From the So Many Blogs/So Little Time department:

Silflay Hraka, whom I should both read and link to more often, writes:

I decided I wasn't a prejudiced bastard because at the end of last summer none of those thoughts would have entered my head. They were put there by Muslims in the year that followed, by the ones who murdered and the ones who could not condemn those murders without saying "Yes, but..". That will be the lasting legacy of the suicide bombers, of the 9/11 terrorists and those who waffle in the face of terrorism when it is directed against Jews. Not a Palestinian homeland, not the destruction of Israel, nor the departure of Western troops from the land of their holy places. Certainly it won't be the restoration of the Caliphate, or any of Al-Qaeda's other fevered dreams.

Their legacy will be to tar their religion with a smear of lunacy, distilled from the blood of innocents. From now on, many people, in all probability most people, will not look at a Muslim family without thinking of explosions, of terror and death, of the actions that might be taken to protect their loved ones in the seconds before the shrapnel arrives.

True. And more than a little sad.

 
From The Spectator comes somthing I had not considered:

[Just prior to the onset of Gulf War I] Mr Secretary Baker issued a warning to Saddam. There were thresholds which he must not cross; if he did, he must expect a terrible retaliation. [As I recall, the phrase was "retaliation of biblical proportions". An excellent choice of words, which had precisely the effect intended. - CG] If it was necessary to issue a nuclear threat to Saddam then, it is even more necessary to remove his nuclear threat now. Back then, Jim Baker said what he did in order to ensure that Israel would not use nuclear weapons against Iraq, and that any such escalation would have been a solely American responsibility. If it now became clear to the Israelis that the Americans were giving up the attempt to defang Saddam, they would get ready to do the job. If there were no second war between the US and Iraq, there would still be a war, between Israel and Iraq, almost certainly involving nuclear weapons.

I'm not sure that I agree that the reason Baker said what he did was to prevent Israeli use of nuclear weapons (as opposed to preventing any Israeli retaliation for the use of Scuds), but that is largely irrelevant. Baker said what he said, and his statement had the effect that it had.

Nor does the Spectator give any evidence or make any argument in support of the proposition that Israel will make war if the US does not. The Israelis did take out Saddam's nuclear reactor years ago, in a move obviously intended to prevent or delay his development of nuclear weapons. I have little doubt that, if again faced with the prospect of being joined in the nuclear club by Saddam, Israel would do something about it. The real question is not whether Israel would act but what they would do.

I confess that, other than airstrikes to (again) eliminate Saddam's nuclear capability, I don't see many Israeli options. They have fearsome armed forces, but look at a map (.pdf format/Adobe required). An Israeli invasion of Iraq (which which its shares no borders) must go through either Syria or Jordan. Either route requires that Israel first defeat the armed forces in its way. While I am sure that Israel would not have any qualms about (and probably not much difficulty in) taking out Syria, there is a thirty year history of peace and (relatively speaking) good relations with Jordan to consider. Additionally, having defeated Syria and/or Jordan and cleared the way to Iraq, Israel would then be faced with supply lines stretching through 200 plus miles of hostile territory before they could take an inch of Iraqi territory. My guess is that you would have to add another hundred miles or so before the Israeli expedition gets anywhere near any target worth taking within Iraq.

And once they get there (where ever "there" is) and topple Saddam, what would Israel do? Occupy and rebuild Iraq as a liberal democracy? That would take years, if not decades, that are simply not available to Israel economically or diplomatically. Withdraw and leave chaos in their wake (even granting that chaos would be preferable to a nuclear Saddam)? To my nonmilitary eye, this just doesn't look feasible, either to start or to finish.

That leaves limited preemptive conventional airstrikes, preemptive nuclear strikes and covert destabilization as the only options. And preemptive nuclear war is really only an option in theory. I am fairly sure that Israel would lose Bush as a supporter and de facto ally if it used nuclear weapons except in retaliation for the prior use of nuclear weapons. Bush publicly and severely chastized the IDF for rocketing a house with a few kids (as well as an avowed, dedicated and resourceful enemy) in it in Gaza. How could he even tacitly support the use of nuclear weapons without a huge provocation?

All in all, I would say that Israel's options are extremely limited. Therefore, the Spectator's argument that Israel would presumably strike if we don't does not constitute a very strong justification for our strike.

Don't get me wrong. I am not among those who would wait for Saddam to get one or more nuclear weapons before taking him out. I consider waiting for Saddam to be able to kill hundreds of thousands (possibly on US soil) when you can do it now without incurring that risk to be the height of stupidity. But Israel's possible or probable reaction to a refusal on the part of the US to act is simply not a justification for US action.

 
Rand Simberg is discussing the difference between agreeing with the result of a political or judicial decision and agreeing with the method used to arrive at that decision.

By my view, when the Supremes make a decision that I dislike, but is constitutionally correct, the appropriate response is not to be angry at them, and to start an impeachment drive, or to lobby my senators to put someone on the Court who will make decisions more compatible with my desires (i.e., to rig the process to give me the result I want), but rather, to amend the document whence the decision came.

Unfortunately, it's easier to play politics and bork judges than it is to amend the founding document, so that's what politicians do, and because the public rarely makes the distinction, they get away with it.

No argument here.

But in passing, he discusses the electoral college. He agrees with the concept, but wants to increase the “resolution” by assigning electors by congressional district (as they presently are in Maine and Nebraska) instead of by state (as they are in the other forty eight states).

There, I disagree.

In 2000, Al Gore instituted the first post election dispute in a presidential campaign in the history of our nation. Not even Nixon (in 1960) was stupid and/or selfish enough to do what Gore did. The Florida debacle was bad enough, and that only took about six weeks and about thirty trips to various courthouses. We are still feeling the effects of Gore's post election tantrum. Fortunately, a split between the popular vote and the electoral college results only seems to happen once every one hundred years or so. Imagine, if you will, the same nightmare re-re-recount scenario occurring in every close congressional district after literally every nationwide election. In a close election I don’t think we would have a president until the midterm elections rolled around. And, in terms of the popular vote, most modern presidential elections are quite close (a couple of percentage points difference). A difference of as much as eight or ten percent is considered a landslide.

Elections are human enterprises. We have to expect that they will not be perfect and that the participants will always attempt to “game” the system. There is absolutely nothing wrong with tailoring your campaign strategy to account for the effects of the electoral college. It exists for that very purpose. It was intended to force candidates to campaign outside the major population centers in order to win. It succeeds in accomplishing that purpose because candidates game the system by tailoring their campaigns to achieve victory in the electoral college.

On the other hand, since humans are involved, we should also expect some people to attempt to subvert the system. All we can do is make the system harder subvert and make it easier to discover and either prevent or correct the subversion. I think the electoral college achieves both of those objectives, to a greater degree under predominant the winner take all system and to a lesser degree under the district by district scheme now in effect in Maine and Nebraska and advocated by Mr. Simberg.

The primary effect of the electoral college is to force candidates to campaign outside of the main population centers of the nation. For more than two hundred years, it has performed as advertised. In addition, the electoral college completely eliminates the incentive to cheat in the state or states where the candidate is strongest. This is precisely where cheating would be easiest and least detectable, and therefore most likely. (Your guy is going to win there anyway and get all the state’s electoral votes. There is no need to cheat.) This would not be the case under the Maine-Nebraska scheme.

Finally, under the winner take all system, the ballot box stuffers in closer states must operate on a large scale to influence statewide results. This makes detection easier and therefore more likely. The same effect is not achieved under the Maine-Nebraska district by district scheme, since a series of districts could be swung with widely scattered efforts involving fewer fraudulent votes.

The Founders were proud of the electoral college. They had reason to be. It ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.

 
Some food for thought via Drudge.

I am not an apologist for the House of Saud. But one of their spokesmen has pointed out that:

Osama bin Laden “purposefully chose Saudis in order to give this operation a Saudi face and drive a wedge between us and America,” Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to the Saudi Government and a key figure in the PR drive, said. “And you know what? He almost succeeded.”

The first part of that statement, that bin Laden chose the nationality of his "soldiers" and that the choice was not random, struck me as true. And if that is the case, then the second part, that his choice was a deliberate attempt to foster ill will between the Saudis and the US, would probably also be true.

There are plenty of things about Saudi occupied Arabia that repel me, from their treatment of women to exporting Wahhabism to funding extremists in lots of places. And that list is far from complete. But the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks were Saudis appears less egregious in light of the obvious (and much overlooked) fact that they were hand picked by a madman with a major beef with both the US and the House of Saud.

I am quite sure that any country in the world with a population of more than, say, a few hundred thousand, will contain 15 people who can be convinced to attack the US. That is especially true if most of them are not informed that their return from the war has not been arranged.

The last part of the PR flack's statement, that bin Laden "almost succeeded" is wishful thinking. The US, outside the beltway, is good and pissed at the Saudis, and that anger is just not going away. They can mount a PR offensive, giving away bin Salman's horse (the daughter will take the beast, if no one else wants it, even though she's not really into thoroughbreds) and dumping a bunch of money on charities or victims, but the relationship between the Saudis and the US has taken a serious hit from which it will not recover anytime soon.

It would certainly recover sooner if the Saudis took the advice of Scott Koenig over at Indepundit:

1. Stop funding terrorist groups. This includes Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, etc.

2. Shut down the terrorist fund-raising and recruiting operations in your country.

3. Arrest every al-Qaeda operative in your country. Don't pretend you don't know who they are, you aren't fooling anyone.

4. Hand over anyone responsible for financing, planning, or supporting the Tragic Tuesday attacks to American authorities.

5. Apologize to the American people for not doing enough to combat terrorism.

6. Pay restitution to the families of the victims of terrorism. Don't try to link these payments to changes in American foreign policy.

7. Stop attempting to spread your hateful brand of Wahhabism throughout the Islamic world. You can't pretend to be our friends at the same time that you teach children to despise us -- we're not stupid.

8. Allow American citizens being held against their will by their Saudi relatives to return to the United States.

9. Stop oppressing your people. Beating women in public for allowing a lock of hair to slip from their veils does nothing for your image in the international community. Neither does forcing little girls to die in a burning school because they aren't properly dressed to venture onto a public street.

10. Stop pretending that Iraq isn't a threat to your security. Imagine what might happen if we took you seriously.

I'd even let them off the hook for numbers 5 and 6 if they honestly did the rest.

I don't think any apology would be accepted, and I'm none too sure that its a good idea to give restitution to the victims of an act of war. And let's be clear about this. The 9/11 attacks were acts of war. Not political protest. Not murder. War. The fact that war is being waged on us by an organization other than a full fledged nation-state does not make it something other than war.

It's not that I don't sympathize with the victims. I do. And its not that I think that they've suffered a loss which can be neither recompensed nor mitigated. I don't. But I think that extracting restitution for victims of an act of war will eventually result in imposing on the loser of a war the same treatment Germany got at the end of WWI, if not now, then at some point in the future. And conventional wisdom holds that the treatment accorded a defeated Germany in the Treaty of Versailles led almost directly to WWII.

I have a great deal of respect for wisdom which survives long enough to become conventional. There is frequently a reason for that longevity.

 
Congratulations to whoever it was from mediaone.net who visited this site at 6:39 pm this evening after googling "the puppy-oil cannon". You were visitor number 2500. Thanks for visiting, even if wasn't to read something I wrote.

 
Damn. Two quotable nuggets in one day. First, James Lileks provides "le mope juste", and now the Captain writes about "leveraging the flaws of the flesh".

If this is as good as it gets, I can die a happy man.

 
James Lileks has a new screed up, which demonstrates his mastery of the art of fisking. I immediately stole a phrase for my blog description. I can't excerpt from the screed for your benefit because there is no single portion which is better, more pithy, or more succinct than the rest. It's all that good. Go read it. Now. GO!

 
Join the pre-Fisking activities at Instapundit. Fun for all.

 
I have been granted the boon of a new permalink on Beth's Online Archives, but I can't email her to say thank you. Does anybody out there have her address?

 
Via the inestimable Moira Breen who seems (delightfully) to have recovered from shoulder surgery:

Terry Oglesby reports on a professional seminar he attended. The seminar included a presentation by the engineering firm which initially designed the WTC and which was also involved in the renovations which followed the 1993 bombing. That presentation included a video tape of a prior slide show and lecture.

... [The tape] ... went straight to his question and answer session at the end, which had a few technical questions, and then one more:

[Off camera-almost inaudible] ‘Is there anything you wish you had been able to do differently?’

He paused.

“I wish,” he paused again.

Choking on his words, he slowly and quietly said, “I wish…I could have…made it stand up.”

Every once in a while, someone will say something, or I will read something, to which I have an extremely strong emotional reaction. Terry Oglesby's description of the anguish of the designers of the WTC turns out to have been one of those things.

Somehow, I never see it coming. It always takes me by surprise.

I am not conceited enough to think that my emotional sore spot from 9/11 is universally shared, but its a very safe bet that its pretty widespread in the US. Olglesby reports that he and others seeing that video shared my reaction. The only analogous event in US history that I can think of is Pearl Harbor. Americans who woke up on December 8, 1941 to discover that their nation had been attacked reacted by causing a "regime change" in Japan. We dismantled it and rebuilt it. Our reaction to the Japanese attack necessitated our involvement in the war in Europe. Germany reacted to our declaration of war on its ally, Japan, by declaring war on the US. We returned the favor by declaring war on Germany and gave it the same treatment: dismantling followed by rebuilding.

Please note that dismantling preceded rebuilding, in both cases. And please also note that the rebuilding involved more than simply repairing bombed out buildings, roads and rail lines. We dismantled the very cultures of our former enemies, and rebuilt those cultures to our own taste and pretty much in our own image. I believe that the fact that both German and Japanese culture now bears a decidedly Western face (compared to what existed in each nation prior to the war) has been the single most important factor in preventing a recurrence of attempted world domination by either of those two nations. Was that an example of cultural imperialism? Sure. I don't care. It worked.

I think that our course of action here should be pretty much the same: dismantle our attacker and rebuild it in a manner which makes it unlikely that they will repeat their monumentally barbaric act. Dismantle first, then rebuild. And in rebuilding, we must incorporate the Western value of tolerance, at the very least. Cultural imperialism? Yup. Too bad. You'll get no sympathy from me.

This time, the task we face is more complex, in that we are not being confronted by a traditional nation-state with identifiable borders. That means we must take some care to identify what it is we are dismantling and rebuilding.

The US has been attacked by the adherents of a culture:

Which believes that it and only it has all of the answers to every possible problem faced by man;
Which believes that no adherents of any other culture have any right to exist, much less participate in that other culture; and
Which is completely unrestrained in its choice of weapons, targets or methods of attack.

That culture claims to be a religion, Islam. I simply don't care whether or not its a religion. I don't care whether other adherents of Islam hold the same beliefs. It cannot be seriously disputed that our attackers profess to hold those beliefs, and that is enough to justify dismantling that culture, regardless of whether it calls itself a religion.

Any religion which authorizes and even directs its adherents to kill me because I don't share its beliefs is simply unacceptable to me and cannot be allowed to continue. Period. I will not be tolerant of a belief system which refuses to be tolerant of me. Any punishment which I incur by reason of my faulty beliefs must await my (unaccelerated) entry into the next world, if such exists. Anyone who entertains any debate at all on this point is a suicidal fool. If and when that religion changes to the point where it no longer claims that I cannot be permitted to believe as I chose, then I will not oppose it in any manner. Until that time, however, that culture is what we must dismantle.

Where ever and when ever we find it.

Should we constrain ourselves in our choices of weapons, targets or methods of attack? No. There are two reasons for that. First, our adversary uses every weapon available to it and refuses to limit its attacks to targets which would impede our ability to retaliate, so I see no reason why we should not make a similar decision. Second, I have no desire to prosecute this conflict under the Marquis of Queensbury rules. We neither sought nor provoked this conflict. We should prevail as quickly and as cheaply (in terms of the number of our own lives expended) as possible. I cannot condone the death of one American for the purpose of being "fair". Screw fair. Fair went out the window along with the desperate people jumping from the upper floors of the WTC.

Our choice of weapons, targets and methods should be dictated by our goals and by our desire to prevail with the lowest possible expenditure of the lives of our own citizens. All other considerations are secondary, at best. Are we worried about civilian casualties? Our own, certainly. Our adversary's, yes, but only to the extent that incurring them will impede our ability to achieve the goal of dismantling and later rebuilding the culture of our attackers. Is this unfair to the innocents who will die? Yes. Is it somehow fairer that Americans should do the dying? No. A war has been thrust on us through no choice of our own. War is not fair. If war ever was fair, it stopped being fair a long time ago.

You want fair? Here's fair:

Innocent civilians with our adversaries known to be scattered and hiding among them are not innocent unless and until they isolate and identify the terrorists and allow us to attack. They are in a far better position to know of the existence and location of these people than we are. If and when they isolate and identify our adversaries, and allow us to attack, the civilians are more than innocent. They are allies. We are being forced to choose sides in this war. There is no reason to allow others to remain neutral, if by doing so they thereby assist our adversary, intentionally or otherwise.

 
I'm back. For those faithful few who read this space, I apologize for my unexplained absence for the last few days. Unlike some other bloggers, I didn't think that announcing my impending absence to the world would be a particularly good idea. So I just shut my mouth and left.

I spent few days bringing my older child to college. Now there is something that can make you feel old.

My wife, my daughter and I packed up the (somewhat less than wholly trustworthy) Subaru on Wednesday and my daughter and I left for Kentucky, with a layover in Charleston, W. Va. I flew back yesterday (on which more later).

Long trip. Lots of good conversation. Good advice given. Some of that was actually received. (I can never tell if she is taking my wise words to heart when the response is "I know, I know.") When your daughter is 18, you don't get to play the role of father very often. When I get the chance, I play it to the hilt.

And starting college hasn't changed that much in the 30 years since I did it. The biggest difference is to be found at the bookstore. When I went to school, getting your books was a free for all. You fought your way to the shelf and, upon discovering that the text you needed was not there, you grabbed the Calc text from the greedy paws of some undeserving classmate and disappeared into the crowd with your prize. Use of firearms was officially frowned upon, but optional.

UKy has a much more civilized and efficient system: After registering for classes over the summer, you tell the bookstore what classes you have. They assemble the books and have them waiting for you when you arrive in the fall. No fuss, no muss. After unloading the car and moving into the dorm, we wandered over to the bookstore and picked up the books. It took five minutes, four of which were spent figuring out that there was not enough money in the on campus debit account to pay for same and writing out a check.

There are other differences. For example, in the 70's I did not spend a half day running around looking for a barn to house the bribe I had received upon gaining admission to college. We saw two barns: One was expensive, available, and unnacceptable to the daughter, the other was expensive, more than acceptable to the daughter and currently unavailable. To be fair, the acceptable one was less expensive than the unacceptable one (though not enough less expensive in my opinion). Result of search: The bribe stays where it is (an hour and a half from campus) for now, and the search continues with help from the people with the good barn (and they were very nice people, despite their very real and very lofty position in the world of dressage). If anyone out there knows of a dressage barn within a relatively short drive of the UKy Lexington campus with full board, I'd appreciate a holler.

The flight back: Lucky me, I was randomly selected for the full security treatment. The guy doing the search inquired about what I thought of the process. I told him I thought it was both intrusive and useless to inspect the shoes and carry on luggage of a middle aged, overweight lawyer from New Jersey while ignoring the very real demographic data we have concerning hijackers/terrorists. I was surprised that he agreed completely. He seemed to chafe at the inability to "profile" in order to reduce the intrusions and make what intrusions are necessary more effective (ie: use what data we have accumulated to narrow the scope of the search). I mentioned that I had read that the screening process still seemed to miss the vast majority of all prohibited items. That one, he very politely disputed. He said that his airport had one of the worst records in the country for missing such things because the FAA intentionally tested people with only a few days experience on the job. Well, I can see his point, but I can also see the FAA's. Security is only as strong as its weakest point, so you test the weak points. Additionally, I would venture to guess that there will be a lot of turnover in this job, so having inexperienced people on the line will be a continuous problem.

So, I avoided detention without trial and arrived back in New Jersey feeling crotchety because my daughter is old enough to attend college. I spent the evening catching up on my reading (both professional and blogging). And now I have to go to a meeting. Yeah, a meeting on Sunday. Lawyers are always surprising you, aren't they?

 
Via Damian Penny:

Moammar Gaddafi is the new chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission.

And Damian has art.

Why do I think that Gaddafi looks like Corporal Klinger in drag?

 
Via VodkaPundit, who, judging by this post, is about to discover what wedded bliss is all about:
The Puppy Oil Cannon.

 
This is interesting. It seems that someone has invaded Iraq.

Two people were injured when four or five members of a previously unknown Iraqi opposition group occupied the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin and took hostages, German police said Tuesday. The Iraqi ambassador was believed to be among the hostages, a police spokesman said.

“IRAQI OPPOSITION members tried to force their way into the embassy and then there were shots from the embassy,” a police spokesman said.

A statement in the name of the group, which called itself the Democratic Iraqi Opposition of Germany, announced that “we are taking over the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin and thereby take the first step toward the liberation of our beloved fatherland.”

“Our action is peaceful and limited in time,” said the statement received by The Associated Press.

There are a number of confusing contradictions in that story.

Opposition members tried to force their way in? That they failed is implied, since a successful attempt would be reported as "Opposition members forced their way in..." And, of course, if they failed, the first sentence is simply wrong in its assertion that the embassy was in fact occupied. Further, if they failed to force their way in to the embassy, how did they take hostages?

The action is described by MSNBC as including hostage taking, but described by the perpetrators as peaceful.

And I cannot resist reporting my vision of President Bush saying to his father, "Honest, Dad, it wasn't me! I swear."

UPDATE: And it is also impossible to resist reporting that I beat the ever alert Professor by a total of 13 minutes.

 
SUSAN SARANDON UPDATE: I commented earlier on the stupidity of Sarandon's remarks that a positive result of the 9/11 attacks is that America now has something in common with the rest of the world and that Enland and Ireland are lucky to to know what it is like to suffer from terrorist violence.

I said I hoped I never got that lucky.

Apparently Sarandon doesn't want herself or her family to get lucky either. From The Telegraph:

She would not take [the play about 9/11 currently being shown at a festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, to mixed reviews] to the Middle East. "I do work for Unicef but I don't know if I want to go to the Middle East. It's so violent and I've got a family."

 
The Professor is in trouble. Lynn B has confessed that she is the blogchild of Meryl Yourish.

And now Lynn wants an allowance.

This concept will do great violence to the budget at Instapundit Manor.

Cognocentric hereby formally declares that it is incapable of siring any blogchildren. And I have proof.

 
Via Clueless:

The Albuquerque Tribune reports that the

"president of a counterterrorism consulting firm has been arrested after federal agents raided his Roswell compound and took missiles, court records show...

According to the complaint, the company also is involved in tactical entries of aircraft, entries involving explosives.

Federal agents discovered small missiles in 49 explosives crates, court records show. There were 48 missiles in each crate inspected, according to the complaint...

The warheads ... cost $23,040, according to the complaint.

For my wife the math teacher:

49 crates, containing 48 warheads each, and each warhead costs $23,040.

48 x 49 x $23,040 = $54,190,080

$54.2 million. And that doesn't count the two tons (yes, tons) of explosives ATF also found. The type of explosive found is not identified in the story. To be fair, the report is not crystal clear as to whether the cost is $23K per warhead or $23K per crate. It certainly appears to be $23K per warhead, but that seems high to me for some reason. Even at $23,040 per crate, you're still talking about more than $1million, again, not counting the explosives.

Who got paid? Where did the money come from. Why did the manufacturer (or whoever sold him this stuff) deliver it to him if he didn't have the appropriate permits? And did that same manufacturer (or whoever) sell anything to anyone else without the proper permits?

This investigation had better not stop with this guy and his company.

 
More than a decade ago, one Wallace Fugate killed his ex-wife. Apparently, there was never any question that he killed her, just the circumstances under which he did so. Georgia arrested him, provided him with two lawyers, and tried him. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

Fugate was executed this past week after years of appeals and last minute stays. His current lawyer, Stephen Bright, issued a statement (which you can read in its entirety here), the gist of which was that this execution was not a result of the fact that he committed murder, it was a result of a seriously deficient legal system.

[A] Superior Court judge, assigned two court-appointed lawyers who represented him no better than a couple of plumbers would have.

His death penalty trial lasted a mere two days- much shorter than many trials for petty crimes. The trial of Sidney Dorsey went on for six weeks and the State was not even seeking the death penalty.

Wallace Fugate’s sentencing hearing lasted just 27 minutes, about the length of a TV sitcom. But this was not a comedy. It was a tragic farce. No person would buy a house or a car based on a 27-minute presentation, but a jury sentenced Wallace Fugate to death on such a presentation.

I came across the statement on Talk Left. Because the statement did contain a word about the crime of which Fugate was convicted, I did a google search and found that Fugate was accused and convicted of murdering his ex-wife by shooting her in the head at close range in the presence of their 15 year old son. According to Online Athens:

[T]he testimony of Fugate's son was damning to Fugate at trial. Mark Fugate said his father chased him around the house with a gun before dragging Pattie Fugate outside by her hair and shooting her in the forehead.

Bright doesn't think that those facts are relevant to the application of the death penalty. We know this because he refused to include them in his statement. The only relevant facts are that Fugate had a couple of plumbers for lawyers and neither the trial nor the sentencing hearing took very long. Case closed.

That's all I know about the entire case. I am not commenting on whether the death penalty was appropriately applied in this case. I am commenting on Stephen Bright's statement following Fugate's execution.

Lawyers are supposed to present one side of the case when representing a client. In issuing his statement after Fugate's execution, however, Bright was not representing Fugate. He couldn't have been representing Fugate. Fugate was dead, and that death terminated the lawyer/client relationship.

Bright was acting on his own. He had no client. He was criticizing Georgia's legal system as a private citizen. It is certainly his right to do so, but his argument would be far more convincing if he gave us all the facts. In the age of the Internet, it is ridiculously simple to look those up, so anyone trying to convince me had better deal with them. Because the son's testimony was "damning",
Bright needed (and failed) to deal with it. Was the testimony false? What facts indicate that it was false? Should the testimony not have been admitted into evidence? Was there evidence that was kept away from the jury that would have indicated that Fugate's son was lying (or just wrong)? I don't know. I don't know because Stephen Bright didn't tell me

Could I go look those facts up, just as I did to discover the testimony of Fugate's son? Sure. But I'm not the one trying to convince people that Fugate should not have been executed and that the decision to do so was a result of a "farce". Stephen Bright is. Until he deals with all the facts in the case, both pro and con, Bright's attempts to convince me will fail.

 
Via Tim Blair.

Susan Sarandon on 9/11:

The actress said one of the positive results of the September 11 attacks was that it gave America something in common with other countries who have fallen prey to terrorism.

"Afterwards, I said to my kids: 'We've joined the rest of the world now'," she said.

"You're so lucky in Ireland, England and Spain. Everyone there already knows what it's like to have inexplicable terrorist violence."

God damn, what a stupid thing to say. This came out of the mouth of an actress who is supposedly trained to discern and empathize with the emotions of others?

I live within sight of the WTC. One of the reasons we bought this house was the view of the NYC skyline. The view from my window gave me a great deal of pleasure.

On 9/11 I was alerted to the attack by a friend and colleague to whom I was talking on the phone. I went to the window and watched. From the safety of my living room far removed from the scene, I saw the antenna atop One WTC disappear as the building collapsed. As a result, I will never take the same pleasure in the view from my window again. Amazingly, that was the only personal loss I suffered on 9/11, and for that I consider myself fortunate. But the "loss" I feel every time I look at the altered NYC skyline is completely and utterly insignificant in comparson to the losses borne by dead and their familes. I think they would disagree that everyone now knows "what it's like to have inexplicable terrorist violence."

And not just the dead at the Pentagon and the WTC and their families. The causalties of any terror attack anywhere (and those closest to them) bear the same unique burden. The dead know nothing. But their families know what its like. I don't, and neither do you, Ms. Sarandon.

And I don't think they consider themselves lucky.

I sure as hell hope I never get that lucky.

 
Aha! Through the magic of actually reading the code in the polygeek test I took and posted earlier, I have learned how to post an image here. And therefore I can show you Susanna Cornett's photo.



Note: Photograph used by permission; you may link but not duplicate or use on another site without permission.

Except that when I posted the photo, the geek test results, along with my deathless prose from all of my other posts, was moved so far to the right as to be off the page. In fixing that problem, it was easier just to delete the geek test results. If anyone missed it and cares, I am 46% geek.

But the recessive geek in me can now post photos!

 
The high point to date of my brief blogging career came when Glenn Reynolds linked to this post on Brad de Long's vision of the steps on the road from liberal to neoconservative. Now I come to find out that Mr. de Long himself has taken notice of the Power of Cognition. He agrees with my comments concerning the recitation of the Gettysburg Address on the observation of the first anniversary of 9/11.

All right, all right, I hear you (yes, both of you). The man's politics are not to my liking, but no one's perfect. Can't fault his taste in classic speeches. His site is pretty good, too, since he is not afraid to poke a little fun at himself.

 
I am cheap. Pennies quail when I enter a room, such is my reputation for pinching. I am certainly cheap enough to not want to pay for a server and all the other stuff it would take to maintain this site myself. For my purposes, Blogger is perfect.

Except I can't post graphics. Normally, I just write. No pictures, no graphs, just thoughts, occasionally expressed in whole sentences.

There are times, however, when I long to post a picture. This is one of them. Susanna Cornett, over at Cut on the Bias, has a picture that the world should see, and I can't post it here.

The price one pays for being cheap.

 
One of my earliest posts was a disagreement with Steven denBeste concerning the effects of a treaty the terms of which violate the constitution. My only excuse is that I was young and stupid.

OK, my only excuse was that I was stupid.

Today, I again fearlessly venture into the wild to test my wits against that same Titan of the Web. But this time, I'm going to be really smart about it. I'm not going to use my name. Remember, you didn't hear it here first. OK, here we go:

In discussing the deferral of the disagreement in the UN between the EU and the US about immunity from prosecution (in the International Criminal Court) for US peacekeepers, den Beste notes:

[T]he EU has asked that any nation requesting membership in the EU not make ... an agreement with the US [to grant immunity from such prosecution to US peacekeepers] until after the EU comes up with an overall policy on the issue.

He later concludes that [i]f one of these nations [we ask to enter into such an agreement] comes to need our help, ultimately they will have to agree to this no matter what the EU says. Of course, they could always ask the EU to help defend them against armed invasion instead of us, and the EU could deploy its army of bureaucrats from Brussels, using their much-feared ferocious glowering at the invaders.

It is that last phrase that draws my ire. It has been well established that the Krupp FGG-19 is the finest ferocious glower generator made in the world today. These aircraft mounted generators can ferociously glower at high power in a "footprint" seventy meters wide from an altitude above ground of one hundred meters. Once in flight, this remarkable weapon is capable of making the difference not only in any single engagement, but an entire campaign. Test flights over Paris have conclusively demonstrated that the once the glowerers have ferociously glowered at the glowerees for a total of 1.75 ferocious glowers, the will to oppose any threat of violence is reduced by 82.74%, regardless of the nature or source of the threat.

Experiments with the less expensive technology of painting a frowny face on the lower surfaces of an aircraft have also been planned. Those experiments include varying the size and placement of the frowny face and changing the color of the aircraft from grey to both camouflage green and solid pink. Additionally, despite fierce political opposition, enhancements to the existing technology are in the works, including the thermobaric ferocious glowerer, which, experts predict, will be able to ferociously glower around corners and into underground bunkers covered by as much as three inches of course gravel. However, both the planned enhancements and the new trials had to be delayed until a new test range is located. Paris was deemed to no longer be a suitable test range when it was discovered that Jacques Chirac had ceded the Louvre and Versailles to the first pre-teen he saw with a soccer ball after receiving a complaint from an eight year old boy that the neighborhood bully had stolen his ball.

Incredibly, den Beste simply ignores the well known capabilities of this proven and devastating technology. The argumentum no-see-um is no more than a well known debating tactic, the use of which does not measure up to den Beste's usual impeccable standards.

Posted by Anonymous

 
Tim Blair, ozblogger extraordinaire, has learned that there are abnormal women in the world who actually like sex. He claims to have read it in a science journal. He's lying. You know he read about such women in every prepubescent males first "men's" magazine: National Geographic.

 
Where in the world has Osama bin Hidin?

The Osama is dead crowd is apparently gaining converts. On the other hand, someone recently pointed out that radical islamic organizations love to publicize and worship their dead "martyrs" and that a dead Osama would be too good a PR bonanza (for consumption outside the US, of course) for al Qaeda to pass up. And, of course, no body has been found.

My none too certain conclusion (guess, really) is that Osama has been forcibly converted to yak food in or near some cave in Afghanistan. The longer we don't hear from him the more certain I am of that conclusion.

That leaves the question of why we have not been treated to a rendition of "Osama and his Virgins" from the al Qaeda PR machine. Perhaps they aren't sure either, and fear that Osama, if alive, will not have the same reaction as Mark Twain to the greatly exaggerated claims of his death.

 
An interesting question has been posted by Jane Galt:

Is Europe's peace and unification a result of a philosophical evolution, or the fact that we have essentially made Europe an occupied protectorate of the United States for the last 50 years?

I think American military presence in Europe affected European philosophical evolution.

With the exception of the western portion of Germany under the control of the western Allies (US, UK, France) American occupation of Europe was not designed to, nor did it, militarily threaten any western European nation. After the formation of NATO in the face of the threat of Soviet expansionism, even West Germany was no longer threatened by the occupation. To me, that means that, even though the US troops stayed put, the "occupation" ended, at the latest, with the formation of NATO. It simply wasn't an occupation any more. West Germany was our ally in both name and deed. The presence of the US Army in West Germany was no more an occupation of West Germany than the presence of the US Army at Fort Leavenworth was an occupation of Kansas. The presence of US military forces in Europe was no longer aimed at keeping a resurgent Germany from rearming and threatening its neighbors, or keeping the peace among western European nations. The purpose was to deter (and, failing that, to oppose) a Soviet invasion.

Our post war presence on German soil, both initially as occupying conquerors and later as invited allies had the effect of allowing a economically and militarily exhausted western Europe to forego the cost of preparing to fight a third European war, and, to a large degree, similarly avoid the cost of defending Europe against the Soviets. The inevitable result was that West Germany was seen to have been neutralized as a military threat to Britain and France, and all of western Europe therefore ramped up spending on a socialist or quasi socialist political and economic agenda and allowed their respective militaries to deteriorate.

My father once observed that when a practical man fails at something, he tries a different solution to the problem, but that when a idealist fails, he often attempts to impose the same failed solution on more people. The problem with gun control, for example, was not that controlling guns in, say, New York was impossible or impractical, it failed only because other states refused to go along and prohibit the sale of guns to New Yorkers. The idealist's solution is not to try something else in New York, it is to impose the policy which had failed in New York on a larger group of people. The same mindset gives rise, in part, to the present war on drugs. Because the government has utterly failed to control domestic consumption of illegal drugs, it is attempting to impose its anti-drug policy on those foreign nations which are home to the producers of drugs illegal in the US.

I think the same dynamic is at work in Europe, today. The individual members of the EEC could not successfully apply many of their overly idealistic policies within their own borders. Each national economy subject to those policies became less and less efficient and experienced higher and higher unemployment, and each sovereign nation had a strong incentive to make its policies just a little less restrictive than its neighbors. The result in the US would normally be the widespread adoption of minimalist restrictions. Not so in Europe. Unification is an attempt to apply those same failed policies on a continent-wide basis. I think that most of the policies failed not because the policies of a neighboring nation were slightly different, but because the policies themselves are economically unworkable. Changing the number of people or nations to which those policies appy will not change the economic viability of the policies. It will only change the number of the people burdened by them. For example, the drive for equalization of the tax structures of the member nations has become, in fact, a drive to tax all people at the highest rate of any individual member nation, otherwise the citizens of low tax members like Ireland have an "unfair advantage." The low tax regime in Ireland does in fact give it and its citizens an economic advantage over much of the rest of Europe, and it did so before unification. Unification allows those with the self imposed disadvantage to level the playing field by imposing a similar disadvantage on the others.

On an oversimplified basis, the urge to control "just a little bit more" to achieve the desired result is in large part what drives European unification. That desire for control arises from the socialist mindset now widespread in Europe. The socialist mindset is, ironically, enabled by the post war American military presence in Europe.

 
I stumbled across Jerry Pournelle's website some time ago. On Chaos Manor, I found the flame to end all flames. It is vitriolic, hilarious, and, most strikingly, entirely free of vulgarity. It immediately came to mind when I read Adrian Hamilton's proposal for a regime change in the US (via a resurrected Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing).

Now, both of you who read my long winded rants regularly know that I fairly frequently complain about the tenor of political discourse. So I am not free to use the flame on anyone while still retaining the single shred of self respect remaining to me. That does not mean that The Flame is altogether useless. I use it as a measuring device to test Tim Blair's theory that the idiocies of the world are converging. I will know that we have reached the Chomsky Event Horizon when everything in The Flame applies to a single act or post. Fortunately, that has not yet happened.

I could never use any part of The Flame on someone with whom I was attempting to conduct a political dialogue. But that will not be true of everyone, so I have decided that this is too good an opportunity to waste.

And therefore ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the flame of flames:

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, and a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Insensate, blinking calves, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, and a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane.

You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are Trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.

This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away all of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a coherent statement was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a patch of paranoia among a load of babbling was hardly effective...

Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometime forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

Hope this finds you in good health

UPDATE: I forgot to credit Paul Wright at TANSTAAFL for coining the term "Chomsky Event Horizon". That omission (along with my failure to mention that TANSTAAFL is one of the best blog names I've come across) has now been corrected.

 
Ken Layne, whose book I am reading two months later than everyone else in the blogiverse, comments on his own Gore is a loser post:

Please, God, give us a viable candidate in 2004. As it stands, we could be in a major depression and Bush & Cheney could be in jail, and Gore would still lose.

Gore fits right in ... with the pathetic losers the Democrats have nominated my whole voting life (with the exception of Clinton, who I both loathe and sorta like). Mondale, Dukakis, Gore ... when will it end?

As for that prissy jackhole Vinegar Joe Lieberman, I'd rather vote for a snakehead fish.

Unsolicted Poli Sci 101 combined with advice for disaffected Democrats from someone who will probably never be a Democrat:

Your party has been captured by a coalition of single issue interest groups, none of which appeals broadly to the middle class. I am talking about the teachers unions, NARAL, etc. Republicans have their own special interests to contend with, of course, but on a national level, at least, the Republicans seem to be better at restraining their single interest groups in favor of a wider agenda than the Democrats.

There are only two solutions: Recapture the party using more broadly based groups or leave the party to form your own.

You can't succeed doing both simultaneously, and whichever option you choose, you won't succeed if you only do it halfway.

Political opinion is spread along a spectrum and the voting population is distributed along that spectrum in a bell curve. Winning elections involves moving to the center of the spectrum or moving the center towards your position. Democrats have been spectacularly unsuccessful at moving the center towards themselves on the issues of concern to the individual special interest groups now largely in control of the party. The only other option is to move the party towards the center.

That means taking the party back from the Democratic brand of special interests now entrenched in the party. Doing so would probably yield faster and more certain results (in terms of federal and state legislative seats, gubernatorial wins, better Presidential candidates and maybe even actual Presidents). But it will necessarily involve adopting a political philosophy other than racial (and most, if not all, other) preferences, demonizing businessmen and claiming that "We fight for the little guy" while cozying up to your own Hollywood and other bigwigs and attempting to strip the middle class of a large(r) portion of its wealth. [Note to readers and critics of CognoCentric (may you both be many): The foregoing characterizations are just that: characterizations. Democrats would not describe their positions in that manner, but I believe the characterizations to be accurate, even if they are simplified and somewhat insulting.]

Changing those messages will involving seriously pissing off a number of the existing power centers within the party. Yes, you will lose Al Sharpton's support, for example. But in doing so, you will gain far more support from moderates disgusted by Sharpton than you lose. That's what Clinton did. (Remember Sistah Soldier?) Besides, where else is Sharpton going to go? He can either sit out the election and risk a Republican victory or support the Republicans and ensure that victory. The first option will, at best, result in thoroughly alienating the other power centers within the Democratic party which now maintain friendly relations with Sharpton, and the second (which is little more than a theoretical possibility in any event) will do that to an even greater degree. Neither option results in any political benefit to Sharpton. Formation of an effective new party by Sharpton is not a likely outcome, for the reasons discussed below. You can safely and profitably start to diss Sharpton.

Bolting from the party to form a new one is far difficult in this country than it is elsewhere. Of the eight presidential elections in which I have voted, there have been three in which a serious third party candidate ran: Anderson, Perot and Nader. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, none got more than a few percentage points of the popular vote. I am not sure, but I don't think any of those candidates won any electoral votes, either. The only effect they had was to throw the election to whichever of the two other principal candidates was farthest away from the third party candidate on the political spectrum.

It requires a great deal of both persistence and money to form a new political party. Forming a new party will, in the short term, result in little benefit to the party members while also causing a great deal of damage to the old party. Because of the near term damage which would be done to their former party, not many Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) are generally willing to desert their party in favor of creating a new one, preferring to try to influence the existing party.

Since only a centrist party can win elections in the US, no new party with any chance of winning can be formed by a group for which a single issue such as abortion or the environment is so important as to override all other concerns, or even a coalition of such groups. Those groups won't join the new party without a commitment by the party to adopt the appropriate position on THE issue. That, in turn, will result in the new party being effectively branded as extremist on that issue. The people needed to form a new centrist party are the same ones who, in terms of sheer numbers, should be capable of retaking the old party from the special interests in the first place.

So, all in all, I'd say take the damn party back from the Sharptons of the world. If that doesn't work, you can always try to form a new party later, but stay away from Sharpton, Nader and their ilk.

 
The Prof is never going to get his Boeing if he continues to work as the unpaid research assistant for a UPI columnist.

I haven't made up my mind whether that's a good thing.

 
Ahhhhh! That's better. I found the magic bullet to change the green background color of Cognocentric. Finding it was actually pretty easy once I decided to look.

One of the first people kind enough to notice and comment on my blog was Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings, who noted the unfortunate color scheme of the template I was using and suggested that the reasoning behind that use was an affinity for his similarly colored site. Alas, no. While I read Unqualified Offerings fairly religiously, I chose the template because it was the only one on which I could figure out how to put perma links.

And now I have figured out how to lose the color.

You will all soon be within my power! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

 
I have arrived.

The Instapundit bandwith bandwagon is in full swing, as CognoCentric is linked by the master for the first time.

Don't be strangers. Y'All come back anytime, y'heah?

 
Jane Galt is a new addition to the links on your left. She has a series of posts on the proposed war on Iraq, all of which are well written and astute. This one, however, causes me to quibble. She states that the nuclear balance of power from the 1950s to the 1990s, which was based on the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD, which has got to be the most appropriate acronym in the history of mankind) was stable.

Well, yes and no.

It was certainly very stable at the beginning of that time period and remained very stable until the 1970s or early 1980s. At that point, missle guidance technology had advanced to the point where the likelihood of a missile landing within a few feet of its intended target was very high.

There are three points in time when a nuclear power can launch its missiles:

Before the other guy does.

After the other guy does, but before his missiles start exploding overhead.

After the other guy does and after his missiles have already exploded.

The first option is a pre-emptive strike and, as far as I know, was never seriously considered as an option for US policy.

The third option is what our policy was from the beginning of the nuclear age until the mid to late seventies or early eighties (I may be wrong on the time frame, here, but probably not by much). This option really is mutual assured destruction: You can kill our nation, but not our retaliatory capacity. It will survive your strike, it will be launched following your strike and you will not survive that counterstrike. The same message is received from the adversary. Both messages are accepted as true. Ergo, no nuclear strikes.

But for that to work, our counterstrike capacity had to survive a first strike. With the improved guidance systems, this was becoming less and less likely. Fortunately, this was only true of our land based missiles. If our bomber fleet could get off the ground, the individual bombers became immune to nuclear strikes, and only a few of them needed to be able to penetrate Soviet and/or Chinese air defenses to inflict what was assumed to be unacceptable losses on the adversary. The other leg of our nuclear triad, missile submarines, (the boomers of Tom Clancy fame) were relatively immune at sea. The problem in both cases was communications with the "launch platform" after suffering a first strike.

We tried to find a way around the problem. For example each of our new MX missiles was to be housed in one of several silos and moved periodically. Playing peekaboo with our retaliatory capacity (the assumed target of any first strike) was designed to make a successful first strike harder by increasing the number of potential targets. Either the MX was never deployed (which is what I seem to recall) or MIRV technology (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) negated the needle in the haystack advantage. In any event, in the seventies or eighties, it became stated US policy that its land based missiles would be launched when we received warning that either of our nuclear adversaries (PRC and USSR) had launched their missiles.

We literally had our fingers on a hair trigger for the better part of fifteen years. It still worked, but it wasn't what immediately comes to mind when the word "stable" is used.

 
A man after my own heart:

If anyone tried playing Celine Dion at my funeral, I'd come straight out of the coffin to kill them.

Gregory Hlatky via Rand Simberg.

 
Via Instapundit:

Brad de Long describes the four stages of becoming a neoconservative:

The first stage is to hold that the flaws--the mighty flaws--of the center-left in American politics are important enough to more-or-less balance the flaws of the right.

First, I would like to note that there is no "left" in Mr. de Long's analysis, only the "center-left." The absence of a left, of course, does not prohibit the existence of the "right" for Mr. de Long to poke at. Labels, Mr. de Long; please take more care with your labels.

Second, Mr. de Long's readers are left to conclude that the flaws of the left should not "balance out" the flaws of the left. This sounds an awful lot like a contradiction of the moral equivalence arguments so beloved of the left: Since no culture is superior to any other culture, whatever emanates from a culture must be acceptable. And: Since the US is not a perfect utopia, it has no standing to complain about the world's worst despots. Please note that I am not familiar enough with Mr. de Long's writing to know whether he indulges in such arguments, and I therefore make no claims as to him. However, there are any number of left leaning writers who do. Because I don't buy the moral equivalence argument, at least when the attempt is made to equate the inherently unequivalent, such as Palestinian suicide bombers (homicide bombers, 'splodeydopes, you pick the term) with Israeli settlers or the regular Israeli army, I also don't buy Mr. de Long's strawman argument that conservatives can validly make the same type of argument as to unequivalents.

The second stage is to start making desperate and implausible excuses for Republican politicians and functionaries.

Note that the "right" has now assumed the persona of "Republican politicians and functionaries." Undesperate and plausible excuses are obviously permitted, then? How about just plausible explanations of a position assumed or an action taken by a politician or functionary of either party? Desperation has nothing to do with it. Nor does party affiliation.

I am willing to ascribe a certain level of integrity to most people who engage in public discourse. Until, that is, their integrity has been shown to be lacking. As in the use of phony polling data to gin up support for a position you've already adopted. I've got no problem with you taking the position, just don't lie to me by producing a phony poll claiming that your position is the one held by so and so many Americans. After I am shown slanted polling questions obviously designed to elicit a specific response, as opposed to a genuine attempt to determine where the polled group stands on an issue, my bullshit detector starts to go off whenever I hear from the group that sponsored that poll.

Additionally because Mr. de Long is talking about the changes in ones political philosophy (ie: changes in one's subjective thought processes and political leanings) the fact that an explanation may actually be implausible is irrelevant unless the maker of that statement believes it to be so. And how may conservatives (neo or otherwise) make explanations that they believe to be implausible? My guess would be about the same as the number of liberals doing so: relatively few.

The third stage is to lose contact with the substance of public policy issues, and focus instead on intellectual and rhetorical "errors" made by those left of center.

Again with the labels. There is no left, only left of center. Mr. de Long thinks that the deaths of six million children annually from starvation is more important than the fact that some members of the American left is attempting to generate propaganda by asking slanted questions in polls. He is right to feel that way. I don't know whether six million children die each year from starvation, but even one such death would be more important than an attempt to propagandize the US electorate. But then he assumes that attempting to creating phony "public support" for a specific attempt to deal with the problem he cares about through the use of biased polling questions has no importance at all. There, he is wrong. The end simply does not justify the means. Obtaining a politically acceptable answer does not justify the use of biased polling questions.

De Long also assumes that, by complaining about those biased polling questions, Mickey Kaus has somehow indicated that he does not care about the deaths of six million children annually from starvation. I think its a safe bet that de Long is wrong there, as well.

And the fourth stage is to start acclaiming right-wing political hacks as noble thinkers, and right-wing office holders as bold and far-sighted leaders with a plan to guide us to utopia.

Note that now we have gone all the way from plain old "right" to right-wing political hacks and right wing office holders. Obviously, by definition, there can be no conservative other than a hack, and no conservative office holder could ever be bold or far sighted. So it stands to reason that anyone who agrees with a conservative or believes that a conservative is a noble thinker or that a conservative office holder is bold or far-sighted must be wrong. QED.

If this is what passes for political discourse these days on the left, I'd prefer to skip it, if its all the same to you.

Oh, and as to the use of biased polling questions (for the specific purpose of creating a false appearance of public support for a given proposition) as justifiable in light of the gravity of the problem being addressed by that proposition: Wouldn't that qualify as a "desperate and implausible excuse for politicians and functionaries"?

 
Andrea Harris (who LINKS with me!!!) has a screed on policies which have accreted over the years which almost have to have the effect of discouraging adoption (and thus encouraging abortion). While the ongoing stupidity of the nanny state has been well documented, Andrea's comments are well worth reading.

 
Jeff Jarvis doesn't like the fact that the Gettysburg Address will be read at the observance of the first 9/11 anniversary.

How many people on a committee did it take to come up with that ridiculous compromise to saying something real.

The Gettysburg Address is about a nation at civil war, a nation that was not sure whether it could survive. That is not us. We are not in a civil war; we are united! We are not unsure about our fate; we know that we will and should survive.

I disagree.

The Gettysburg Address, all 267 words of it, is set out below. My comments interspersed.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We are now engaged in a war to see whether our nation, or any nation "conceived in liberty" can endure, or whether theocratic thugs will decide when and where my wife can go for a walk.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

They will be.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

That is part of what they will be there to do, given the thousands who are now what either Steyn or Lileks called "death loam." (Sorry, guys, I can't remember which of you said it.) To be fair to Mr. Jarvis, the thousands of dead, with the exception of the emergency responders, did not give their lives so that their nation might live. Their lives were stolen by religious fanatics bent on achieving world domination for a bizarre and brutal sect.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

Can anyone disagree that this applies to the WTC and the Pentagon sites?

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Even if that last phrase doesn't perfectly describe the vast majority of the WTC and Pentagon dead (who gave the last full measure of devotion, but not voluntarily as the soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy had at Gettysburg), it fits the responding emergency personnel to a T.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

I am completely areligious. But that still draws an "amen" from me every time I hear it.

The Gettysburg Address is only nominally about a nation at civil war. It is about the sacrifice made by those who died in a war being waged so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." It is about renewing the commitment of the living "to the great task remaining before us[:] ... that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ..."

Re-read that speech, Jeff. There's a reason we had to memorize it in grade school.

 
It appears to be official now, if it wasn't already. The Washington Post is reporting that Saudi Arabia won't allow an attack on Iraq from its soil.

Saudi Arabia has made clear to Washington – publicly and privately – that the U.S. military will not be allowed to use the kingdom's soil in any way for an attack on Iraq, Foreign Minister Prince Saud said Wednesday.

We had plenty of warning on the Saudi position. That's why we moved, as reported on July 29:

The Saudis believe that the U.S. won't try to go to war without them. But in the war rooms inside the Pentagon and at Central Command in Tampa, Fla., military strategists no longer think the U.S. needs the Saudis to dislodge Saddam. Strategists say a war against Iraq would require as many as 200,000 troops, with forces launching from Kuwait, Turkey and the smaller gulf emirates, reinforced by a massive U.S. Navy and Marine presence. The U.S. already has 10,000 Army troops at Kuwait's Camp Doha, where the Pentagon has stored tanks and other weapons. Some 3,000 U.S. troops man the al-Udeid air base in Qatar, just across the gulf from Iraq. The military has added new runways to a 15,000-ft.-long airstrip that is big enough to serve as the backup landing area for the space shuttle. General John Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, says the military is upgrading al-Udeid for use as a command-and-control center if the Saudis put CAOC [Note: Combined Air Operations Center, a U.S.-built facility at the Prince Sultan base] off-limits.

That leaves the question of what becomes of our facility at the Prince Sultan base when the US attack is launched from the sea, Kuwait, Turkey and elsewhere, and coordinated from Qatar. The attack might well cause the house of Saud to be replaced with a fundamentalist regime willing to oppose us militarily (whether by conventional means or otherwise). I wouldn't consider that such a terrible thing since it merely formalizes what is actually happening now (see this report), but I sure as hell don't want our "newly minted" opponents them to inherit a state of the art facility with which to harass and interdict our forces and gather intelligence on those forces. Even if, as Den Beste persuasively argues, the successors to the current Saudi regime will be weaker than the present one, there is certainly no upside to providing them with additional means to oppose us.

Oh, and I love the part of the Saudi announcement saying that they don't mind continuing (from their sacred soil) the part of the operations designed to protect them:

Saudi Arabia has no objections to the United States continuing its decade-old monitoring of Iraqi skies from the U.S. air control center in the kingdom, Saud said.

These guys are the greatest pals we ever had.

 
Instapundit asks Is Iran burning? Maybe, maybe not.

From Glenn Frazier:

According to several trusted email correspondents, Michael Ledeen, and a website run by a pro-democracy Iranian student organization, yesterday saw demonstrations across Iran that erupted into violence.

According to Reuters, UPI, AP, CNN, BBC, and everyone else in the whole universe...nothing. One of the biggest stories out of Iran, according to them, is that a male bellydancer has decided to continue living there despite being barred from teaching dance. What's going on?

The answer to that question could range from "nothing", to "widespread rioting and anti-government violence, news of which is being suppressed by the theocrats." The nice thing about modern communications is that suppression of news can only work on a short term basis. And the term has been getting shorter and shorter.

Spin, on the other hand, can last forever.

 
Steven DenBeste has been saying (for a long time in Blogyears) that requiring the US to wait to be attacked in order to "permit" a military response is dumb. I agree and I won't bore you with the reasoning. Just read DenBeste.

But is anybody listening out there?

From the Times:

Brent Scowcroft [former US National Security Adviser to Bush the Elder - CG] who remains close to the Bush family, urged the President to concentrate on trying to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians while separately pursuing terrorist threats to the United States. But he said that by going to war with Iraq without linking President Saddam Hussein and September 11, Washington was risking a conflagration in the Middle East that would also engulf its efforts to defeat global terror groups.

His warning came as a former British Chief of Defence Staff said that Britain risked being dragged into a “very, very messy” and lengthy war if it supported a US military assault on Iraq. Field Marshal Lord Bramall called on Tony Blair to exercise caution, saying that an invasion to topple Saddam may not be morally or legally justified.

What exactly is it that we now have in the middle east? An acceptable level barbarity? Does Scowcroft think it could get worse? How is it that taking out a major source of revenue and logistical support for terrorists in general and Palestinian terrorists in particular will hurt the war on terror or make things worse for or in Israel? The effect on Iran and Saudi occupied Arabia of ousting Saddam will be bad how, and how does that compare to the effect on those regimes of NOT taking Saddam out?

And another thing: Why is it that we have to either wait for one of our cities to be nuked or prove (to whose satisfaction?) that Saddam already attacked us on 9/11 before going after him? Personally, I live too near to NYC to find the risk of waiting for the morally correct moment to strike (back) acceptable.

 
Now, as to Hraka's (aka Sid Stafford) response to my comment on his post:

SH aka SS says, "Well, most of [the people who are going to take up arms in order to qualify for the program] are going to get caught. Certainly most of the Palestinians do. In any case, they must not only escape Justice, they've got to create a conflagration that burns the US, as this one has. It's not right, but it's the way of the world."

A. I hope that most of the Palestinians who are conducting the terror campaign in Israel are getting caught, but I don't know that to be a fact. Certainly the grunts who actually conduct the attacks are getting caught. What about the leaders and planners and financers and bombmakers and such? Certainly Yasser Isaliar is still walking around.

B. We are talking about an incentive to avoid taking up arms. How many of those who actually take up arms think that they will get caught? And if they do think that they will get caught, are they still rational if they nonetheless persist in taking up arms? And if they are not rational, no incentive is going to have the desired effect on them.

C. Granted that the Middle East has a unique economic and strategic importance to the US because it is floating on a sea of oil, and therefore the conflagration there can burn the US. However, as the recent threat of nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent showed, the Kashmir conflict could have a similar result, in that it could cause the fall of the secular Pakistani government (along with control of nuclear weapons) in favor of an Islamo-fascist regime. I am sure that the Blogosphere can come up with more examples of local conflicts having an effect in the US.

He also says, "There's no incentive for us to do anything ten [subsequently changed to twenty --CG] years after they've finally calmed down over there."

Except keep our word, which I think is important.

 
Silflay Hraka (who turns out not to be named Silflay Hraka ... Doh!) read my comment on his Palestinian Green Card proposal, emailed me to say thank you and was kind enough to link to the post below and comment re same (on which, more later).

So I read some of his blog and found a link to this.

Question: What do the Christians who control Christianity's most holy site do when they can't get along?

Why, call in the Jews to keep the peace, of course.

There must be a God. Who Else could have a sense of humor like that?

And don't miss the Money Dance.

 
Steyn. Read it, if only for the Songs for Splodin' Losers crack.

 
Via InstantMan:

Silflay Hraka says that simply punishing the Palestinians for being murderous assholes who revel in the wanton slaughter of innocents is insufficient. He says we should invite them here, subject to an applicant being disqualified for entry into the US if there is a Mossad file on him, as an incentive to behave in civilized manner. A metaphorical carrot. Hraka is not talking about dropping the negative incentives, just adding positive ones. To be fair, he clearly states that the Palestinians have crossed the line dividing the civilized from the barbaric. And he makes a valid point that it is literally impossible for all individual Palestinians to be bloodthirsty crazies bent on revenge.

Despite the obvious validity of that argument, my gut reaction was still NOT A CHANCE IN HELL, pal.

Hraka responded to various critics of his post here. Having read his responses, I still vehemently disagree with his proposal, as stated.

I think we and the rest of the world have every right to expect, and should demand, a minimum standard of civilized behavior from everyone. Everyone. No exceptions. I simply don't want to hear any crap about how this culture or that should be exempt from such an expectation or demand. We are talking minimum level, here, as in don't allow, much less encourage and facilitate, a fifteen year old to blow himself up in the hope of taking out as many people on the other side as possible, and don't have mass celebrations in the streets when someone actually does it. When I saw those pictures on LGF, I wanted to vomit.

That does not mean that the US (or anyone else) has to enforce that standard. But if it is reasonable to expect some minimum level of civilized behavior from everyone, then no one should be required to provide incentives for any group or individual to meet that minimum standard. Compliance with a minimum level of expectation should not be rewarded at all, much less rewarded with what the rest of the world regards as the brass ring: permanent US residence. Providing such an incentive will have the perverse result that groups with real or imagined grievances will engage in barbaric behavior so as to become "eligible" for the incentive.

However, there might be a way to modify Hraka's proposal so as to make it acceptable (to me, at least). Not just more acceptable. Acceptable.

The US would grant permanent visas to all Palestinians who do not have a Mossad file. The mere existence of the file would be sufficient to disqualify a person for the program. No arguments about what's in the file or whether it is true. (In this regard, I hope the Mossad is like the FBI, and keeps files on every possible threat and their grandmother. Just to be safe.) BUT, this special visa program would not come into being until the US President (whoever he or she is at the time) certifies, and both houses of Congress agree by a roll call vote of more than 60% in each chamber, that there has been zero political violence perpetrated in the name of or on behalf of the Palestinians for the preceding twenty years. Zero. None. Full disclosure: when the idea first occurred to me, I put down ten years in a comment on Hraka's site. Upon further reflection, I think twenty years is better. Each act of political violence restarts the 20 year clock. I don't care how many times or for what reasons Yasser Isaliar or anyone else condemns it.

That's an entire generation. If a whole generation of Palestinians can grow up without political violence, then I have no problem admitting them to the US en masse.

Oh, and maybe there should also be a requirement that no PA sponsored school uses the kind of antisemitic propaganda in their textbooks that they've been screwing up their kids with. What the hell. I'm pretty sure we rewrote the textbooks the Nazis were using.

 
Can someone in Oregon please check on Moira Breen. She was last heard from more than a week ago, saying something about a keed.

 
To Glen Wishard: Get a blog.

Mr. Wishard posts a comment on Little Green Footballs in response to images of Palestinians celebrating the premeditated murder of students in the Frank Sinatra cafeteria:

When you consider the number of nations that profess some degree of "solidarity" with the Palestinians, and you consider the vast wealth commanded by those nations --- not to mention the largesse that the U.S. is prepared to dish out --- why don't these kids have some kind of future that includes a real education and reasonable economic opportunity?

Because they're TOOLS, that's why. The Lords of Jihad don't want happy, peaceful, well-fed Palestinians, they want dead ones --- as Arafat so helpfully put it: "Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs by the millions!"

So they drench them in hatred and hopelessness until they're old enough to sacrifice, in the sacred cause of murdering as many Jews as possible. What could be sadder than this? The fact that the safe and well-fed idiots of this world stand in utter awe of this disgusting process, as if it were the most noble and beautiful thing they ever beheld

I especially like the Lords of Jihad phrase.

Via Damian Penny.

 
I installed Site Meter. The icon is at the bottom of the page. Now I can tell if I am just talking to myself.