You can make the worst of anything

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...

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

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?

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...

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

...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!

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

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

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

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.