Thief's Den

"Yeh canna break the laws o'physics, General! Yeh dunna have the pow'r!"

Wesley Clark is not impressed with the laws of physics.

"I still believe in e=mc², but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it."

While Clark's belief may stem from his knowledge of sophisticated military projects, there's no evidence to suggest that humans can exceed the speed of light, said Melnick. In fact, considerable evidence posits that time travel is impossible, he said."

Both this article and the blogfather believe that the General is referring to the possibility of time travel. But based upon how his remarks are connected with NASA and the space program, I happen to believe that Clark is referring to the possibility of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel...in other words, Star Trek's Warp Drive. And E=mc^2 (Einstein's famous formula explaining how mass and energy are both governed by the speed of light) also says, at least now, anyway, that FTL is as equally impossible, if not more so, than time travel.

But this gets me thinking... Which Star Trek character most resembles each presidential candidate? (Drawing on the original series, Next Generation, and Deep Space 9 only. Voyager was a piece of crap.)

Clark - Captain Picard (TNG) - Very distinguished service record, and extremely politically savy, but his beliefs in multilateralism and diplomacy sometimes turn simple situations needlessly complex.
Dean - Dr. McCoy (TOS) - Says what he thinks, but gets more than a little befuddled sometimes.
Kerry - Commander Sisko (DS9) - Constant air of righteous indignation. Little else besides.
Lieberman - Mr. Spock (TOS) - Very dry and humorless, but the only one of the group who thinks straight 99% of the time.
Gephardt - Scotty (TOS) - A problem solver, and damn good at what he does, but a little too eager to go along, especially with ideas he knows are impossible, as well as a little too over the hill to make a real leader.
Edwards - Quark (DS9) - Like your typical Ferengi, always making himself out to be everyone's friend, but in reality, comes off as a glad-handling shill.
Graham - Data (TNG) - Absolute command of information, but very dull personally, with a very forced sense of humor, and with a penchant for logging every minute detail of his life.
Kucinich - Counselor Troi (TNG) - Empathetic? Try simply pathetic. Peave-loving and tolerant to a fault, and never gets angry at the right things.
Sharpton - Worf (TNG) - Got a chip on his shoulder the size of a small moon, and is not afraid to let everyone within earshot hear it. (I would pay money to see him and Jesse Jackson go one-on-one with Bat'leths.)
Mosley-Braun - Lt. Uhuru (TOS) - She's the only skirt in the room, but aside from that, not much else to offer.

Hate mail from Trekkies AND Democrats...ooh...I can't wait!

My Job.

Boss: "What do you have going on this afternoon?"
Me: "Nothing. I never have anything going on. Ever."

Another Gitmo Bust.

One is an accident.

Two is a coincidence.

Three is suspicious.

Four will be a conspiracy.

I know, I know. I don't want to smear an entire religion. But if three people, who work closely with detained Muslim terrorists, who are Muslim themselves, are taking classified documents out of Gitmo and taking them to Syria, or Egypt, or God knows where else, then the loyalty of all Muslims working at Guantanamo, or even in the whole U.S. Intel, Diplomatic, and military community will inevitably come under scrutiny. I hate to say it, but if there are any more cases like this, the possibility of a Muslim fifth column will start seeming all too real.

Vermin Alert

State Dept. Issues Mouse Warning:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As if the State Department didn't have enough to worry about with Iran, Iraq and the French: the onset of cooler weather in the capital has prompted a mouse alarm.

The department issued a warning Monday in its main building, saying that "increasing numbers of mice and their larger cousins" were set to launch their annual search for warm lodging and food.

Wait, Mr. Powell... those are no rats! That's the Saudi Ambassador and his staff! Didn't you remember your 11AM lunch appeasement, er...appointment with them today?

That oughta get this dude's attention...

Smart Blogs and Dumb Media

Samizdata's Iraq Correspondent has some pointed criticism of the media, and some good words for the blogosphere.

The difference between the media and the blogosphere is reinforced by the emphasis on pictures in the modern media, especially during the war itself. Every story must have a picture, and the reality is that with no picture, there is no story. The picture comes first, the story is then attached to the picture.
I can think of an example most of the readers will probably remember: The British Army has Basra surrounded and is making progress everywhere with very few casualties.
There is no picture to illustrate that. The most the media can show you is a picture of a couple of tired soldiers in a foxhole, because most of the time, that is what they were doing. Don't hold the front page. (Note: This is true. The soldiers were in a foxhole, and they were tired. But this tells you nothing about progress on Basra. This is like trying to understand what France looks like by being shown a picture of a street lamp in Bordeaux.)
Meanwhile, an American self-propelled gun has an ammunition accident and explodes. This is a great picture, and it will therefore be shown repeatedly. What you cannot show is the fact that this did not matter to the war effort. The Americans replace the kit. The barrage continues uninterrupted. Nothing important is illustrated by the picture that contributes to understanding of the situation. But, it is a great picture. And it is the picture that becomes the story, not the 'big picture', for which there is no actual picture.
Can you blame the media for this? They do this because people like to look at pictures and will 'buy' more news, if they are interesting to look at. The great advantage blogs have is that they do not have to sell their stories the same way. Therefore they can be more interested in telling the truth as they see it and fill in the niche that the media are leaving wide open.
My impression based on my experience of the Iraqi reality, media reporting and the blogosphere before and after my stay in Basra is that both people 'in the know' and people who care are starting to trust blogs more than they trust the mainstream media.

My problem with the media is that it assumes that citizens are either so stupid, so lazy, or so time-deprived that all they can handle are pictures. (Reminds me of how, in the movie version of Fahrenheit 451, the newspaper we see Montag reading has no words.) TV is the worst offender, but newspapers seem to be catching up. The problem with pictures is that they are not informative. They are designed to elicit an emotional reaction. That's what all the best photographs do. But news cannot be based on subjective emotion. It must be based on objective fact. Therefore, you must do it with words, or even better, with numbers. Sometimes the truth is better told by taking a few hours and writing 1,000 thoughtful words, rather than holding a shutter button down for two seconds, developing a photo for 10 minutes, and then spending 60 seconds composing a caption. But speed, simplicity, and emotion rule.

And here's what us bloggers are saying to the media: We don't want our news simple. We don't want our news fast. We don't want our news emotional. We want our news ACCURATE.

But accuracy doesn't sell. Simplicity sells. Simplicity frees up ad space and allows you to buy less paper in the case of newspapers, or in the case of TV, time to cover things like entertainment, sports, fashion: the junk food of television news, the stuff that brings in the real ratings.

Accuracy doesn't sell. Being fast sells. If you have the story first and scoop all your rivals, you sell more papers and more ads. More people watch your show than the other guy, which means you get more ad dollars.

Accuracy doesn't sell. Emotion sells. You tug at people's hearts, inflame their passions, and stroke their egos, you get them hooked. They will watch.

So accuracy, because it doesn't sell, is forgotten. But if news stories are not accurate, and the people who report them are not accurate, they fail.

Take Florida in 2000. The whole night, all of the networks were falling ass over teakettle trying to be the first ones to predict the outcome and declare a winner. They had the exit polls flying off the wires (all controlled by one media-created collective, the Voter News Service, because God forbid the media would actually spend money on accuracy), the predictor computers a-hummin' away, the pundits yammering away, all trying to get a quick and easy answer for mass consumption as soon as possible.

They ran headlong into chaos theory. (Yes, I'm shamelessly ripping off Jurassic Park. No mail, please.) The crux of chaos theory is that seemingly simple systems can yield complex and unpredictable results. Take the weather, for example: It's sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, windy, rainy, or snowy, at any one place in time. But how does the weather at that one place, at that one time, get to that simple result? It's complex: Ocean currents, jet streams, barometric pressure, so many variables that it takes a computer model to keep them all straight. And even then, sometimes it doesn't come out accurately. Or the stock market, an even simpler result: Either the market is up, or it is down. A binary choice; up/down, yes/no, 1/0, on/off. The forces that make the markets go up and down are even more numerous than the factors affecting weather. If the weather is affected by a thousand things, than the market is influenced by billions of things. Corporate earnings. New Products. Deals. Personnel issues. Analyst reports. Even rumors. It's so complex that modelling it, even semi-reliably like we can with the weather, is beyond the limit of our present information technology. Simple things aren't so simple.

An election is the media's dream. It is a simple system, either Dude A wins or Dude B wins. It is not only simple, it is over in one night, and it is filled with emotion and rhetoric and sound bites and all sorts of things that media people love. It is, in short, the perfect story for the media.

Except when it isn't.

You saw it for yourself that night, almost three years ago. Predictions started going wrong. The election returns didn't match what the exit polls and predictive computer models were saying. Both candidates won states that conventional wisdom said they should not have won. (Bush winning West Virginia and Tennessee, and Gore winning New Mexico and Pennsylvania, for example; all were thought to be safe or near-safe bets for the other side.) Judges interfered with the predictions as well, holding polling places open longer than had been anticipated. Even the media itself may have unintentionally interfered; by predicting winners in Eastern states, they may have contaminated polling that was still occuring in Western states, convincing people that one side or another had already won, and that the election had already been decided, which some people interpreted as a reason not to go vote. This even happened within states broken up into two different time zones, and thus with two poll-closing times (i.e. Florida, which the networks called for Gore while the polls were still open in the Panhandle, a prediction which they later had to retract.)

And it was in Florida that the system finally ground to a halt. Even after all these problems, and a close election, the media thought they had their simple, binary result, namely, Bush winning. They had even driven Gore to the point of concession. Then, a few of Gore's poll workers noticed a discrepancy between the media reports and the election returns in Florida, and convinced Gore to pull back at the last minute.

The media had rushed to get the story. And they rushed because they had assumed they would get a simple result, on their fast schedule, on their emotional terms. Even if they had to use inaccurate modelling to get it a little bit faster, or omit a real vote total here or there, or get caught up in the emotion of the moment to fill air time, no one would know the difference.

Needless to say, that didn't happen. We didn't get a yes/no, 1/0, Bush/Gore answer. Instead, we just got a collective "What the hell?"

Simple answers are complex. Fast answers are usually wrong. And emotion is not an answer at all.

But blogs don't care about being simple, or emotional, or even fast. They put accuracy first. Everything else follows. Because the blogger who forgets accuracy gets a reputation for being inaccurate, the blogger who lets his emotions run ahead of his facts gets a sound fisking, and the blogger who puts out bad posts, no matter how fast, is ignored.

And how does one tell the best blogs? The hits. More hits mean more people are reading your work. The better and more accurate a blog's analysis, no matter how fast, how emotional, or how simple, the more hits they get.

The proprietors of Stop The Bleating, before they became lawyers, were both U.S. Marines. They had on their website, at least until a few days ago, a "Blogger's Creed," a hillarious (and thought-provoking) send-up of the Marine Corps' Rifleman's Creed. (Through the Miracle of the Google cache, I managed to get a copy, which I have listed as an extended entry.) Here's the relevant part:

My blog knows nothing, because it is just an arrangement of electrons on a little piece of silicon somewhere, but I know that what counts in blogging is not merely the number of posts I blog, the force of my rhetoric, nor the smoke I blow. I know that it is the hits that count. I will get hits...
...I will keep my blog fresh, interesting and up-to-date, even when I am not. I must make my blog ever better. I will...

Bloggers never assume that citizens are either so stupid, so lazy, or so time-deprived that all they can handle are quick blurbs, emotional pictures, and stories utterly devoid of context and real analysis. Bloggers don't assume that the masses are stupid. They come from the masses. They live among the masses. They ARE the masses. Consequently, their perspective is different from the elite media. Which means they understand things in ways that the media simply cannot. And the sheer number of bloggers means that all perspectives are represented, and all biases can be accounted for and countered, and that the best analysts get the reputation for being the best, and become guideposts for all the others. For all the talk of how journalists are there to report the truth, they haven't been, for reasons of bias, ignorance, snobbery, or stupidity. Thus, the task of truth falls to the blogosphere.

Weblogs... the invention that saved journalism?

Why not? It's not like we could do any worse than the media does.

Extended Entry: The Blogger's Creed (Not really offensive, except to Marines who take themselves way too seriously...)

UPDATE 9/30/03 -- I am reliably informed from the proprietors of Stop the Bleating that only one of their current two blog authors was a Marine. (And thanks for the blogroll, guys!)

The Blogger's Creed
by Matt Rustler

This is my blog.

So be it, until victory is mine and I get all the hits.

Assumptions are bad, mmkay?

The CIA, contrary to conventional wisdom, had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden during the Afghan War in the 1980's. The sources are pretty convincing, too: two retired CIA officers, who had both served as chief of station (i.e. the director of all CIA activities in their assigned countries) in Islamabad, Pakistan, between 1984 and 1989. The officers note that there were two Afghan resistance movements working against the Soviets, one CIA-backed, relying on local militias, and one Saudi-backed, relying on Islamic fighters from other countries (think non-profit mercenaries.)

I must admit that even I fell into the trap described in the article, conflating the two rebellions because they happened at the same time and were directed at the same enemy, leading to the assumption that they must be the same.

Henceforth, Thief's painfully-learned lesson for the day: NEVER Assume. For every time you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.

Stars in their eyes...

So General Clark thinks Bush is a loser. That's not what he said in the pre-9/11 days. When he spoke at an...ahem...GOP fundraiser.

During extended remarks delivered at the Pulaski County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 11, 2001, General Clark declared: "And I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice... people I know very well - our president George W. Bush. We need them there."

Y'know, if the Democratic party and the national media were real people, and these hypothetical people were drunk, one could be forgiven for saying that they were seeing with their beer-googles on.

Why the fascination with Clark? Those four stars on his shoulders, no matter how he earned them (read: strategically deploying his lips on certain posteriors of interest, earning him the ire of many of his colleauges) gives him instant credibility on national security, Bush's strongest area. Never mind that he's got Arnold's vagueness on just about everything else, domestic issues, social issues, etc. Now we have his speech about Bush, which may feed the image of Clark as a "serial user," with an excess of ambition. When you've fallen head over heels for someone, when you have stars in your eyes, you tend to overlook the little things. And politics is all about the little things.

South Park Republicans? SWEEEEEET.

Read this, for I am indeed a "South Park Republican."

More Soon.

Via The Blogfather.

UN Condemns Milky Way Agression

(Reuters) -- The United Nations Security Council met this morning to consider a response to the Milky Way Galaxy's agression against its peaceful neighbor, the Sagittarius Galaxy.

French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin asserted his country's opposition to and condemnation of the Milky Way's "deceptive ways in their aggression on Sagittarius, which is considered as aggression in intergalactic law and the United Nations Charter." Villepin called for an international effort to halt the Milky Way aggression, for the Milky Way to halt its "collision course with Sagittarius," and for possible economic sanctions against the Milky Way. Villepin also stressed Sagittarius's sovereignty, independence and keeping the neighboring galaxies' secure and stable.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal stated that the Milky Way aggression targets the whole region to serve Israeli interests, saying, "After all, are there any Jews in Sagittarius? I don't think so. They obviously wish to construct futher settlements within Sagittarian territory, and it is our firm hope that the opressed peoples of Sagittarius will stand up and defend themselves like their Palestinian brothers."

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, when asked about the U.S. position on the Milky Way's aggression, broke out into hysterical giggling.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan responded by saying "This is no laughing matter, for the US or anyone. If we do nothing to stop the Milky way aggression, we risk inflaming the 'Sagittarian Street' and provoking terrorist retaliation."

Experts are divided over whether the UN can have any real impact on this situation. University of Virginia astrophysicist Stephen Majewski explained "As I said, it's clear that the Milky Way is the aggressor here. But the Milky Way's move towards annexing Sagittarius is probably unstoppable, the result of gravitational forces that the best scientists in the world barely understand. It's not like a few pieces of paper will stop it."

But MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, well known for his criticism of international aggression, especially by the United States, believed that the UN's disapproval, even if it couldn't stop the Milky Way's aggression, would send a powerful signal, "that no galaxy, no matter how big or powerful, can bully its neighbors. Resistance to hegemony is a universal ontological duty, even on the part of inanimate stellar matter."

Despite repeated requests for a statement sent by radio-telescope, no one from the Sagittarian Foreign Ministry was available for comment.

Bag O'Pleasure

I love Alabama, don't get me wrong. But damn, don't these people have anything better to do?

How Appealing has this interesting bit. Apparently someone in Alabama thinks people should not be allowed to buy sex toys. Messr. Bashman's correspondent reports:

Senior Judge Hill was funny as hell, and rather forceful in the view that this was an absurd law. Choice paraphrases of what he said:

"What exactly is it that you're trying to protect Alabamians from? What's the horror here?"

Yeah, if you want to shout "Oh God, we're coming," you can do it with the clowns protesting that 10 Commandments statue!

"Next thing you know, you'll be banning bathing suits, and then on to burkas."

If this is the best that Alabama can produce, then you'd have to ban burkas too. Because in this case, a well-placed burka would enhance sexual pleasure.

"When I was young, condom packages said 'for medical use only.' Could a vendor lawfully sell these devices if they had a label that said 'only for the treatment of psychological needs within a marriage relationship'?"

Wait...marriage relationships are about psychological needs, not just this? Did I miss something?

The State also relied on what I call the Brookstone defense, which was something like, "if you want to buy such a device, just buy one of the readily available things that is marketed for other purposes but easily adaptable to stimulation of the genitals." Somehow or another, in the State's view, this saves the constitutionality of the statute.

I bet stores in Alabama do fairly brisk business in cucumbers and electric toothbrushes.

The courtroom, by the way, was full of high school students. Don't know if they knew what was on the docket and came on purpose in connection with some class, or if they just luckily stumbled in to a day full of cases that involved child porn, vibrators, and a high school principal seeking qualified immunity despite having severely beaten a student with a metal walking stick for no good reason.

OK kids, who wants to be a lawyer when they grow up?

Apples to Apples

Larry Lindsey takes down people who say that liberating Iraq will be expensive.

"It now seems that the cost of deposing Saddam Hussein and re-establishing civil government in Iraq will be in that range. Critics are using words like "massive" and "staggering" to describe the cost. But what we really should ask is: Compared with what? We cannot walk away. If we have no choice but to fight, it makes sense to spend what it takes to win. While any dollar amount in the billions is substantial, it's important to put it into perspective. The Vietnam War cost 12% of GDP at the time and World War II cost 130% of GDP....But what does that really mean? Each year American households spend about 1% of their income on alcoholic beverages and another 1% on tobacco products. We spend about 0.7% of our money on cosmetic products. In other words, our combined operations to combat terror in the Middle East cost a bit more than we spend on makeup and shampoo and a bit less than we spend on booze or tobacco."

I don't know about y'alls, but to me, a stable Iraq is worth some smokes, some eyeliner, and light beer. (Unfortunately, I loathe all three already. Especially the light beer.) Via Balloon Juice.

Ronald Reagan, Heretic?

I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as a "tolerated" sin for the purpose of conceiving children and who believe all children to be born in sin. My personal belief is that God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and woman is the highest form of companionship ...

Via Andrew Sullivan, who notes that Reagan "is specifically challenging the doctrines of Saint Paul, daring to challenge the Bible itself. And he's an antidote to the cramped, fearful and narrow notions of someone like Senator Santorum who has said that love has nothing to do with marriage."

Annan: "The French are tools."

Well... he doesn't quite put it like that. But strip out the diplospeak, that's what you get. Rick at Texsanity fisks this New York Post piece.

Q.E.D.

"Greenie claims that the rich countries consume 80 per cent of the world's resources while poor countries consume the remainder is just sloppy thinking. If this were literally true there would be nothing left after 12 months. What the rich countries actually do is produce 80 per cent of the world's annual output, the value of which they then consume. They do this by converting raw materials into higher-valued goods. For example, silicon is transformed into fibre optic cables and computer chips. Therefore, once we look at the situation in terms of production we see that leftwing claims that rich countries consume at the expense of the poor ones are utter nonsense.

In any case, the earth's resources are not fixed. How can they be when the state of technology defines resources? This means that because technology has to be applied through the use of capital, economic growth is really a resource-generating process. It follows that the only road to prosperity is economic growth, the very process that the Greens are dedicated to destroying."

Via Dissecting Leftism

I spy with my little eye...

and then I give it to the Syrians.

At least that's what this clown did. USAF Senior Airman Ahmed I. al-Halabi has been arrested on charges of espionage. The AP reports:

"al-Halabi was carrying two handwritten notes from detainees that al-Halabi intended to turn over to someone traveling to Syria, the charging documents say. He also was carrying his personal laptop computer containing classified information about detainees and 180 messages from detainees he intended to send to Syria or Qatar, it was alleged."
In addition, Halabi:
_Took pictures of the prison camp.
_Had unauthorized contact with the inmates, including giving them baklava desserts.
_Had contacts with the Syrian Embassy to the United States which he failed to report as required.
_Lied to the Air Force by falsely claiming to have become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2001. Al-Halabi, who joined the Air Force in January 2000, is Syrian.

And the fact that the guy is Muslim? And that Chaplain, too? Oh wait, that's racial profiling. And we all know that's bad, right?

Put Up or Shut Up!

Thus Spake Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping. He wants to see an essay that positively documents how President Bush "actively lied" to the American people about a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Read the rules, and then see if you can.

No, seriously, try. Take your best shot. I dare ya.

We'll be right here waiting...

PH34R T3H 4R4B STR33T!

... not quite.

...all this talk about the "Arab Street" (how do I get there again? Turn left at "Africa Street"?) is a useless generalization, reinforced by a bunch of journalists sitting around the Al-Rashid and Palestine Hotel bars, while they wait for their drivers to pick them up in air-conditioned SUVs for a day trip out to Fallujah or Ramadi. Is there a "White Street," an "Asian Street"? It's a ludicrous and vaguely racist concept to begin with.

I have spoken to loads of Iraqis, Syrians, Kuwaitis etc. and what I have seen is the definitive breakdown of "Arab Unity" as a generation of academics (the ones who taught me at least) knew it. As I mentioned in the last e-mail, the graffiti on the walls of Baghdad University is not "US Go Home"-- it's actually...."Palestinians Go Home. The Free Ride Is Over"!!! There is a sea change going on, right now, and CNN will be the last place to learn about it.

Via The Blogfather and Blogcritics

Help From Down Under...

"PRIME Minister John Howard today lashed out at France following French President Jacques Chirac's stinging criticism of the United States over the war against Iraq.

"The French have been utterly opportunistic from the very beginning on this issue," Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney today, following a speech by Mr Chirac to the United Nations."

Amen, Mr. Howard. And may I add, on behalf of the USA, "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi Oi!" Via The Command Post

Deliverance, the High School Years

Time to bust out the dueling banjos and "drop them pants"...

A Small Victory reports on this sick, sick, story:

Three high-school varsity football players from Long Island allegedly hazed three of their J.V. teammates, sodomized them, and then threatened them further if they told. They were found out when one of the boys required surgery for his injuries.

So what became of these errant members of the Mepham High School (Butt)Pirates? The school board cancelled the football season. But that wasn't the end of it. Both the entire student population of Mepham High, AND THEIR PARENTS, started protesting. Also of note was that this isn't the first time hazing got out of control.

My Suggestions:
1. Expel the three perps and file criminal charges against them. (If the locals intimidate the local DA out of filing charges, or if the DA in Wayne County, PA, where the attacks took place, can't get enough evidence, get the U.S. Attorney's office to pursue Federal civil rights charges against the three.)
2. Suspend any member of the team who knew and didn't say anything.
3. Put in a new policy: Anyone doing ANY hazing will be expelled. No exceptions.
4. Keep the football season cancelled just so the lesson sinks in. Or if the (Butt)Pirates absolutely must play, then let them and their athletic supporters get a full dose of ribbing from every other school they play. I'm talking soap-on-a-rope thrown on the field, mooning them from the sidelines, basically every lewd and nasty form of ridicule there is.

Mepham High School, you are a disgrace. You are no better than those Southern towns who covered for people who attacked minorities and poll workers in the 60's. You deserve every ounce of ridicule thrown your way.

Operation Little Iraqi Freedom

...is well underway. Dean Esmay went and expanded on my original post on the history of the First "Uncle Wiggles," in addition to some more info about a great (and cheap) way to get lots of toys to the Children of Iraq via the Second "Uncle (Chief) Wiggles."

Basic rules per the Chief's Orders: No toy guns or violent toys of any kind, no Barbie dolls or any scantilly-dressed doll, and nothing with batteries. (Crayons are iffy...they may melt. Water-based markers may be better.) Other than that, use your imagination. If you were a kid in a war-torn country, without power half the time, and living a day-to-day existence, and an American soldier came up to you and said, "here's something for you, kid," what would you like that thing to be? A stuffed animal? Some sidewalk chalk? Paper to make paper airplanes with? Maybe a hairbrush?

All together now!

Send it all to:

Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO, AE 09335
*APO adresses count as US domestic mail (cheap!) but you will have to go to the post office and fill out a customs form.

Also, right now there is no PayPal or Amazon donation system set up, and they're not accepting any kind of checks or money order. Can anyone out there help?

Drugs are bad, Mmmkay?

...if you do drugs, you might end up cutting your penis and tongue off, Mmmkay?

How to Get Into University

Samizdata explains the path to a university degree for those "across the pond." It's not pretty... it involves slums, pot, and FCUK t-shirts. The way they make it out to be, it makes dealing with SAT Prep, FAFSA forms, College Board Bureaucrats and the kneecap-breakers seem easy by comparison. (Though the part about parents divorcing to get their kids financial aid is something not unheard of here.) Plus, we kids don't get to get stoned while we do our admissions essays.

Wes Clark's Honeymoon...

The Weekly Standard is also not impressed with Wesley Clark. The above picture shows Clark trading hats with Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, a now indicted war criminal. Back in 1994, Clark ignored the State Department and wend to meet Mladic anyway, knowing full well Mladic was already under investigation for shelling civilians in Sarajevo and emptying Muslim villages. "What State Department officials said they found especially disturbing was a photograph of Clark and Mladic wearing each other's caps. The picture appeared in several European newspapers, U.S. officials said. Clark accepted as gifts Mladic's hat, a bottle of brandy, and a pistol inscribed in Cyrillic, U.S. officials said. 'It's like cavorting with Hermann Goering,' one U.S. official complained."

Clark is right now on his honeymoon, before the blogosphere picks apart his professional career like Texas prarie vultures on a dead armadillo. This lull will last about one month. Then things will get so hot for Clark that even the New York Times will have to run stories like this, just like Dean got gang-fisked on Vermont's health system and his dismal performance on Meet The Press.

Welcome to the campaign trail, General Clark. Incoming fire has the right-of-way.

P.S. Here's the reaction of one of my non-political friends, who had previously had nothing but good things to say about Clark, upon this revelation:

Me: Oh, BTW, there's a photo of Wesley Clark floating around showing him joking with a bosnian war criminal.
Me: The honeymoon...is over.
Friend: well damnit.
Friend: who am I supposed to vote for now?
Me: Bush?
Me: :-)
Friend: ....
Friend: :-(

His Master's Voice

Yes, yes, yes, the man won a Nobel Peace Prize. But you wanna know how Yasser Arafat and the PLO got started? It was the USSR. Good ol' Uncle Joe.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian Intelligence under Ceaucescu has this piece in the WSJ today describing what Yasser and his ilk were like "before they were stars."
-- Romanian Intelligence alone gave the PLO $200,000 in laundered money every month, in addition to two cargo planes worth of uniforms and other supplies (explosives? guns?). Other Soviet Bloc states did the same.
-- Romanian Intelligence was assigned the task, in 1972, of "ingratiating" Arafat to the White House. "We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace."
-- Arafat was "an Egyptian bourgeois" recruited by the KGB in the early 60's and trained in in terrorism at the Balashikha school in Moscow.
-- The KGB decided to "groom" Arafat to be PLO leader, much the same way as how they groomed Kim Il Sung to be North Korea's leader. They helped by altering Egyptian birth records so that Yasser Arafat could claim to be Palestinian by birth.
-- The KGB not only published and distributed Arafat's propaganda over the Arab world, they gave Arafat a PR makeover into a rabid anti-semite for fear that his "high-minded idealism" would attract few followers.
-- In addition to training him in terrorism, communist-bloc intelligence also gave him diplomatic pointers: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.
The result: Jimmy Carter bought it...hook, line, and sinker. Carter gushed about Arafat and called Ceaucescu a "great leader."

Ceaucescu may be long dead (fittingly, killed by his own people), along with the rest of the Soviet Bloc, but their Arab Frankenstein lives on, following his long-dead master's voice. And being praised for it by people who are unable to distinguish good and evil.

Contrast this to an op-ed in the Washington Post today by none other than...Jimmy Carter himself, yet another Nobel Prize winner, musing on the 25th Anniversary of the Camp David Accords:

It has been recognized that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were a violation of international law and the primary incitement to violence among Palestinians. Our most intense arguments at Camp David were about their existence and potential expansion. The parties agreed that all those in Egypt's Sinai region were to be dismantled, and there was a strong dispute about their growth in the West Bank and Gaza, then comprising about 4,000 settlers. During the first Bush administration, Secretary of State James Baker said, "I don't think there is any greater obstacle to peace than settlement activity that continues not only unabated but at an advanced pace," and the president threatened to withhold American financial aid in order to discourage settlement expansion.

Today, except for the fact that the Palestinian issue has become one of the foremost causes of international terrorism, our strategic interests are much less involved in the Israeli-Palestinian violence. There seems to be no urgency in resolving the relatively localized dispute, with harsh crackdowns from the Israeli military and abhorrent terrorist acts perpetrated by Palestinians who claim to have no hope for freedom and justice.

Oh, the Palestinians have a hope for freedom and justice. But Carter never even stops to consider that Yasser Arafat, the man who allows the current intifada to happen, who preaches peace in English and jihad in Arabic, and who has never stopped placing his own wealth above the welfare of his people (his net wealth is $300 million), might be why the Palestinians have neither freedom nor justice. Carter doesn't even mention Arafat's name. It's all about the Israelis and how they have failed in the "peace process."

No matter what leaders the Palestinians might choose, how fervent American interest might be or how great the hatred and bloodshed might become, there remains one basic choice, and only the Israelis can make it:

America's worst betrayal of Israel would be to support the second choice.

And what would you ask of Arafat and his cronies, Mr. Carter? Would you ask them to allow the Palestian Security services to stop suicide bombers? Would you ask them to stop inciting six-year olds to kill Jews on the Palestian version of Sesame Street? Would you tell the Saudi Sheiks and Syrian dictators who feed Palestine's misery with their terror bribes to go to hell? Would you even, dare I say it, step aside to allow a new generation of Palestinian leaders to step forward and make peace? Or do you think that the Israelis should take down that fence, make the West bank judenrein and go sing Kumbayas with Hamas?

Mr Carter, you were blind to the truth of terror when you were President. (That's why you lost.) Why bother opening your eyes now?

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion."
(Oh, that God would give us the very smallest of gifts
To be able to see ourselves as others see us
It would save us from many mistakes
and foolish thoughts.)
-- Robert Burns, "To A Louse"
The whole Pacepa article is here. Via Little Green Footballs.

Mystery Solved.

Apparently they found the cause of the blackout that happened a few weeks ago. Warning: The following image is extremely insolent...

Via Yale Diva. Who, if she is ever in DC, has a standing offer for lunch.

Do you hear that, RIAA?

It is the sound of Inevitability. It is the sound of your death.

Chaplain Spy Case Update

Tacitus reports that Army Capt. Yousef Yee, the Muslim chaplain arrested for spying, was trained at the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, VA, as were 9 of the Army's 14 Muslim Chaplains. GSISS is DoD's sole source to certify new Muslim Chaplains. As it turns out, this is not a good thing. GSISS is also a known front company for recieving Saudi/Wahabbi terror money, and its director, Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, is probably an unindicted co-conspirator of defrocked USF professor Sami Al-Arian, currently awaiting trial on charges of raising money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Thank you, Tacitus. Let's all keep digging...there may be far more to this than any of us thought possible.

Chief Wiggles is in Good Company!

Dean Esmay notes one of those nice symetries of history. And makes it into a trivia contest.

And I know the answer.

There was another "Wiggles," many years before, who perfomed a similarly selfless act for the children of a war-torn country. Who was he?

His name was Lt. Gail Halvorsen, a U.S. Air Force C-54 pilot during the Berlin Airlift in 1948. The Soviets had blockaded the Allied Occupation Zone of Berlin, trying to starve its people into accepting Soviet rule. The U.S. and Great Britain responded with the Berlin Airlift, AKA "Operation Vittles," a feat of aerial logistics that has never been duplicated since. Flying 24 hours a day, seven days a week, cargo planes single-handedly supplied all of West Berlin with food, coal, and other supplies... 5,500 tons per day.

Lt. Halvorsen was one of those pilots. Halvorsen could see the children of West Berlin lining up as he flew into Tempelhof airfield, eagerly awaiting their next meal. So Halvorsen took some Hershey's chocolate out of his daily meal, attached a parachute to it made out of a handkerchief, and dropped it out of his window as he landed, floating the chocolate down to the kids. Halvorsen's fellow pilots and crewmen donated chocolate, gum, and parachutes for the cause, which Halvorsen dubbed "Operation Little Vittles." He eventually developed a signal so that the kids would know it was him, and that he had chocolate: he would wiggle his wings as he came in to land. He thus became known to the Children of Berlin as "Uncle Wiggly Wings." Halvorsen's other nicknames included "Der Schokoladen Flieger" (the Chocolate Flyer), "Uncle Wackelfluger," and "The Raisin Bomber."

So many children would line up under the flight paths of the airplanes that the Air Force, fearing that someone would be hurt, eventually started dropping the chocolate parachutes over playgrouds, and even took to delivering chocolate (by ground!) to children in Berlin's hospitals.

Of course, the Soviets were less than thrilled. Not only did Lt. Halvorsen sometimes detour over Soviet-occupied East Berlin on his drops (which resulted in an official diplomatic protest,) the Soviets also claimed in their newspapers that the waiting children had damaged a cemetary.

By January 1949, over 250,000 chocolate parachutes had fallen into the waiting hands of West (and East) Berlin's children. For his actions, Lt. Gail Halvorsen was awarded the 1948 Cheney Award, established by the USAF to "recognize an act of valor, extreme fortitude or self-sacrifice in connection with an aviation event." The Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, has more information. Halvorsen also told his story as part of the CNN Documentary Cold War:

I just firmly believe that the Berliners were the heroes. They slept in bombed-out buildings, they slept without heat and with lights only for an hour or two ... not enough to eat -- but not one would complain. The Soviets offered them food rations: "Hey, we'll give you all you want. Just sign up with us." And only 4 percent of the total population of Berlin capitulated and asked for help from the Soviets. They were determined, they said, "It's freedom or else."

Halvorsen would later serve as base commander at Tempelhof, and retired as a Colonel. And he is still around, with a book about his experiences. Here's an address I found:

Gail Halvorsen
19 East Southfield Rd.
Spanish Fork, UT 84660

To Chief Wiggles, and Col. Wiggly Wings... thanks.

And don't forget "Operation Little Iraqi Freedom:"
Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335

Compassion Kills

Especially in the case of the homeless. Joe Katzman at Winds of Change explains:

Most of the homeless I see on the streets of Toronto have one of 2 problems: mental illness, or substance abuse. Remove those cases from the homeless population, and the numbers fall dramatically. This is patently obvious to anyone who so much as walks on Toronto's streets, yet it's almost never addressed in debate. Which means the root causes are never really addressed - and that's just cruel.

Joe recognizes the true causes of the massive increase in homelessness: the elimination of vagrancy laws, mental patient deinstitutionalization, and a tolerance for substance abuse. You bring back the vagrancy laws, enact strict substance abuse programs in prisons, and put people with mental health problems in facilities where they can get medication, counseling, three meals a day, and a roof over their heads, and I guarantee you that you will solve 2/3 of the homeless problem right there.

Of couse, try telling that to the asshats running Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, OR, Albuquerque, NM, Austin, TX, Madison, WI, and Washington DC.

It is possible to care too much. Compassion Kills.

Fun With Eunuchs

Pseudorandom Thoughts encounters this news from Japan:

Six members of a Waseda University "rape club" pled guilty to charges of sexual assault and rape. These guys organized "rape parties" where they invited girls, got them playing rigged drinking games, got them drunk, raped them, and then took blackmail photographs to ensure silence. About 500 girls in total were raped, more than a handful became pregnant, some even committed suicide. And here's the best part: the club's leader said "We never planned those incidents in advance."
Reminds me of Bruce Willis' best line ever, from The Last Boy Scout (altered here:)
Club Leader: "It just happened, officer."
Japanese Cop: "Sure, sure, it just happened. You tripped, fell on the floor and accidently stuck your dick into a drunk college student. 500 times. 'Gee, I'm sorry, ma'am, this just isn't my week.'"

Does the Japanese Imperial Palace still use eunuchs? If not, they should...

And one other thought: Japan produces so much porn it's scary. If you have so many problems that busty anime babes in short skirts can't satisfy your urges, you have problems.

Hey, somebody had to say it. (On the upside, I'll be finding some really funny entries in the refer logs.)

Real News Story Here.

Fun With Hippies

Kim Du Toit discusses this amusing bit of news. Apparently some impish conservatives set up a concession stand at the WTO protests in Cancun, Mexico, offering two kinds of soda: regular soda for 5 pesos, and "fair trade sodas" for four times as much. They were promptly boycotted.

Mr. Du Toit criticizes the conservatives for not standing up to the boycott. I have to say, though... the basic idea is sheer brilliance. Think about it...thousands of anti-globalization protestors all in one place, and you're the only concession stand. You just know that these people are going to have severe cases of the munchies after a hard day of "protesting..."

Mmmm...capitalism...

"Hippies...hiiipies...they're everywhere...they wanna save the Earth but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad...heeeeelp..." -- Eric Cartman, South Park

Fun With Moral Relativism

Donald Sensing has deciphered the lexicon of the left: Anything that the left says is true. Anything that anyone not on the left says is false. You see, it all depends on your perspective. If you have the right perspective, there's no such thing as true/false, right/wrong, or any other such binary statement. Allow me to demonstrate some examples of leftist thought in practice:

USA: "Police State!"
North Korea: "Peaceful."

John Ashcroft: "Terrorist!"
Yasser Arafat: "Freedom Fighter."

African-American: "Persecuted Minority!"
Sudanese Christian/Pakistani Shiite/Iranian Jew: "Huh?"

Anyone else out there have any more examples?

They may take our blogs...

...but they can never take...OUR FREEDOM!

On behalf of every blogger out there, allow me to extend a very large raised middle finger to the spineless, gutless pettifogging bureaucratic sack of monkey dung who censored newsblogger Daniel Weintraub. Tony Marcano, Ombudsman of the Sacramento Bee, censored Weintraub's blog after a biting, but well-argued post claiming that had not California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante not had a Latino surname and heavy Latino backing, he would be another in a parade of mediocre legislators, and saying "it's indisputably true that the Legislature's Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity." Fair point? Not to the California Assembly's Latino Caucus, who went and bitched to the Bee's publisher. Thus, the censorship. Marcano's response?
Make what you will of Weintraub's statement, and of the caucus' protests. No matter what I or anyone else thinks, he has every right to analyze the political scene and reach those conclusions. But no newspaper should publish an analysis without an editor's review. That doesn't necessarily mean that Weintraub's blog should have been reworded, but an editor should at least have had the opportunity to question his conclusions.
Oh really? So why is it that Molly Ivins can state without a scintilla of hard evidence that Bush is in the pocket of "big bidness," that Michael Kinsley can turn an assortment of prejudices into hard evidence that President Bush is a liar, and that E.J. Dionne can call half the Supreme Court partisan hacks, all in the national papers, while Mr. Weintraub has to get every observation, musing, and rhetorical flourish fact-checked into oblivion at a mid-size papers' web-only commentary? I know why. It's called a bias, Mr. Marcano. It's called a double standard. Until you recognize it, you do not deserve to be an ombudsman any more than I do. I thought you would have learned about not being biased and treating all your workers the same earlier in your career...oh. You learned how to be an editor at the New York Times, alongside Howell "Reign of P.C. Terror" Raines and Jayson "No standards, please, I'm a Minority" Blair. That explains a lot.
And you idiots in charge of the elite media wonder why FNC, the WSJ online and the blogosphere are eating your asses for lunch...

Do it for the kids!

Chief Wiggles is doing it for the kids over in Iraq... he's starting a toy drive for Iraqi children, and he needs all of us to pitch in. His requests, and some of his commentors suggestions:

First, the no-nos: Any guns of any kind
No violent action hereos
No violent toys
No barbie dolls or dolls skantily dressed
No toys that shoot something, no projectiles
No water guns
Lets just keep it simple, simple toys, just the basics, these kids have
nothing.

Now, the good stuff: Pencils, pens, crayons, washable markers, paper to draw and color on
Finger paints, map pencils along with a sharpner, rulers, stencils, stickers scissors(blunt end) and glue or glue sticks. Bubbles and side walk chalk. Jump ropes, jacks, match box cars
Toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, brushes, combs, etc.
Stuffed Animals
Whistles, mini-flutes, tambourines
Tops, frisbees, boomerangs
soccer balls, rubber balls
kaleidoscopes, prisms
squeeze flashlights, glowsticks
silly putty, yoyos, beanbags
toy cars, trains, balsa airplanes,
balloons, sunglasses.

Just use your good judgement, and if you are unsure, contact a local muslim group for help.

Send it all to:

Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335

You can e-mail Chief Wiggles with any comments or question at plungeATmac.com (Remember to replace the AT with an @... I assume the chief doesn't like spam either!)

"That oughta get me out of a couple of years of purgatory." -- Calvin

Viva Las Blog(as)

Never Say Jihad Again: This has been floating around the blogosphere all weekend, but it just got top billing over at CNN. A Muslim U.S. Army Chaplain has been arrested on suspicion of espionage. This chaplain was assigned to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to minister to Al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees. He was arrested in Florida carrying documents that "a chaplain shouldn't have," including a map showing the location of several detainee's cells, along with the names of the detainee's interrogators. In addition, the chaplain is suspected of having links to radical Islamic groups within the U.S. Innocent until proven guilty, I know. But still, profoundly disturbing. Rare kudos to CNN for having the guts to put it front and center, albeit a few days after FNC.

One of the Blogfather's minions found this piece by Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA). His point? Iraq isn't Vietnam, but the media is treating it so. And that is getting soldiers killed. The Hill reports that Marshall isn't the only one: Ike Skelton, (D-MO), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Gene Taylor (D-MS), another member of the committee, think that things are going better than the media reports. Now that the media hears this from one of "the great and good," (AKA the Democrats), will they listen? Doubtful.

From the Command Post:
Many of the people in the cabs in Tehran had the similar thoughts. "Tell George Bush to come and get rid of the mullahs for us." I was shocked by the openness of that statement. With one fellow I tried to discuss it with him in more detail to see if he really meant it or was just talking. I told him that if George Bush came and got rid of the Mullahs, it would not be to help the people of Iran; he would be coming for the oil. The fellow replied, "He can have the oil, its not doing us any good anyway and at least then we would be free."
Gee... is it "imperialism" when you knock out a government that its own people hate?

For the 9th Circuit:

Thank you, random Florida voter. You may sit down now.

Now Judge Pregerson, copy this down 100 times.

I WILL NOT STOP THE F*CKING ELECTION SIMPLY BECAUSE 1% OF CALIFORNIA'S VOTERS ARE TOO STUPID TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PUT A G-DDAMN HOLE THROUGH A PIECE OF CARDBOARD.

Oh, and don't forget the dunce cap while you're at it, smarty. Rest of the class dismissed.

Mad Props to Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday.

Yawn.

YAAAAAAAAAAAWN.

I'm up. And blogging.

Hey, what can I say. Thief works by night

I am a Discoverer...

at least according to my Kingdomality Profile.

To wit:
Your distinct personality, The Discoverer, might be found in most of the thriving kingdoms of the time. Your overriding goal is to go where no one else has ever gone before. Regardless of the number of available natural problems to be solved, it is not unusual for you to continually challenge yourself with new situations or obstacles that you have created. You are an insatiable explorer of people, places, things and ideas. You thrive on constant change and anything new or different. On the positive side, you can be creatively rational as well as open minded and just. On the negative side, you might be an impractical and indecisive procrastinator. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.(God willing. -- Thief)

This is so close to me it's scary. (Not to mention the fact that WinAmp chose this moment to come up with the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, "Faith of the Heart," about an explorer who says he "is going where my heart will take me.") I like a new challenge and a new situation to keep my mind busy and growing. There are so many things in this world that I want to do, to see, to understand. I truly am a Discoverer.

I took a class in college about the great explorers. Not just Columbus and Magellan, but people like Eric the Red, a Viking chieftain who probably beat Columbus to America, or Zheng He, a Chinese admiral who led a fleet of 1000-foot long wooden ships to the horn of Africa and back, or Ibn Battuta, who fled from the Bubonic plague and ended up documenting the Kingdom of Mali in North Africa. I post the final reflection paper I wrote for that class.

“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.” -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

For most of human history, humans were anything but sedentary. We had to be. We had to follow the herds of animals for food, search out new acres of fruit trees to gather from, follow the summer rains, flee from the winter cold. Only impassible oceans and disagreeable neighbors occasionally stopped the human race in its drive from the African Savannahs to Tierra del Fuego.

As the late astronomer Carl Sagan wrote,
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game – none of them last forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a reckless few – drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

What, then, is this craving that fires the passions of the great explorers? I think there are two ends of exploration. The first is to know; to sail ‘round the world (or as far as you want to go today), and return, not just with physical treasure, but an innate understanding of a place that is different, but not wholly unlike your own. The second is to escape; to abandon a place which has condemned you to poverty or death, whether by sentence of law or by the blood in your veins, and to leave one home in search of another. The former drove many of the great known explorers, from Zheng He to Neil Armstrong, but the latter, aside from a few luminaries, is the prerogative of the millions of other human explorers, who leave their homes, knowing they will never return, in search of new lands.

What possible knowledge can be gained from new lands? Don’t we have all we need right here? Why ruin yourself on fools’ errands? These are the words of skeptics from the Imperial Court of China to the floors of modern-day Congresses and Parliaments debating further exploration of our world and others as well. Of course, there are the conventional enticements: gold, silver, spices, silk, diamonds, oil, porcelain, tea, minerals, and the occasional giraffe or white-furred tiger. But empires are driven by money; explorers usually wind up penniless, obscure, or killed in action. Perhaps it is something in the mind of the explorer that forgoes the cost-benefit analysis and heads out anyway, consequences be damned. Is it the desire to see a New World with one’s own eyes, hear strange bird calls, touch the other side of the world and then return to spread the tale? Could it be the desire to set foot upon new grounds and see what is the same and what differs from the place you came from, as if it was a self-test of your own perceptions and prejudices? Scientific Inquiry? Bragging rights? The desire to see a new set of stars in the sky? Or just the ability to step onto the pier at home port and say “I know more now, and I am all the wiser for it?”

Then, of course, there are the miserable explorers, the ones who did not choose their lot. Eric the Red, the Viking explorer, was banished three times for murder. Ibn Batutta, the Arab traveler who documented the Kingdom of Mali and much of Africa, was fleeing the Black Death. Then, of course, there were the billions of immigrants who crossed land and sea over two millennia in search of places where they could start a new life, find a quiet part of land to farm, meet an exotic woman, raise a family, and forget about their hardscrabble life before? Homer’s Odyssey tells the tale of the Island of the Lotus-Eaters, who consumed lotus blossoms daily to forget their troubles. Odysseus’ crew also fell under their influence, and soon they forgot all about Ithaca, their old homes, and the families waiting for them. Could it be we were built to look upon exploration, in the worst of times, as a nepenthe by which we could forget our previous lives? So why are so many of us, (especially us American “mutts,” the lands of so many different peoples coexisting in us), drawn back to the lands of our ancestors, to find places we heard of only in the tales of our grandfathers?

Perhaps the one place in this cosmos we will never be fully able to understand is inside of our own minds. To truly understand ourselves and reap the benefits of all our explorations, maybe we must explore inward first. But whether it is the bottom of the oceans or worlds beyond ours, we will not stop exploring. We have so much more to explore. Whatever drives us to explore, it is insatiable, like an infinite fire that feeds on the fuel of human imagination. As T.S. Eliot wrote,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This. Is. BULLSH*T.

This was originally going to go in my daily web revue. But this is such a black hole of utter and complete bullshit, it deserves its own entry. Debbie Schussel provides the gory details.

Madeline Sweeney might be turning over in her grave.

Given Hamad’s record, it is outrageous the FBI would honor him for anything. And it is an abomination of Sweeney’s heroism in the face of sudden death by terrorists. (Information she gave on a phone call to the ground helped the FBI piece together evidence and reconstruct the hijackings.)

Sweeny is a hero. Hamad is a criminal. Yet they are being honored together?Read on...

Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hamad was a suspected member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Communist faction of Palestinian terrorism responsible for countless homicide bombings and the October 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi.

The INS was so opposed to Hamad’s presence in the United States that it fought to deport him for over two decades. But, under political pressure from Michigan politicians, like Senator Carl Levin and Rep. David Bonior, the immigration judge chose to disregard classified evidence, and he is now a U.S. citizen. (Hamad’s lawyer, Noel Saleh, proudly proclaimed that he financially supported Hezbollah.)

Thank you, Senator Levin and Rep. Bonior. Allow me to compensate you for your troubles in defending this poor man. How does thirty pieces of silver sound? I hear that's what people who sell out to evil get nowadays...

Since then, as Midwest Regional Director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Hamad has been busy promoting the terrorist cause—doing interviews throughout the Detroit media supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic hate.

In a March 1999 Detroit News interview, Hamad defended the same program and Palestinian textbooks that portray Westerners, Christians, and Jews as the enemies of Islam and the Arab World.

Lemme spell this out for both Mr. Hamad, and the FBI, too:
patriotism (pâ´trê-e-tîz´em) noun
Love of and devotion to one's country.

genocide (jèn´e-sìd´) noun
The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
[Greek genos, race + -cide, killing]

Yes, there is a difference.

Hamad has opposed virtually every arrest, indictment and conviction of Islamic terrorists.

When men were arrested (and later convicted) for smuggling arms to Hezbollah over Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge, Hamad wished for "better U.S. relations with Hezbollah," the terrorist group which murdered over 300 American Marines and civilians. "People here are morally supportive" of Hezbollah, he said. When Customs raided several Islamic businesses and arrested owners for laundering over $50 million per year to Yemen in violation of the Patriot Act, Hamad protested. When four Detroit Al-Quaida sleeper cell suspects were charged (three were convicted) of plotting to blow up landmarks and tourist attractions, Hamad protested that, too.

If Hamad can protest our efforts to stop terrorism, hatred, and violence, both here and in the Islamic world, we can protest him being honored for it. Call FBI Director Robert Muller (202-324-3000. No e-mail). E-mail Attorney General John Aschcroft, Mueller's boss. E-mail your Senators and Congressmen, Ashcroft's bosses.

Then there’s the 2002 National Palestinian Student Conference on the Palestine Solidarity Movement, whose ostensible purpose was to promote divestment from Israel. "Annihilate the Jews" was chanted in Arabic at the University of Michigan conference, which featured indicted alleged Islamic Jihad frontman Sami Al-Arian as its keynote speaker, along with other anti-Western, anti-Semitic speakers, some with terrorist ties. Hamad’s Michigan ADC sponsored and endorsed the conference, which was organized by ADC-University of Michigan chief Fadi Kiblawi. Under Hamad’s "leadership," Kiblawi authored an article stating he wished to "strap a bomb to one’s chest and kill" Jews.

Director Mueller, I ask you again, why are you rewarding this man? Why are you rewarding someone who consorts with, aids, and comforts the very criminals you have devoted your lives to fighting?

At Michigan ADC’s April 25th awards banquet, Hamad gave its "Attorney of the Year" award to Nabih Ayad, an attorney for several accused terrorists and over 130 illegal Middle Eastern immigrants who paid off an INS employee to become instant greencard holders. Hamad and Ayad sued to keep them from being deported. Ayad’s clients, include Omar Abdel Fatah Al-Shishani—accused of attempting to launder $12 million in phony bank checks to fund Al-Quaida—who recently pled guilty to a lesser charge and is awaiting sentencing. Hamad defended him, too.

Sure, every American has a right to counsel. But if a defense attorney helps his client carry out a crime, that lawyer has commited a crime as well. Remember this, Mr. Hamad. Because the FBI may not care about this, but a lot of other Americans do.

Hamad has been busy globetrotting to promote the Islamist cause. In January, he led a delegation to terrorist sponsor state Syria, where Syrian officials discussed American disinformation campaigns targeting Arabs and Muslims and hailed Hamad for "enlightening the US public opinion about the reality of the situation in the Middle East." In May, he visited Lebanese Parliament President and former Shi’ite Amal Militia chief Nabih Berry, leading a delegation which included several men who head Detroit Islamic charities that are suspected Hamas and Al-Quaida fronts.

Oldest trick in the book. As part of the Islamic religion, Muslims are required to give a portion of their income to charity each year, an act known as a zakat. These funds, ostentibly used to build mosques, hospitals and schools, instead end up being diverted for terrorist activity. Hamas, Hizbollah, and many other Islamic "charities" have been doing this for years.

Hamad’s latest effort is opposing Michigan Senate Resolution 77, which denounces Palestinian terrorism and supports Israel in fighting against it.

I actually went and took a look at this resolution. (Search for string "Resolution No. 77") In the "whereases," there is nothing which should be remotely controversial to anyone with half a brain. And it condemns people who, by any rights, should be condemned, not the least of which is Yasser Arafat, the architect of all this misery. As for the ADC's response? This resolution misrepresents the Arab-Israeli conflict and lends unconditional support to Israel, without recognizing the plight of the Palestinian people. No benefit exists to the public, if the State of Michigan approves this resolution. In fact, passing such a resolution would be insensitive and inconsiderate to the large Arab American community in Michigan who view the conflict differently than the Resolution portrays it. Why this boilerplate? Because they cannot argue with the facts...and they know it. But heaven forbid Hamad and his ilk should stop trying to back death and destruction.

Hamad was nominated for the award by Detroit FBI Special Agent in Charge Willie Hulon because he organized BRIDGES, a group of Arabs who meet with Hulon and other Detroit federal agents once a month to protest arrests of suspected terrorists, and because he enlisted Hulon to partner with ADC for its unique brand of sensitivity training for Detroit area high schoolers.

Note to the FBI: It is time to unlearn the lessons of the 1970's. Some people who go around insulting you are indeed threats to this country. Take them seriously. And do not pander to them or go easy on them. If you get called racists because of this, consider it a badge of honor.

Since Hamad has opposed the FBI and other government efforts to thwart terrorism every step of the way and given his views, the FBI award is like an award to Fritz Kuhn and his Nazi-sympathizing German American Bund during World War II.

You’d think the FBI would have more respect for the dead.

I'd like to believe they would. I'd like to believe that this is the influence of political correctness run amok, that the FBI is being forced by its clueless overseers in Congress to throw a banquet for a man who is an avowed enemy of everything this country stands for, who stands for terrorism over respect for the law, who lauds those who kill the innocent while spitting in the face of those who have devoted their lives to saving the innocent, who consorts with people who would like nothing better than to see every FBI agent dead.

If the FBI has become so blind that it rewards with a man who should rightfully be under 24-hour surveillance, if not rotting in a jail cell with Richard Reid and Ramzi Yousef, then God help us, because the FBI sure as hell won't.

To the FBI, I ask: Remember your Priorites. Show this terrorist-supporting weasel the door.

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
Sir John Harington (1561-1612), English writer, courtier. Epigrams, bk. 4, Of Treason (1618).

And so, I'm having a wonderful time, but I'd rather be blogging in the dark...

Good stuff from the Command Post. The U.S. military is trying to get the software the Israeli military uses to train its troops about how to deal with angry mobs for our troops in Iraq. I have my doubts, but it's worth a try. Ex-Baathist Information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, AKA Comical Ali, is now saying that Saddam's war plans were "flawed." And he is just realizing this now? Finally, some interesting reflections questioning why, exactly, we are fighting.

Bill Whittle is going on the road, giving America a much needed pep talk, or at least, that's the idea. And it's a damn good one, too.

Ralph Peters is also not impressed with Wesley Clark:
Being a general is not quite the same thing as being a leader, nor does military service, even at the highest levels, guarantee strategic insight. What has Clark made of his experience? Does he have a clear vision for the 21st century? Or is he a 20th century man, who elevates failed theories of international relations above the brutal realities confronting us? Did Oxford hurt, rather than help him?... Does he lack, even now, a visceral sense of emerging global realities? Wes Clark has exactly the administrative skills and knowledge to make an excellent vice president. And he might grow into readiness for the top job, under the right tutelage. But, until convinced otherwise, I cannot see the general as my president. He knows a great deal, but understands too little. And I do not believe he takes our enemies seriously.
Via One Hand Clapping (and Kudos for the link!)

Bill Hobbs links to this wonderful, and underreported piece of news: Our decisive actions in Iraq have made Iran, Syria, and the rest all think twice about messing with us. As the Romans said, oderim dum metuant... let them hate us, so long as they fear us. (Or if you need a more modern interpretation, see Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song.")

Remember how I said that there were no good warbloggers left? Well, I was wrong. Chief Wiggles is keeping the peace, and doing a damn good job of it. Of course, not that this matters to those nattering, nagging nabobs of negativism across the pond.

Ray at Pseudorandom Thoughts fisks another one of the favorite Democrat talking points, that Karl Rove blew the cover of a CIA agent who didn't support Iraq. I'd go into more detail, (I have also read the book Ray refers to) but the power here's been kinda flaky. (I do wish to thank him for the link to the Den!) Moving on...

Dean Esmay has some interesting thoughts about growing up among racists. (Hint: It wasn't in the "solid south.")

Imago Veritatis has found a great link: An Academic Bill of Rights. Too bad most universities would keel over and die rather than implement it.

COINTELPRO Tool postulates that journalists fall for conspiracy theory because of laziness. I say he's too easy on the media. With Snopes.com on the case, and the sheer power of Google at their disposal, the media have no excuse for laziness. Apropos quote I just found on this subject:
The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.
Anthony Lewis (b. 1927), U.S. journalist. New York Times (25 Sept. 1975).

Dissecting Leftism finds this piece by Bjorn Lomborg, reaffirming that there is no connection between global warming and extreme weather. Lomborg, incidentally, because of his writings on the environment, has had to put up with more crap from the Euro-peon establishment than Galileo. And we all know how that turned out, right?

Master Li(leks) fisks with fury:
In short: the same people who chide America for its short-attention span think we should have stopped military operations after the Taliban was routed. (And they quite probably opposed that, for the usual reasons.) The people who think it’s all about oil like to snark that we should go after Saudi Arabia. The people who complain that the current administration is unable to act with nuance and diplomacy cannot admit that we have completely different approaches for Iraq, for Iran, for North Korea. The same people who insist we need the UN deride the Administration when it gives the UN a chance to do something other than throw rotten fruit.

The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.

Monkey see, monkey do, monkey bitch, monkey moan. Apparently monkeys have a sense of fairness too. One can only imagine what the poor little primates would have to say about the American tax system. Via Best of the Web Today.

People are stalking Howard Bashman, author of one of the most-read blawgs in the world. Question: should all other bloggers be jealous?

Southern Appeal discovers a paradox: If liberals think all government is corrupt, then why do they like it?

Spam is not only annoying, it could be hazardous to your health. Another good reason not to buy from, or even read spam. I'm no fan of Saudi-style justice, but I have a suggestion: let's make it so that every time you send a piece of spam, you lose a finger. Either you spammer-ass idiots learn your lesson, or you have to learn how to type and fix computers without fingers. Thanks to Boing Boing.

And finally, according to the Ecosystem, I am already a "Crunchy Crustacean." I've been at this blog for less than two weeks and already I've passed through three planes of existance. Thank you all.

The Lights are still on.

Under the Weather?

I am. In more ways than one, with Hurricane Isabel and a killer sore throat. But, us government monkeys have a bit of good news: a four-day weekend.

In celebration of this new day off, I will probably do my first major maintenance on the Den tomorrow, updating the blogrolls, working on archive templates, etc. I've also been toying with the idea of a "treasure chest," a collection of the best academic articles I can find as I troll the net. (Hey, if it finally puts my $150 copy of FrontPage to use again, so much the better.) Plus, between my first trackback and my first blogrolling, I'm starting to feel I'm coming out of the "speaking to nobody" phase that afflicts new bloggers. Check back soon... I think you'll like what you find.

If only we got hit with hurricanes more often.

The (Not Quite) Summer Wind...

...came blowing in...from across the sea...

Just got a call from my boss. No work tomorrow because of the hurricane! And there was much rejoicing (Yaaaaaaaaaaaay....)

For all you government monkeys in the DC area, official confirmation.

Just my luck that I had to come down with a cold tonight, though. Ah well. I got beer, cambell's soup, ice cream, and decongestant. Bring it.

Muchas Gracias, Isabel.

It's funny 'cuz it's true.

"DC Once Again Muder Capital, Mayor Brags"

"I'll admit, it's a little rough here," Williams said. "This city isn't for everyone. You gotta have street smarts to get by. You can't carry yourself like some tourist from Cowtown, USA. You gotta watch your back."

"Even so, it's still the best place on earth," Williams said. "I wouldn't live anywhere else. Washington has so much to offer: history, culture, entertainment. A few murders won't change that. They just bring those of us who live here a little closer together. You see, we look after our own here. We got one another covered."

I know this is just a parody, but still... wanna know why DC has such a bad crime rate? Because DC is a one-party (read Democrat) town. They could never elect a Giuliani or a Riordan (i.e. a Republican) who could shake things up in the police while ignoring the hordes of "community activists" who keep DC law enforcement on the shortest feasible leash for fear of the "institutional racism" of the DC police. No, instead they elect Twink Williams and his amazing do-nothing administration, or the epitome of all that is wrong with DC, Marion "Bitch Set Me Up" Barry. Meanwhile, gangs, drug pushers, and taggers turn 3/4 of the nation's capitol into an absolute crap-hole, and the only people with the resources to actually do something to stop this never-ending circle jerk (yes Adams-Morgan, Burleith, Georgetown, Cleveland Park, Tenleytown, and everyone on the west side of Rock Creek Park...THIS MEANS YOU!!!) do nothing.

Hey, you people get the government you deserve. At least in Maryland and Virginia, you can get a legal gun to protect yourself.

(Full Disclosure: I actually partied in the hotel room where Marion Barry was caught on tape snorting crack. I just hope the video bug had been removed.)

Road Gators of the information superhighway

John Burns takes the media to task on Iraq. Says that the media sold out the Iraqi people for access. Via The Corner.

Bruce Ackerman, a normally liberal Yale law prof, is also unhappy with the 9th Circuit. So is Debra Saunders. (Via How Appealing)

Let's Start A War! Start a Nuclear War! Porphyrogenitus takes a walk down memory lane, to a magical time when a now-presidential candidate damn near started a nuclear war.
Cato and Misha I dump on Clark too, while Just One Minute rips Clark's CNN analysis on Iraq to shreds.

One Hand Clapping covers Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Imago Veritatis has an interesting critique of a new Religious Freedom Declaration.

Siflay Hraka hosts the Carnival of the Vanities, where the best new bloggers post their best entries! For the record, I'm going to send around my M. Moisi fisking. Cuz bloggers all hate the french.

When in doubt, whip it out. A warrant, that is. LawMeme reports on an interesting case from Washington state upholding police use of a GPS tracking device attached to a murder suspect's car. The judge said that this would require a warrant, and since the police had one, the murder suspect (who was suspected of killing his own daughter) had his conviction upheld. Even the ACLU is happy. Would that every case turns out this well. And all because some police officer was smart enough to say "y'know... I'm not sure we can do this. Let's go ask a judge." Officer, whoever you are, Kudos.

Matrix Essays believes the Matrix could work as an urban planning strategy. No commuting, fewer resources consumed, even recycling (never mind that it's recyling PEOPLE!) I can see it now: treehuggers saying "So what if you spend your life in a tank of pink goo with fiber optics screwed into your head? We all need to do our part to save the planet!"

A Small Victory reports that Pat Robertson is trying to use prayer to keep Hurricane Isabel away from the East coast. Uh, Pat? Prayer is good. Getting the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY of the hurricane is better. Now, I happen to be a fairly religious person, but it wouldn't surprise me if God was intentionally steering this thing right towards Virginia beach just to teach this asshat a lesson about not saying really stupid things in God's name.

Baldilocks notes that the suspect in the murder of Venus & Serena Williams' older sister is a Crip. A White Crip. Proof positive that stupidity knows no racial boundaries. (Kinda puts Eminem in perspective, too, don't it?)

And finally, from the "No Shit, Sherlock" files: Saudi Arabian donations account for 50% of Hamas' budget. And these people are our allies...why?

Around the Net...

...in 80 minutes. Which is how long it takes me to do this.

War! HUH! Yeah! What is it good for? Turns out, a lot.
L.T. Smash explains it all.
Iraq is rolling towards democracy. That muffled clunking sound you hear? Just Iraq's neighbors shitting bricks. Via The Command Post.
And it turns out you can deter suicide terrorism. Adam Wolfson reviews a new paper which explains how.
Reuel Marc Gerecht (Ex-CIA Ops Officer, now with AEI), explains why "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" in Iraq is a bad strategy.

The Blogfather scores with this (verified) lecture by a federal judge working in Iraq.

Question: What is Osama Bin Laden's Strategic Plan? Answer: He doesn't have one.

Pyongyang Delenda Est
Tacitus on Yodok camp. With any luck, it'll be as well known as Auchwitz in a few years.

Core Values
10 Conservative Core Values. Anyone who e-mails me saying that they forgot racism, classism or gender bias will have their e-mail address automatically signed up for fee-based interracial pornography spam.

The Law Is An Ass
Robert Alt (a real, honest to God attorney) fisks the 9th Circuit decision in the California Recall.

Democrats can play dirty pool too. As opposed to most third parties, who can only play pocket pool. Via Kim Du Toit.

Balloon Juice thinks Japan needs to control its explosive gas. Seriously, I can smell it over here in DC.

Dude
Dude, where's my refund? From the Sheep-Free Zone.
Dude, where's my law? Muchas gracias al (much grass to) How Appealing.

Welcome to my Parlor, said the spider to the fly
The Empire is not impressed with Wesley Clark. Neither is Eugene Volokh. Though truth be told, the General does a hella funny impression of Slobodan Milosevic.

...and the Twins!
If Anna Kournikova was a Pokemon, she'd be Jigglypuff.

Attack of the Budget Boggarts

E.J. Dionne is mad. Hear him roar:

Let's get this straight: The administration wants $87 billion in new spending for Iraq, refuses to contemplate rolling back any of its tax cuts to pay for it -- and then proposes holding down new spending on child care for mothers trying to leave welfare.

The way to reach a balanced budget, Cheney insisted on "Meet the Press," was "to have fiscal discipline on the rest of the budget." That presumably includes child care.

Oh, good heavens! The Children (TM) are in Danger! Whatever else you do in Washington, you can never hurt The Children (TM)!

I won't bore you with the details. But suffice it to say that it involves two hard-hearted Texans cruelly going around making poor mothers on welfare and The Children (TM) suffer needlessly, all while a few liberal Republicans and their Democratic allies seek to thwart these nefarious plans.

What's certain is that the administration believes that making high-income taxpayers "struggle a little bit" is definitely a bad thing. On that "Meet the Press" appearance, Cheney was asked about freezing the administration's tax cut for the top 1 percent of Americans, which, as host Tim Russert pointed out, would generate enough money to cover the $87 billion for the war in Iraq.

In a nifty move, Cheney manages to hide all of the nation's millionaires and corporate CEOs -- New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso and his $140 million compensation package come to mind -- behind the proprietor of your local laundry or the owner of the neighborhood machine shop. I guess that struggle is a real motivator for Burger King Mom, but not for guys like Grasso.

Ummm...EJ? Cheney may have a point. Those small businesses you think are just a screen for millionaires and their filthy lucre? According to the Small Business Administration, they employ about 109 million people. That's about half of the jobs in the United States. More money to them equals more jobs for schmucks like me. Which means people like me do not have to get their kneecaps broken. Capice?

It would be hard to find a clearer example of why the administration is running into increasing bitterness and opposition over its Iraq policies. By refusing to budge on any of its tax-cutting priorities, the administration is putting many of those who agree that more money needs to be spent on Iraq in an impossible position. If they vote for the money, they know they will be adding to the deficit -- and creating even more excuses to short the working poor.

That's why Congress should reject the new money for Iraq -- beyond what's immediately needed by our troops -- until the administration gives some ground on its tax cuts. Making the administration struggle a little bit would not necessarily be the worst thing.

The oldest trick in the book. See, the government spends a lot of money on a lot of things it neither it nor the people need. Naturally, the government and its political allies want the government to keep what it has and get more. So what they do is when the call for fiscal discipline comes down, they offer up the most politically sensitive programs first. (Usually anything involving The Children (TM), or police, or national defense, or the elderly.) This allows them to look poor while keeping their pork, and make the rest of us feel guilty enough to let them have more of our money. This is what is happening in the Beltway, again. Shame on the democrats for pulling this stunt...again. Even greater shame on Bush for falling for it.

In the world of Harry Potter, there is a demon called a Boggart, "a shape-shifter that takes on the form of its intended victim's worst fear. It generally likes to hide in dark, enclosed places, such as in closets, under beds, or in hollow trees." Boggarts, however, can be defeated simply by 1. Recognizing what they are, 2. Laughing at them, and 3. Giving them a quick blast of the Riddikulus charm. What Mr. Dionne is ranting about, and what everyone in Washington is frightened of, is a Budget Boggart, in this case, one that is taking the form of "Guns vs. Butter," or in this specific case, "Iraq vs. The Children (TM)." So how does one stop a Budget Boggart? Same steps as a regular Boggart. Identify, laugh, and kill.

In this case, steps #1 and #2 have already been taken care of. Citizens Against Government Waste have compiled a list of all the wasteful spending in Washington, line by dirty line. Everything from duplicate agencies to corporate welfare.

So I whipped out my printing calculator, picked an agency from the drop down menu, and went to work. Half an hour and three feet of calculator tape later, I had found exactly $87.003 billion dollars in things that we could easily do without. (For the picky, the cuts were made in Agency-wide spending, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, the SBA, the EPA, several Independant Agencies, Education, the USPS, the GSA, State, Commerce, the FDIC, Legislative and Judicial branches, plus selected cuts from Transportation, Labor, Justice and HUD. I didn't even have to touch Health & Human Services, foreign aid, Defense, Veterans Affairs, FEMA, or Social Security. And this is just government operations and a few grants to states.) That's the president's whole $87 billion for Iraq right there, plus a lot more for E.J. and The Children (TM). Your mileage may very. Dionne's raving about how much Republicans hate children and families is starting to look very, ahem... Riddikulus by comparison.

Now if only Bush would whip out his wand...er, pen, make the cuts, and have enough of a spine to tell Congress to take their pork and shove it up their barrels, thus saving $87 billion for people who could really use the cash.

My first Blogroll!

"Finally, I've changed the world....now I know how God feels." -- Homer Simpson

Mad props to Rick (Perry, perhaps?) over at Texsanity for my very first blogroll.

If at first you don't suceed...change the rules until you can.

The Ninth Circuit strikes again. The California recall election has been pushed back until March 2004. Why? It's Florida redux: punch-card balloting.

While skimming the court's decision (written by 2 Clinton appointees and a Carter appointee) I came across this little tidbit regarding the legality of using punch card machines:

The only potential justification is that the California Constitution requires that a recall election be held within sixty days of certification by the Secretary of State. However, this justification has no application to placement of the initiatives on the ballot because there is no similar time constraint applicable to them, and they were originally scheduled to be placed on the March 2004 ballot. As to the gubernatorial recall vote, this rationale is also weak. Indeed, had the recall petition been certified just a month and a half later than it was, the recall election would have been scheduled to take place not within sixty to eighty days as provided in the California Constitution, art. II, §15(a), but instead in March 2004 under the California Constitution, art. II, § 15(b). That exception provides for the efficient consolidation of a recall election with an upcoming regularly scheduled election: “A recall election may be conducted within 180 days from the date of certification . . . in order that the election may be consolidated with the next regularly scheduled election . . . .” The operation of this exception produces arbitrary results; because the signatures were certified seven and a half — instead of six — months in advance of the March 2004 election, this exception does not apply, and the deadline falls in early October. In essence, granting a preliminary injunction would put the election only one and a half months after the longer six-month time period provided for by the California Constitution. (Southwest Voter Registration Project v. Shelley, at 32)

Now, I'm not a lawyer. (Yet.) But it seems to me that the Ninth Circuit is moving the goalposts in the middle of the football game. It goes around calling this rule and that "arbitrary." But the simple fact is that you cannot have an election without a constant set of rules, just like you can't have any kind of organized sport. You can change the rules, too... but you don't change them in the middle of the game unless you have a damn good reason. And I'm sorry, but voter stupidity is not a good reason. (Hey, I've used punch card ballots before. If you just check that all the holes are punched right, this eliminates 99% of the problem. Got bad eyesight? Ask a poll worker to help you. A bad system, yes. That's why California was going to decertify punch-card machines... IN 2006. Shelley, p. 10) The rule about the 60 day time limit on the recall is in the California Constitution for a reason: so that the politicians being recalled cannot fudge the rules and postpone it until the next scheduled election and keep their jobs in the interim.

But this all goes back to a disturbing tendency among the Democrats: If you can't win an election fairly, you keep changing the rules until you can win. This was Florida in 2000. This was the New Jersey and Minnesota Senate elections in 2002. Get a few friendly judges on your side, scream "equal protection," and get the rules you don't like thrown out or altered.

All the ranting about Bush v. Gore and the sacredness of voting is beside the point. Changing the rules in the middle of the game is not called "equal protection." It's called cheating.

UPDATE 9-23-03: An en banc panel of the 9th Circuit has unanimously reversed.

We need France...

...like we need a bullet in the head. To the French, we Americans are a young power, desperately in need of the enlightenment of our betters. Especially when it comes to turning tail. France's problem with us, literally, is that we do not know when to run.

At least, that's the point made by one Dominique Moisi, a senior advisor at France's Institute of International Relations, who says "Now That You Need Us, We have Something to Say."

There are lessons to be taken from France's experience in Algeria. Washington's ambitious revisionist attempt to democratize the Middle East could benefit from the sobering humility of a former colonial power.

First, Iraq isn't Algeria. Algeria (and Vietnam,too) was a French colonial posession. France wanted control over it permanently. Despite all the confusion introduced by the radical left, Iraq is not a new American colony. We do not intend to be a permanent occupying power. We are only going to be there until we are satisfied that Iraq has an infrastructure, a political structure, and a civil society strong enough to survive without any outside help, including from us. We are still in control of Iraq because we have not reached that point yet. The terrorists attacking us in Iraq are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, operating in the Sunni heartland of Iraq (Baghdad, Tikrit, Fallujah, and the surrounding areas). We have had only a few prominent incidents with the Shi'a of southern Iraq, and virtually none with the Kurds in the north.

Let us contrast this with the French experience in Algeria.

Algeria was, for all intents and purposes, considered as much a part of France as Normandy or Lyon. Algeria was divided into departments, essentially, the French equivalent of U.S. states. France had conquered Algeria in the 1830's. History takes over from there.

"In addition to enduring the affront of being ruled by a foreign, non-Muslim power, many Algerians lost their lands to the new government or to colonists. Traditional leaders were eliminated, coopted, or made irrelevant; social structures were stressed to the breaking point. Viewed by the Europeans with condescension at best and contempt at worst--never as equals--the Algerians endured 132 years of colonial subjugation. Nonetheless, this period saw the formation of new social classes, which, after exposure to ideas of equality and political liberty, would help propel the country to independence. During the years of French domination, the struggles to survive, to co-exist, to gain equality, and to achieve independence shaped a large part of the Algerian national identity."

Read that again. Not two years. Not three years. One hundred and thirty-two years. If we stayed in Iraq for 132 years, made the 18 Iraqi provinces into the next US states, and eliminated all sources of native political opposition, then the Iraqis would have every right, indeed, the duty, to kick our asses. But we have only been in Iraq six months, and we have no intention of staying in Iraq for anything close to 132 years. If France is trying to warn us away from being the next colonial power, we're way ahead of them. We were devolving the Phillipines when the French were strutting around Algeria and Vietnam like they owned the damn places. And they did.

"The French military command ruthlessly applied the principle of collective responsibility to villages suspected of sheltering, supplying, or in any way cooperating with the guerrillas. Villages that could not be reached by mobile units were subject to aerial bombardment. The French also initiated a program of concentrating large segments of the rural population, including whole villages, in camps under military supervision to prevent them from aiding the rebels--or, according to the official explanation, to protect them from FLN extortion. In the three years (1957-60) during which the regroupement program was followed, more than 2 million Algerians were removed from their villages, mostly in the mountainous areas, and resettled in the plains, where many found it impossible to reestablish their accustomed economic or social situations. Living conditions in the camps were poor. Hundreds of empty villages were devastated, and in hundreds of others orchards and croplands were destroyed. These population transfers apparently had little strategic effect on the outcome of the war, but the disruptive social and economic effects of this massive program continued to be felt a generation later. "

Gee... Sound familiar? Resemble any other international crises/flaming bags of dog shit dumped on our doorstep by the French? Anyone remember what happened the last time we did as the French did? (I'll give you a hint: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.")

"Sobering humility?" I should hope so. But I hope in vain. On the contrary, the advice Mr. Moisi gives is neither sober nor humble. Instead, it confuses history and the present. Discuss.

Moisi sees in Iraq what happened in Algeria:

This is what the French can tell America: Military strength will take you so far and no farther. What America needs in Iraq now is not more soldiers, but policemen and administrators. Just last week, American soldiers killed eight Iraqi policemen by mistake in a desert firefight. This is the kind of error that must be avoided. This is the kind of act that leads to a sense of oppression and repression. And we can tell you from our experience that repression in cities creates anger, and before you know it, the liberator has become the brutal oppressor. Hegel said that men make history but do not know the history they make, and his famous warning seems to describe the consequences of American policy in Iraq perfectly. The entire region has changed, but has it changed for the better?

Of course! Bad things are in the headlines, so all must be going badly, no? Yes, what happened to those Iraqi police is a tragedy. Such is war, things do go wrong. But take a look at the stuff that's going right, just today:

" U.S. troops in Tikrit on Monday arrested seven people suspected of helping bankroll resistance to coalition forces."

"United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan says consensus between five key U.N. members on the future of Iraq is "essential and achievable."

Two steps forward, one step back. Us being the military top dog, far from worsening things, is the only reason why things are getting better. But try telling that to Messr. Moisi.

"Forget the tactical lesson and go to the heart of the matter. Get the Iraqis involved. You may think your presence in Iraq will be indefinite but not infinite. This is wishful thinking. Unless you change your strategy, you'll be stuck in Iraq for the long haul and forced to have a massive presence there." America should transfer authority to Iraq as quickly as possible."

It depends what you mean by indefinite, my friend. And yes, the Iraqis are involved. Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers. Iraqi schools and universities, Iraqi oil workers, Iraqi builders, an Iraqi cabinet. But the problem is that the Iraqis have not yet rounded the learning curve. They still have to re-learn how to run a country without resorting to terror, mass murder, and killing your poltical opposition. The process is happening on its own schedule. Transferring authority now sounds really good, but it is a recipe for diaster.

That is why France wants a new U.N. resolution on Iraq, a new division of responsibilities and a new calendar of events.

OK.

Paris would probably be happy with a triumvirate to run the reconstruction, with an American general in charge of security under a U.N. mandate,

Cool.

an Iraqi interim government given many more political responsibilities

Could we give the new Iraqi interim government a few more months to get their act together and start working as a team? Or is that too "colonial" for you?

and a U.N.-designated representative having overall responsibility for the process and for organizing elections on a shortened schedule of a few months. Ideally, though not necessarily realistically, power should be returned to the Iraqis before the beginning of next year.

No, no, no, no. This is inviting major problems. Iraq currently has no electoral law, no electoral rolls, no political parties, no constitution, a weak central government, two neighbors with their own agendas who would like nothing better than a power vacuum, a bunch of Baathist yahoos shooting at the people who took their money away, and Saddam still hiding in a cave someplace. And you want to be have elections and have out of there by next year? Have you learned nothing from your last experiences with decolonization? How all those carefully cultivated colonies in Africa and Asia you left are now either kleptocracies or dictatorships, where the rule of men prevails over the rule of law? Maybe the French are satisfied with that. It's not our problem anymore, they say. Let me clue you in. If the US screws up Iraq, it will continue to be our problem for a very long time Terrorism will flourish there, and it will come knocking at our door... maybe even yours too. And if you want to screw up Iraq, this "wham, bam, thank you ma'am," election strategy is a good way to do it.

"These conditions are probably unacceptable to Washington, which would see them as an admission of its own failure."

Yeah, right. It's all about us stupid Americans and our easily wounded pride. The fact that doing elections in Iraq now is a really bad idea has nothing to do with it.

I am, in fact, not convinced that the French alternative would be any more successful than the American.

So why bother with it?

Nevertheless, it is worth a try. I believe we French must step up to the plate and extend our assistance to Washington. One thing is absolutely clear: America did not need its allies to win the war in Iraq. But it does need them if it wants to avoid losing the peace. For both sides, the time has come for what John Foster Dulles called an "agonizing reappraisal" of our respective positions.

I said it before and I will say it again: outside help would be nice. Help is always nice. But it is not necessary. We can handle Iraq all by our lonesome selves. It'll just take longer. If you really want to see Iraq suceed, put your money where your mouth is, give us a few thousand troops and a few billion Euros, and we will show how how to re-build a country.

Mr. Moisi's analysis, and French foreign policy in general, is falling prey to what is called "mirror imaging." It is when people of one country project their own modes of thinking, with all the biases that come with them, onto another country. France sees us occupying Iraq, France looks back on its own history and deduces we're just another power-hungry colonial empire. Never mind the fact we are pursuing a radically different course than what the French did, and that we are motivated by a completely different rationale. Mirror imaging is always a danger in any kind of foreign policy analysis, for it does not allow assumptions to be questioned, nor does it allow alternate theories to develop. Mirror imaging is how America ended up with Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage crisis. It will prove to be the downfall of France's Iraq policy as well.

No, Mr. Moisi. We do not need you. We do not need your defeatism, nor your willingness to live with a bad situation rather than tackling the problem head-on, nor your failed ways of doing business, nor your flawed analysis. And we have something to say to you, too. In the words of John Stuart Mill,

"When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

I like what my friend said about what to do with France: "'Y'know, we should just walk over to Germany and say 'Remember WWII? Our bad. Here, have some tanks.'" At least it would remind France and Mr. Moisi of the consequences of running away from a problem of their own making.

UPDATE 2003-09-16 2:23 PM: Fareed Zakaria agrees.

UPDATE 2003-09-16 11:48 PM: Reuel Marc Gerecht explains why the "Iraqification" that France wants is a really bad idea.

Wealth for Me, but Not for Thee

So Republicans are the party of the rich, eh?

So why is it that 8 of the 10 richest Senators are...Democrats? And the net worth of the Senate's Democratic millionaires is FIVE TIMES that of the Senate's Republican millionaires?

Of course! Democrats are millionaires! They don't need Bush's tax cut! That's why we should repeal it! (And never mind those Republican non-millionaires out there...)

Via Tom McMahon.

For Your Information:

Aaron over at Rantblog has drawn up a list of terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinian terrorists over the years. Just go read it.

Going Postal

New from the Washington Post: For all the talk going around that the US is going wobbly in Iraq by going to the UN for a new resolution, take note: The UN is going wobbly too.

The terrorist bomb that destroyed U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last month sparked a period of soul-searching that has convinced anguished U.N. leaders and influential diplomats that the organization endured too much risk in Iraq for too little influence over events.

Apparently, many UN officials believe that by even being associated with the US invasion and occupation, that the UN has left itself open to terrorist attacks like what happened on August 19th.

The motivation behind the bombing remains unclear. U.N. officials have suggested three main possibilities. One is that the bombers targeted Vieira de Mello because only a few days earlier he had endorsed the Governing Council, considered illegitimate by occupation foes. Another is that the United Nations was targeted in a campaign to make Iraq ungovernable.
A third theory is that the United Nations failed to develop an identity independent of the United States. A statement from a group that took responsibility for the bombing called for further attacks on the United Nations.
In response to the bombing, the United Nations dramatically reduced its personnel in Iraq. There are now fewer than 100 international staff members in Baghdad, down from more than 300. A similar reductionis occurring in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq.

20 years of dealing with terrorism, and the UN still doesn't get it? Please allow this crude, uneducated American to spell it out. You cannot let terrorism stop you. Why you were attacked is an interesting and legitimate question. But it is also the most irrelevant question. The terrorists are going to hate you no matter what you do. There is nothing you can do or say which would convince them otherwise. At the UN, you deal with rational people who, national rivalries aside, are ultimately looking to do good. The people who attacked you are not that kind of people. They are former Baathists who once had a lot of power and money, which has been taken away from them, and they want it back. They are foreign terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda, who basically hate all Non-muslims, in addition to any Muslim who doesn't think and believe exactly like they believe. They are the criminals that Saddam let out of prison just before the invasion, which a lot of people thought was proof of his magnaminity or desperation, but which was probably aimed at exactly this kind of situation, i.e. "the invasion will probably fail, and I will return. If you help me and kill my enemies, when I return, you won't go back to prison." You are dealing with people who have nothing to lose, and who will never be open to compromise.

Here's the cruel part: if you leave, their job becomes easier, and yours becomes much harder. They will mark you as a soft target who will turn tail and run if hit hard enough. This is what ultimately got us September 11th: a refusal to stand up and continue on, regardless of the cost. Wherever you go in the world, they will hunt you and kill you, for no other reason than because you got in their way.

So here's what you do. First, you get smart about security. You don't take stupid risks. (i.e. You don't keep around the same Baathist security guards you have had since the end of the first Gulf War, who are all probably still on Saddam's payroll.) You implement good security practices. Set your buildings back from the streets, or failing that, close streets off. You train your staff members in personal security, defensive driving, distaster protocols, how to think clearly in an emergency. (I saw you guys in action during the bombing. These last two were things you did very well.) And of course, you arm yourselves, so that if all else fails, you can defend yourselves in an attack.

Second, you go after the bastards who keep doing this, or if you're not willing or able, you help the people who are. Or at the bare minimum, if you can't (or won't) help, at least you stay out of their way. Terrorists have a much harder time planning attacks if highly trained professionals are looking for them.

Third: you mourn your dead, show the world that you are not afraid, and keep going. And if you stay involved with the reconstruction of Iraq, and make it known that you want to see Iraq become a prosperous and free democracy, eventually the attacks will stop. Your enemies will have used up their resources, their ammunition, their money. The people will be living their lives instead of looking for scapegoats. It's called "draining the swamp."

What the United Nations needs, according to several senior officials, is a Security Council resolution -- similar to proposals made last week by France, Germany and Russia -- that defines a role independent of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority and empowers the world body to play a concrete role.

Such a solution could mobilize the U.N. staff to return to Iraq in larger numbers and, at the same time, make it a less likely target for political violence. But it would also require a dramatic convergence of Security Council nations that have very different ideas of the best way forward.

There is a role for the UN, if they will choose to take it: economic and infrastructure reconstruction, investigating Saddam's crimes, helping rebuild civil society. These are things which the UN has done before, and I am the first to admit that they do a damn good job of it. It's not about what the next resolution says. It is about being willing to do things which need to be done. The UN does not need "permission" from the US in order to get involved in Iraq successfully, nor does it need full political control. What it needs to do is abandon some illusions, the same illusions the US has abandoned.

"Clarity is important to the U.N. We're nervous about a fudge," a senior U.N. official said. "But we're reconciled to a fudge as the most likely outcome, because that's how the Security Council most often reconciles a difficult question."

And guess who's trying to pack in the fudge? You guessed it: France. Specifically, Dominique de Villepin, France's oh-so-sophisticated foreign minister.

Also at stake is the question of the United Nations' role in postwar Iraq. In an opinion piece in the French newspaper Le Monde today, de Villepin called for "a radically new approach" in which the United Nations would effectively take political control of Iraq from the United States, help Iraq establish a provisional government within a month, write a constitution by the end of the year and hold elections next spring.

The U.S. occupation, de Villepin wrote, "let's be brave enough to say, is leading nowhere. Far from promoting stability, it arouses bitterness, incomprehension and frustration."

Let it never be said that the French miss an opportunity to profit from a crisis. France doesn't want a stake in Iraq because they're concerned about the Iraqis. (If they were concerned, they wouldn't have stabbed us in the back the last time we tried going to the security council.) No, they want to give the US a black eye, toot their own horn, and shout "we told you so" from the rooftops. Here's a hint, fellas: you can only shout "we told you so" if you were right the first time.

Not only does the UN not want to take full control over Iraq, this idea of quick elections followed by a hasty retreat is not going to work.

Think of it this way. Iraq is like a man in the hospital, recovering from a serious infection. He's still on life support. He's recovering, but very slowly, and the infection has not yet been brought down to the point where the man's own immune system can keep it under control. So, if you were the doctor supervising this man's care, and your objective was to get him healthy and on his feet, would you let him stay in the hospital until he has recovered? Or would you cut short the course of treatment and hope that he's well enough? Hopefully, you'd choose #1. #2 would get you a malpractice suit. To carry this analogy to its absurd conclusion, France would take option #2, simply because it does not want to "offend" the infection. Simply put, Iraq is not ready to stand on its own feet yet. It is going to take time. We'd like the world's help, but we're the attending physician. We set the rules. We can handle Iraq on our own. It will take longer, and it will be messier. It would be nice to have help. But it's not essential.

Oh, and as far as the bitterness, frustration, and incomprehension? That's just us reacting to the latest French attempt to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq just to give us a black eye.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the vulture had become France's national bird.

Let the Hatred of Macs Begin!

OK, I use Windows machines both at home and work. Ha ha ha. But to all you Mac-aniacs...who really has the last laugh?

Watch these and ponder, friend...

"Crash Different"
"I don't feeling like I'm operating the Mac so much as I'm just there sharing the Mac experience. And if I can do something useful while the Mac. is willing, so much the better.... I like the handle here. That's so you can attach a chain and use it as a BOAT ANCHOR!!!"
(.wmv file)

"Mac Gamer"
"There are a lot great games on the Mac! Like WarCraft III...um....that...that puzzle game with the Apple Logo...that's a great game!"
(.mov file)

Around the Blogosphere...

From the home office in Blogroll, NE, tonight's top 10 blog entries:

10. Pontifex Ex Machina is home. First L.T.(Cmdr.)(select) Smash, then Chinpokomon, and now Pontifex? This means all the warbloggers I have on my roll are no longer kicking ass. Hey, I'm happy for you guys, don't get me wrong. You deserve the rest. But unless you want the rest of us getting our war news from fools, asshats, and the just plain ignorant, you've got to get us some other links.

9. Steven Den Beste is in top form, as always, this time discussing Hamas' threats to blow up Israeli high-rises if Israel keeps killing its leaders. Except...uh... they actually can't. One quick comment: forget the whole discussion of rat poison and anticoagulants. THIS is the truly frightening thing about suicide bombs. It's called "butterfly lungs." Basically, this is when the concussion wave generated by the detonating bomb hits someone in the chest. It literally shreds their lungs. It starts off with a mild cough. But soon, your lung tissue swells up with blood and you can no longer take in oxygen. Respirators can even cause more damage. As many as 47% of people in suicide bombings suffer this kind of injury. Many die or face weeks in the ICU. You don't even need to be hit by any kind of shrapnel to suffer this. It is a horrible way to die. And yet, Howard Dean says we're supposed to call these people "soliders..."

8. Bill Whittle has got his 9/11 essay up. Barely a page. C'mon. You can do better than that, Bill!

7. Imago Veritatis has just informed me that Star Trek is a communist conspiracy. Now, I hate commies, too. but, the Federation seems to be more like Thomas More's Utopia than Marx's. If you want to see sci-fi communism, look no further than the Borg. No individuality, no personal thoughts or desires, relentless expansionism, a missionary zeal to "perfect" society, etc. etc....

I just realized I am a nerd.

6. Prudent Politics has another great taxation parable. Just go read it.

5. But I don't wanna be a martyr!

4. How Appealing links to two articles of note. First, from the Washington Post, US Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer says that America can learn from Israel how to balance terrorism and human rights. Second, Robert Bork is back, and he thinks that the Supreme Court needs to stick to American Law.

3. Are you a NeoCon? Kudos to Southern Appeal for this interesting find.

2. From the "Do as I say, Not as I Do" file... 10% of American parents send their kids to private schools. More than 40% of Senators and Congressmen do...and then lecture us about how we need to support public schools. Via No. 2 Pencil.

And the Number 1 Blog post of the Day:

1. "Exiling Arafat Could Bring Violence to Mideast." Is it a bad sign when the real news and the fake news start looking the same?

A bit longer than I expected...

Greetings all...

As you can tell, it's September 12th, and I still haven't finished my September 11th essay. That's because I have a lot to say about it. It is just going to take some time. (Now I know how Bill Whittle feels.

Right now I'm here at work, earning my keep. If I don't, these guys are going to come break my kneecaps. Expect real content very soon. I will keep posting my 9/11 essay as I work on it.

Thief out.

The War Inevitable?

Two years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I headed to bed in my dorm room, after wandering aimlessly around the internet. I had set my alarm for 8:45 AM, to make it to my campus job at 9.

This is my story of September 11th, 2001. A day that changed America as only a few says had done before. But it is more than that. For you see, I had seen flashes of the truth about terrorism, about our enemies, years before 9/11. But they were just that: flashes. Fleeting instances of clarity in a sea of confusion and half-truths. Part of it was my youth, my inexperience, my naivete. Part of it was that I, like so many others, simply could not grasp the sheer horror of the truth. And yet, I still knew that it was coming, though I did not know when, or where, or how.

I.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-- Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

Flash back to October 1999. I had just returned from a weekend out in Washington, D.C, visiting with several high school friends. Of course, we all rode on the Metro. That next weekend, I was channel surfing when a Nightline episode came on. Its title: BioWar. It was a simulation of what would happen in a terrorist attack, with real-life police chiefs, fire chiefs, and public health leaders serving as the leaders of a fictonal city. The premise was frighteningly simple: a terrorist group disperses anthrax through the subway. The subway cars act as giant pneumatic syringes, pushing the spores through the tunnels and circulating it throughout the city. Because anthrax takes time, no one realizes what has happened until it is too late. Over the course of eight days, 50,000 people die. Thousands more are infected but live. Riots break out. The miltary is called in to restore order. The city is in chaos. All across the nation, people begin to chant, "never again," and demand that their government get the people who did this, civil liberties be damned.
But that wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that the stock footage of the subway system they used was the Washington, D.C. Metro, that I had rode on the week before (and today, I ride every day to work.)

One handful of men. One plan. Thousands dead. It was possible, this I realized. Question: Who would do something like this, and why?

A few months later, browsing in the campus bookstore, I came across The New Terrorists. I read it, cover to cover. Now I was worried. I began to read more. I learned the names of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. I saw the profile of radical Islamic terrror. I read about the first WTC bombing, the destruction of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Here is what Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber, said at his sentencing:

"This case is not aboit so-called terrorists who planted a bomb for no reason but to kill innocent people for the fun of it. What this case is about is about the outcome of terrorism… You have been supporting Israel throughout all the years in killing and torturing peoples, innocent peoples…. You enjoy seeking people having war together. You enjoy sucking blood and shedding blood… you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb... And since this is the way you invented… [it] was necessary to use the same means against you because this is the only language you understand."

Suddenly, I understood why they wanted to do us such harm. It wasn't because we had "oppressed them," it wasn't because we hadn't done them any harm. In fact, my cousin was then serving in the Army in Bosnia, defending innocent Muslims and keeping the peace; not to mention the numerous wars our country undertook to save Muslim lives, even at the cost of our own: peacekeeping in Lebanon, fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, hunting down warlords using food as a weapon in Somalia, liberating Kuwait from a rampaging Iraq seeking only profit. And their justification for attacking us was...the Crusades? Israel? The bombing of Hiroshima? The "decadence" of Western Society? No. There was something behind all of this. They hated America. They hated our freedom, the way we had grown and prospered as a nation while they, the faithful, were being left in the historical dust. They hated the way that American ideas were opening the minds of their children, to a world of freedom and possibilities, and away from tyrants and theocrats who exploited the name of God for their own personal gain. No, they said. We are the true believers. Our laws are perfect. Our society is perfect. If we suffer while America and her allies prosper, it must be because they are the source of evil in the world. And if the utopia they had been promised was ever to happen, America would have to die. The Dar-al-Islam, the "House of Islam" would have to conquer the Dar-al-Harb, the "House of War."

They never even considered the fact that they could be wrong.

They had declared war on us.

"...In compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, 'and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.' ... We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. "
-- Osama Bin Laden, Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, Feb. 23, 1998

Funny thing is, we didn't even know we were at war. Yet.

The major conflict in theoretical International Relations in the late 1990's lay between two authors, representing two distinct points of view. The first view was the "End of History." Francis Fukuyama, the author of the book that defined this school, made the case that with the end of the Cold War, humanity had come to the end of a linear history. "A true global culture has emerged, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it." Fukuyama wrote that liberal democracy, the winner of the Cold War, was the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution'' and the "final form of human government." All that was left now was to wait for the rest of the world to come around to our side. Like Marx, Fukuyama's history was one of simple inevitability. There was simply no better choice.

The other view was much less hopeful. This side began with Samuel Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations." Huntington believed that the Cold War was an anomaly. He believed that human beings define themselves not by ideology, but by culture. The source of new global conflict would not be about which political ideology you follow. It will be much simpler: "What are you?" Most controversial in this thesis was Huntington's conviction that "Islam has bloody borders." To Huntington, Muslim countries constantly fought with people over religion: Christians in the Phillipines, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, animists in the Sudan, athiests in the Soviet Union. He argued that the West should worry not about Islamic fundamentalism but about Islam itself, in his words, "a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power."

And so the debate raged among the academics. But among the students, the people who gave any creedence to the Clash were a distinct minority. In my first IR class ever, I started out as Huntington's most rabid defender (mostly because I had read his book in high school.) But the pressure mounted against the Clashists was intense, both inside class and out. We were basically accused of seeing things that weren't there. We were "looking for a new enemy to replace the Soviets." We were "a bunch of angry white men with no countries left to beat up on." We were "being manipulated by the headlines." We were "ignoring the signs of progress around the world." Worst of all, our beliefs and thoughts were "a self-fulfilling prophecy:" If we believed all out war was coming, then it would come. If we believed that peace was upon us, it would be so. Eventually the pressure got too great, and not having the intellectual tenacity of my peers, I surrendered, with the joke that we need to start a group called "Clashists Anonymous," to help people break free of the Clash. Other Clashists persisted in their error, while my attention drifted to other things. Still, deep down, I wondered. As I began to understand why the terrorists wanted to do us such harm, I began to ask, what if I had been right the first time? What if something was happening on the other side of the world?

The end result of my thinking and research was a paper for my seminar in American Foreign Policy about "Catastrophic Terrorism." Who would do it, why, what would happen, and how could it be prevented. I wasn't a Cassandra. In retrospect, I missed the mark in three big places. First, I had argued that the Christian Identity movement, the heady brew of racism and fear of government that had given us the Oklahoma City bombing, was as equally likely to commit an act of serious terrorism as Al-Qaeda. (Actually, that attack, I later came to believe, had single-handedly destroyed the Christian Identity movement, most of whose members recoiled in horror at the destruction carried out in their name and promptly left for the fields of more mainstream political views, leaving only a small group of diehards without any resources or mass appeal.) Second, I had failed to consider the possibility that one does not need a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon to cause a lot of death. In fact, the intent of the first WTC bombers had been to cause one tower to topple into the other, potentially killing all the occupants inside within a matter of seconds. Why go to all the trouble of developing a WMD when a well-placed conventional explosive can do the same thing? Or even better, turn the volatile fuel that powers cars and airplanes into an explosive? Finally, I had overestimated the effects of a potential attack on people percieved to have supported it; in this case, American Muslims. I had thought of raising the possibility that there would be mass violence against Muslims, even a mass internment of Muslims as had happened to the Japanese during WWII (an idea which I removed from my paper at the last minute). Turns out, thank God, there was no such reaction. The American people were smarter than most pundits gave them credit for, and understood that Islam itself wasn't the enemy. Undoubtedly this was because many Americans knew Muslims. My roomate that year happened to be a Muslim... from Indiana, of all places. I bounced several thoughts off of him as I was writing this paper. His reaction to the terrorists I profiled was stark: "These guys aren't Muslims. I don't know what religion they follow, but it's not mine." 99.99% of Americans would understand this when the chips fell. Let it never be said that this country hates Muslims. Ever.

But a good part of my paper was pretty close to the way it happened. The motives of the terrorists (hatred of the U.S, religious fanaticism, percieved oppression, media attention, and "macroterrorism" -- a big word for killing a lot of people). Where they trained and operated from (Afghanistan). Who supported them (Islamic "charities"). What would happen afterward (cleanup costs of the attack, a military response and changes in national security strategy, pressure to curtail civil liberties and give government agencies more power, doubts in the government's ability to protect us.) How we could stop it (Consolidation of government agencies, sharing information between intelligence and law enforcement, use of more human intelligence, including "dirty assets," use of RICO-style laws and roving wiretaps). My overall conclusion was simple. Terrorists will not stop hating us, and we cannot change our national policies to accomodate them. All we can do is prepare.

I turned in the paper. Got an A. Heard rumors that somehow this paper made it to one of the big poohbahs in the intelligence community who happened to be an alumni. And that was the end of it. Life went on. I continued with my studies. And the few people with influence who still took the threat of terrorism truly seriously continued to toil in obscurity. The rest of the world still mocked them for seeing things that weren't there; like so many Cassandras, they knew the future but could not make others understand. And I still couldn't stop thinking about when it would happen, how much time we had.

War was coming.

September 11th, 2001, dawned like any other day. Specifically, with me trying to squeeze every precious minute of sleep I can to make up for the time I wasted last night on the internet. My TV's alarm went off at 8:45 AM. Right on schedule. CNN flicked on. News blather. Gary Condit or some such stuff. Yawn. I figured five more minutes of sleep would be nice. I reset the alarm for 8:50 AM, and went back to sleep. Five minutes later, CNN was back on. But there was no blather. There were live shots of the World Trade Center's North Tower on fire. Strangely enough, I wasn't worried. I figured that a plane landing at JFK or Laguardia had miscalculated. I knew that something similar had happened at the Empire State Building in 1945. No crisis. I got up, and began getting dressed.

9 AM came. I was going to be a few minutes late for work, but not much, certainly forgiveable. I'd just say I was watching the news. I had the TV turned so I could watch it from the bathroom. Just as I finished combing my hair, I heard the newscasters gasp. I turned just in time to see the South Tower erupt into a massive fireball.

It suddenly hit me. This was no accident. There are no coincidences this big. This was deliberate. We are at war.

I turned off the TV and left for work. As I shut the door, I grabbed the morning paper from my doormat. The photos and stories were of standard political fights and local news. It was the last time I would ever see the age of "normalcy" that I had grown up in, that everyone around me believed would continue forever.

I shoved the paper in my bag and headed downstairs.

(More to come. Read my paper here.)

The falling man.

The Obligatory Introduction (A.K.A. F.A.Q.)

Q: Who are you?
A: Thief is a mysterious character. Little is known of his origins, not even his real name, except that he is most likely of Elvish descent. He is more than a mere brigand, he is skilled in the arts of deception, confusion, and misdirection, and is able to talk himself out of most any situation, using charm, stealth, and guile to become anyone he wishes. Thief’s Den is rumored to lie on the banks of the North Channel, and it is said that that Thief’s dream is to return to his ancestral homeland and serve as one of His Elven Majesty’s Royal LawNinja…

Q: No, really. Who are you?
If you must know…
I am originally from one of the big square states out west, but a southerner by heritage. I spent most of my childhood and my teenage years in the northeast. An unnatural love of history, the news and current events led me, via Model United Nations, to a well-respected Mid-Atlantic college, where I studied International Relations. Now, having less than stellar academic credentials, I find myself in Washington, DC, working on the low end of this city’s vast legal community, hoping to build up enough wasta (Arabic for “connections”) to make it into a good law school and then public service, though not necessarily in that order.

Other things about me:
– I come from a military family, and I know a thing or two about several national security-type things: defense, intelligence, terrorism, criminal/constitutional law, computer security… the really important (and cool) stuff.
– I went to a public elementary school and a private high school. Guess what I thought of each one?
– I speak Spanish fairly well, and I just started learning Arabic.
– I love computers and most anything technological, though I couldn’t program or do math to save my life.
– I read a LOT of books – sometimes three or four at once. I read mostly non-fiction and current event-type books, but I enjoy the works of Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury, Brian Jacques, and J.K. Rowling.
– I used to write poetry, but it’s something I haven’t done since high school. My favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings , and Robert Burns.
– I have really weird taste in music. My WinAmp playlist has been coming up today with the Eagles, Noel Gallagher, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Dave Matthews Band, The Kingston Trio, Moby, Cake, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pink Floyd, Good Charlotte, Elbow, Jamiroquai, The Beastie Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, Fatboy Slim, Ben Folds Five, U2, Dire Straits, They Might Be Giants, Dilated Peoples, Jimi Hendrix, Coldplay and Vertical Horizon.
– I don’t envy the rich. I don’t pity the poor. I own a gun. I think the Constitution means exactly what it says. And I think people who whine about the state of the world and don’t vote are the biggest idiots out there.
– I don’t hate anyone because of their race, religion, gender, disability, or political views. I do hate people who think that their view is the only valid one out there and attempt to force it on everyone else, either by law or violence.

Q: Why not just come out and say who you are?
A: If you live in Washington, DC, long enough, or have any interest in politics, you will find that a lot of people confuse ideas and actions with the people who advocate them, something known as the ad hominem fallacy, or more tongue-in-cheek, the reducto ad hitlerum (Hitler supported X, Hitler was a bad man, therefore X is bad too.) Yes, I am a real person, with real political views and opinions, many of which will be fairly obvious. I make no apologies for these views. But I think ideas should rise and fall on their own merits, not those of the person proposing or supporting them. In the rest of the world, feel free to take pot shots at the messenger. But here, either deal with the message itself or go home. Here in the Den, the person is irrelevant. Only ideas and actions matter. (Note that I consider myself bound by these rules too. If I step out of line, let me have it. That’s the advantage of the blogosphere… we all keep each other honest.)

Q: Your e-mail address doesn't work!
A: I hate spam. So I did something to fool those idiots who can only make money off the stupidest .1% of the internet. Just replace the AT in my e-mail address with an "@" sign. And if you know a spammer, beat them senseless for me. And if you are a spammer, please send me your name and snailmail address....it's because you've won a prize. Yeah, that's it. A prize. A really cool prize.

Q: Who are all these little people on your site?
They are the characters of Final Fantasy, originally made for the NES by Square. This was the first video game I seriously played, and for its time, it was the best of the best. The plot is basic: the four elements that govern the world have gone haywire, and it is up to your four “Light Warriors” to find the cause. Within the game itself, Thief is one of your choices. He’s not as strong as the Fighter or Black Belt, and he can’t use magic like the Mages. But he makes up for it by being fast, which allows him to dodge attacks and get your party out of danger. The other inspiration for the use of FF1 is 8-Bit Theater, an incredibly funny web comic by Brian Clevinger, chronicling the journey of the Light Warriors... though I don’t remember this in the game. Or this. Anyway, new strips come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Check it out.

Q: Isn’t that stealing?
A: No, it’s called fair use. But if anyone from Square reads this, realize this is a tribute to the best RPG of its time.

Q: Why Thief? Black Mage is so much cooler!
A: A few reasons. One, Black Mage (at least this Black Mage) is simply evil, what with all those “stabbity urges” and such. Thief, however, is much more subtle. He doesn’t need to use violence; he can just talk you out of your most valuable posessions. When you think about it, that’s a pretty good metaphor for being a lawyer. And since I want to go to law school eventually… well, it just seemed to fit.

Q: Why don’t your comment boxes work?
They should now, but please note something important if you want to comment.

Q: Can I cuss if I make a comment?
A: Sure. Most people swear all the time. Even Supreme Court Justices. But don’t go overboard like this guy. There is an art to cursing: If you’re going to use a filthy word, make it mean something.

Q: How did you make this site?
A: Very, very slowly. REALLY slowly. And while learning to master templates and cascading style sheets on the fly. The main page here and the archives are done with Moveable Type, which is a damn good piece of software, it’s free, and it doesn’t eat posts like Blogger. I sketched out the rough layout of the site in Microsoft Front Page, made the banners and link graphics with MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop, and uploaded it all with CuteFTP. And rest assured, as I learn more about blogging, I will make changes!

Q: Something on your site offends me. Take it down now!
A: No. I have the right, as a commentator, but more fundamentally, as an American, to say whatever I want, to hold whatever opinions I see fit, and to express them any way I want to. You, on the other hand, have no right not to be offended. (Note, too, that this site resides on a U.S. Based server, so no foreign “hate speech” laws apply here... just the simple freedom of the 1st Amendment.) But, if you are so offended by something I put on my site, write me a note about it pursuant to the above rules, and if it is substantive, I will post it. I will, however, reserve the right to make my own comments about your comments. The proper response to offensive speech is not suppression of that speech. It is more speech. After all, this country wouldn’t be here if a couple of rogues back in 1776 didn’t “offend” someone…

Q: You made (grammatical error).
A: I don’t care. The people who speak a language every day determine its rules, not a bunch of fat-headed academics in tweed coats. If the people like a new word, or find a certain way of speaking better than what’s in Warriner’s, they’re going to use it.

Q: Can I link to your site?
A: Sure!

Q: Will you link to my site?
A: If you’ve got something to say, and you say it well, welcome aboard!

Q: Am I Hot or Not?
A: If you have to ask, you probably already know the answer.

Anything I missed, give me a shout out.

The Beginning...

And so, the journey begins...