is that to believe with all your might that the unassimilated and fertile young will one day take up their (ahem) cross and support you in your age is to ignore the obvious. The Spanish election results in March 2003 clearly marked the Spanish populace's position: as Steyn puts it, "We apologize for catching your eye." That Theo van Gogh could be brutally murdered in the street and the outcry concerning the culturally insensitive subjects of his movie-making could actually be used, if not to justify, then at least to rationalize the manner of his death - farce. Let me quote a paragraph in its entirety:

In June 2006, a fifty-four-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six - what's that word again? - "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some forty passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those forty other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, thirty of the forty scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be - quelle surprise! - of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those forty passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."

Wait - I've got to include two more sentences:

No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those forty passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone.

The so-inclined reader will no doubt glom onto that first paragraph as "further" "evidence" of racism by a non-voting Rethug. But that's not it at all. The point Steyn makes is that "youths" are young; their victims, or their neighbors if they're just ordinary "youths" rather than violent criminals, are older. As he notes, the ten percent of France that is Muslim is significantly skewed younger (more like 45% of the under-twenty crowd in the major cities), which makes cultural assimilation absolutely vital to the future of French society as it is generally understood. Let me say it another way, to be utterly clear: I don't give a hoot whether 45%, or 65%, of all of France visits a mosque rather than a church or synagogue (or, more likely, a café), and their country of origin is even less important, provided that that 45% (or 65%) buys into the kernel of Western civilization that makes us liberal and pluralist: individual, natural rights that are only affirmed, not granted, by government.

For the love of Pete...

2007-11-06T17:19:00.000-05:00

So Instapundit steered me to this piece in The New Republic. I can't figure out how to comment on it directly, which it deserves - and which its commenters deserve even more so - so I'm a-blogging instead. (And America Alone languishes on the bedside table, because blogging on it takes more thought and time.)

Saith author Michael Crowley,

What do the Democrats do if--yes: if, if, if--the surge appears to have succeeded? (Or at least seems, to voters, to have succeeded: I realize the tribal shift in Anbar, for instance, wasn't imposed by US troops--although my correspondent friend said surge forces did enable us to exploit Sunni tribal cooperation and root out al Qaeda.) Indeed, if Iraq somehow stabilizes and even incrementally improves, doesn't that affect the presidential campaign in important and unpredictable ways? Obviously it's almost impossible to concieve of an outcome in Iraq that any reasonable person could call "victory." Democrats will resonably argue that the adventure wasn't worth the cost in lives and dollars. But the notion that Bush's patience really did save Iraq from unmitigated humanitarian and strategic catastrophe might be a powerful one. Expectations have been lowered to such an extent over the past several months that any glimmer of hope is a godsend for Republicans.

First point: who cares whether "the surge" was the proximate cause of success, if we and the Iraqis do achieve lasting success? Overlapping a troop rotation or two ("the surge") was and is the necessary factor for improving security at a critical time; most of the heavy lifting is up to the Iraqis now, with spotting and assists from us and our allies. As a guy named Reagan once tried to remind us, credit is a whole lot less important than results.

That being said, the "important and unpredictable ways" in which the 2008 elections would be affected by lasting stability in Iraq are indeed important, but does the author really believe they're unpredictable? The Democrats have done an absolutely fantastic job of ensuring that any success in Iraq, or shall we say "any glimmer of hope," will not be laid at their feet.

All the rest that needs to be said about this post is basically this: About time you people started to consider the consequences of your policy stance, not to mention your tactics.

On to the comments. Here's my favorite:

[Even if lots of good things happen, with expletive,] what have you got to show for our efforts? An Iranian Shiite outpost in Mesopotamia, a disempowered and p[...]ed-off Sunni minority with allies in Saudi Arabia and across the Islamic world, and the legacy of 6 years of criminality, sectarian cleansing and armed conflict - and a disreputable government that does not command the loyalty of its security forces and cannot rule without the US military to support it.

Hmm. Let's review what Iraq had before: a no-fly zone expending American resources to absolutely no good effect, international sanctions which, we were told, killed some hundred thousand innocent Iraqi children a year, an oil-for-food program that undermined our alliances with some of our formerly staunchest allies, an empowered and p'ed off Sunni minority (with the same allies the commenter named, but less need of them because they already had all the guns), the legacy of 20+ years of criminality, sectarian cleansing and armed conflict, and an utterly disreputable and dangerous dictatorial government that had already invaded two of its neighbors, that commanded the loyalty of its security forces by holding their families hostage, and that held power by dint of rape and torture rooms and an established willingness to use at least chemical and possibly biological weapons against its own people.

Gosh. Now Iraq has trouble, right here in River City - but also the most liberal constitution in the Middle East, a significant and growing cadre of people of good will of all ethnic stripes who see their own and their country's interest in defending that constitution, and the help of the undeniably mighty American military to get to their feet and keep on cranking out those clean elections. None of which they had under Saddam Hussein.

That same dour commenter goes on, "The only thing worth celebrating is the day when no more Americans will be fighting and dying in that hell-hole -- the difference is I would like to bring that celebration home tomorrow, whereas you are willing to wait till 2009." And again I say, Gosh. That's the only thing worth celebrating? And is s/he laboring under the delusion that the American military would in fact "celebrate" it if they left tomorrow? Perhaps s/he doesn't visit milblogs very often... This commenter believes that we're in Iraq because Bush wants to "save face"; I beg his or her pardon, but does s/he really believe that Bush, a lame duck president whose approval ratings hit rock bottom long ago and have only rebounded into the 30s, has "face" to save? If Bush were interested in saving face, he could've done so by doing exactly what the Democrats want to do: by declaring victory at any arbitrary point and pulling out all American troops, then blaming Iraq (and/or Iran) for not being able to hold the gains we'd given them.

Instead, this man's legacy is going to have to wait. I'm an optimist; I believe that Iraq has a good chance. I also believe that Bush's legacy will be a heck of a lot more history-book-apt than Clinton's (at least, I cringe at the thought of my children's learning about the more noteworthy aspects of Clinton's presidency), and certainly more positive than that bumbling goofball Carter's. (Bravo to you, Carter, for swinging a hammer for the downtrodden - but ferme la bouche about Israel, sir; you only come across as an antisemite.)

Two things. Well, three.

2007-09-27T02:37:00.001-04:00

One: I really, really don't like Bob Dylan. Whiny little so-and-so...

Two: I was listening to NPR this afternoon and heard a review of the 40th anniversary edition of The Graduate by the network's - what did they call him again... reviewer-at-large? Roving reviewer? Anyway, some guy named John; it cracked me up. See, when the film first came out, he was a sophomore in high school, and he saw it repeatedly (the way some of my generation saw Star Wars, albeit when they were five years or so younger). He felt swept up in the zeitgeist of it all; he felt as if Nichols had made the movie just for him. In the review, he wryly noted (side note: at least some programs on NPR remember to poke fun at themselves for putting such a premium on wryness, though this was not one of those programs) that millions of other teens felt exactly the same way. He identified strongly with the Ben character (Dustin Hoffman, for anyone who - like me - has never actually seen the movie but only the "You're trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson," clip). He says that Mrs. Robinson was much more interesting to him than her daughter even at the time, but still goes with the Young as his point of connection with the movie back then.

Fast forward: he refuses to re-watch the movie until now, when he was asked to review it, honoring his memory of it (yup, actually said that). (Another side note: I'm not above "honoring the memory" of something by avoiding it; I'm sure I've done so myself. But I recognize that the impulse comes from fear that it'll either (a) age poorly, or (b) reveal me as a philistine. Probably a lot more (b) than (a). I recently passed up the chance to watch Ladyhawke, which I loved in my early twenties, for just that reason. Maybe next week I'll be brave...) He was pleased and delighted that the film held up well through the years... but lo and behold, as a grown man he suddenly "realized" that the true "rebel without a cause" (yup, actually said that too) was not Ben but Mrs. Robinson. Ben was, he said, a cipher, a suburban placeholder for the real (one might say "authentic") rebels who, by the time the film hit theaters in 1967 rather than the few years earlier when the film appeared to have been set, were actually on the scene in American life; Mrs. Robinson, now, she was the iconoclast, the brave soul who broke out of her milieu.

Oh, please. He's now 55, by my count, and suddenly Mrs. Robinson is the "real" rebel? Is this guy completely without self-awareness? If he would just have wrapped up his review with a (wry) "Of course, I would think that now, wouldn't I?" I would've forgiven him. But instead, we're supposed to stroke our chins and muse, with him, over the Truth that back in the '60s, Ben was universally perceived as the rebel, yet now, with our eyes sharpened by time, we can easily perceive that it was Mrs. Robinson, all along, who should have engaged our sympathies. Or perhaps "empathies" is a better word, since that's the obvious problem here: he identifies with the middle-aged character now. Duh.

I am not, I repeat, immune to these feelings. I certainly identify more strongly now, speaking of the zeitgeist and all, with the Han Solo of Return of the Jedi than with the Mark Hamill of A New Hope (which, for you non-Star Wars geeks, is Episode IV, most commonly known as Star Wars), and I don't identify in any smallest way with any character from any of the Episode I-III movies (especially not that bleeping Natalie Portman, just hours from delivering twins, in heels, leaping gazelle-like from rock to rock with boiling lava all around, her belly pretty much invisible unless she turns sideways, dang her). All right, maybe with C3PO, which makes sense, given my love of Miss Manners. But it's not one of those things I'd care to admit publicly.

Oops.

Third thing: I shall, as God is my witness, get back to America Alone - soon. When my husband relinquishes custody of it and the beginning of the school year steadies down a bit.

Not optional - Chapter One

2007-08-24T08:57:00.000-04:00

Chapter One of Mark Steyn's America Alone is entitled "The Coming of Age." I ended rather abruptly yesterday - maybe I can be a little more coherent today.

And so. Populations in the developed world are aging. And, in the developed world, old people expect that systems they've been "paying into" for much of if not their entire adult lives will continue to "pay out" at expected rates. And how, pray tell, do we manage this on less and less actual money coming in, given that among these social programs there's not a "lockbox" to be seen? Take the U.S. Social Security system: it's apparently predicated on "30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017." Yet the U.S. population is at replacement rate, 2.1-ish births per couple. How do we grow by 30 percent in the next seventy years when we're only just replacing ourselves?

Immigration, of course. Right? The trouble is that everyone in the developed world is in the same boat, many nations in far worse shape than we are. Take Spain, now, at 1.1 births per couple. Their population is halving itself in every generation. Can it possibly invite - attract - support enough immigration to replace all the babies not being born there, to pension off its rapidly aging populace? And add to this conundrum the fact that fertility rates are declining all over the world, not just in developed countries; it's just that in the developed world, we've already been close to the edge for some time.

Steyn's point is why I'm calling this portion of this blogpost series "Not optional." You ignore the bare facts of demography at your peril. You, as a society, defer or avoid having children for today's reasons, but tomorrow you'll pay.

His secondary point is that if you're going to rely on immigrants to have the children who will eventually pay your social security, you ought probably to think about how those immigrants and their children will fit in to your social systems, such that they'll be willing to abide by the social contract that compels them to give up (at present) a quarter of what they might otherwise expect to pocket in order to support today's elders. (Yes, I know the percentage that comes out of my paycheck is half that, but if my employer weren't having to pony up the other half, perhaps he might consider increasing my rate of pay. Or not; I'd settle for the extra 13 percent and my own IRA that nobody but me has to fund.)

I was on a demographics blog (yup, there are some) today in which someone was claiming that "family friendly" policies including cash payments until age 18, free day care for all, etc., etc., were the solution to the demographic cliffhanger in which participating. You know, in some ways I almost wish I could believe it. But I have three children; free day care would not have enticed me to work, work, work to support somebody else's grandparents while my kids were babies, and I'm already making "cash payments" for my children until age 18 and beyond; I can't imagine why anyone else would be willing to pay for them too. Any "cash payment" that could make a meaningful difference in the expense of having children for me would be prohibitive. Three kids, each costing a quarter mil or so to raise to adulthood - isn't that the number we hear so often? So society - which, face it, is US, all of us, whether or not we have children, whether or not we have one, two, three, or eight children - would "owe" me $750,000 over eighteen years? And by the same token, I as a worker in society would owe a portion of that amount to some other three-kid family? How on earth do we make those books balance? Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Social payouts can't be a longterm solution. But the problem must be solved, somehow, or we pass from the earth - we liberal pluralist democrats.

Not optional

2007-08-23T09:17:00.000-04:00

There's only one man in the world who could, at my advanced age, convince me to have another baby, and he's neither my husband nor that lopsided-lip knowitall naif George Clooney, however popular he is with my set: it's Mark Steyn, humorist commentator and demographic doomsayer. I finally found his America Alone and started it last night. I'm only up to page 59 (Deathly Hallows was like the world's longest sprint while hopped up on goofballs, while this book takes a little more digestion on the way), but I decided on the strength of what I've read so far that I'm going to blog it chapter by chapter.

Beginning with the prologue, and beginning here: "To Be or Not To Be."

Steyn acknowledges the resemblance of his thesis to the many end-of-the-world theses that have been promulgated since, well, the beginning of the world (as he says) - but perhaps I should start with that thesis: that Islamists pose the greatest-ever threat to (in his apt formulation) the community of liberal pluralist democracies, and that demographics alone gives them a significant advantage over the nations that belong to that fraternity. Muslim-majority nations have, across the board, way way higher birth rates than we LPDs (because I wouldn't be a military brat without occasionally introducing a new acronym) have, and most of us, save - wait for it - America alone, are not even close to replacement level. Therefore we'll simply be outpopulated, and the Islamists and their indifferent Muslim counterparts will achieve the Islamist aim of widespread, even global, caliphate without firing a shot. Or many, at any rate.

It's terribly hard to resist launching into a whole lot more on this piece of the topic right now, but I'll try to stick to the prologue, the point of which is the ever-popular "We stand at a crossroads." We do, and I (and many others) have been talking about it since 9/11, when multicultural sensitivity first clashed with the determination of the world's most committed enemies of liberalism on the front pages and the TV news ledes. Yet we continue to muddle through the bogs of fantasy:

All dominant powers are hated - Britain was, and Rome - but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it.

That's one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power [I might say, instead, if it acted like one - ed.], the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy. "We are," warns Al Gore portentously, "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe."

Spoken like a true child of the Crazy Years. Al Gore, I mean. And my Lord, my Lord, I'm reminded of my dear friend who told me, post-9/11, that her most potent fear was that Bush would be reelected in 2004. Here we are, three years on from that dread day, and so far she and her kids continue to live normal liberal lives, probably sporting that puckish little "Oh well, I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway" button I ran across in Dallas.

I also heard a dude on the radio the other day, a caller to the Glenn Beck program, which I seldom hear but usually get a chuckle from when I do, who came across with the usual "You righties are living in fear" line. Uh-huh. No. The analogy that sprang to mind was actually a real event: a wasps' nest outside the door of my work, which happens to be a door children use a lot. I'm not afraid of stinging insects. In fact, there's a ground nest of bees in the lavender in my herb garden, and we live in perfect harmony, the swarms of bees and I. I do, however, realize that wasps can hurt people, that some people actually are in grave danger from stinging insects, and that a door opening and closing in front of the nest all the time might incite the critters to action.

So my choices were (a) to detour everybody to another door, and therefore avoid irritating the wasps, or (b) to remove the nest, at some risk to my skin. I removed the nest - of course. What are we, as a society, as a liberal and, we hope, global community, to do about the Islamist wasps who have built their nest outside our door? Do we avoid them so they don't get stirred up, or do we remove them, taking back possession of our door? Me, I'm for removing them; we built the damn door. (The analogy fails where it comes to Europe, because the nest - of unassimilated, disaffected Muslims - is in the middle of the living room.)

Standard disclaimer: I'm speaking of Islamists, not Muslims: of that minority in the Muslim world that looks forward to and works toward a renewed caliphate in which non-Muslims are dhimmis who exist on suffrance. Those who practice Islam but are committed, by birth or by conversion, so to speak, to the principals of liberal pluralist democracy, are my brothers and sisters as much as anyone else who embraces the principles of the Enlightenment.

Steyn concludes his prologue: "One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia." This statement comes after a bunch of examples of Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity's capitulation to the unreasonable demands of Islamists: the Danish cartoon "kerfuffle" that resulted in dozens of deaths, Burger King's elimination of squiggly-topped ice cream cones from British menus because they looked too much like the word "Allah," the fact that Muslim inmates at Gitmo are handed complimentary copies of the Koran by gloved soldiers (gloves not being normally part of the Uniform of the Day), such that the U.S. military has tacitly acknowledged and attempted to mitigate its ritual uncleanness to its prisoners and enemies.

Book Club

2007-08-16T17:25:00.000-04:00

June 21, huh? Amazing how time flies, especially when a new Harry Potter book and movie come out...

So let's start there, shall we? Putting aside for the moment my Mrs. Robinson thing for Harry (and I do mean Harry, not Dan Radcliffe, who I think is cute and all but my goodness, he could be my son if I'd just gotten an earlier start), what makes the Potter franchise so very not a franchise and so very much a world to which I wish I had access? Well... consider Wicked, which I read this summer too, for the first and last time.

Before I go on, I should point out that I'm an avid rereader. I love to read more than just about any other recreational activity. But the only books that survive my periodic purges of my home library are the ones I want to read, and read, and read. Dune is in there, but not any Dune franchise book after the third. The Mitford series are all there. Most of the Evanovich number books (One For the Money, etc.) made it, but none of her other romantic pabulum. Wicked was great when I read it - in talking it over with them afterwards, it appeared that I enjoyed it much more than did most of the friends who had recommended it to me - but then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out and Wicked became just another book I'd borrowed and given back, without wanting to rush out and buy it for the home shelves. I loved the style of Wicked: the fairy tale made real, with mundanities salted through the magic to make it a little bit droll and with big emotions played out on an enchanted stage. It echoed the gorgeous Technicolor of The Wizard of Oz.

But it failed to catch my heart, because no matter how you slice her, the Wicked Witch of the West really does try to kill Dorothy and her friends, and ideological necessities can't erase that fact. Let me be clear: in the real world, there is such a thing as a "lesser evil." Hard decisions can and do cost innocent lives. It's possible to be a hero and not have clean hands. And yes, I do understand that Wizard is the children's version, Wicked the adult one: that we, the nuanced, are supposed to see Elphata in shades of gray, so to speak. Sure, I can do that. But it doesn't make me want to revisit her. She stood up for something good but her means to that end were meants to encompass the willful killing of a child; why should I have to read that twice?

Deathly Hallows, now - and while we're at it, Order of the Phoenix, which I took my oldest to see and then sneaked out two days later, leaving a babysitter with the kids, to see again alone: there's no doubt about Voldemort. Not even his own supporters actually think he's good - they just substitute power for virtue, knowingly and often cynically. The whole story arc of the Harry Potter books brilliantly combines a very clear view of global good and evil with far less clear personal struggles on the part of several characters (Harry first, of course) to choose, and to continue to choose, over and over, the good. What the books do is to instruct the reader, entertainingly and with generally terrific pacing, that it's never enough to be good once. Teenagers sometimes think they know this already, but it's my opinion that most adults (perhaps all adults) could use the reminder. I know I can.

That's why all the Harry Potter books (except, inexplicably, Order of the Phoenix, which I swear was in the house two weeks ago but has vanished) are on my shelves: because I need that reminder.

Which brings me to two more books, one a former and one a current selection of my friendly real book club: The Kite Runners and A Thousand Splendid Suns. For the four people who haven't read them, they're Afghani stories: one that begins in Afghanistan and moves to the United States, the other that never makes it farther than Pakistan. Both moved me profoundly. Both impressed me horribly with the sheer brutal punishment the human body can endure, and impressed me tragically with the odds-against possibility of staying normal when everything around you is crazy-bad. Both made me feel woefully inadequate as a human being. But that's not why they're leaving my shelves; they're one-timers for me for the same reason that Prince of Tides was: because, having suffered through vicarious depravity once, I don't see why I should pollute myself again.

Anybody spot the discrepancy there? It's not as if Deathly Hallows is short on depravity. Maybe this is why I enjoy a certain degree of fantasy, and certain subgenres of science fiction: because there, the depravity is invented - even if it's based on what people have indeed done to one another over history, it's still not to be taken as "really real." No characters were harmed in the making of those stories. Whereas, in a realistic novel such as A Thousand Splendid Suns, it's hard to escape the sense that Hosseini was writing biography with (as Heinlein said) the serial numbers filed off. A doctor, perhaps he's revisiting old cases; an Afghan, perhaps he's recounting first- or second-hand accounts. I don't close my eyes... but I read fiction for entertainment, not to be harrowed up. The real world is quite harrowing enough... and while we're on the subject, Suns is a frickin' fantastic advertisement for why we need to stay in Iraq until Iraq can hold itself together on its own.

A rather clumsy segue into this appalling non-comedy:

A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.

Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass.

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? … What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

(Actually an MSNBC story, but I prefer to credit Jeff at Protein Wisdom with winnowing it out.) Honest to God. Goes right along with the story I read sometime in July about the Episcopal (of course, she says, rolling her eyes at her adopted sect) priest in Seattle who is also a practicing Muslim, seeing no cognitive dissonance there. Again let me be very clear: Islam is not my, nor our, enemy. Muslims are not my, nor our, enemy. But when fanatical practitioners of one religion cause clergy of another to abdicate tenets of their own faith out of a sense that the fanatics might quite literally go medieval, it's hard to avoid labelling the fanatics "evil." Isn't it?

Danger? What danger?

2007-06-21T17:44:00.000-04:00

So I was reading this blogpost from the Instapundit Glenn Reynolds's "lovely and talented co-host," his wife Helen Smith, and I supposed I'd better weigh in, since I bought the book in question last week. It's The Dangerous Book for Boys, and Dr. Helen's post did two things for me: first, it noted the upcoming publication of The Daring Book for Girls, a companion book of sorts; and second, it made me roll my eyes at the willingness of some folks to see sexism behind every door and under every throw rug. (Not Dr. Helen - Cathy Young, on whose post Dr. Helen was commenting.)

I have children of both genders, so I'm thrilled that the wonderful Dangerous book has a possible Daring commadre. Because I loved Dangerous. I haven't finished reading it yet - but man alive, just its table of contents sold me. Seven poems every boy should know! Spies - codes and ciphers! Making a paper hat, boat, and water bomb! First aid! Extraordinary stories - part one: Scott and the Antarctic! Coin tricks! Tanning a skin! Grinding an Italian nib! (Hang on, I want to check that one out right now.)

Okay, grinding an Italian nib is a little... arcane. And it's not the only thing contained herein that a whole lot of boys (and girls, and men and women) might not find all that interesting. (I myself found that particular bit very interesting indeed; I'm just not willing to try it with any of my good pens! I thought it'd be about actually making a quill pen, which I've always wanted to try. Not as if there's a dearth of goosefeathers around my house...) But the overall flavor of the book, both at the table-of-contents level and at the level of the actual articles and essays, is delicious. And dangerous in only one sense:

This book is about concepts, skills, even values, that are on the verge of passing into history, a place I don't believe they belong, because too many people disagree with me. I think I've written on heroism once or twice; today's heroes must be antiheroes, or minimally have Size 13 EEE feet of clay, or their stories aren't told. Scott's Antarctic expedition failed, it's true, both in its goal to be first to the Pole and for its members to return alive - but the attempt was great, and kids should know the story undistracted by petty details. There is plenty of time to learn whether Scott and Oates squabbled on the way south, or whether Shackleton was a dilletante, or whatever (I made up both of those irrelevancies); but the value of the story is in the determination of the men to overcome hardship, to win one of the original great races, to return triumphant, and failing that, at least to die well.

I think every kid should make invisible ink. I think every kid should be familiar with the biggies of Shakespeare. I think every kid should know what a mackeral sky means (that a warm front is coming - rain in a couple of days, if the clouds have enough moisture in them). I don't think calling a book The Dangerous Book for Boys is either sexist or a significant barrier to any girl; I think (boys and girls being what they are, society today being what it is) a book called The Daring Book for Girls is less likely to be seen in a boy's hands than the other way around, because, for instance, girls can wear skirts or pants, but a man in a kilt still attracts attention in today's United States, however unfairly. I'm looking forward to Daring, and I plan to photocopy good parts for my boys if need be.

Basically it comes down to this: I want my kids, all of them, to be brave, virtuous, resourceful, polite, and determined, among other things. If Dangerous and Daring help, even a little, to counteract the effects of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, then they have a place in our library. (Like all the Harry Potter books, which celebrate the virtues I'm trying to teach.)

Remembrance of things past

2007-06-12T14:27:00.000-04:00

Specifically, Bill Whittle of Eject! Eject! Eject!. I have yet to figure out exactly who or what he is; I know he's a pilot, I know he's a TV producer, I know he's an essayist. He takes forever (longer even than I do!) to come up with a post, but when he does, it's so persuasive and so full of insight (that paradoxically seems utterly self-evident) that somehow you come away from it thinking that he didn't tell you anything at all that you didn't already know, but you want to go out and tell other people to read what he wrote anyway.

I seldom write in the second person because I don't like to make assumptions about other people's reactions, and saying "You do this" and "You do that" sounds an awful lot like making those blanket assumptions. But there were 650 comments attached to the post I just finally got around to reading, and the reactions of as many of them as I could get through seem to bear up my own (the man's fans are as passionate as any Beatlemaniac).

The post: Tribes, from September 2005. Its hook is Katrina, but its theme is much larger: Whittle divides society into the Pinks and the Greys, and uses the old military analogy of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs to good effect. Here we go:

On the subject of disasters man-made and natural, one more thing from INSIDE 9/11 [a TV documentary -ed.] rings a powerful bell with me. At the very end, as Osama makes his way out of Afghanistan and into hiding, he tells an Al Jazeera reporter his motivations for the 9/11 attack. In his own words, to the friendly folks back home, he explains that his goal was to hurt America so badly that we would have no choice but to go after him and start the world-wide jihad that would result in him becoming the new Caliph, ruling from his recently completed palace outside Kandahar. He had seen much of the Pink tribe in his formative years, seen weakness and retreat in places like Somalia. He thought he had our number, but he made the mistake of having perhaps the least Pink individual in modern history in the White House when he made his move. He made a worse mistake in flying his murdering deathbots into a town that looked Pink, that was painted Pink from head to toe, but whose foundation was rock-solid granite Grey.

If I had gotten my 2000 voting wish and Al Gore had been president that day, would he have been Grey enough to knock that entire regime over and carry the fight to the rest of the region? Or would he have issued Stern Warnings and Worked With Our Allies and gotten the UN to Issue a Major Ultimatum?

I don’t know.

But I do know, that there, in his own words, the wolf said why he did what he did: he wanted to provoke War with the US, and would do whatever was necessary to accomplish it. And if we had not given him this war, he would have kept striking until he got what he was looking for. Nothing about US foreign policy, no word about injustice for the Palestinians or Evil Corporations or any of that. No, he said he wanted to start a war with the US. And so he has it. And he would have done whatever he had to do to get it.

And they will strike again, and those silent, dogged sheepdogs who have succeeded so many times in the dark silent hours will miss a scent somewhere, and more people will die and that's what we can expect. Not dying of Influenza or Black Death, not being steamrollered under Nazi jackboots or watching Mongol hordes swarming towards us over the horizon as we run for the city walls. None of that. Only this.

And when they come, storms man-made and natural, what will the sheepdog/sheep ratio be? Enough?

Let me briefly review the sheep/wolves/sheepdogs thing, because while parts are obvious, others could stand a little illumination. One particularly noteworthy part is that sheep generally don't like sheepdogs. (See Babe for instance.) Yet sheepdogs, historically, were the only thing preventing the wolves from picking off the sheep at the edges of the herd. I think a lot about shepherding analogies, because I attend a church with actual sheep, and am of a sect that puts great stock in the whole Good Shepherd thing; it's easy for us moderns to read "shepherd" and think "Bo-Peep" rather than "unwashed, lanolin-stinking roughneck sleeping on the ground for months and killing predators with a stick." Those shepherds in the Christmas story? The ones abiding in the fields by night? First off, it means that Jesus's birth didn't happen in the winter because -

Well, have you seen Brokeback Mountain? Those shepherds were a lot like the shepherds of Jesus's place and time: hard-bitten guys who didn't shrink at either dark nights or sharp claws or snow in June. But they brought the herd back down at the end of summer, because even the worst sheep owner knows that winter in the uplands will kill his sheep. So the Jesus shepherds were living in the fields because it was summer.

Anyway. Shepherds aren't necessarily nice to sheep; they just protect them with their lives. (At my church, the amateur shepherds complain bitterly about the bleeping rams, whack them with the food bucket to keep them at a distance, and generally go about their shepherding duties because they do indeed want the sheep to live, even if sheep as individuals are not their favorite people, so to speak.) Sheepdogs - as Whittle's essay points out - look a lot like wolves, share a lot of heritage and instinct with wolves, and are even less beloved of sheep than shepherds. But they too live to protect the sheep.

Here's the important part: the sheep are able to live in denial of their haplessness in the presence of the danger that surrounds them (or used to, at any rate). They carry on, bleating and eating, heedless of the wolf, because there's a mean shepherd who makes them go where they don't want to and there are vicious dogs that nip at them and keep them in a bunch.

Whittle's point is that, as humans, we may be born with or without the capacity for violence, but it's possible for both the naturally non-violent and the naturally violent to be "good." Sheep, he says, are not weak, and they also greatly outnumber both their protectors and their enemies; they're just not able, on some level, to hurt or kill. The wolf is. The sheepdog is. But the sheepdog husbands his capacity for violence, saving it to use against the wolf.

How does all this get to the Pinks and the Greys, the Tribes of Whittle's theme? Pinks are sheep. All of them are sheep. But not all sheep are Pink. Because we're humans and not in fact sheep, we can choose whether and when we'll support the sheepdogs, even if we ourselves don't share their capacity for violence. (A sidenote that's maybe not so "side": a preponderance of Whittle's commenters either termed themselves sheepdogs, hoped that they were, or wished that they were. I'm in that camp too. I find that a little weird - predictable, but weird nonetheless.)

So the other day I heard the reprehensible Daniel Schorr holding forth on Putin's recent invitation to the Bush (Sr.) family getaway at Kennebunkport. Schorr actually said that Putin and his ilk would not view this unprecedented invitation as conciliatory and diplomatic but as weak, and cautioned (all right, scolded) Bush about it. Where, oh where, was this point of view where Iran was concerned? How about Kim Jong Il? Go back a little - Saddam Hussein himself? I don't listen to Schorr unless I happen to turn the radio station at an inopportune moment and haven't eaten recently (among sort of mainstream radio folk, only Garrison Keillor is as hard on my digestion), but I think I can say definitively that he was not advocating a tough-guy stance when Ahmadinejad was publicly praying for the coming of the twelfth imam by the expedient of wiping out Israel. Daniel Schorr: Pink sheep. George Bush: sheepdog, possibly forced into the role against his preference (I think that's the case, based on his general softness on just about every issue except Islamist terror) but nonetheless willing to accept great personal rancor and significant physical risk in order to protect Schorr from his own damn self.

Believe it or not, my posts aren't as long as Whittle's.

You can make the worst of anything

2007-05-15T06:48:00.000-04:00

Here's a headline for you:

New detainees strain Iraq’s jails
Sharp rise follows start of security plan; suspects housed with convicts

And the lede:

BAGHDAD - The capture of thousands of new suspects under the three-month-old Baghdad security plan has overwhelmed the Iraqi government's detention system, forcing hundreds of people into overcrowded facilities, according to Iraqi and Western officials.

I wonder what the headline would have been if the "surge" had been unsuccessful in rounding up "thousands of new suspects"?

This article carefully skirts the issue of the evidence against these "suspects." Nowhere is the claim that neighbors with grudges are gleefully informing on one another and that this alone is enough to get you crammed into Baghdad's overcrowded jails - so, since there's no doubt in my mind (particularly given the tenor of the many, many other articles to which the WP's special correspondents on this story have contributed) that that detail wouldn't have been left out if true, it strikes me that perhaps the standard of evidence to throw someone into the slammer where they'll await arraignment is perhaps along the lines of "seen planting a roadside bomb."

This isn't to say jail overcrowding is not a problem, nor that it's good that uncharged suspects are held with convicts. My point is that the narrative doesn't change no matter what the news is: Baghdad is burning. Pre-"surge," it was an insurgency out of control; inter-"surge," it's an imperfect and inadequate criminal justice system, of all things. (Still no resurgence of the rape rooms, though.)

I commend to your attention the "parliament of clocks" fable from Chicagoboyz. It's highly instructive, with regard to the media narrative.

And running away, and buggering off...

2007-05-07T20:22:00.000-04:00

Via Captain's Quarters, which I haven't visited in too long, we hear that Bill Richardson goes that extra mile beyond his Democrat brethren in advocating pullout from Iraq:

He would pull American troops out of Baghdad, but also from Anbar and Diyala, where they face al-Qaeda terrorists and where we have made a lot of progress in engaging the local tribes.

And from Richardson himself:

So I would deauthorize the war, I would set a timetable of all troops out by the end of the year. And here is where I'm different from other candidates -- I would have no residual forces. No American troops, except for an embassy detail [in Baghdad] of Marines, which is traditional in our diplomatic representation ...

Furthermore, he thinks Congress, acting alone, can correctly accomplish this lofty goal:

I believe that deauthorization, on the basis of Article I of the Constitution, also would have a Congressional reaffirmation of its power to declare war, which it has, but which it has not exercised. The President can't veto this. The issue probably would go to the courts.... But it's decisive, it's strong, it's direct, it's specific, it's easy to understand by the public, and that's the course I believe it should take.

So he plans decisively, strongly, directly, specifically, and most importantly ever-so-simply to leave Iraq altogether.

Paging the post-GWI Kurds...

The grace of God

2007-04-23T22:21:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted on the Virginia Tech shootings; not only have I been busy with more personal matters, but I've been sorting out my feelings about the terrible crime and tragedy of that day a week ago. Here's what I've concluded.

My son has a little (all right, not so little) problem with negativity. I keep hoping it's just a phase - but he may in fact be one of those poor souls who goes through life under a cloud, all my husband's and my best efforts to change this pattern notwithstanding. When he starts in with the "I can't do it," "It's too hard," "I'll never be able to's," what do we tell him most often? We tell him that thoughts like these, negative thoughts, are first of all not the only way to look at whatever situation he's in, and second not helpful in changing the situation he's in. Try this, we say. Instead of saying, "I'll never be a good pitcher! I've been practicing all afternoon and I still throw more balls than strikes," try saying, instead, "Wow, this pitching thing is a real challenge. I've been spending a lot of time practicing, and look how much I've improved since I started!"

Sappy, right? But positive self-talk is a way to shape your attitude, to predispose you to positive outcomes.

I'm a sometime Weight Watchers member (the only program I've ever found that, if you choose to learn it this way, teaches you how to eat normal foods wisely). One of their tools is positive self-talk. Like this: "I can't believe I ate all those chips. What was I thinking? I have no willpower. I might as well give up now." Versus, "Those chips were really good; I really enjoyed them. I'll just make some really good choices at the next meal and be right back on track to meet my goal this week." Acknowledge your action, put it in the most positive light you can, and get back on the horse: it's the next thing you do that counts.

Columbine. Not the first school shooting, but the most notorious. A terrible waste that day was that police policy was to secure the perimeter but not to engage while shooting was going on. And after Columbine, police policy changed, and lives have been saved elsewhere on that account.

I remember after 9/11, I used to think a lot about Flight 93. My dad and I talked about it on one occasion I remember well. I told him, "I just hope that if I were ever in a situation like that (God forbid), I could be brave enough to try something. But I don't know... after all, my kids would probably be with me..."

He glanced up at me from whatever computer he was tinkering with. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "I think when something like that happens, people just... do what they have to do."

That's a fairly unambitious and undemanding statement. But consider the source: while sitting on a flak jacket, he flew helicopters into combat zones in Vietnam, as a newly married 23-year-old with a pregnant wife. Perhaps because he found himself in terrifying straits so soon after both intensive training and (let's face it) the onset of adulthood, my father's own personal pattern was set: "what he had to do" would forever include the possibility of barricading a door with his body while his charges escaped, as Prof. Librescu did last week (I find myself wondering whether one reason God brought this man through the Holocaust was to save the lives he saved last Monday, may he live forever in the loving presence of his Creator). It would include facing a crazy man with a shotgun in a playground, as my mother had to do one afternoon at the Catholic school in East St. Louis where she taught when I was fourteen. It would include - it did include - dropping into a clearing in a jungle where the gunfire could come from any direction. I feel sure that it would have included rushing the cockpit with a drinks tray.

And after that conversation with my dad, I started scoping out airplane cabins. I'd been counting seat backs between my seat and the exit for quite a while; I'd been mentally lining up the friendly-looking people between my row and the exit row to whom I'd physically pass my kids if the need should arise. But now I started also assessing what I had that could either distract or disable, and how I'd go about using it if I had to. A positive response, an internal dry run to help shape my reaction if the real world ever presented a scenario where such planning was necessary.

I'm just now getting to this point about the VA Tech shootings. I don't know what the classrooms looked like (I've avoided all television coverage, and apparently I should be very happy that I have), so I don't know, for instance, whether the desks were fixed to the floor. But I'm thinking about books, laptops, calculators - what could be thrown? If the desks were free-standing, wow, what a great tool they could be for someone in the front row. Could I have been the one - even if from under my desk - to chuck something from my purse at the door and try to get the shooter to turn? Would that have been enough to get someone on his blind side moving, to clock him with a textbook? Enough to start a rush for his knees?

My first reaction to these thoughts is guilt: I feel as if I'm judging the students facing a stone killer in a Keanu-Reeves stance with two very scary guns and obviously no compunctions about using them. Shouldn't I be saying to myself, "I don't know what I would have done. I can't possibly tell what I would have done"?

Just now, after a week, I'm giving myself permission to have these thoughts - because, after all, if I don't "know" what I would have done (and indeed, how could I know?), why must I assume that I would have done nothing? Why not let those thirty-two deaths teach me something, as the deaths of those on Flight 93 taught me something? Just as we all realized that 9/11 was separated from 9/10 by a chasm of unbelievable proportions, just as we all realized sometime in the latter half of September 2001 that we were living in a post-9/11 world, we now live in a post-VA-Tech-shooting world: it's a world where no one, armed with gun, bomb, gas can, or anything else will ever again be so damnably successful in his designs on the lives of other students. I hope we can generalize still further and no one will ever again be so damnably successful in holding anyone in any public space hostage.

But, you see, it's the attitude, not the weaponry, that makes the difference: while I wish we could turn back the clock and arm an ROTC student in one of those classrooms, I wonder whether a conventionally unarmed but determined few students could have turned the tide against that poor, deranged, and now dead man.

I'm utterly ignorant of any personal stories from the scene; there may have been an attempt, or more than one, to stop him. I'm not actually second-guessing what any person did on that day; I'm only preparing myself for an exigency I hope will never arise. The only reason I'm blogging on the subject at all is because the "vibe" I'm getting from listening to the radio and reading some other blogs is that we have no right to consider alternative responses - to judge, in a sense. There but for the grace of God sat I. I'm blogging to say that it's not only my right to consider alternatives, but my duty and a smart course of action, and indeed an homage to those who died - that their cruelly curtailed lives can make a difference even now.

Dream... or epitaph?

2007-04-13T21:50:00.000-04:00

Victor David Hanson dreamt about the West:

I recently had a dream that British marines fought back, like their forefathers of old, against criminals and pirates. When taken captive, they proved defiant in their silence. When released, they talked to the tabloids with restraint and dignity, and accepted no recompense.

What a poignant beginning. My Anglophiliac soul weeps. I remember a scene from Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys, in which she's advising her nephew Emil about how to behave as an officer at sea. She tells him that every bit of rope used by the British Navy contains, at its core, a single red thread - that anywhere in the world, anyone can tell that that piece of rope is British because it contains that strand of red. She urges him to take that rope as his model: to let his character be known to and seen by all, no matter the circumstances, no matter his companions. He's later shipwrecked, and when he's rescued, he recounts that in some of his darkest moments on the lifeboat, he remembered the story and her admonition - and that it was out of fear that his loved ones would have to discover that he had behaved dishonorably that he did his best to behave honorably.

Somehow I doubt that a red thread is at the core of British rope today. Moving on...

Fellow Democrats like John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and Harry Reid would add [to Pelosi's stern opposition to the actions of leaders of Syria and Iran] that, as defenders of the liberal tradition of the West, they were not about to call a retreat before extremist killers who behead and kidnap, who blow up children and threaten female reformers and religious minorities, and who have begun using poison gas, all in an effort to annihilate voices of tolerance in Iraq.

These Democrats would reiterate that they had not authorized a war to remove the psychopathic Saddam Hussein only to allow the hopeful country to be hijacked by equally vicious killers. And they would warn the world that their differences with the Bush administration, whatever they might be, pale in comparison to the shared American opposition to the efforts of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Syria, and Iran to kill any who would advocate freedom of the individual.

Et cetera, et cetera. In brief, his dream is that the West has definable character, a recognition of its roots, its fundamental aims, and the price paid over hundreds of years to achieve a good measure of those aims. What do we have instead? An essentially two-party system in the United States such that the undisputed enemies of this country actively root for just one of those two parties to take power. What message should the Democrats be getting, loud and clear, from that fact? And why aren't they? Or, if they are, why don't they care?

He ends this way:

And then I woke up, remembering that the West of old lives only in dreams. Yes, the new religion of the post-Westerner is neither the Enlightenment nor Christianity, but the gospel of the Path of Least Resistance — one that must lead inevitably to gratification rather than sacrifice.

Once one understands this new creed, then all the surreal present at last makes sense: life in the contemporary West is so good, so free, so undemanding, that we will pay, say, and suffer almost anything to enjoy its uninterrupted continuance — and accordingly avoid almost any principled act that might endanger it.

I heard a tarot reader on the radio this morning. She did a passable cold reading for a caller; if you were inclined to believe she had "powers," she didn't shake your belief. (If you were disinclined to believe in those "powers," well, her probing questions were kinda obvious.) She told this woman that the hardships in her life were just "tests," that there's no negative outcome in life - just exercises from God to help her move to the "next level." The funny thing is, I tend to see my faith in this light: the stumbles I've had, the obstacles in my way, have each contained some lesson or some hidden good that was eventually revealed, so I've had a pretty easy time believing that God sends these trials at the same time that God sends the means to cope with them, with a purpose known only to God.

But what about the family whose child is abducted and killed? Where's the "hidden good" in that for them? There may indeed be a hidden good for someone there; John Walsh's personal tragedy has brought about good for others, but I doubt that he misses his murdered son any less as a result. God's plan may not include my happiness, is what I'm saying. The thought that they might move to the "next level," for victims of Nazi inhumanity during WWII, would probably have been small recompense for the horrors they endured and from which so many millions escaped only through death. (I could have circumvented Godwin's Law there, but with a Holocaust denier at the top of the list of enemies of the United States, I felt the need to underscore the reality of the Holocaust.) How many enslaved people died as chattel, in the US and elsewhere, so that their disregarded remains could scream out the injustice of considering a human life "ownable" by anyone but its holder?

There is, like it or not, evil that can't be overcome by good thoughts. Likewise, there are threats to our most passionately held and vitally important societal beliefs that fail to respond to linking arms and singing about buying the world a Coke. That project to get as many people to have (shall we say) very, very happy thoughts simultaneously, and thereby bring about an end to the war in Iraq? Somehow I doubt that my refusal to participate was the deal-breaker there.

We went to Williamsburg for spring break this year. We didn't spend enough time in colonial Williamsburg - much more at Busch Gardens, to be honest - but while we were among the colonials we did at least have a chance to hear the Declaration of Independence declaimed. I hope, oh, I hope that kids are still stirred by these words as much as I am now and was as an idealistic teen:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

I hope that there are as many Americans (and others! This document should be known to everyone who values freedom) today as ever who realize that those words were not empty. Those men, and the women in their lives who supported their dangerous act, undoubtedly knew that they faced hanging and permanent familial disgrace if they failed - and that some of them might (probably would) die in the attempt even if they succeeded. Their lives. Their fortunes. Their sacred Honor. That's the price they were willing to pay for the inalienable rights in which they believed. Hanson believes that the West is no longer willing to pay that price for those goods - that the highest price we are now willing to pay, we pay for craven comfort instead.

What do I believe? I believe, or perhaps I only hope, that he's wrong.

Unconfirmed report...

2007-03-27T17:35:00.000-04:00

...of bombing in Iraq, via Bank of America. Crude oil spiking - up about $1.50 - unconfirmed, once again. ??? Awaiting information!

UPDATE: OK, just a rumor. In particular, apparently the rumor was that Iran had fired on an American carrier (?). The Navy denies. Another rumor, so far as I know NOT being denied, is that the US has moved two carriers into the Gulf. I haven't been keeping up at all with troop movements and such, so for all I know, this is old news!

Idealism: what it is, what it isn't

2007-03-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

Via Instapundit (as usual), recently I came across this very interesting piece, entitled "The Gospel of John and Yoko: The Origins of Mad Morality." An excerpt:

If you believe the Gospel of John and Yoko [ed. Think of the lyrics of "Imagine" for a quick apologia.] represents a higher morality, you will naturally begin to resent such obstacles in the way of “progress” as reason, the rule of law, common sense, the need to be a master of your own life, and the responsibility for your own well-being. And since the United States of America was built on such values and remains their most dedicated proponent, any honest and consistent “progressive” is bound to develop a seething hatred towards this country.

In the “progressive” book of virtues, American values are the quintessence of evil. So if you are a “progressive” and you aren’t mad at this country, that just means you’re neither honest nor consistent. But then again, because living by this dead-end moral code is logically impossible, one has to resort to hypocrisy and seek compromises, forever balancing on the edge of madness.

The writer, born in the Soviet Union when there was a Soviet Union, is as determined a foe of collectivism as pretty much everybody who escaped that terrible regime is. His past naturally colors his opinion. I myself am inclined to listen to the opinion of a former socialism victim, however intemperate it may seem in the current circumstances, for the same reason that I'd go to a famine survivor for accurate information about what the early stages of starvation feel like, or to a resident of the Northwest Territories to find out about SAD: he's really been there, and my baby experiences of leftism, hunger, and seasonal depression don't even mildly compare.

(Am I being intemperate by using starvation as a comparison? Hmm. Ask Stalin. Ask Mao. Of course, they're dead - like the millions they starved.)

Here's the rub: I believe there's an important role for (stereotypically) youthful idealism in a liberal society. Idealistic thinking, particularly when it's articulated intelligently, causes society to examine its postulates. When an idealistic concept is able to stand up to this first examination, it can mean that the context of a societal construct has changed and the postulate itself must be altered or even discarded. Slavery, for instance, has been a given in human society since there was human society. But perhaps the most important fruit of the Enlightenment was (and is!) the assumption of the fundamental value of each individual human being - and the idealistic concept that a slave of African descent is observably and provably a human being, and therefore a natural beneficiary of the Enlightenment, ultimately could not be denied. It kept coming back. Thoughtful people continued to hold it up to the light, to discomfit the conservatives (in the old and true sense of "people committed to preserving the status quo"), until the idea was no longer revolutionary but inevitable - because internal consistency demanded it.

But like Bills on Capitol Hill, not every idealistic notion makes it to inevitability. All societies that endure are conservative to some degree: they've come across a system that works, and they have a significant interest in preserving it. The beauty of a classically liberal society is that new ideas, propounded by free people, can be heard and debated - not that they're immediately adopted and the old stuff tossed on the rubbish heap of history. The presence of a strong conservative (still in the old and true sense) element in society is a buffer against too-precipitous change. And where that buffer is weakened or absent, the adoption of new ideas may take place without the hard-eyed examination that may, just may, prevent a really bad turn.

So here's the problem with idealism in our society today: somehow it's escaped this vital testing and tempering.

Someone (I think I know who) is going to read this post and conclude that I think slavery in America lasted just long enough, or some such drivel. No. At the moment that the Enlightenment took hold, when the value of the individual became a paramount societal concept, slavery should have passed from the earth - and ideally, of course, it should never have arisen; the intrinsic value of a human being, and the simple fact of the humanity of every mammal, however different-appearing from The People (whoever The People are to the particular observer) that can breed true with another human being, should have been obvious from the start. But the world is what it is, and apparently an Enlightenment was necessary in western culture in order to introduce the idea that human life is beyond buying and selling, and many years were necessary after that to break down the status quo.

So what about the idealistic notions of today? I believe that they too should be judged by whether internal consistency with our core principles requires them. "War is not the answer" doesn't rise to that level. Nor does "logic is male, male is bad; feelings are female, female is good." Nor does "Arabs aren't ready for democracy." Nor does "private ownership is by nature oppressive to someone." I hope that effectively instant mass communications can bring about necessary change more quickly than we saw with slavery, civil rights, female suffrage, child labor... but I draw the line at assuming that every possible change is necessary.

On carbon neutrality

2007-02-28T23:34:00.000-05:00

Let's start with the links. Here's Wikipedia on the subject. And here's a killer bit about Al Gore's supposed carbon neutrality - note particularly that he's apparently buying his offsets from a company of which he's cofounder and chair. And of course here is a piece about Bush's Crawford ranch, with its geothermal climate control, rainwater collection system, graywater recycling, and modest size.

What I bring from these stories is a Lenten theme, weirdly enough. It's the injunction to pray in secret, to wash your face and smile on the street - not to be like "the hypocrites" who hire people to beat drums ahead of them on their way to make their offerings at the Temple. It'd be so much easier to take the Terrible Threat^TM of (anthropogenic?) global warming seriously if its Jeremiahs were less ludicrous.

Instead, as I've said before, my position on global warming, cooling, spinning, magnetic-pole-changing, etc., etc., is that the Earth has been doing these things, willy-nilly, for some five billion years now; it behooves us, as a species that may (for the first time in global history) have some modicum of control over its destiny, to try to make ourselves and our society as adaptable as possible to major changes. We know that we as a species already survived ice; we know that large numbers of people already survive heat, though there are obvious problems such as disease, crops, and how to get everyone to like warm beer. We already genetically engineer lots of plants to suit our current needs; is anybody working on genetically engineering very heat-tolerant and cold-tolerant and drought-tolerant and wet-roots-tolerant strains of foodstuffs? If not, that's where our concentration should be. Water purification and desalination: another no-brainer. Inoculations against diseases more common in lower latitudes, especially those horribles for which the main therapy right now is "get the uninfected out of Dodge and wait for it to play itself out."

When the Earth's climate changes, it will be beyond us to stop it - and any efforts we make that have an actual effect, however small, are bound to have other, unintended consequences as well (see: rabbits, Australia). If we limit our attempts at ginormous changes to the social and technical, it seems obvious to me that we also limit those unintended consequences. That alone, even leaving aside the do-ability factor, brings me to my firmly held opinion that our better course is to prepare ourselves, not to try to hold back the tide.

Social engineering, then? No... I'm agin' it. But if we're going to try to take some kind of major action, I vote for explicitly setting out to build a resilient society rather than (a) giving very rich people feel-good points plus a free pass to contribute as much carbon to the equation as they like, (b) setting up a "carbon underclass" of people who, because they can't afford a "carbon usage tax" or magical (if ineffective) offsets, simply have to live as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, and (c) holding down the development of the undeveloped and underdeveloped world in the name of The Environment. And as I (and others, I'm sure) observed somewhere (I'm sorry, it's after midnight and I don't recall whether it was in some blog post of mine or a comment left elsewhere), if those selfsame Jeremiahs actually believed the drivel they're spouting, they'd be doing things differently: if Gore thought we were decades from "buh-bye Manhattan," he'd be living... um... the way Bush does.

So it comes down to power, as always. Sometimes I imagine Gore in his carefully offset obscenely energy-hungry mansion, giggling like a little girl over how much more influence and exposure he has now than he did as a Presidential candidate.

What a maroon

2007-02-20T06:17:00.000-05:00

I just stumbled across Mark Kleiman at Reality-Based (?!) Community, via this Instapundit bit. Kleiman has a "thoughtful and damning critique" (not a quote from Kleiman or anyone else but my characterization of how he seems to appear to himself in that spotted and wavy glass he evidently calls "reality") of Mark Steyn. In sum, Kleiman claims that Steyn advocates genocide against Muslims. He bases this claim on this passage from an interview Steyn gave to Christopher Hitchens:

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

And here's what Kleiman says about that passage:

Hitchens let this pass in silence, except for a little bit of tut-tutting about the differences among Muslims, but let's call it by its real name: Steyn is justifying genocide, both retrospectively in Bosnia and prospectively in the rest of Europe.

He implies that the silence of everybody else from "Red bloggers" to anti-Holocaust groups on the subject (of Steyn's call for Euro-genocide, that is) is tacit agreement with Steyn's premise as he - Kleiman - interprets it. He of course overlooks the fact that all this silence might just mean that his interpretation... um... doesn't fit the facts.

Only someone who had never read one other word of Steyn could interpret that statement as advocacy of genocide. I'll admit that a passing familiarity with Steyn's actual premise on Europe - that demographically, Muslims in Europe are not just outperforming but overwhelming traditional, or ethnic, Europeans, and that therefore the "never again" Europeans had better watch themselves lest they somehow manage to forget the "never" part of that phrase - is a bit helpful.

Kleiman, you listening? (At last I understand the frustration Michelle Malkin's opponents feel when they can't comment on her blog - though, given the horrifying examples of comments she received that led her to disable commenting, I don't blame her, and for all I know, Kleiman has been on the receiving end of similar disgusting displays of pique.) Steyn is, was, and has long been warning Europe that they will be faced with "the cold equations" sooner than they expect: Muslims will soon outnumber ethnic Europeans (forgive the awkward phrase - I'm at a loss for what to call non-Muslim Europeans besides the even more awkward, and less descriptive, "non-Muslim Europeans") if current demographic trends continue, and birth rates among ethnic Europeans and Muslims in Europe and elsewhere pretty much guarantee that current democratic trends will continue. Europe has a history of using genocide as a weapon against "threatening" ethnic groups. It has happened in living memory, not just in the Holocaust but thereafter in Bosnia, as he points out in the passage from the Hitchens interview. Muslims are a potentially "threatening" ethnic group, in that all over Europe, Muslim communities have resisted assimilation and have insisted that they are or should be bound by other rules - sometimes even other laws than the rest of the society in which they live. Some of these rules, and certainly Shari'a law, stand in direct opposition to the Enlightenment values on which European civilization is supposedly based.

Steyn's assertion is that European "civilization" is a veneer. It's an effective, beautiful, and in some ways robust veneer, but he writes and speaks from the standpoint that a veneer is not very thick and is vulnerable to accidental or willful rubbing, and that it didn't take a whole heck of a lot to sand through that veneer to expose the barbarity beneath during World War II, for instance.

He doesn't except the rest of western civilization; he just points out that Europe is in a particularly bad position at present: faced with what it - Europe - has tended to view as an existential threat, with feckless domestic policies that do nothing to address that threat, a populist sense not unlike that which allowed Hitler to come to power in the '30s could again prevail in Europe, and we don't want that.

Are we clear?

Wonders of modern medicine

2007-02-15T20:50:00.000-05:00

You want to know how many different drugs my children are getting at the moment? Three proton pump inhibitors - a different one for each - to block acid production in their stomachs in response to acute gastritis attacks, probably caused by a nasty stomach bug that's going around; two antibiotics - a different one for each of two of them - for strep and an ear infection possibly caused by strep (I assiduously avoid giving antibiotics for ear infections without great cause - but in this case, the older brother with strep is cause enough); two pain relievers, alternating around the clock, for fever reduction and pain management (I normally only medicate fevers if the child is really uncomfortable, figuring that a fever serves a purpose - but in this case, rest trumps allowing body temp to rise for whatever purpose); and one antihistimine being used as a sedative (on doctors' advice! I swear it!) until a couple of nights ago to help one of them sleep around the gastritis; and one narcotic, given in the hospital to two of them over the last two weeks whose gastritis was severe enough to warrant (I'd say require) hospitalization.

Five, count 'em, five trips to the ER. So far five visits to our regular doctor's office. One meltdown by my dear husband addressed to said doctor's office, to the effect that the county hospital is apparently now our primary caregiver and what the bleepity-bleep is our doc doing for us besides rubber-stamping what the ER and peds docs are saying? Four strep cultures and a flu culture. Untold urine and blood samples. One (ugh) stool sample (that was a fun one). A chest X-ray, a belly X-ray, a CAT scan, an ultrasound. More lousy hospital food than I care to remember, none of which was for me, so why should I complain? Five full nights and about seven days in the hospital, plus two (I think) more partial nights. One overnight babysitting issue, precipitated by a five-day business trip by my better (or at least 'other' - the jury was definitely out during the business trip) half. One nor'easter, just to add variety and excitement to our regular (far too regular) route to the ER.

All of this is out of order and minimizes the strenuously resisted panic that's been at the top of my emotional spectrum for the past seventeen days; at the moment, with everyone well medicated and apparently recovering, it all just seems banal. Thank God for the art and science of medicine, and the efficient yet compassionate care of the nurses and docs who have been taking care of us. My title was in no way ironic: while none of what has ailed my kids has been life-threatening (probably - or not too life-threatening anyway), it's been far, far easier to cope because of the tools, therapies, and knowledge of which we've been the beneficiaries.

I was, and am, a fan of minimalism, preventative medicine, medicinal herbs, and providing support to the body while it does the heavy lifting. But the naturopathic options for my child sobbing "Help me... help me..." as he arched, writhed, and twisted in agony just didn't seem all that... compelling somehow. I still advocate doing as little as possible to mess up body chemistry and function - but bring on the morphine, baby, when it's needed: that's what it's for.

Unspoiled

2007-02-04T09:35:00.000-05:00

Wretchard at Belmont Club was writing recently about Palestine, in particular the terrible price Palestinians pay for their hallowed status as perpetual victims.

Did I just state a chicken-and-egg problem? Are Palestinians poor, insecure, and desperately unhappy because of their refugee status, or are they still considered refugees because their situation is so dire? Well... as Wretchard says,

The pseudonymous Spengler, writing in the Asia Times, argues that Palestine is partly the Frankenstein creation of Western guilt and international fantasy. They are people forced into a time trap, in a kind of ghastly ethnographic museum, except that their native dress consists of explosive wrapped round their waist, and their colorful dances celebratory gunfire fired up to rain down on their heads, because we want to remember them that way.

The comment thread for that post includes a number of observations about the irony of multiculturalism: that once you postulate that all cultures are not just equally valid but equally desirable (or, in practice, that the less first-world - even more, the less American - the culture, the more desirable), and take it as your mission to preserve each native culture unchanged, you've become King Canute standing in the incoming tide. Worse, you've become the paternalist you deride.

Orson Scott Card wrote about this phenomenon in Speaker for the Dead. Humanity's first contact with another intelligence resulted in the destruction of that other intelligence. So, long afterward, when humans discover another intelligent species, they strictly constrain themselves from "polluting" that species in any way: like anthropologists they spend time with this other species and observe them, but the human scientists carry no artifacts (they do wear clothes!) and say nothing, ask no questions that would provide clues to human culture. No asking about hunting, for instance, because if this species doesn't hunt, asking them about hunting might encourage them to explore this species-inauthentic activity for themselves.

Eventually a representative of this other species, the pequeninos, finally snaps, accusing the human observers of withholding valuable information from them not out of respect for their culture but out of fear. (It turns out that the human enclave on this planet, which the humans believed to be protected by an impassible barrier, had been under close observation by the pequeninos from the get-go: a goldfish bowl.) Why not share agriculture with these hunter-gatherers so that they can thrive, work less hard, develop more technology on their own, have more offspring? Because if the pequeninos are given this head start, they may sooner pose a threat to humanity. So says this "piggie," as they're colloquially known.

And so. When we say, "The Muslim world isn't ready for democracy," "The Palestinians can't help being disaffected," "There's no sense in opposing tribalism in Africa," or "Western culture is supplanting authentic native cultures all over the world, and we need to stop," what is our real motive? Does it even matter? If our motive is in fact respect for these different cultures, who are we to tell them what they can and can't do, should and shouldn't adopt? More, if we can save them some stumbles on the road to first-world status, aren't we negligent if we withhold our experiences? Yes, it smacks of paternalism, as I said - but at least it's a more benevolent paternalism than the alternative form, which pats a third-world culture on the head and says, "You're not mature enough," then stands back and watches, bemused (or even sticks out a foot to trip them), as they make mistakes we can see coming.

On the other hand, if our motive is to keep these other cultures "authentic" (hence relatively primitive) so that they pose less of a threat to us, we're first, cowards, and second, obtuse.

I know an ardent nativist. He has traveled fairly extensively in the Southern Hemisphere and considers any incursion of American or Western culture there a travesty, an ugly blot on the pristine fabric of native life. And he's convinced that he is on the side of the natives in taking this view. Now, don't get me wrong: I have zero desire to live in a homogeneous world, and great respect for both differences among peoples and the right of every person, and every people, to stay separate if that's their wish. But, as a privileged member of the dominant culture, for this man to try to keep his culture away from others in the name of cultural purity - for the little village, not for the American city - denies the village information and opportunities that could be helpful as well as "polluting." If he's doing it for the natives, he's being paternalistic; if he's doing it for the authenticity of his own experience, he's being selfish. And either way, he's condemning the natives to nastier, more brutish, and shorter lives than they might otherwise enjoy.

Of course he doesn't see it that way. I applaud and share his desire to experience all the great diversity of humanity, even as I hope his tactics fail: whether he likes it or not, all culture is authentic.

A short course in terror

2007-01-24T17:37:00.000-05:00

So another SOTU is behind us... and again Bush laid out what we're fighting and what we're fighting for in Iraq:

In the mind of the terrorist [sic], this war began well before September the 11th, and will not end until their radical vision is fulfilled. And these past five years have given us a much clearer view of the nature of this enemy. Al Qaeda and its followers are Sunni extremists, possessed by hatred and commanded by a harsh and narrow ideology. Take almost any principle of civilization, and their goal is the opposite. They preach with threats, instruct with bullets and bombs, and promise paradise for the murder of the innocent.

Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country. By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology. Listen to this warning from the late terrorist Zarqawi: "We will sacrifice our blood and bodies to put an end to your dreams, and what is coming is even worse." Osama bin Laden declared: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

These men are not given to idle words, and they are just one camp in the Islamist radical movement.

But here, as the President was speaking about the 2006 response of terrorists to our military and diplomatic successes in 2005, is the passage I believe most important:

In Iraq, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists blew up one of the most sacred places in Shia Islam -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra. This atrocity, directed at a Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia -- and it succeeded. Radical Shia elements, some of whom receive support from Iran, formed death squads. The result was a tragic escalation of sectarian rage and reprisal that continues to this day.

This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in.

I'm not a fool, and nor (in spite of claims to the contrary) is Bush. Sectarian strife existed in Iraq long before Saddam Hussein and was bound to be problematic in a post-Saddam Iraq whose central government had not yet consolidated its power and authority. But for a while it appeared manageable - disruptive and sometimes tragic, but not rising to the level of an existential threat. Heck, sectarian or ethnic violence has existed and does exist in many nations not considered failed states. Actions like the destruction of the Golden Mosque, which incited a degree of violence that hadn't yet been seen from the Shia majority, were instrumental in bringing us, and Iraq, to this point, and it's vital to realize these actions for what they were and are: a tactic in an overall strategy.

The strategy: to weaken Iraqi support for a moderate government and to sap the American will sufficiently to undermine our efforts to uphold that duly elected government. The tactic succeeded in bringing strongly Shia-sectarian elements in that government into ascendancy, which in turn gave cover to Shia militias, first perceived as "protectors" but eventually functioning as lawless pseudo-vigilantes, their every action undermining the Iraqi government's necessary monopoly on armed force.

Enough, says Bush - and I hope al-Maliki is speaking the truth when he echoes that declaration. Because if al-Maliki is ready to back up the word with the commitment, Baghdad can be a real capital city of a real democratic nation.

This whole exercise - a live-fire exercise with no do-overs - is a fascinating study in what we've taken for granted. We in the West, I mean. Take that monopoly on force: in the United States, the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear arms, and the debate rages (to coin a phrase) over whether the founders meant that each individual ought to be able to own a gun, or whether the intent was to arm a national guard. (Where I stand should be obvious.) In neither case is there any implied threat to a government monopoly on the use of force. When militias have arisen in the United States, post-Revolution, they've been widely decried as - at least - bordering on extra-legal. (Yes, some American militias have achieved a regional and ephemeral celebrity.)

But in Iraq, such groups actually had, and for some Iraqis no doubt still have, a tacit claim on legitimacy. Middle Eastern society has skipped too many steps. The nations with oil have been able to pole-vault from the Middle Ages to the new millenium without passing through an Enlightenment. A math analogy: in my freshman calculus class, about half the students had taken calculus as seniors in high school, and, smug, shouted out, "3x²!" as soon as the instructor wrote "x³" on the board. The prof, determined to get us to understand what we were doing, rolled her eyes and, in her lovely Texan drawl, asked them, "Why?"

In other words... Iraq can do this. There is nothing intrinsically lacking from, or different about, Iraq in terms of its ability and even its desire for civil liberties such as we take for granted. (Side note: we take them so much for granted that recently I saw a button in a novelty store that said, "Oh well, I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway." The irony inherent in that button's even existing must have escaped both its manufacturers and the store.) All it lacks is time to get up the learning curve. We can give Iraq that time - and it's obvious to the Administration and me, among others, that it is in our national and moral interests to do so. Unfortunately not everyone seems to agree.

Two more years.

Waste of time

2007-01-18T15:10:00.000-05:00

I've spent time recently at Asymmetrical Information and am flat-out depressed: Megan McArdle has not only come to believe that going into Iraq was a mistake (with which I disagree completely - none of the strategic reasons for doing so at the time have changed, as far as I can see), but has opened her forum to a bunch of ninnies who all just want to chant, "We were right, you war-mongers were wrong," incessantly. Now, whatever gets them through the night, I guess... but what I hate about Megan's original post is that its subject is, "I was wrong - discuss!"

It's possible, pig, as Westley said, that those of us who supported (and, in my case, continue to support) the Iraq invasion were wrong to do so. We can never know, of course, because we don't have a handy parallel universe in which to test the other case. It's certain that people at all levels have made mistakes in prosecuting, not the invasion, but the reconstruction/stabilization period, but that's no different from any other war or aftermath thereof. I can concede and in fact insist that a "postmortem," a debrief, a lessons-learned session of seriousness and length is appropriate, because how else can we avoid the mistakes in future?

But to provide nothing but an opportunity for snarky folk who think it's the height of wit to refer to Bush as Dear Leader to gloat - that's not only not helpful or productive, it's darn close to pandering in my eyes. Poor Megan... She lives and works in Manhattan, and the pressures brought to bear on her must be extreme, just through the course of her day. But I do so wish that she could've kept her confession to herself - because we're in Iraq and must make the best decisions we can, now, about what to do next. Providing fuel for the pitiful birthday candle that passes for "fire" among the particular doves she attracted to that post doesn't assist anyone in that effort.

Yeah. I know. We in the 101st Chairborne aren't going to be the deciders. But we, the American people, are going to have influence over our representatives, and the nature of the blogosphere combined with the nature of Washington are such that (a) we don't know how influential a few emails to any one Congressperson will be, nor (b) do we know how many blog readers are going to be influenced to send those emails by a blog like AI.

Naturally it also irks me on a sheer emotional level to watch valuable pixels being used for "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah" with - still! - no consideration or discussion of where to go from here. Megan's critics took exception to her claim that just because "the doves were right," it wasn't through their perspicacity; they predicted all kinds of direness that didn't come to pass and were therefore correct only by chance. Those critics had a point of a sort; there were in fact anti-invasion people bringing up the possibility of insurgency and destabilization before the invasion. But - and this is where those critics' "rightness" falls right off the page - those were far from the loudest or most quoted voices, nor can I quite believe, listening to Megan's commenters, that they, the commenters, were stroking their chins and nodding sagely in agreement with Pat Buchanan back in the day.

And here's the next place where I feel confident in predicting that those critics will turn to the logic they just rejected: they'll say that since they were "right" about not invading, they're also right, now, about pulling out altogether. It Does Not Follow. If the common goal is a stable, moderate Iraq, Iraq the Model one might say, which, as a significant benefit, also serves as a demonstration that it's possible to be prosperous as a nation and part of the Middle East (and not Israel) at the same time, it's incomprehensible to me and to everyone on my side of this debate how leaving Iraq at this time will accomplish that goal. The only way that an early pullout appears to be a viable choice is if the goal is something else.

A Band-Aid for Iraq?

2007-01-12T07:54:00.000-05:00

In short, no, again via Instapundit, which is the only blog I get a chance to read pretty much every day now.

No, but as usual, opponents of an Iraq strategy that involves making an actual positive difference in the Middle East (and, always, importantly, in our own position and security therewith, or else we would be irresponsible as a nation to undertake it) focus on the one factoid they appear able to comprehend, or at any rate willing to sound off about: 21,500 troops. What they - the forces of both troop reduction and troop increase - consistently fail to talk about, and have failed to talk about all along with regard to their own competing proposals (such as they've been), is what to do with the troops. For over a year I've been listening to and growing increasingly frustrated with demands that we send "more troops" (sometimes with a number attached) or that we "bring the troops home," either precipitously or gradually - with no discussion of tactical change, when a change in troop strength, up or down, clearly implies a change in tactics.

But we do indeed have a change in tactics. 21,500 more troops (which, I heard pointed out by a Republican Senator whose name I missed on NPR yesterday, still leaves the total number of coalition troops in Iraq at a level below that total last year at this time), primarily deployed in Baghdad, where current troop strength is just 13,000. An almost 150% increase in troops, in the area that most needs them, since anyone paying attention is aware that the vast majority of Iraq is already stable, with Baghdad the primary hotspot. Does that sound better than "a niggling 21,500 added to the 140,000 already there"? Furthermore, a concomitant change in the rules of engagement: the Shi'ite militias are now an explicit target, a monopoly on the use of armed force by the duly elected Iraqi government an explicit goal. And still furthermore, a commitment from that same duly elected Iraqi government to bury the militias, in spite of sympathy to them at high levels.

So the race against the clock continues. We have two years from next week, or so, to stabilize Baghdad and provide the nascent moderate democracy of Iraq with a margin of safety in which to operate; after that, we have to assume a worst-case scenario involving a rabid dove in the White House who would rather play to the crowds (when was the last time the Great American Public was consulted so often and taken so seriously in the matter of how to prosecute a war?) and "bring our boys home" without regard to the price of that action.

As I started saying in, oh, 2005 or so, please, Democrats - for the sake of the children you tend to trot out at convenient moments, nominate someone with some foreign policy credibility and a will to maintain the American Moment.

Again with the slippery slope

2007-01-08T18:50:00.000-05:00

Via the mighty Instapundit, an AP story on CNN.com indicates that amniotic fluid is a "plentiful source of stem cells." These aren't embryonic stem cells, which theoretically can become any type of cell at all but, in an ethical Catch-22, must be "harvested" from an embryo that is destroyed in the harvesting; but they're promising and apparently very malleable, according to the Wake Forest researchers doing the work.

As a free marketeer, I have to conclude that R&D on stem cells would eventually have gotten to this point - exploring amniotic fluid rather than destruction of embryos, since, if researchers were able to withdraw the stem cells without damage to mother or baby as they say there were, the implication is clear that there are lots and lots of stem cells in there (you're not sucking out a pint or two of amniotic fluid in search of half a dozen cells). I'd assume that an extraction method that amounts to amniocentesis is cheaper than in-vitro fertilization, or in-vivo followed by intact removal of the embryo (I have no idea whether they're proposing that means as a viable stem cell generator).

However, I'm also inferring, rightly or wrongly, that the pressure on researchers to come up with "non-controversial" sources of stem cells is hastening that progression. In other words, if there were no ethical issue with destroying human embryos in order to harvest their cells, we'd just be doing it that way - no fuss, no muss. I'm deeply grateful to those in the public sphere who are bringing that pressure to bear, since the last line of the AP story is, "[Dr. George Daley] began work last year to clone human embryos to produce stem cells[,]" pretty much exactly what those of us on my side of the debate have been fearing and warning against: human cloning - creating a construct that would, if (able and) allowed to grow to viability, be a human being by anyone's definition - with the express purpose of killing that construct and harvesting its parts, further cheapening human life by sanctioning not just its creation (I'll reluctantly give you "potential creation" if there's the usual hair to be split about when a human embryo constitutes a human life) but its destruction at the whim of a scientist.

I'm no Luddite. I believe that private research should go where it will, and that private research is bound to be a more fruitful field than government-sponsored research. But I also believe that bioethics is not just for fun, and that there are important and difficult ethical issues with the intermediate steps between, say, cloning followed by destruction within a few days and in-situ cloning of organs or limbs (the pipe dream I'd love to see fulfilled).

Let me be even more explicit. There's a slippery slope inherent in embryonic stem-cell research: today we create an embryo in vitro and destroy it at, say, the blastocyst stage - what is that, eight cells? sixteen? - in order to take advantage of the total malleability of its cells, a potential that to date remains unrealized; tomorrow, what? If a human embryo created for this purpose is valueless except as a collection of spare parts, what about any other human embryo? and if it's possible, and ethically acceptable, to grow liver cells from embryonic stem cells (hey, it's possible to grow them from adult stem cells - but so far, no go with the embryonic variety, I understand), how much easier would it be, with this valueless embryo, just to let its highly efficient and nearly perfect built-in mechanism work to create a whole liver for you, then harvest that liver, discarding the rest of the spare parts that aren't needed? And while you're at it, why not wait until it's easiest of all to harvest that liver - after the embryo is no longer encased in a uterus? (Of course we'd want to avoid the word "born" there.)

And as I've said before, the logical fallacy of the slippery slope argument is that the dreaded outcome is inevitable, not that it's possible. I think it's hard to argue that such an outcome as I've described is impossible. Likely? Not in a literal tomorrow, or next year; but a whole lot of people in the southwestern United States were in the past, and possibly still are, willing to cross the border looking for medicaments and treatments that hadn't passed FDA muster; where's the barrier to a black market in baby parts? Adult parts are a bit easier to keep track of, because the adult from whom they come has a history; but if the goal is getting a useful part out of a "mature embryo" and then discarding the "mature embryo," all you need is a human broodmare and an incinerator. And an ethical atmosphere that refuses to acknowledge that there's something deeply disturbing about creating human (or potentially human) life with the intent only of destroying it.

To heck with it

2006-12-20T08:55:00.000-05:00

Gosh, look at the time. Has it really been three months since my last post?

I've been ruminating on whether to take this blog down; I work in a bastion of progressivism, in a field in which my "clients" expect and favor the nice-sounding but too often ineffective nostrums of that ideological position, regardless of its irrelevance to what I do and what they expect me to do, and I feel a certain responsibility to my wee staff not to rock the boat with our "clients." (Am I being sufficiently inscrutable? Sorry about that... I fear Google.) But in the end, I yam who I yam. I skipped the election season; it's time to say something again.

Newsweek has noticed what's been reported in "off-Broadway" sources for over a year now: Iraq's economy is booming. Of course they don't present this "news" without the requisite disclaimer:

Says Wael Ziada, an analyst in Cairo who tracks Iraqna: "There will always be pockets of money and wealth, no matter how bad the situation gets."

But the funny part is that that statement immediately follows this one:

[T]he company [Iraqna, a mobile phone company] posted revenues of $333 million in 2005. This year, it's on track to take in $520 million. The U.S. State Department reports that there are now 7.1 million mobile-phone subscribers in Iraq, up from just 1.4 million two years ago.

That's... let's see... fivefold growth in subscribers in two years nationally, and a near-doubling of revenue in one year for that company. Looking further:

Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006.

Requisite disclaimer: The World Bank "has it lower: at 4 percent this year." And more requisite disclaimers: the article lays credit for Iraq's economic growth at the feet of the rest of the world ("money pouring in from abroad"), while nearly simultaneously noting that oil revenues "and foreign grants" are set to exceed $41 billion this year. That's a nice bit of sleight-of-hand: combining revenues from sales of Iraq's one unequivocal natural resource with handouts from a sympathetic world, without telling us how much comes from each source.

But that's not enough yet:

It goes without saying: real progress won't be seen until the security situation clears up. Iraq still lacks a functioning banking system. Though there's an increasing awareness of Iraq as a potential emerging market, foreign investors won't make serious commitments until they are assured a measure of stability. Local moneymen are scarcely more bullish on the long term. In Iraq's nascent bond market, buyers have so far been willing to invest in local-currency Treasury bills with terms up to six months, max.

If it "goes without saying," why does it have to be said? "Real" progress is apparently signified only by foreign investors' trust, not at all by a nascent and enthusiastic middle/entrepreneurial class and several-hundred-percent real estate price growth. A moving goalpost, in other words: signs of health in the economy of another nation cannot possibly be taken as signs of health in the Iraqi economy, because the narrative is Disaster; therefore, we have to discount these signs and look only at the ones Iraq isn't yet exhibiting. Remember the Iraqi elections? Remember the ratification of the Iraqi constitution? In both cases, the pre-vote story was that security issues would overshadow and ultimately kill the democratic process; since the democratic process failed to be killed, the post-vote story had to be that in spite of the millions of Iraqis who voted, the electoral results were unimportant, even irrelevant, because violence didn't suddenly and magically cease.

Why, I continue to wonder, is the narrative Disaster? What's the goal of those penning (keying?) that narrative? Why not hope for success and concentrate on potentially useful critique of strategy and tactics, rather than carping, snarking, and continually pointing out only those areas where success hasn't yet been achieved?

Five years ago tonight

2006-09-10T22:04:00.000-04:00

...I was eight and a half months pregnant with our second child and had no idea that the world was going to stop spinning the following morning.

God rest the souls of the three thousand who, tomorrow morning, I'll stop and remember most particularly. Now that we live close enough to both NYC and DC that we can day-trip to either by car, we know people who lost friends and family that day rather than just, ourselves, feeling a kind of remote anguish at the lives - and the life - that ended. But that "remote" anguish is still a strong motivator for me: My own personal circle was unbroken by the evil of that morning, but for the first time since the Challenger disaster when I was in high school, I felt viscerally and powerfully the horror of completely unjust death. Certainly, every time I hear a story in which an innocent person dies, I'm moved and saddened - but as I curled on our sofa on 9/11/01, unconsciously mimicking the posture of the baby in my belly, and watched the towers fall on live television, I was - I was -

If I had been God, I would have been Shiva in that moment. I was wroth.

Angry. Dreadfully, impotently angry. Because I was not God.

It's been years since I've doubted the existence of God. It's been a year, perhaps, since I've doubted His motives. September: the month I was born, the month I was married, and the month in which I most often ask that question God must weary of hearing from all of us: Why?

The answer has been around since Job railed against his undeserved lot: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? I'm not the first to recall that answer to this question, though I'm forgetting where I first read it. It's not a satisfying answer, but it's the only one we get, and then we have to go on and do something with it. In our case, in this instance, we took up not just a billy club but a rifle, and we not only went after the immediate perpetrators but the ideological instigators, and that's where we are today: trying to make a difference in the atmosphere that allows such evil to breathe. That's the side I'm on, and that's the only vengeance I claim for our side against the evil and for September's dead.

I can't blog much any more. I'm busy with my new work, and the work I do requires - to me, in any event - that I keep my personal views personal, since I now represent some small part of an organization much greater than myself. But this day can't pass uncommented.

Requiescant in pace.

O tempora! O mores!

2006-08-10T18:57:00.000-04:00

All right, twice now I've written posts about today's foiled plot to bring down six to ten jetliners using liquid explosives in carry-on luggage. The first time, my kid deleted it to play some game or other (why again did we buy him a GameCube for his last birthday?). The second, I got caught in a Blogger planned outage and didn't save the whole thing quite in time, and the part I did manage to save before the outage was the link-free intro. Darn it.

I'm too tired now to recreate the links. The point was this: I woke up this morning and flipped on the TV, something I seldom get to do, and - holy cripes, a monstrous plan to kill thousands, caught apparently just in time, disrupting air travel in the UK and the US in ways we haven't seen since 9/11. Surely, I thought, this near-miss will have a salubrious effect on the Left, in spite of their foolish triumphalism about Lieberman, one of dang few Democrats with any appeal to the center.

But no - the two dominant memes I've seen on the big sinistrosphere blogs have been these:

1. I Question The Timing! or, isn't it conveeenient that this plot is disrupted right after the Lieberman-Lamont primary? (No kidding. That really is one of the nutty ideas floating around out there: that the Rovian Right was willing and able to create a fake plot that would cause the British government to shut down Heathrow and US travel authorities to cause parents to drink their babies' formula in front of a security officer in order to bring it aboard, yet for reasons known only to them, delayed it until after Lamont won, as a kind of "told you so" to the anti-war anti-forces. No kidding. No kidding.)

2. Nothing to see here..., which describes the way Kos was treating it. Two pages into DailyKos, no story or commentary. A few diaries addressed the plot, over in the right sidebar (which may be no coincidence... though they seemed largely to conform to either my #1, above, or #3, below), but Markos apparently didn't find the situation compelling enough to talk about.

3. This plot demonstrates the failure of Bush's War on Terror! or, as a Protein Wisdom commenter noted, apparently the new standard for success in the War on Terror is that no terror attempts - nay, no terror plans - occur. I guess the idea is that Bush thought we were so convincing that a group of people who, like medieval Europe, are living only for the rewards of the afterlife, in the space of three to five years (depending on when the Leftish speaker believes Bush started screwing things up), should have abandoned their pursuit of Allah's glory and their own paradise in favor of a Prius and a bargain on a Super Tuscan.

I actually saw one Left-side commenter referring to Bush's Iraq policy as "short-sighted." "Short-sighted": a generational plan to recast the Middle East in a more liberal image. I also read one blog, apologies that I can't recall which one, in which the writer mused about a definition of intelligence s/he had read: (paraphrased, but accurately) the ability to hold two opposing views in mind simultaneously. I certainly hope that that writer meant "to consider" rather than "to hold," which IIRC was in fact the word used (I can say definitely that it wasn't "consider"), because otherwise what we're talking about is not intelligence but cognitive dissonance, the resulting imbalance from which can lead to awful and nonsensical rationalizations.

Such as, for instance, "The Bushies are stupid doofuses who masterminded the 9/11 attacks." Or "The interruption of a plot to kill thousands, which resulted in inconvenience to many more thousands of travelers but no loss of life, was [take your pick here] a Rovian plot to spank the righteously angry anti-war netroots, or a failure." Or "Portraying Joe Lieberman in blackface is not at all antithetical to our liberal commitment to tolerance and proportionate ethnic diversity in the public and private spheres, but rather simply political speech that really doesn't concern you Republicans, since it's internecine." Or "Israel is committing genocide(!) [do they even remember what 'genocide' means?] by attacking the sources of rockets being fired at civilian targets in Israel by an organization pledged to destroy Israel as a nation and Jews as a people, because those sources are placed deliberately in civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon."

I thought - I hoped - that the good that could come out of this foiled plot, besides the fact that thousands who might have been killed will not be, would have been that the Democratic party would wake the hell up and realize that Islamism really doesn't give a flip which American president is in office: the aim is to destroy the West because of its liberal, to some observers libertine, ethos. And the people most vilified by Islamists are the ones the Democratic party claims most especially for its beautiful organic-cotton vegetable-dyed rainbow tent: atheists. Gay people. Feminists and other uppity women. Jews. Fornicators and the debauched of all stripes (which we might call "people who believe in bodily freedom," perhaps).

Wake up. The important common denominator among us in the West is not which groups we embrace or identify with - it's which philosophies we embrace and identify with. And the greatest of these, the one that changed everything and continues to inform our lives daily, is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

Generalization versus specialization

2006-08-03T08:09:00.000-04:00

Steering well clear of Lebanon, not out of lack of interest but out of lack of energy to get all read up on it so I could have anything at all insightful to offer...

I've been reading Jane Austen lately, and as always with literature of that period and the periods immediately following - say, up until the Edwardians or so - I'm struck by the concept of "accomplishments." I mean the way all girls of the middle class and above learned to draw, play piano or some other instrument, sing, write descriptive prose and poetry, dance, arrange flowers, do fine needlework, all of them acceptably well regardless of native ability; and the way all boys of the middle class and above learned some of the above but more about riding, shooting, maybe swordplay (ornamental or practical), dressage if they were in the country, and so on. Both genders were expected to have a working knowledge of "the classics," of course.

All times have their accomplishments. In my teens I was "expected" to master (or at least to perform acceptably) certain things that I largely didn't: gymnastics (no prayer - I couldn't even touch my toes for most of my youth), pop singing (classical is another matter! But I could never get the whole close-your-eyes-and-whine-nasally genre down), drawing horses (I've never figured that out), fashion (to judge and to wear, not to design, not that I could design it either). My brother had to be competent in certain team sports, be familiar with some canons like Star Wars (at which I was better), and do tricks on something with wheels like a bike or a skateboard. I'm not able to step outside my own life well enough to determine which well-rounded young person, the 1980s one or the 1800s one, had the harder time learning his accomplishments. But I find roots in the youthful-accomplishments idea in the Renaissance and the Renaissance man, and I find similarities in places today.

This post, from the Long Tail blog, deals with how digital photography and cinematography change acting and directing:

Why [has digital caused such large changes]? Because film costs a lot and must be used sparingly, while digital tape is practically free. The difference between the scarcity economics of film and the abundance economics of digital is, as Bill put it, "the difference between pointing a loaded gun at someone and a toy gun. You point a loaded gun at them and they're going to act different. A film camera is a loaded gun. Digital is not."

He explained further what he learned shooting Flyboys with the Panavision Genesis. "The old model of acting is that the rehearsal is great and then things change when you say "rolling"--usually for the worse. Now there's no film in the camera. You can shoot everything. So there's no rehearsal. Or perhaps it's all rehearsal. Either way, it's far more natural."

Actors freeze up when they know that there's a cost to failure--a thousand-foot magazine of film costs $1,200 between film and developing. Said Bill: "That slight whirring noise of film running through the camera is the sound of money. And it gets in the way of being real."

Anybody? Anybody? I have on my wall three absolutely fantastic candid pictures of my kids, enlarged and proudly displayed rather than clustered on a shelf or on the fridge, because we bought a big memory card for our digital camera and are able to take a hundred and some high-res pictures without unloading. If I hadn't had literally dozens of shots of each child to choose from - that is, if I'd been limited to the amount of film I was willing to buy and develop - I would have had virtually no chance of taking three shots good enough to treat like professional portraits. My mother-in-law, digital camera always at the ready, treats the medium the way she always has: "Get over there next to your brother, honey. Sit up a little. Turn. No, the other way. Now - SMILE! Darn it, you had your eyes closed. Let's try it again..." rather than clicking away twenty times on the premise that one of those twenty captures will yield something good. It frustrates me to watch (especially since the whole reason professional photographers can charge the big bucks for children's portraits is because it's so hard to get three kids to look good all at once in a portrait-style shot), but I understand the impulse.

So. Available tools change the types of accomplishments we strive for - no great news there. The question for me is whether our "accomplishments" in these days, aided by tools that can turn the rankest amateur into an occasional master by dint of sheer persistence, render this age a new renaissance, in which we ought to try not just to perform learned skills adequately but actually to be relatively masterful in several areas at once. With my computer, an internet connection, my digital camera, and enough time, I can (both theoretically and, in some cases, in fact) turn out a killer home movie, gallery-worthy photos or even "art" if I apply enough filters, an animated feature, a book that only needs professional binding... Add some readily available craft materials and I can actually bind that book and expect it to last for decades, or turn out cards that ought by rights to put Hallmark out of business, or illuminate a manuscript. If I have a melody line in my head and a Moog or its equivalent, I can (and this is purely theoretical - I've never yet come up with a melody that's worth remembering) arrange it and "perform" it with multiple virtual instruments, sing it in harmony, and distribute it over the internet. Between the resources available at any public library and the resources available at my desk, I have access to almost everything I need to become "accomplished" in the 19th-century sense, at least on paper (I can't afford a horse), as well as in the 21st-century one (that's what my HTML, VBScript, and SQL books are for). So. Do I focus, or do I diffuse my efforts? With so very much available to be learned, am I better off as a specialist or as a generalist?

Heinlein had his opinion:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, first published in Time Enough For Love

A distinction with a difference

2006-07-16T08:46:00.000-04:00

I'm at a bit of a loss. I believe that the state of things worldwide breaks down into a few categories: Western capitalism-of-sorts against (largely) Eastern collectivism, though I'm not sufficiently versed in Asian culture to understand why collectivism should have so much persistence (albeit in corrupted form) there when it's clearly failed everywhere else; national wealth through general adherence to a code of fair play that we, at least, inherited from the British in the form of common law, versus national poverty and degradation through kleptocracy and rampant open corruption - I discount tribalism in this equation not because it doesn't exist, but because I believe it can coexist with common law; and finally, liberalism versus fascism, which at present means "liberalism versus Islamism." Not that there are no other fascists around; I'm certain that there are. But only Islamists marry the elevation of a central leader to a far-flung organization with enough coherence to coordinate attacks against the West and Westward-looking others, yet enough "looseness" to defy rounding up and fencing in.

Because to my horror, that option - fencing in the Islamic fascists - keeps occurring to me. "Circumscribing" might be a better term: I'm not talking about concentration camps here (God in His mercy forbid that we ever relive those days again), but about limiting the scope of their actions, financially, politically, and socially, not just by not preferring them under the law (see for instance last year's debate in Canada about whether to look to Shari'a as a source of legal precedent, a debate that fortunately ended correctly - for now), but by forbidding them to do certain things that we in the West take for granted, such as starting a school, without significant oversight. But as I said, it can't be done; the Islamists are too scattered, too independent whenever they choose to be, for even circumscription to work.

Point is, the struggle is existential, as I've said before, even if it's going on at a low level at the moment. I urge you to read all of this before you scoff:

“Asian youths,” a British euphemism for Pakistanis and Muslims from South Asia, in parts of Oldham are trying to create no-go areas for white people. One of them told: “There are signs all around saying whites enter at your risk. It’s a matter of revenge.” However, it’s not just the white natives that are targets of Muslim violence, but other non-Muslims, too. A report on Hindus being driven out of the English city of Bradford by young Muslims was described by some Hindus as “ethnic cleansing.”

...

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post noted that some Muslim leaders explained that what they wanted was autonomy in their ghettos: “They seek to receive extraterritorial status from the French government, meaning that they will set their own rules based, one can assume, on Sharia law. If the French government accepts the notion of communal autonomy, France will cease to be a functioning state.” Following three weeks of unrest, the police said 98 vehicles torched in one day marked a “return to a normal situation everywhere in France.”

...

A researcher for the Netherlands Ministry for Immigration and Integration found that 40% of young Moroccan Muslims in the Netherlands rejected Western values and democracy. Six to seven percent were prepared to use force to “defend” Islam, and the majority were opposed to freedom of speech for offensive statements, particularly criticism of Islam.

...

In Denmark, the nation-wide organization of Women’s Crisis Centres claims that a number of taxi drivers with immigrant background are spying on female immigrants who are in hiding, sending information about their whereabouts to their families. It was a group of taxi drivers who informed a Pakistani man where he could find his sister. He murdered her in broad daylight outside a train station because she had married a man from Afghanistan against her family’s orders. 80% of the women seeking help at crisis centres in the city of Oslo, Norway, are from immigrant background.

...

A secret high-level UK police report concluded that Muslim officers were more likely to become corrupt than white officers, with complaints of misconduct and corruption against Muslim officers running 10 times higher than against their colleagues. “Asian officers and in particular Pakistani Muslim officers are under greater pressure from the family, the extended family [...] and their community against that of their white colleagues to engage in activity that might lead to misconduct or criminality.” The report argued that British Pakistanis live in a cash culture in which “assisting your extended family is considered a duty” and in an environment in which large amounts of money are loaned between relatives and friends. It recommended that Asian officers needed special anti-corruption training.

So. Is it possible to distinguish between a Muslim of a generally liberal bent and an Islamist? As a practical matter, walking down the street - no, just as it's impossible to distinguish between, say, me, and a granola-crunching (I love granola) Birkenstock-wearing (OK, my Birks just got "retired," but I'm in Tevas or barefoot six days a week anyway) Bush-hating (you've got me there) hippie in her middle years (no bifocals yet, but gray roots). However, there is a difference, and we must distinguish it. The challenge is in drawing the distinction without going all racist, though the people we, the liberal West, need to watch and guard against often share some physical characteristics that could invite cries of "racism!" How do we do it?

Heck if I know. But here, from a post entitled "Marx and Muhammed":

In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary [I'd say "an unobservable," but the point is taken. -ed.] afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.

There's my circumscription idea and yet another reason why it won't work against Islamism. What it points up is the necessity of figuring out ways to convince people fixed on the hereafter that the here is also worthy of attention, and not just the kind of attention that results in blowing it up in order to hasten the journey to the -after. So perhaps the solution is just to bombard everyone, all of society, with the superiority of life under a liberal banner; the people who already experience and accept that superiority will roll their eyes, order another latte or lassi or lager, and ignore it, while the unconvinced may - possibly - be drawn in against their will. It means rejecting multiculturalism, or at least that part of multi-culti that begins from the premise that all cultures are equally good and sufficient for their adherents.

Steyn making sense

2006-07-14T21:37:00.000-04:00

Some more reasons why you ought to be reading Mark Steyn, whether for the humor or for the insight (you can't have one without the other):

The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: If it's a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to nonpolar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states that can't feed their own people globalize their pathologies.

In other words, American hegemony: If not us, who? If not now, when? Read the whole thing; it points out that the threats we, and the world, face are not our opponents' (or even enemies') strengths, but their weaknesses. We have an unbeatable package right now. We won't always - that's the way of things - but at present, there is no other nation, nor even a group of nations functioning together such as the E.U., with the money, the military, the technology, or (much less "and"!) the will to do what we are doing by default: policing, funding, and establishing liberal (you know which "liberal" I mean) social and cultural norms for the world.

Or take this, concerning the recent "rolling hunger strike" of celebs, during which they each vowed to lay off the kibble for 24 whole hours before tagging out and letting the next undernourished accessory display fixture skip three squares:

Personally, if celebrities have to ''put their bodies on the line for peace, I'd much rather see them bulk up. How about if Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow promise to put on 20 pounds for every month Bush refuses to end his illegal war? Absent that, it's hard to see what a ''rolling fast'' does except confirm the vague suspicion one or two Americans may harbor that politically active celebrities are a lot of vain dilettantes unwilling to discombobulate their pampered lifestyles. It's unclear whether any of these celebrities will be ''starving'' long enough even to feel hungry. Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers of the 1980s were never going to force Mrs. Thatcher to back down, but at least they did actually starve themselves to death.

How about if the celebs did that? Wouldn't that, after all, get right to the heart of the matter? Wouldn't that bring piercing clarity to the issue by forcing the American people to choose between tedious geopolitical responsibilities and Jennifer Aniston? Imagine if the flailing neocon warmongers had to explain to the American people why we were now down to one Dixie Chick.

No, I am not kidding: these vacuous infants actually thought it'd be a valid protest, a "sacrifice" worthy of measuring against the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers deployed in the Middle East, to do what crash dieters do by choice. Now. I just watched Emma Thompson's lovely Sense and Sensibility today, and I loooove a good costume drama, as well as a good action flick (I have an as-yet-unset date with the husbands of several of my friends to see X-3 since, inexplicably, neither my own husband nor my women friends are interested). I have great respect for a gifted actor as an actor; I have zero respect for an actor as an activist. Perhaps they just got confused, being used to reading lines on the fly and all, by the fact that the two avocations share some letters at the beginning.

Anyway. That's a decent segue into the world of the cinema.

In Depp’s hands, Cap’n Jack is more of a swishbuckler than a swashbuckler, and the more he swishes the more it’s the movie that seems to buckle. He’s worked so long and so hard and so ostentatiously on multi-layering the micro-details of his character that he leaves everybody else looking like preliminary sketches. It’s like Medea joining Charlie’s Angels: it’s bound to leave the other gals looking a little underwritten.

I haven't seen the first Pirates, about which Steyn was writing there, won't for some time since my oldest has declared it "too scary," and may not see the second ever if the first turns out to stink, but I love the Medea reference. Back in my extreme youth, back when I had a crush on one Jason and was into writing silly love stories, I couldn't imagine anything more romantic than his falling in love with a fictional Medea (even though I did know by then that Medea was a tragic heroine who had murdered her own children and that her marriage to Jason was, like, the definition of ill-starred love). I think I was the only thirteen-year-old in my school who had read the play. I may be the only almost-forty-year-old in my neighborhood who has, for all I know.

That's enough.

Escalation of hostilities

2006-07-10T03:34:00.000-04:00

Anyone out there doing the same blog macarena that I do (DUM dadaDAdadadaDAda InstaPUNdit, DUM dadaDAdadadaDAda Protein WISdom, DUM dadaDAdadadaDAda FallbackBELmont...) will have seen the Frisch situation arise and quickly spiral out of control on Protein Wisdom - and I should note that this will be a link-free post, because there's altogether too much heat surrounding the exchanges already. Here's the background for interested parties who follow other blogs:

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom is an expert in hermaneutics. He's also a stay-at-home dad of a toddler. He's also multiply employed in academia and the World o' Blogs. He writes frequently about the cost to society of identity politics and the importance, in critique, of authorial intent, and believe me, these subjects are highly relevant in the world of politics-politics today. He's loathed by the Left generally, as far as I can tell from my seat in the Right's bleachers (though, to extend the metaphor beyond its logical limits, I'm more along the first-base line than way out in right field). He has a few intrepid dissenting commenters, who suffer a certain amount of verbal "abuse" (quotation marks because this post is about actual verbal abuse) and mocking from his more generally concurring commenters, plus he gets pretty regular influxes of ill-tempered and intemperate trolls from Glen Greenwald's site and elsewhere.

One such intemperate person was a woman named Deb Frisch, a psychology professor on the staff at the University of Arizona. She had some strongly dissenting comments to make about a post I can't even recall at the moment - strongly dissenting but presented in such uncivil terms that I, who avoid the term "troll" almost all the time, can find no other word for her. Jeff's regulars piled on her with the mockery, which she took relatively well for a little while. That's kind of the price you pay when you're working a hostile room, it seems to me.

Then she stopped taking it well. She decided, according to her later comments, that she felt "threatened" by some of the comments directed at her (she hasn't specified which ones, and although I was following the conversation at the time, I can't think of any that struck me as over the line - I remember insults but no threats, overt or implied), and she responded "in kind," also according to her own comments, by starting to say some very ugly, very scary things about Jeff's child, and some very insulting things about his wife. I'm not going to repeat what she said except this far: noting that Jeff lives in Colorado, she several times brought up Jon Benet Ramsey in a context involving Jeff's son that would give any parent (and ought to give any non-parent) pause.

Jeff, never one to recede meekly into the background, posted directly about her comments, and his commenters, some of them currently or formerly in law enforcement, urged him to contact the FBI and, themselves, contacted the UofA about Frisch's giant leap over the line. The comments, which started out in dogpile mode, rapidly progressed to a realization that this woman might be mentally ill; upon that realization, the comments stayed strongly critical of her words but at least started to involve calls for her to get help and calls for other commenters to lay off her personally because she might not be compos mentis. Problem being, of course, that she might read comments encouraging her to seek help as some kind of dismissive mockery rather than sincere wishes, which I believe almost all of them were, based on the people commenting. (No doubt a few were intended otherwise. Jeff's minions aren't all sweetness and light, though most of them are, between the lines.)

Cutting to the chase, she resigned her (temporary) post there and blogged a non-apology apology at her own blog. Meanwhile, in a possibly related incident (it's happened to him before, so it's unclear whether he ticked off someone else besides Frisch's supporters at the same time), Jeff's site was brought down by a DOS (denial-of-service) attack that, as far as I can tell, continues for some of us, at least; Instapundit and others report that the site's back up, but I can't get there yet.

I'm terribly troubled by it all. Stepping way back from the situation, I'm troubled by the fact that Jeff's often bitingly on-point critiques of matters on the Left are bringing about actual livelihood-threatening actions from his enemies such as this DOS attack. There's a difference between, say, boycotting a newspaper because you disagree with a columnist or the paper's editorial stance, and sabotaging the presses so that the paper can't be printed, which is the analogy that applies here. (Talk about your chilling effect...) I'm troubled that dissenting rhetoric so easily segued from simple rudeness to actively threatening a blogger's child because the blogger's commenters were rude back. But even more than these, I'm troubled by Frisch.

I read the non-apology she posted. Only two comments, at the time that I read it, supported her, which, this being the internet and all, is about the best I could've hoped for; even most of her ideological allies couldn't get behind her "tactic." But she herself ought to be frightened by the fact that she even had these thoughts, much less that she then made the decision, such as it was, to go public with them. As a psychologist, she ought to be terrified about what they reveal about her mental state. But that's the rub with mental states, isn't it: she may not be able to step way back, as I can. She may not see, even now, how dangerous she's been accurately perceived to be. I feel as if I've witnessed a full-blown break with reality, and it gives me renewed respect for those in the mental health field who see this kind of thing daily and do their best to help those going through it. On top of that, although my sympathies are almost all with Jeff here (I reserve some sympathy for Frisch if she is indeed over the edge - but I do not in any way condone any of her horrible comments about Jeff's family), it appears to me that Jeff's post may have been the factor that pushed her over. Now, as with the total engine failure of our recent houseguests' car upon their return to their home airport, it was going to happen regardless; if not this trigger, another one. But I wouldn't want it to happen on my watch.

Phew.

Parents

2006-06-18T19:28:00.000-04:00

If I'd remembered to post a tribute to mothers on Mothers' Day, this would be a tribute to fathers only... but I didn't, so here's to parents of both genders: those of you who approach the vocation with love, commitment, and determination, as mine did and do, are the invisible flying buttresses of your children's lives. We wouldn't be what we are if not for you and all you've done for us.

Thank you!

An open letter to my friend Cobra

2006-06-10T03:13:00.000-04:00

Cobra -

My reply to your comment here was getting overlong, so - thanks for inadvertantly getting me to write a new post! The question you asked:

Ponder this...exactly what argument could we make against China if they decide that Taiwan poses "an imminent threat" to them?

Give me a hard question, Cobra! The answer: We could say, in our own national interest and in complete truth, that we therefore consider China to be a threat to us. That's an oldy from the Cold War. Communism, or socialism if you like, totalitarianism in general, is a threat to what we like to call "our way of life" - which does not mean the trappings of Western society half so much as it means the Bill of Rights and the (relatively) free market. The MI complex as profit generator? Yes and no - there's a broken-window fallacy there, I think, wherein IF that money weren't spent on guns and tanks, it could be spent on other things, things that create more profit, but once it's spent, it's spent. I'm far from an economist - but here's my take on the "neo-con" strategy: We will have to deal with the consequences of totalitarianism abroad, one way or another. Containment is not a viable option any more, and hasn't been since, oh, China got the bomb, I'm gonna say. The first line of both defense and attack is economic: beat them by GDP, which is largely what we (the West) did with the Soviet Union. But when the opposition is not necessarily motivated by self-perpetuation, but is instead messianic or more or less purely ideological, the economic approach is limited: an ideological enemy is much less open to the persuasions of the market than an essentially socio-economic one like the Soviet system.

Look at China: still a totalitarian regime, but with widening cracks in its facade because it can't withstand the pressures of the market - both the economic and informational market - without giving in to some of them. The demise of that system is coming, sooner or later. I don't think we'll ever have to raise arms against China in order to bring it about.

Or, look at the current divide between Repubs and Dems: it's an ideological chasm that separates us, and appeals to common sense (in analogy, the marketplace) don't do diddly to bridge it.

It's my opinion, and one that the Bush Administration apparently shares, whatever its motives (and thank you for assigning me altruistic ones! I know your intentions are altruistic, though, as you said, I often disagree with your proposals), that nations with a strong commitment to individual rights approximately as our founders spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights are good neighbors. Or at least better neighbors than those whose commitment is instead to the collective.

"Altruism" is a private matter, I think; when government attempts it, the line blurs between help and coercion, because government has power far beyond that of most individuals. An individual may choose to act outside his own self-interest without much risk of doing great harm if he's wrong in his choices; a government doesn't have that luxury. As such, it makes a lot more sense to me that government should primarily stay out of the way of individuals' attempting to exercise their freedoms to live mostly as they want to, up to the point where their exercise of freedom infringes on someone else's. That, in a nutshell, is why I named this blog what I did: because the principles of the Republican party (which, sadly, may differ a whole lot from its elected leaders' practices) suit my ideal of the least government, most of the time - but I completely reject the stereotype of Republicans as heartless.

So many of my metaphors are parental; heck, it's what I do. But here goes: It's not heartless for a parent of an adult to stand far back when the adult offspring falls into something nasty - instead, it's an acknowledgment that the adult offspring has agency, capability, pride, responsibility. However, it's also not characteristic for most parents to allow the adult offspring to die - and indeed, this is why I'm not a libertarian. If one of my kids, when grown, tries to come back home because living on his own is inconvenient, well, it was a nice visit, kiddo, but hit the road. If he comes home because he's at rock-bottom and has no other options, I'll make up the spare bedroom with love and reluctance, and try to light a fire under him to get him back on his feet as fast as possible.

Far afield. It's 3AM; I can't sleep. I hope you have fun in MD - I assume you're going there for fun, though you didn't say. We'll disagree again when you get back! Always interesting - thank you for continuing to visit.

Zarqawi dead

2006-06-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, operational head of al Qaeda, is dead, along with seven of his aides. Link here, among other places; I saw it on TV, an exceedingly rare occurrence. (And I'm scooping Instapundit! Unbelievable!)

May they rest in the peace they strove against. May God have mercy on their souls. May the people who gave Zarqawi up come in from their self-imposed cold and the rank-and-file of al Qaeda be discouraged in their fight; may the Iraqi people take a bit of time to celebrate (as they are at present, appropriately, since they were his primary victims) and then carry on proving the world wrong about their ability to create something fruitful there in the desert.

Remember

2006-05-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

Here's Victor David Hansen:

[W]hat did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers?
[...]
Our soldiers fought for the chance of a democracy; that fact is uncontestable. Before they came to Iraq, there was a fascist dictatorship. Now, after three elections, there is an indigenous democratic government for the first time in the history of the Middle East. True, thousands of Iraqis have died publicly in the resulting sectarian mess; but thousands were dying silently each year under Saddam — with no hope that their sacrifice would ever result in the first steps that we have already long passed.

Our soldiers also removed a great threat to the United States. Again, the crisis brewing over Iran reminds us of what Iraq would have reemerged as. Like Iran, Saddam reaped petroprofits, sponsored terror, and sought weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Iran, he had already attacked four of his neighbors, gassed thousands of his own, and violated every agreement he had ever signed. There would have been no nascent new democracy in Iran that might some day have undermined Saddam, and, again unlike Iran, no internal dissident movement that might have come to power through a revolution or peaceful evolution.
[...]
After Iraq, the reputation of bin Laden and radical Islam has not been enhanced as alleged, but has plummeted. For all the propaganda on al Jazeera, the chattering classes in the Arab coffeehouses still watch Americans fighting to give Arabs the vote, and radical Islamists in turn beheading men and women to stop it.

These are significant matters. We've lost 2,400 soldiers in this conflict; we'll lose more. The people of Iraq have lost many thousands to suicide bombers and other forms of terrorist attack, as well as to the horrible vagaries of combat in an urban zone, and they too will lose more - ask Israel - yet they continue to campaign and vote and start businesses and create newspapers and buy appliances and open clinics and exhibit an optimism missing from their nation for decades.

So in addition to the gratitude we formally offer the fallen soldiers of our history on Memorial Day, I want to add this remembrance of the accomplishments of the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the hundred-thousand-plus fighting and building in theater and the hundreds-of-thousands-plus in supporting roles:

What you have done is near to a miracle, and you've done it essentially under radio silence, uphill through molasses, ignoring the "support" that calls for you to leave your job unfinished and the "respect" that decries you as ignorant children. Thank you for your service; thank you for your sacrifices; thank you for your Churchillian commitment.

Preaching to the choir

2006-05-25T15:45:00.000-04:00

I've come across this essay several times in the past couple of days - I think Instapundit had it, and I know Jeff Goldstein over at PW did, and I just saw that Pejman at the mellifluous A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days does as well. The terrible misfortune of it all is that not a mind will be changed. Those whose minds are made up won't even read it, much less be influenced by it, because Opinion Journal is after all a mouthpiece for the Administration. But still...

Iraqis can participate in three historic elections, pass the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, and form a unity government despite terrorist attacks and provocations. Yet for some critics of the president, these are minor matters. Like swallows to Capistrano, they keep returning to the same allegations--the president misled the country in order to justify the Iraq war; his administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments; Saddam Hussein turned out to be no threat since he didn't possess weapons of mass destruction; and helping democracy take root in the Middle East was a postwar rationalization. The problem with these charges is that they are false and can be shown to be so--and yet people continue to believe, and spread, them.

Of course Mr. Wehner proceeds to demonstrate the falseness of the charges, so that all of us who do read OJ can nod our heads vigorously. But in a week in which a skinny wide-eyed kid claims to be a Ranger (and Special Forces to boot) and proceeds to "admit" to military atrocities rivalling WWII propaganda (on both sides!) about what the enemy would do to "our" women and children if they could, it's got to be worth something to stand up for the verifiable.

In case any benighted soul reading this thinks Jesse MacBeth has a shred of credibility left after his pathetic impersonation attempt, click the link, click the link; he's at best delusional, and at worst malevolent.

Iraqi cabinet is formed

2006-05-20T20:44:00.000-04:00

Tip o' the hat to Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom for alerting me to this... ahem...

HISTORIC EVENT.

I have to say that the Iraqis have a positive talent for doing noteworthy things that don't coincide with the Western news cycle. I'd like to refer the interested to Gateway Pundit's roundup of the story, which includes the headline that "A Sunni representative tried to stop the proceedings but he was voted down" - which, gosh, is one heck of a sight better than being gunned down, you know?

Still light blogging; I'm in the process of preparing to go back to work. I don't mean "go back to work" as in, "I was on my lunch hour but I'm going back to work now," but rather "I was staying home with kids for some five years but I'm going back to work now." It's... distracting, to say the least, which bodes well for my work but not so well for my blog. I hope to achieve balance. Someday.

Revolting versus revolution

2006-04-26T07:26:00.000-04:00

The inimitable Strategypage has an interesting piece on "information warfare." It begins, briefly, with a discussion of the six retired generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld's retirement over his handling of the Iraq phase of the war.

Let me first say that I'm sure these generals are men of courage. What I don't understand is why that portion of their courage that falls on the political spectrum apparently failed to make an appearance until after their next star was no longer on the line. As my dad points out, they're still "vulnerable," if you'd care to call it that, even in retirement, in that Congress could vote down their pensions, or something like that - but again, if mishandling of Iraq is a matter of conscience, and these men are men of courage and conviction, shouldn't their retirement packages be a secondary concern?

Nonetheless. They've been outtalked not only by the great mass of other retired generals and their active-duty brethren and sistern (as Anything Goes has it), but by the troops themselves, as Strategypage points out:

The mass media ran with the six generals, but got shot down by the troops and their blogs, message board postings and emails. It wasn't just a matter of the "troop media" being more powerful. No, what the troops had going for them was a more convincing reality. Unlike the six generals, many of the Internet troops were in Iraq, or had recently been there. Their opinions were not as eloquent as those of the generals, but they were also more convincing. Added to that was the complaint from many of the troops that, according to the American constitution, it's the civilians (in the person of the Secretary of Defense) that can dismiss soldiers from service, not the other way around.

Emphasis mine, and please note it well. The troops appear to have a better grasp of their place in American society than these few retired generals do - which, given the temperament that goes along with becoming a general, is perhaps not so surprising. A general, like a tenured professor or a CEO, has to have thick skin, unshakeable confidence, and a certain amount of arrogant belief in his or her own superiority, or he (or she) is not general-officer material. However, the framers of the Constitution, aware of this tendency (in spite of their close relationship with General Washington, whose innate arrogance he himself kept in iron check, at least where his civilian bosses were concerned), made it abundantly clear that the civvies were in charge.

All right then. So much for the revolting generals. Strategypage then goes on to the more interesting part - in which we learn that the Internet once again changes everything:

The troops got on line, found each other and have been sharing opinions and experiences, getting to know each other, and doing it all very quickly. The most striking example of this is how it has changed the speed with which new weapons and equipment get into service. Troops have always bought superior commercial equipment, usually from camping and hunting suppliers. And a lot more of that gear has been available in the last decade. Because the word now gets around so quickly via the net, useful new gear is quickly purchased by thousands of troops. After September 11, 2001, with a war on, having the best gear was seen by more troops as a matter of life and death. This quickly got back to politicians, journalists and the military bureaucrats responsible for buying gear for the troops. The quality of the "official issue" gear skyrocketed like never before because of the Internet pressure.

And more than just gear: Strategypage notes that milbloggers, early on, began to share "tactics and techniques" openly on their (publicly viewable) blogs. The DoD necessarily called a halt to this too-open information sharing - but in contrast to an earlier day, in which the DoD might have tried to hold back the tide and forbid the guys from trying to pass on what may have saved their lives in their last engagement:

The military got into the act by establishing official message boards, for military personnel only, where useful information could be discussed and exchanged. All this rapid information sharing has had an enormous impact on the effectiveness of the troops, something that has largely gone unnoticed by the mass media.

The brass have not tried to discourage all this communication, because the officers use it as well, for the same reasons as the troops.

This is a revolution - in a good way, so far. Strategypage points out that there may be negative consequences to all this connectivity, but that so far the benefits are clear. The military lives in tension: freedom versus imposed discipline (the imposition of discipline, which occurs nearly always without the threat of violence or legal consequences, is only possible because members of the military are themselves disciplined, by temperament or training); openness versus secrecy (which is another self-discipline issue); internal hierarchy versus civilian control (an even larger self-discipline issue, but because the concept is ingrained in our soldiers from the get-go, you won't be seeing a military coup anytime soon in this country). When the ignorant talk about GIs as if they're unlettered adolescents, zipped into inferior armor and sent out with inadequate training to perform an undefined mission, I want to take them by the ear and show them the inside of a Bradley. Your average nineteen- or twenty-year-old GI (who is not your average American soldier in Iraq, by the way) may or may not have read Jane Eyre, but he or she is highly trained, drilled, and disciplined in the mission, knows why he or she is performing that mission, and will perform it to the best of his or her ability out of a sense of pride and duty with which the ignorant critic may be completely unfamiliar.

Hmmph.

Iraq defies "conventional wisdom" again

2006-04-22T18:59:00.000-04:00

All right, I don't have time for a real post, but -

Iraq has formed a unity government. Praises be. I'm actually too surprised and happy to use exclamation points - and I don't think they do the event justice in any case.

Jawad al-Maliki, an outspoken Shi'ite and member of the same party as the outgoing al-Jaafari (but apparently a more respected statesman than al-Jaafari), has been named Prime Minister. He hasn't been confirmed yet by the general assembly, but the major parties have backed him, which is a darn sight better than we've seen for months now. Via GatewayPundit, via Yahoo!News:

Parliament elected President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, to a second term and gave the post of parliament speaker to Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab. Al-Mashhadani's two deputies were to be Khalid al-Attiyah, a Shiite, and Aref Tayfour, a Kurd.

The tough-talking al-Maliki was nominated by the Shiites on Friday after outgoing Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari gave up his bid for another term

...at the urging of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Benjamin Franklin of Iraq. I just want to send that man some flowers. Or, as GatewayPundit suggests, a Nobel Peace Prize, for heaven's sake.

The unbearable lightness of blogging

2006-04-19T15:47:00.000-04:00

Spring break is over; the grandparents have returned to the Wild West; Little League baseball season opens this week; I have a staff meeting, a church playgroup, and a school auction project to complete tomorrow alone; a painter is discombobulating my house, life, and mind; and therefore I have nothing of value to say and probably won't until next week. Apologies in advance to both of you. Oh, sorry, is there someone behind the door there? All three of you.