WichitaBoy

2005-09-26T23:55:00.000-06:00

Serenity, The Movie

Firefly was a very enjoyable TV series which didn't quite make it. The characters were interesting and human--all of them--while the story was slowly developing. Set in a future dystopia, it was a strange but appealing blend of Star Trek and old-fashioned westerns.

Personally I was quite sad to see its demise--I wanted to see what was going to happen next!

Now comes a slight reprieve in the form the movie, Serenity. It's being prescreened across the land this week.

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal. The Serenity website is at this site.

I'll be watching it tomorrow night in Denver. Stay tuned to this site for the review.

2005-05-26T21:02:00.000-06:00

Mac as Hell and Not Gonna Take it Anymore

Winn Schwartau, a self-proclaimed Windows bigot and expert on security who has worked on security issues for 22 years has decided to switch...
to a Mac.

I'll let him say it in his own words:

...predicated on the hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft basher, either. I never criticize a company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence.

I have come to the belief that there is a much easier, more secure way to use computers....

my company has given up on WinTel [an Intel-based computer running Windows]. We have successfully moved to Mac in less than two days. Think about it: a security-friendly alternative that works and doesn't require gobs of third-party utilities to safely perform the most mundane tasks. Please follow the details of our experiment at securityawareness.blogspot.com. It's already way more interesting than I thought it would be.

Although it is often asserted that the multitudinous security problems besetting Windows computers are due simply to their large market share, professional computer experts say otherwise. The design of the Windows system is insecure from the ground up. It was never intended to be networked with other computers and proper safeguards to ensure security for the users were never put into place. Microsoft's focus has always been on making things look good on the surface, hooking as many users as possible as quickly as possible, and only later adding invisible but necessary components, and only then when absolutely necessary. Since then it has been bandaid piled on top of bandaid, never addressing the fundamental issues, never making the systems really secure. Even the fans are bailing.

2005-05-25T12:29:00.000-06:00

An Eternity at the Opera

Charlie (CO), a frequent contributor to Roger Simon's blog and elsewhere, pointed me this morning to this rather cynical post by Mickey Kaus. In response to Senator McCain's holier-than-thou pronouncement that he is (once again!) taking the money out of politics, Mickey suggests that the reality is precisely the opposite. Namely, that it is the solely the threat of filibuster which keeps the Democratic Senators important, which keeps corporate money flowing into their PACs. Mickey quite rightly argues that in a simple majority-rule house they would be rather irrelevant. But the air of cynicism toward money he ascribes to McCain doesn't strike me as quite on the mark here. McCain is self-interested of course, but it seems to me he's interested in self-aggrandizing by promoting his persona as the go-to anti-big-money man in Washington, not in grabbing money per se.

Pondering Kaus's attitude, I noticed a link he provided to an article he wrote five years ago comparing Darwinism to Marxism. Kaus is a former Marxist who still sorta wants it to be true. He's the proverbial idealist hiding inside the cynic.

Which got me to wondering--what the heck is the appeal of "Marxism" anyway? Of course there's the naughty-boy appeal of surreptitiously adopting a philosophy opposed to the parental figures in government--the "Establishment"--at the height of the Cold War. That should be good for a few sophomores but fails to explain the lingering appeal after all these years. What exactly does "Marxism" represent. Scanning Kaus's article, the following ideas appear: 1) the material trumps the mental/spiritual, 2) things occur because they're worked out through a back-and-forth interactive process (called the "dialectic"), not an all-at-once ab initio creation, 3) there are "laws" by which these processes can be described in a particularly laconic manner, 4) religion and culture are reduced to "epiphenomena", which is really simply an elaboration of 1).

Do these things really make sense? Well, can there be anything more hilariously absurd than a bunch of academics--people whose very existence is devoted to the primacy of mind--solemnly declaring in a religious way that mind doesn't matter and religion is mere fluff? So much for 1). 2) strikes me as nothing but common sense. Whereas philosophers famously seek the "philosopher's stone" in the form of an overarching system that explains all, every mere mortal understands in his bones that other people "get a vote" in the current military parlance, i.e., that the whole world is a vast interactive system that can never be explained or predicted by any one system. Which means that 2) is really a direct contradiction to 3). 3) is itself the most interesting. It is the glory of modern science that it is able to explain vast amounts of observation from a few very sophisticated laws. Wonderful, but there are limits to the abilities of science to proceed in this direction, limits to the use of rationality itself. These limits are not just somebody's theory, but are hard and fast mathematical proofs. The theory of Kolmogorov complexity for example proves that in the grand scheme of things the "laws" we can conceivably create are only a small fraction of the facts we will observe. Gödel's Theorem and the Halting Problem are similar results.

The bottom line is that Marxism seems to be nothing more than a hodge-podge of outdated Nineteenth Century science amalgamated with common sense and silliness. So, what's the appeal?

2005-05-23T11:10:00.000-06:00

Self-Hating American Press

Here's another terrific must-read from Wretchard. He points out that the American press, by magnifying as much as possible every American pecadillo while simultaneously ignoring outrages against humanity perpetrated by the enemy, are having the effect of making the enemy appear to be invulnerable while diluting the efficacy of the American military more and more. Why do they want our soldiers to die?

2005-05-23T10:50:00.000-06:00

From the Department of the Weird

It's well-known that human beings produce about 105 live boy births for every 100 live girl births. After that it's downhill for the boys: they die at a higher statistical rate during each year of life. In the olden days, women frequently died during childbirth. Now that's unheard of, and by the time old age rolls around there aren't all that many men.

These trends are different in such countries as India, China, and Korea, where there are something like 140 boys for every girl, at least in some areas. What happens to the girls? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Here's where it gets weird. A recent study in Britain finds that if you divide people up by profession, engineers and people in other standard male-oriented professions are likely to have far more boys than the general population, 140 boys for every 100 girls, while people in nursing and other traditional female professions are likely to produce 135 girls for every 100 boys. Is it nature or nurture? Something in the water? Do people in more traditional female jobs have genes preferring girls? Is there a sort of backroom evolutionary competition going on between male engineers and female nurses to control the world? Who knows?

2005-05-22T01:54:00.000-06:00

A Tale of Two Views

There seem to be two approaches toward dealing with the head-sawers being advocated. On the one hand we have the Bush administration approach: send in the marines and bring the war to them. On the other hand, we have the Kerry approach: bring the troops home and hope for the best.

I have a simple question. Has there ever been a single instance in the historical record when the act of appeasing the crazy barbarians caused them not to attack? I've been wracking my brains without being able to come up with an example.

2005-02-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Hall of Mirrors

With the Eason Jordan case, the MSM find themselves in the quaint position of reporting on the consequences of a major story which--oops!-- they never reported in the first place. Exactly as in the case of the Soviet propaganda newspaper Pravda, their readers and viewers are prevented from seeing the truth of what's really going on directly; they are required instead to read between the lines in the hope of discerning reality. If they're lucky, they will. The MSM are presenting smoke and mirrors and calling it reality.

Unfortunately for them, the rise of the internet has allowed ordinary people not inducted into the journalistic priesthood to have a voice. Suddenly the MSM is like a junior-high teacher caught out in a bald-faced lie about sex while all the kids in the back of the room snigger and whisper the facts amongst themselves. The MSM still has power and authority, but their ability to impose a faux narrative just because they say so has been forever lost.

2005-02-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

There is More

Here's another interesting bit on the HP fiasco, apparently the inside view.

It seems that capitalism certainly has the potential for going seriously awry in some of these short-term scenarios. It's too early to tell how it will do in the long run.

2005-02-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

Good News

Carly Fiorina's mission to eviscerate one of the world's truly great technology companies while building her own private air force has ended. Hewlett-Packard employees are reported to be dancing in the aisles. The stock has gone up $7b on the announcement. That ought to tell you something.

Here's one former employees take (many more can be found on the cited link).

I worked at HP in the 80s, still hold stock in the company, and I have been horrified for years at the degradation of HP from a great place to work (and a profitable, socially responsible company) into a soulless, internally repressive corporate tyranny. Bill and Dave would be speechless with rage were they still with us.

Ms. Fiorina has presided over such low points as dumping a profitable calculator division (without even spinning it off or doing an EBO!), and a recent corporate general meeting where the proxy-voting process was blatantly abused and manipulated to ensure the board got their way regardless of what the stockholders wanted.

To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits; they preferred to make money by adding value, and believed in interoperability and good corporate citizenship (a quaint concept, I know, but I'm an old fart...)

2005-02-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

Wardie In Deeper DooDoo

It would appear that Professor Ward Churchill, with his masters degree from Sangaman State, is guilty not only of falsifying his own background, but of plain old academic fraud. It's crunch time. We'll now find out whether CU possesses any integrity whatsoever.

2005-02-08T01:39:00.000-07:00

A Thought for Freedom

Many people were shocked at the turnout for the Iraqi elections. Having convinced themselves and all their friends that the whole thing was a sham, that "it was all about oil", etc. etc., the sight of millions of Iraqis coming out bravely to vote was too much. There is a distinction to be made between propaganda and reality; though propaganda is useful it behooves one to keep track of where it ends and reality begins. Or else.

The skeptics should have heeded this quotation from Paul Johnson:

Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom, above all their freedom to earn their livings how and where they please, has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues. We need not suppose that the exercise of freedom is bought at the expense of any deserving class or interest - only of those with the itch to tyrannize.
1977 - from Enemies of Society

2005-02-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

PCLinuxOS

I tried this last week. It's suddenly my very favorite LiveCD for Linux. Awesome.

2005-02-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

Economy for the New Age

The human mind--and most basic human habits--have been formed by the processes of thousands of years of evolution. During 95% of that time we were hunter-gatherers living from meal to meal. Statistically, even magnificent predators like the Siberian Tiger only manage a kill in 1 in 7 tries. We are geared right in our genes toward scarcity and surviving scarcity. We have an inherent urge to gorge when food is available because our genes are telling us it might not be available next time, and that's one reason so many of us are getting fat.

The scarcity economy applies to all sorts of things besides food. There aren't as many houses as people might like, there aren't as many cars, and so forth. Nearly any physical good fits the scarcity model.

The virtual world doesn't fit the model. There seems to be a virtually limitless amount of computational power, bandwidth, and memory so that virtual worlds can be built without limit. And there is a so-called networking effect, so that other people's usage of a certain good--say, the AIM Instant Messager--increases, rather than decreases the value I derive from this product.

In the Twentieth Century it was discovered that very small things such as electrons do not behave like anything comparable in ordinary human experience. They aren't particles and they aren't waves--they're something our genes have not prepared us for in the least. Similarly, we seem to be entering a new realm in the virtual world for which we have nothing in our gut-level feeling to prepare us. The old laws, based on a scarcity economy, no longer seem to be appropriate. The Economist describes this in more detail. Undoubtedly it will take a long time for our thinking to adjust.

2005-02-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

Easongate

The head honcho of CNN went to a hoity-toity meeting of the world's top-drawer (and I mean really top-drawer) über-people at Davos, Switzerland (yes, the same place where Khatami received a huge ovation a year or so ago and where Clinton played to the peanut gallery after leaving the White House--you're getting the picture I'm sure) and informed them that he personally knows of 12 journalists who were "targetted" by the American military. Serious and inflammatory charges. The Arab members of his audience were quite happy to hear this, or so we are told. There is supposed to be a videotape of the speech which will verify all this but it hasn't been released yet. The story is being carefully followed on this new blog, but not of course anywhere in the MSM.

It turns out that Eason has a history of this sort of accusation, although he has shifted around a bit on who should take the blame. A few years ago it was the Israelis who were targetting the innocent journalists slandering them in Palestine. No proof that time either. Much information about Mr. Eason can be found here. The man has a perpetual list right there in his pocket, you just don't get to see it.

This is the man, allow me to remind you, who admitted after the downfall of Saddam Hussein that CNN had cut corners in its coverage of Iraq in order to ensure continued access. Tit for tat between a huge prestigious American network and a brutal murderous dictator. But I'm sure the two men could share a fine taste in Cuban cigars.

I wrote to CNN to complain about Eason's behavior. I pointed out that if he has proof he needs to make it public and if he doesn't he needs to shut his trap, because this is real, his words have consequences, and American soldiers are going to die as a consequence of his actions.

I got this reply from CNN:

Eason was attempting to speak out on an issue that is important to news organizations all over the world. Unfortunately, he was not clear enough in explaining his assertion. He was responding to an assertion that all 63 journalists killed in Iraq were "collateral damage." While the majority of the 63 journalists killed in Iraq have been killed by insurgents, the Pentagon has acknowledged that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. Mr. Jordan emphatically does not believe that the U.S. Military intended to kill journalists and believes these accidents to be cases of "mistaken identity."

This is my reply to CNN:

Your response is disingenuous at best. Mr. Eason used the word "targetted". Are we playing little-kid games now and we can make words be whatever we want them to be? Or are we going to be adults? Because "targetted" in common English parlance, means "aimed at deliberately", which is exactly what Mr. Eason was intending to convey and exactly what his audience was thrilled to hear. Now, you know that, I know that, and all the fanatical Arabs listening to Mr. Eason know that. I repeat, Mr. Eason will have blood on his hands for this action. Shame on CNN for this. Does he have a secret list of 12 in his pocket? Has CNN no decency? Had Mr. Eason the merest vestige of honor, he would resign immediately.

And I'm confident we'll be getting full, honest disclosure from CNN right after CBS fesses up about Dan and the forged memos.

2005-02-06T21:06:00.000-07:00

Capitalist Overlords of the New Age

Get this. There are virtual reality games being played over the Internet. There are thousands of people worldwide who go to these virtual worlds and play games and, how to say it, live their lives in these places (MMORPGs is the technical term). They accumulate points for various activities. The points can be traded and sold. The points are so valuable to other players that they are now being sold out here in the real world on Ebay. Recently a "virtual island" owned by one of these players in one of these virtual worlds sold for $30,000. That's US cash, on the barrelhead, 600 US Grants.

This has attracted attention. Commercial attention. So now companies have sprung up to exploit this new opportunity. They hire underpaid employees in third-world sweatshops to play the games, win the prizes, and then the prizes are sold back on Ebay in the real world. Ka-ching! Dickens must be rolling in his grave.

2005-02-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Geek Out!

You haven't truly geeked out until you've treated yourself to the sound of your cpu running through your speakers.

2005-02-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Vietnam, Infinite Redux

The following posting by John Moore on Roger Simon's blog was so good I thought it worth preserving.

This is a bit tangential, but the Viet Cong didn't succeed. In fact, after the three offensives of 1968, they were wiped out. Furthermore, they were never an internal revolutionary movement, but rather a fifth column put in place by the North Vietnamese in the '50s. They were encouraged to marry into Southern families to link into the indigenous people. Most importantly, the only enemy in Vietnam that the US faced was the North Vietnamese, either actual NVA units, or VC who were totally controlled by and supplied by the North. Note that the war was won by a foreign power (the North Vietnamese) in a massive combined arms invasion that had more tanks than George Patton ever commanded. This only happened because the backer of the South, us, reneged on our obligations as a result of a loss of will.
The Vietnamese were ready to sue for peace after the Tet '68 fiasco, until they realized that the press and opportunistic activists and politicians treated it like a defeat for the US, when in fact it was a catastrophic defeat for the VC (destroying 50% of their total force, and showing that the people of the South were unwilling to rise up in "liberated" areas and joine the VC in the fight).

See here for a history of that war.
Contrast that with Iran. They don't have a safe haven like the Vietnamese Communists did. We would have to provide that (or Iraq or Afghanistan), and also weapons. The VC/NVA was a huge operation, and took many years to get the VC ready for battle (about 5 years). In five years if not stopped, Iran will be a nuclear power with ICBM's. In fact, in a lot less than five years.

2005-01-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Reporting as it's supposed to be done.

2005-01-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

This is cool.

2005-01-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

Running Viruses Under Linux

It's not easy to do. One has to use the Windows emulation layer (WINE). Even then, you have to give most of them a lot of help, setting things up just the way they like it. Despite all theat, most of them poop out. Linux just isn't up to Windows standards yet! Details are here.

2005-01-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

A New View

We're all used to talking about the "War on Terror". There seem to be two views about al Qaida's attack on September 11th. One is that they started a war with us and we should finish it, the same way we finished the Civil War once the South fired on Ft. Sumter. The other view is that we deserved to be attacked because of our policies toward the rest of the world. The exact policy that is at fault seems to differ from author to author, the only constant is American and Western guilt. Examples which prove our supposed culpability include: support of Israel, not signing the Kyoto treaty, the Crusades, colonialism, supporting Saudi Arabia, etc.

It is astonishing to realize that these competing narratives actually share a common assumption, namely, that al Qaida is operating in a rational way, that there is reason behind their actions. What if this is not so? What if their action has nothing whatsoever to do with reason? That's the view advocated in this amazing article.

It's a must read.

2005-01-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

A Shot Across the Bow

The election has been held, the votes have been tallied, and the new president has taken his oath of office. Has there been sufficient time yet to discern what it all meant?

There are currently two competing narratives making the rounds. Republicans believe that Bush's reelection represents an endorsement by the populace of his War on Terror. Democrats began the post-election process with depression (there are any number of stories out there of Democrats who were too depressed for a month to do anything) followed by denial (witness the crazy conspiracy theories involving Diebold being passed around in email) and have finall moved to the stage of creating an alternative narrative. Theirs is "We were defeated by the religious nutcases who voted in record numbers, so our defeat is specious." This convenient narrative obviates the need for any change in policy or attitude on the part of the Democrats and their leaders.

I would like to offer a third alternative, different from b0th of the above. This is that Kerry was simply the weakest candidate to be offered the American people since George McGovern. Kerry completely failed to connect to the heartland and likewise completely failed to connect to the middle class or the working class. Kerry was the perfect candidate of the upper class, the idle class, those who are exempt from working and feel a need to push the country in the direction of higher causes in order to find meaning in their own lives. Kerry is neither hunter nor farmer, has never worked in a serious job, and possesses scarcely any knowledge of the myriad tasks necessary to keep life moving. An introvert who rather obviously cares little for "little people", he had nothing to offer any people whose life it is to put food on the table or keep the buses rolling. Kerry was in short a terrible candidate who's only message was "Kick Bush out!".

Considered from this point of view the election takes on a completely different meaning. It means that Bush barely won what should have been a cakewalk. Support for the War in Iraq is weak, support for the War on Terror is weak, support for the forced Democratization of the Middle East is weak, and support for George Bush is weak.

Republicans would do well to watch their step very carefully. Exultation is not the appropriate order of the day.

2005-01-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

I thought this from an author with a literary background who just finished a new book on Linux was interesting.

I'm a programmer or technician only by amateur or theoretical inquiry, not by trade. My background is literature and philosophy, which has brought the advantage of perspective. The secret that most people don't seem to know, because of what our culture has become in recent decades, is the fundamental idea that computer software is not, strictly speaking, technology at all. A program is just a literary work; it's a kind of technical literature. I talk about this in the introduction.

Forty years ago the United States was the greatest producer society in the world. What happened in that interval and how does it relate to Linux? Part of that transformative shift was the adoption of the view that computer programs were objects that you bought at the store, that they were somehow new "technology" to bank on. This obscured what they really were - written works to be published and examined and read, as well as performed by the hardware. When you remove that from the culture and only sell it as a sealed object in the box, you have a fairy-tale economy and a culture that is sliding into irrelevance, decadence, and decay. Linux is a return to the old tradition, to the individual inventor-scientist and industrial entrepreneur as the productive member of an educated populace. That's what so exciting about it.

2005-01-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Blue Unions, Red Suburbs?

What's fueling the bizarre political divide we're seeing these days? I don't know (and I abhor the terms "red" and "blue", but there you are), but the following two posts seem to seem to shed some light on a confusing situation.

First, this interesting post by Paul Musgrave. Is it all about public-sector unions with their noses in the trough?

The growing, or at least persistent, power of municipal governments has the effect of turning naturally Blue cities even more azure. Most private-sector employees in New York City backed Mike Bloomberg; most public employees voted for Democrat Mark Green. Bloomberg's anti-tax, anti-spending campaign was a direct threat to the jobs of many city workers, who feared having to find new ways of earning their living. Because their jobs are on the line in every election, government workers are especially mobilized in politics: Although they account for only a third of the workforce in New York, Malanga notes, public sector employees represented 37 percent of the electorate in 2001.

Not only local politics but national politics are affected by this shift in composition. Because government workers are reliably Democratic, and because Democrats need to maintain their metro base even as they woo suburban voters with promises of middle-class subsidies, the municipal and government workers' unions are big players in the national Democratic movement. This is a predictable, if unconscious, response to the unions' power at the local level. The natural result of overregulation and business-hostile bureaucracy is economic weakening within cities as firms flee to the suburbs and friendlier areas. The unions have turned their cities and school systems into private fiefs. Now, to preserve their power and their members' paychecks, then, public sector unions have to try to extend their reach beyond municipal boundaries.

For generations, the Democratic party was the party of private-sector unions. Now that the trades union movement in the States has been broken, the donkey has a new rider. If Republicans want to ensure better government and preserve their political predominance, weakening these public sector unions has to be high on our agenda.

Then, this interesting comment by the ever-interesting Thibaud, a frequent commenter on Roger Simon's blog. Is it about families living in the suburbs?

The red-blue divide does not run along state or even county lines. It's primarily a divide between a shrinking inner-city blue core population and a swelling red-to-purple nonurban population. The natural allies of the municipal government unions are all those social groups that comprise large downtown populations: the very poor and very rich; childless secular yupsters; gays. From a Democratic perspective, what's wrong with this picture? Aside from the very poor, whose real needs (eg good schools, secure neighborhoods, honest local pols) often go unaddressed by the Dems' platform, none of these groups is much inclined toward bearing and raising children. So along with the replacement problem you have a substantive problem: the Dems are, increasingly, out of touch with US families and family life. Secondly, it's not a good idea for any party to be so heavily dependent financially on downtown gazillionaires like Soros, Lewis and the other guy who gave Kerry and his allies more money than they could figure out how to spend intelligently. How to break out? Try traveling a bit, say, ten miles or so, to a suburban mall or church or soccer field, and TALK TO PEOPLE. LISTEN TO THEM. I'm willing to bet that Pelosi, Kerry, and Kennedy have not set foot in a suburban mall or ballfield more than once or twice in the last decade. Pitiful, really, when you realize that Tip O'Neill's faithful have all moved to the suburbs. That's where elections are won and lost today, and yet O'Neill's party is now led by downtown goldiggers, socialites, rich kids and investment banker types.

2004-11-29T17:45:00.000-07:00

A compedium of over-the-top rhetoric from the last election. Is it just my imagination or is the level of civility in political discourse really degenerating?

2004-11-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Europeans decide to proceed unilaterally. I guess the message is clear. If the United States does it, it is wrong. If Europe or the French do it, it is right. All right-thinking people know this.

2004-11-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

Cross Kerry and lose your job.

2004-11-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy du Jour

"No blood for chocolate! No blood for chocolate! No blood for
chocolate!

Where are the mass protests in the streets of the world's capitals
against France's military intervention in the Ivory Coast?

This month, French peacekeepers in the former French colony launched a
pre-emptive assault against the Ivorian air force. They also
interferred with the internal politics of the troubled nation and
sought regime change -- or at least they have been accused of both by
President Laurent Gbagbo.

They acted without authorization by the United Nations Security
Council.

They violated both the UN Charter and the terms of the peacekeeping
resolution that established their specific mission in the West African
nation.

The Security Council did sanction their attacks after the fact.
Nonetheless, the French acted unilaterally, and only sought and
received a UN cover story later. There wasn't even a coalition of the
willing. No Brits, Aussies, Poles or Dutch to help out; just French
troops, jets, helicopters and armoured personnel carriers.

While the French have achieved their military goals quickly and
easily, they have failed to stop the destruction of much of the I.C.'s
infrastructure.

They have been powerless to end a Muslim insurgency that controls half
of Ivory Coast's territory. They have stood by while schools and
libraries were torched, failed to prevent widespread looting and have
even fired on civilian mobs twice, killing as many as 60 Ivorians. And
they have hardly been welcomed as liberators by the locals.

Tens of thousands of Ivorians wielding machetes, clubs and long-
handled axes marched through the streets of Abidjan, the financial
capital, last week shouting "French go home!" and "Everybody get your
Frenchman!" as they ransacked French-owed businesses and residences.

Tens of thousands of immigrant Ivorians have been turned into
refugees, fleeing into neighbouring Liberia, Guinea, Burkina Faso and
Ghana.

Who knows, perhaps we'll also soon learn that some fabulous national
museum containing world heritage treasures -- yet a museum no one in
the West, outside of a handful of archaeologists, had heard ever of --
was picked clean thanks to French neglect.

All of this was done in the name of protecting French commercial
interests in the IC's lucrative cocoa trade (and timber, mines and
oil).

So where are the campus radicals, the smug Western intellectuals and
the preening pundits with their accusations of blood for chocolate?

Where is their accusation that the whole thing has just been a giant
conspiracy to ensure French President Jacques Chirac's buddies in the
chocolate industry have all the cheap cocoa butter they want?

There has been no media talk of quagmire, even though the French have
been involved in the I.C.'s civil war for nearly three years. The
French military intervention proceeded for the first 17 months without
any UN authorization whatever. And the Chirac government has
repeatedly escalated its troop commitment from 500 in 2002, to 2,500
in 2003, to 4,000 earlier this year, to 5,000 today. And the situation
only worsens.

Where is their outrage at the inability of French forces to secure
instantly and perfectly every block of the Ivory Coast's teeming
cities? Where are the BBC interviews with Secretary-General Kofi Annan
declaring the French adventure "illegal," as he did concerning the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq? Where are the letters from Annan to
Chirac entreating him not to quell the insurgency or crush the forces
fighting French troops for fear of provoking worse from the locals,
the way he cautioned the Americans against pacifying Falluja.

Let me be emphatic: The French have done exactly what they should have
in Ivory Coast. They destroyed the five-aircraft Ivorian air force
after it had bombed a French base, apparently by mistake, and killed
nine soldiers. They fired on an ugly Ivorian throng only after the mob
threatened to attack the country's largest airport, which the French
had secured so jets could whisk thousands of French nationals to
safety.

What's galling is the way the French have done it all without any
deference to the multilateral consensus-building they so smugly
demanded of the Americans and British last year when the boots were on
the other feet.

Doubly galling is the silence -- even complicity -- of the UN and the
international community, which last year so sanctimoniously and
vocally obstructed the invasion of Iraq.

No other nation has inserted itself militarily into African affairs in
the post-colonial period more than France -- nearly two dozen times --
including on behalf of the murderous Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who
proclaimed himself emperor of the Central African Republic, and in
support of the Hutu government of Rwanda, whose supporters butchered
half a million or more Tutsis in 1994.

The truth is, international opposition to the Iraq war (including
French opposition) was prompted as much by bitter anti-Americanism and
irrational hatred of George W. Bush as it was by any true concern for
peace or multilateralism. "

Read the whole thing.

2004-11-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

What Really Happened in Fallujah

Get the facts here, if you dare.

2004-11-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

Why Not Just Put All Those Nasty Republicans in an Oven?

The other night the Bush daughters were refused entry to a New York restaurant, which caused all the patrons there to cheer.

2004-11-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

Tell Me They're Not Neo-Puritans

The British government wants to outlaw eating, drinking, smoking, and sex. All for your own good, of course.

2004-11-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

Nihau

Amidst all the troubles of the world, in the middle of our seeming fight to the death with the Islamofascists, one question is more salient in my mind than all the others: How can the United States compete with China? At this point China can build everything we can build. China has access to all the same technologies that we have. They are publishing papers in all the same areas that we are. They can read English, which is taught more or less uniformly throughout China starting from first grade; we have almost no in-country knowledge of Mandarin. We have, in short, lost our technical lead.

Given that they have about four times as many people as we, that their educational system is significantly better than ours, that their country is "lean and hungry" while ours is overfed and languid, and finally that they have a serious shortage of girls, a condition known to cause nations to become particularly war-like, I ask again, how can we expect to compete? In fact, our very survival may be at stake.

2004-11-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

If you're still under the impression that the United States is a free country, this article about Big Brother riding shotgun in your car should disabuse you.

2004-11-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

A fascinating interview with the chief interrogator of Shin Bet.

2004-11-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

Why Romans and chimpanzees both make war.

2004-11-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Eat Your Heart Out, Osama

People at MIT have developed a prototype space elevator. Story here. Pictures here.

2004-11-16T02:06:00.000-07:00

Politics as Life

In the early days of computers the mathematician John Conway invented a little game which was easy to program and attracted a wide following. The game, called "Life", was an early example of what's now called "emergent complexity", i.e., the rules are simple but the results are complicated.

The game works like this. There is a board with checkers on it and there are rounds ("generations"). Each round you put a checker on an empty square or remove a checker that's already there, depending on the positioning of the checkers already on the board near that square. The point is that from one generation to the next the patterns of checkers propagate, creating new patterns, very much as life propagates itself. A free version to play around with can be downloaded from here. It's fascinating to set up a certain pattern and then let it run for many generations to see what it does over the course of time. Many patterns die off and the board becomes empty of life. Some patterns become completely static. A few really interesting patterns keep reproducing, mutating over the course of time into an endless variety of surprising forms.

The game of Life is based on the premise that each checker exerts a kind of "force field" on the squares around it, so that its very presence will determine the presence or absence of a checker during the next generation on those nearby squares.

Now take a look at the county-by-county results of the latest Presidential election, and click on the tab to compare to the results of the 2000 election. It's apparent that blue counties tend to clump together, like checkers in the game of Life. Thinking of each election as a new generation, we see that the blue areas are propagating themselves (as are the red areas).

I'm not a political scientist and I possess neither the means nor the time to do the experiment, but I'd like to pose the question: is it the case that simple location is a far better predictor of ones vote for President than any other possible indicator, such as family, gender, income, or all the other criteria social scientists are incessantly using to slice us and dice us?

I posit that one can probably determine rules for politics, similar to the rules of Conway's game of Life, so that the presence in the last election of overwhelming red voters in all the adjacent counties makes it very likely that a given county will turn out red in the next election. I posit that the votes of the people around us exert a sort of "force field" on our thinking which strongly, perhaps more strongly than anything else, determines how we vote next time.

It's well known that people aren't rational. Much as we all like to think we're making rational choices for President, that's probably not really true. But it's interesting to investigate exactly what the factors are that are most influential in producing results. Could it be that mere geographic location is highest on the list? It is at least plausible. Human beings want to get along with the people around them. We're hard-wired for this. It causes lots of difficulties to be a Bush supporter in a predominantly Kerry area or a Kerry supporter in a Bush area. It tends to make one doubt ones own belief system. There is a huge tendency to want to vote with the people one knows.

I further posit that, if one could create connections in "another dimension" on the map (such as, for example, a line from Broward County, FL to Manhattan, NY)--necessary because all the people "known" to some residents in some parts of the country are actually residents of some other part of the country--one would be able to almost completely predict how any given county would flip, based solely on describing the way things went in surrounding counties, "surrounding" being taken in this broader sense.

Here's a further question. If this is so, doesn't the Electoral College make a tremendous amount of sense?

2004-11-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

134 examples of media anti-Bush bias in the election.

If you view your job as reporting the facts for the reader/viewer to assess, then this is wrong.

But if you view your job as proclaiming the ultimate truth to the world, regardless of the facts, then this is appropriate.

In other words, our media are filled with religious fanatics. All those fanatics who belong to the same religion think that's just dandy.

Honest people see things differently.

2004-11-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

The Elites Speak

We, the bold, free-spirited peoples of the Diverse Lands of Blue America, hereby contract with you, the safe, ordinary drabs of the Nearly-contiguous Lands of Red America to exist peaceably and amicably in the manner to which we've become accustomed.

We will continue to exist in heavily-impacted urban centers in areas where our explosive growth and profligate lifestyle are completely unsustainable -- deserts, swamps, mountains, frozen wastelands, coasts and islands -- and so we will be needing to pull heavily from your water and other natural resources. We will need you to have power plants, waste recycling plants and refineries in your areas, since we can't stand to look at the ugly things.
...

We need a tremendous amount of ever-changing, ever-improving goods and services. We will need you to provide manpower for industries and meet these needs. As such, we will need you to raise respectful, honest, hard-working children. We don't care how you do it, but please don't tell us how. If it has anything to do the preservation of the "traditional family unit" or instilling "moral values" we really, REALLY don't want to know.
...

Though we hold the brave and unique opinion that wars are a bad idea, we will occasionally sanction aggressive action. We will need you and your children to defend us, since we're not very good at the whole macho thing. Be assured that we support the troops, though we're not really sure what that means. We think that it means that we will denigrate their efforts constantly by putting on chic protest events with cutting jibes and clever costumery and a LOT of drugs and alcohol. If so, we support the troops. If it has anything to do with not encouraging the enemy with treasonous talk and the leaking of sensitive information, we don't support the troops. (Sorry. That would just be asking too much.)
...

Since we are too intelligent and enlightened to tolerate mere Christianity or any other traditional religion, we will offer instead our own religious beliefs, which are that good and evil are almost interchangeable, stuff is good and basically there isn't anything to believe in. And you can believe us on this. In fact, we insist that you do. Your religion leads to peace of mind, human dignity and theosis; ours promotes spiritual decay. You see the problem.
...

And STOP driving SUV's. We hate those things too. Don't you realize that your conspicuous consumption will overshadow ours if you drive those boats? Plus, they're big, which just means we have to find something even bigger to drive.

We don't have to be the only ones with strong emotions. We encourage you to despise rich people, who are greedy and mean. But please target rich businesspeople only -- not celebrities or moguls or rock stars or sports figures or recording executives, or anyone who might vote Democrat. They're not despicable -- they're your paisanos, man.
...

Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
...

2004-11-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds explains neo-Puritanism.

2004-11-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

Veteran's Day

I seem to post my best comments on other peoples' blogs. I'm an extravert. What can I say?

What I can say is "thank you" to all of our noble veterans for ensuring, still, that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth," despite the best efforts of Michael Moore. Thank you!

2004-11-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

Bifurcating Reality, Take 708

The view is widespread in Europe that the Palestinians are victims, the Israelis are the new Nazis, and Yasser Arafat was a wonderful human being. The view here in America is that he is a terrorist and probably was a Soviet agent. How can there be such a radical divergence of opinion?

This page explains all. Compare the view of Arafat being offered to the Europeans to the view of Arafat being offered to the Americans.

2004-11-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

Global warming is real.

2004-11-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

Just Like the Old Racism, Only Better

To be a "racist" is to think of or treat a human being based on his or her race rather than on his or her individual merits.

We all know it's wrong to be racist. Nothing is wronger. Racism is so wrong that all unwanted speech is now routinely labelled "racist".

Except when it's right. Remember: a black Democrat is a good black. Knows his place. We love a black Democrat. Michelle Malkin has more:

Minority Democrats in public office are inspirational role models. Minority Republicans in public office are embarrassing sellouts.
Minority Democrat politicians are principled. Minority Republican politicians are misguided.
Minority Democrat politicians represent the hopes and dreams of all Americans. Minority Republican politicians are traitors to their "communities."

2004-11-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Iraqis speak.

2004-11-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

The total biomass of giant squids now exceeds that of humans. They are increasing due to overfishing and global warming. They don't live much longer than 200 days. Link...

2004-11-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

It can be argued that religion makes people better than they might otherwise be. It was religious--not secular--people who built Europe's magnificent cathedrals over the course of centuries. Compare these wonderful buildings with the temples of commerce built by the modern-day secularists in all our major cities. 'Nuff said. Here's another piece of interesting evidence. The generosity index compares the states, based on how much wealth they possess and how generous they are in their philanthropy, and ranks them accordingly. Scroll down to find the first "blue" state. [Hat tip: Powerline Blog]

2004-11-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

There may be hope for Europe yet.

2004-11-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Computers are recipe machines. They have various states; they read through the recipes they are given, step by step, and change themselves from one state to the next, depending on what state they were already in and what the recipe (program) says to do. They are completely incapable of doing anything other than exactly what they are told. The person who writes the recipe (program) has complete control over the machine.

Typically the programs are written in a language readable by human beings. To make them run faster, these are translated into a language readable only by computers, called machine code. The translated programs are stored in so-called binary files. Typically programs are distributed in binary format only, because most people only want to use the programs and have no interest in knowing what the recipes actually say.

In principle, anything that can be codified, anything that can be reduced to a routine, anything that requires no human intervention or thought, in short, anything that can be automated, can be done by a machine. This saves labor and money, which means that lots and lots of activities previously effected by drones working inside vast governmental or corporate bureaucracies will be performed in the future by machines. Governmental and corporate rules and regulations will increasingly be executed only by computers.

Unfortunately, this automation exposes society to a novel danger. If society's rules are enforced through machines and if the only people who are able to see those rules are the computer programmers, then there will be no way for the citizens to know what the actual rules are or to ascertain whether they are being applied fairly. Although the programmers may pay lip service to one set of rules, the computers will obey the rules actually given them by the programmers, not the rules which the programmers claim they are giving to the computers. In effect, we are giving control of our basic social functions to unaccountable computer programmers. It's not that computers are taking over society, as is often feared; rather it is programmers who increasingly hold the reigns of society in their hands. There isn't any problem if the programmers are honest, and most are of course. But if the programmers are dishonest there is no way to check whether the correct societal rules have been applied. A binary file will tell the computer to do exactly what the programmer wants, not necessarily what the citizens want. And the citizens will never know the difference because the binary file is unreadable, unknowable.

The most obvious example of this danger lies with voting machines. These are computers running programs designed to collect votes. What could go wrong? If the programmer has programmed the computer to, say, give every fifth Democratic vote to the Republican, then a fraud will be perpetrated on the voters, completely without their knowledge or consent. When we collected votes via paper ballots we always insisted that there be several observers present to ensure that no votes were miscounted and no cheating occurred. Why do we not demand the same level of accountability from our programmers? Sunshine is the appropriate disinfectant for potential governmental fraud.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to let the proverbial light in. All that is required is that the original recipe which controls the voting computer be made available publicly. Then no shenanigans can occur because everyone will be able to see exactly what the recipe says, exactly which rules the computer is following. In computer parlance, the original recipe (program) is called the "source code" and what is required is merely that the source code be made open to the public. Hence the name "open source". All important governmental processes that are accomplished by computers need to be "open sourced". This is true especially in the case of voting.

All citizens should demand this. This is an essential element of computer-mediated democracy in the brave new Twenty-First century. If it is not done, closed-source computers under the control of possibly nefarious third parties will inevitably add fuel to the conspiracy fires already being fanned by the paranoid. Surely that is a result we all wish to avoid.

Even without any actual fraud occurring, doubts about fraud will be sufficient to bring down the ship of state.

2004-11-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would see this. The New York Times yesterday published an article blatantly calling for the assassination of the President.

2004-11-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

One of the current dogmas is that poverty causes terrorism. There doesn't seem to be any empirical evidence for this, it's just a matter of faith among the faithful. Now one Harvard researcher has decided to investigate the issue scientifically. His conclusion? Freedom squelches terror.

2004-11-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

Lileks Captures the Zeitgeist

"Paul Harvey, of all people, noted that the hard phase of the battle would involve house-to-house combat, “just like Vietnam.” Sigh. It’s now the all-purpose metaphor. There could be a war on the moon with armies on dune buggies launching crossbows at each other, and someone would pronounce it a repeat of a disastrous battle in the Mekong Delta. But he’d be 108 years old, the last boomer, a brittle old survivor - not the Greatest Generation but the Generation that Grates, determined that any conflict should be seen through the prism of his youth with “White Rabbit” playing in the background. Times have changed. It's FLIR and Kid Rock now, I think."

http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/1104/110904.html

2004-11-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

The current meme being passed around by the Democrats and their MSM organs is that Bush won the election because of "red-staters" who believed "moral values" were the most important issue of the campaign. "Moral values" is being spun to mean "hated gays". This is transparent nonsense.

What's going on here? Well, when is a war over? Exactly when one side agrees it has been defeated. Wars end psychologically, not materially. That's what allows little countries like North Vietnam to defeat big countries like the United States. They destroyed us psychologically.

Similarly, an election is over when the defeated party agrees that it is over. If they refuse to agree, and if they convince themselves utterly that the election was lost for reasons which are illegitimate, then they can keep up the good fight and deny the reality which obtrudes upon their pleasant narrative of victory.

That "moral values"--whatever that might mean--were not the issue for most voters in this election is elegantly attested by this new blogger who calls himself "Hogarth". Here's a small excerpt:

Specifically, I voted against:

- I voted against a man that clearly used his Vietnam experience as resume padding. After failing to get his requested deferments, he enlisted in the Naval Reserve, fully expecting stateside duty. When that didn't work out for him, he went overseas and bought a 8mm movie camera to chronicle his exploits. Once enough film was in the can, he gamed the system and got his three purple hearts. Had he been an enlisted man, I think I could have lived with that. As an officer, expected to lead and set a positive example for his men, I cannot. His actions in Vietnam showed early on that this man does not understand or care about the responsibilities of being a leader.

- I voted against the man that came back from Vietnam and slandered his fellow soldiers, ostensibly in protest of our involvement in the war, but more likely in order to make a name for himself to launch his political career. I voted against the treasonous action of illegally meeting with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives on two, if not three, occasions. The fact that he was still in our military at the time exacerbates my feelings of disgust at his actions. There are right ways to protest the actions of our government, and there are treasonous ways to protest. This man chose the path of dishonor.

- I voted against the man that can't seem to tell the truth about even innocuous things like having run in the Boston marathon (he did not). I voted against the man that testified before the Senate that he was in Cambodia in December, 1968. He was not. As examples of this casual, and possibly pathological, lying became even more common I decided that there was no way in the world he could be trusted on any topic. It became even more obvious who had the most credibility between Kerry and the 254 Swift Boat Vets that had come forward to share their direct experiences with Lt. Kerry, war hero.

Works for me.

2004-11-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

This county-by-county map shows the real story of the election.

2004-11-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Problem of Fallujah

We pulled back from Fallujah in the Spring, allowing the place to become a haven and center for terrorists and thugs. The commander at the time thought this was the best way to win hearts and minds. I wasn't sure at the time which was the proper policy, but now I'm convinced it's time to drain that particular cesspool. Here is what one marine has to say. It's so important that I quote it in full.

Dear Dad -

As you have no doubt been watching, we have had our hands full around Fallujah. It would seem as if the final reckoning is coming. The city has been on a consistent down hill spiral since we were ordered out in April. It's siren call for extremists and criminals has only increased steadily and the instability and violence that radiates out of the town has expanded exponentially. If there is another city in the world that contains more terrorists, I would be surprised. From the last two years, I just don't see a way that we can succeed in Iraq without reducing this threat. The cost of continuing on without taking decisive action is too high to dwell on.

The enemy inside the town have come to fight and kill Americans. Nothing will sate their bloodlust and hatred other than to kill everyone of us or at least die trying. It is hard to fathom as a Westerner as rational thought would dictate that we will only be here for a relatively short blip in their history and while we are here, billions of dollars in investments will pour in and opportunity that is beyond comprehension will open up for anyone willing to work. This is not Kansas and this enemy does not think like that.

If we build a school or clinic, they destroy it. They would rather deny medical care or education for the children of the citizens who live nearby than to have any symbol of the West in general and America specifically among them. It is hard to comprehend. Frankly, we are done trying.

For eight months, we have been on our chain. The enemy has fooled itself misinterpreting our humanity and restraint for lack of will and courage. For eight months, we have watched Marines, Soldiers and Sailors maimed and killed by invisible cowards hiding behind some wall or in a canal as he detonates another IED. For eight months, we have been witness to suicidal sociopaths driving vehicles laden with explosives into crowds of Iraqis and into our own convoys.

Just last week, we lost another nine Marines killed and an equal number of wounded as the result of some ignorant extremists who was able to convince himself that killing himself and as many Americans as possible would send him to paradise where he could finally get his virgins.

Now, their own ignorance and arrogance will be their undoing. They believe that they can hold Fallujah. In fact, they have come from all over to be part of its glorious defense. I cannot describe the atmosphere that exists in the Regiment right now. Of course the men are nervous but I think they are more nervous that we will not be allowed to clean the rats nest out and instead will be forced to continue operating as is.

Its as if a window of opportunity has opened and everyone just wants to get on with it before it closes. The Marines know the enemy has massed and has temporarily decided to stay and fight. For the first time, the men feel as though we may be allowed to do what needs to be done. If the enemy wants to sit in his citadel and try to defend it against the Marine Corps and some very hard Soldiers... then the men want to execute before the enemy sobers up and flees.

It may come off as an exceptionally bellicose perspective but where the Marines live and operate is a war zone in the starkest reality. When the Marines leave the front gate on an operation or patrol, someone within direct line of sight of that gate is trying to kill them. All have lost friends and watched as the enemy hides within his sanctuary that has been allowed out of what one must assume is political necessity. The enemy has been given every advantage by our sense of morality and restraint and by a set of operational rules that we are constrained to operate under. The Marines feel like their time has come and we will finally be ordered to do what must be done and be given the latitude to do it. Even though the price will be high, there is not a man here that would chose status quo over paying the price.

Every day, the enemy takes more hostages, assassinates developing Iraqi leaders and savagely beats suspected collaborators. I will give you just one recent example that happened last week. One of our patrols was moving down a street when they saw what looked like a fight. The Marines closed with the scene. It was a family that had come to Iraq on religious pilgrimage that was taken hostage and was being taken into Fallujah. The muj stopped for some reason and the father began fighting. The Marines interdicted and captured two of the kidnappers. Two more ran and the Marines could not get a shot without fear of killing/wounding others.

Every day, insurgents from inside Fallujah drive out and wait for Iraqis that work on our bases. Once the Iraqis leave they are stopped. The lucky ones are savagely beaten. The unfortunate ones are killed. A family that had fled Fallujah in order to get away from the fighting recently tried to return. When they got to their home, they found it taken over by terrorists (very common). When the patriarch showed the muj his deed in order to prove that the house was his, they took the old man out into the street and beat him senseless in front of his family.

Summary executions are common. Think about that. Summary executions inside Fallujah happen with sobering frequency. We have been witness to the scene on a number of occasions. Three men are taken from the trunk of a car and are made to walk to a ditch where they are shot. Bodies are found in the Euphrates without heads washed downstream from Fallujah. To date we have been allowed to do nothing.

I have no idea the numbers of beheadings that have occurred in Fallujah since I have been here. I have no idea the number of hostages that have ended up in Fallujah since we have been here. I just don't know that Americans would be able to comprehend the number anyway. Unfortunately, the situation has only gotten worse. There is no hope for any type of reasoned solution with an enemy like this.

Once again, we are being asked by citizens who have fled the city to go in and take the city back. They are willing for us to literally rubble the place in order to kill the terrorists within. Don't get me wrong, there are still many inside the town that support the terrorists and we cannot expect to be thanked publicly if we do take the city. There is a sense of de ja vu with the refugees telling us where their houses are and asking us to bomb them because the muj have taken them over. We heard the same thing in April only to end up letting the people down. Some no doubt have paid with their lives. The "good" people who may ultimately buy into a peaceful and prosperous Iraq are again asking us to do what we know must be done.

The Marines understand and are eager to get on with it. The only lingering fear in them is that we will be ordered to stop again. I don't know if this is going to happen but if it happens soon, I will write you when its over,

Love,

Dave

2004-11-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

If you like microchips controlling brains, you're going to love brains controlling machines. This brain in a dish controls a flight simulator, flying airplanes around. Robocop anyone?

2004-11-04T21:28:00.000-07:00

Some useful post-election thoughts for Democrats.

2004-11-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

If you're having some remorse over the election, this should make you feel better.

2004-11-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

You might have wondered why, with 98% or 99% of the actual votes counted in the key states of Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico, CNN was unwilling to call the race for Bush. You might also be under the continuing misapprehension that the MSM is evenhanded in its approach to the election. This will explain all.

2004-11-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

Intifada Against College Republicans

Are Republicans the new Jews? [Hat tip: Betsy's Page]

2004-10-27T13:03:00.000-06:00

Enhanced dogs are one step closer now.

2004-10-27T11:35:00.000-06:00

In a recent post on Roger Simon's blog the highly intelligent, extraordinarily gifted, and ever-interesting poster John Moore makes the argument for the use of the IQ test as a reasonable measure of intelligence. John Moore's blog Useful Fools is one of the better ones on the internet. Now I personally would hesitate to claim to have the ultimate answer as to whether IQ should be used as a "valid" or "reasonable" test of intelligence. I do however have some objections to its use which I wanted to air.

John says: "IQ is a rock solid psychometric measure." John's argument, as I understand it, is twofold: 1) that IQ is a very well-tested and reasonable test, and 2) that most of the objections to IQ are due to the fact that the results it gives are not political acceptable and so are suppressed.

I readily concede the second point. In today's highly politicized world in which most university professors believe that politics, rather than scholarship, and most journalists believe that politics, rather than getting the facts out, are their true professions, there is no doubt whatsoever that any and all facts deemed inconvenient to the ruling political elite can and will be suppressed. It happens all the time. Just try publishing a study which casts doubt on global warming in the all-new, politically correct Scientific American.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that IQ is a "rock-solid" test. Well, so is head-size. This can be measured quite accurately, with very little variation from measurement to measurement. But that isn't what people care about. What everyone wants is a proxy for "intelligence". Everyone wants to

2004-10-25T14:50:00.000-06:00

There's something in the psychological literature apparently called "Narcissistic Personality Disorder". Here are the symptoms:

The essential feature of the narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy (DSM-IV?, 1994, p. 658).

Gunderson, et.al, (Livesly, ed., 1995, p. 208) notes that the grandiosity may not be overt or may involve arrogant and haughty behavior.

Kantor (1992, pp. 203-204) describes the clinical characteristics of NPD as:

* inordinate self-pride;
* self-concern;
* an exaggeration of the importance of one's experiences and feelings;
* ideas of perfection;
* a reluctance to accept blame or criticism;
* absence of altruism although gestures may be made for the sake of appearance;
* empathy deficit; and,
* grandiosity.

Frances, et.al. (1995, p. 374) add:

* entitlement;
* shallowness;
* preoccupation with fame, wealth, and achievement;
* craving admiration, attention and praise;
* placing excessive emphasis on displaying beauty and power.

Beck (1990, p. 49) describes the key elements of NPD as presumed superiority and self-aggrandizing behavior. These individuals also give evidence of intense motivation to seek perfection and a feeling state of emptiness, rage and envy (Masterson, 1981, p. 7). They are vulnerable to the most negligible slights and are prone to withdraw and become inaccessible when feeling offended (Benjamin, 1993, p. 141).

http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2004/10/christmas_in_ca.php#c23588

That doesn't remind you of one of the Presidential candidates, does it?

2004-10-22T14:16:00.000-06:00

Singapore to the Rescue

Progress marches slowly on.

2004-10-22T14:14:00.000-06:00

Sharp!

The world's first one-atom-thick fabric has been created. Can single-atom-thick threads for daily use be far away? They would be the sharpest knives physically possible.

2004-10-09T13:10:00.000-06:00

Can You Say "Victory"?

I came across a brand new blogger today with a brand-new message about what's missing from Kerry's speech.

2004-10-08T13:57:00.000-06:00

Deterrence

Here's a wonderful article which perfectly summarizes my views on the War on Terror.

2004-10-08T13:20:00.000-06:00

You Can Trust Us, We're From Microsoft

One of my colleagues came into my office this morning and informed me that we had a problem, a really big problem. He has been working on a multi-multi-million dollar proposal for months. The proposal was written over the course of months using Microsoft Word. He came in this morning to pull it up and... the file was corrupted. Microsoft Word could no longer read the file that it itself had created last night. In a sudden sweat, he tried opening up the backup which Microsoft Word had created. No dice.

No previous version had been saved off.

Thus was the equivalent of two years' revenue about to disappear down the bit bucket never to be seen again.

In desperation, nay panic, he sent the apparently corrupted file to me, in hopes that OpenOffice could open the binary file and save the day. Accordingly I clicked on the file and directed that it be read with OpenOffice. Nothing happened at first, then OpenOffice came up with one of those messed up windows that indicates that the program isn't working, and then suddenly it opened up the file. I saved it off in RTF format for my colleague and the proposal is in the hands of the customer.

This anecdote should give serious pause to everybody who runs a business based entirely on using Microsoft Office. Knowing as we all do the low quality of Microsoft software, does it really make sense to have all of the business's documents dependent on this one buggy program? A program like OpenOffice which writes out its data in a publically available format which can be read by any editor, not just OpenOffice itself, seems vastly preferable.

2004-09-26T01:51:00.000-06:00

Twisting

The AP write that "Bush Twists Kerry's Words". An examination of the facts cited in the article prove that Bush is doing no such thing. Example. Kerry says that "we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." Then Bush says: ""he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today." That sound like a twist to you? Read the details.

But wait, there's more. It turns out that the writer of the AP story just happens to be married to a man who "was previously deputy assistant to President Clinton for environmental initiatives and chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force". No bias here folks, no sir. Move along.

2004-09-23T14:48:00.000-06:00

The New Centurion

A man named Richard Dunbar has argued that 150 is the maximum number of individuals who can cohere as a natural group and that this limit is an inherent one in the very wiring of our brains. Beyond 150, he claims, it becomes necessary to start to institute government, in the form of formal laws and regulations. Even before the 150 limit there begins to be a deterioration in our ability to handle it, as early as 80. Here are three good articles about this and related topics, for example how this puts limits on al Qaida.

2004-09-22T16:53:00.000-06:00

Too Bizarre

Some days it just defies description.

2004-09-22T16:33:00.000-06:00

It's All Our Fault

"Why do they hate us?" a little girl asked me right after the World Trade Center attacks. I didn't have an answer. I'm still not sure that I do. But enlightenment has suddenly arrived courtesy of others. It's all our fault you see.

I got an email the other day which explained that it's all our fault because of the Crusades. Yep. No statute of limitations on that one, we're guilty as charged. Never mind that your ancestors may have been toiling away in sub-Saharan Africa, or the fields of southern China, or else raiding Europe while wearing horned helmets at the time. No, never mind all that. The Crusades were an affront to all Muslims which must be avenged on the Americans of the Twenty-First Century. It's only reasonable.

I've also heard that it's all our fault because of imperialism (never mind that the US steadfastly opposed imperialism from the beginning--ever heard of the "Monroe Doctrine" or the "Suez Crisis"?). And it's all our fault because of Israel (we didn't create it either, but never mind). It's all our fault because George Bush used the word "crusade" and it's all our fault because of our "arrogant" multi-national corporations which try to give the world a Coke instead of allowing them to drink their colorful native beverage.

One thing I've noticed is that the people who strenuously claim it is all "our" fault don't usually mean that it is literally their fault. Canadians for example are fond of saying it's "our" fault meaning that it's the fault of the citizens of the United States. Democrats believe it is "our" fault in the sense that it is the fault of the Republicans. Californians believe that it is "our" fault in the sense that it is the fault of Texans. So there's a sort of false modesty here: "I take full responsibility, naturally, but hang that guy instead." "Feeding the crocodile" Winston Churchill called it.

But there is something else, something subtle. Lurking behind all the permutations and combinations of ways in which it can be construed to be our fault is the flabbergasting mind-numbing arrogance and conceit that everything in the world is controlled by the United States. In this view, other people, when you come right down to it, just don't matter. They're not fully human, they're merely children--or maybe animals--utterly incapable of thinking thoughts on their own or taking responsibility for their own actions or even making mistakes without being pulled by those ubiquitous American (or is that "Haliburton") strings dangling like the ether all over the world. You can't see them, but those who know know that they're there.

This is the ultimate dehumanization. "You little unimportant non-humans are not even allowed acts of terrorism. Blow yourselves up in the grisliest manner conceivable, torture and maim as many little children as you will, saw off head after head on live television, commit the most atrocious acts against humanity ever conceived by any society anywhere, and it will never really matter. Nothing you can do whatsoever will matter because your causes, your beliefs are in the end only an artifact of the omnipotent Americans."

Now there's cause to be angry.

2004-09-21T23:14:00.000-06:00

Who Said It?

Have you ever heard that quotation that goes "Whoever is not a socialist at age 20 doesn't have a heart, but anybody who is still at age 30 doesn't have a brain."? There are lots of variants around. Sometimes the top age is 40, sometimes it's "Democrat" and "Republican" instead of "socialist", sometimes it's "communist". Sometimes it's attributed to Churchill, sometimes to Clemenceau, sometimes to Bismarck, but what's the real deal? I decided to take a look on Google and this is what I came up with.

Apparently the original quote is due to a Frenchman, Francois Guisot who apparently wrote

Not to be a Republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.

A "Republican" in that quote of course refers to the Republicans of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries who were opposed to the "Monarchists".

A good page of quotes similar to the above and attributed to various people can be found here. More discussion can be found here, here, here, and here.

The fact that this quote is so often quoted and so widely attributed is testament to the strength with which its truth seems to resonate in the human mind (or is that heart?).

Among these links is another quote from Churchill that I liked:

Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle.... Socialism seeks to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.... Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.

This reconfirms what I posted the other day, that I am a "liberal" but not a "leftist".

2004-09-21T15:25:00.000-06:00

It's Vietnam Again

When American troops returned from Vietnam they were frequently shocked to find that the country for which they were fighting, the country for which they were risking their lives, had turned on them in their absence. They were frequently called "baby killers", were spat upon, had hot plastic thrown on them when they arrived at the airport, etc. It's not clear where all this left-wing virulence came from but some have pointed the finger at John Kerry and his testimony before the Senate to the effect that there were war crimes being committed by American troops all over the place and at every level in Vietnam.

Now attacks on the servicemen seem to be happening again.

2004-09-21T13:44:00.000-06:00

The Sad, Sad Truth of the Dirty Lowdown

Dear Sirs, I am a senior citizen. During the Clinton Administration I had an extremely good and well paying job. I took numerous vacations and had several vacation homes. Since President Bush took office, I have watched my entire life change for the worse. I lost my job. I lost my two sons in that terrible Iraqi War. I lost my homes. I lost my health insurance. As a matter of fact I lost virtually everything and became homeless. Adding insult to injury, when the authorities found me living like an animal, instead of helping me, they arrested me. I will do anything that Senator Kerry wants to insure that a Democrat is back in the White House come next year. Bush has to go. Sincerely, Saddam Hussein

2004-09-21T13:42:00.000-06:00

Democratic Tricks

Here are some details on why the documents are forgeries.

2004-09-21T13:38:00.000-06:00

New Engines for a New World

Some articles about some cool new engines (acoustic and scramjet) being developed are here and here and here. The supersonic scramjet has no moving parts!

2004-09-21T11:29:00.000-06:00

Frogs at Work

Kerry says we need more of these guys in Iraq.

2004-09-21T11:26:00.000-06:00

Which Country Was That Again?

The Kerry doctrine, fisked.

2004-09-21T11:22:00.000-06:00

Fun in LaLa Land

I have been in the Midwest too long. I'd completely forgotten how much fun Berkeley can be.

2004-09-20T22:34:00.000-06:00

Micro vs. Macro

Google plans to take on the evil empire directly. All I can say is, they've got cojones. I wish them luck.

2004-09-20T22:29:00.000-06:00

A Fish by any Other Name Would Stink as Much

CBS has been coordinating their fake memos with the DNC's "fortunate son" campaign. This is spilling all over the internet tonight. Here's one reference.

But don't worry. They're still unbiased in an "accurate" way.

2004-09-20T22:23:00.000-06:00

Swift Boat Truth

In case you're one of those who has bought the DNC line that the Swift Boat veterans are wrong, a good summary of the situation was provided by some Minnesota lawyers in today's New York Post.

2004-09-19T14:27:00.000-06:00

Ship of State?

What exactly is a "state"?

I submit that it is a concentration of power, of the ability to perform and to control physical violence. While there are other forms of power besides physical violence, physical violence is the form of power of last resort when those other forms of power fail to achieve their ends. That is why we have wars.

The extent of a state is always in flux. This is true in two senses, the extent within their own lives of the coercion the state exhibits over its citizens, and the geographical extent of the state.

Concerning the former, there is always a tug-of-war between the individual and the state. The state is after all about coercion, about forcing individuals to do things or not do things which they would not themselves choose. In modern Western states that tug-of-war has been increasingly pulled to the side of the state to the detriment of the individual. It's clear that the Twentieth Century has witnessed a vast extension of the realm which is deemed legitimate state business, as opposed to family business, or personal business. A century ago cocaine and marijuana were legal; being a dope addict was considered foolish but your own business. A century ago the ability of the parents to discipline their children was restrained by community mores and religious concerns; today nearly every state boasts an all-intrusive human-services department with virtually unlimited powers.

Concerning the geographic extent of a state, one may be subject simultaneously to several states and the question arises as to which of these is paramount. The power relationships betwee these various entities itself shifts over time.

For example, there was considerable disagreement in the United States in the year 1861 as to what this might be. People living in Virginia were torn as to whether they belonged to the state called "Virginia" or the state called the "United States". Which was the true state, on which lay the true allegiances, was a matter of dispute even within the consciences of single individuals such as Robert E. Lee, who took considerable time determining which way to jump. A federal system necessarily fudges the issue of where the ultimate sovereignty lies. Normally this doesn't matter but when serious undecidable disagreements arise then a choice must be made. If broad agreement on the choice then war, as the final arbiter of power, must needs be the result.

A similar event is occurring within Europe today. The seat of sovereignty of the European countries is gradually if imperceptibly shifting from their national capitals to Brussels. This won't matter as long as no serious disagreement arises. It is estimated that at present one-third of all the laws governing the British are now produced in Brussels.

States can contract as well as expand. During the 1970s the United States began to observe in many of its largest cities a contraction of the state from its traditional role as keeper of the peace on the streets. Crime rates soared and vigilantes started taking matters into their own hands.

There seems to be a certain minimal level of day-to-day state control which is necessary. When state power falls below that level new miniature states ascend to fill the market need as it were. This explains the creation of "gated communities" in the United States in recent decades. Because the ordinary state agents are unable to protect the citizens in many areas, they have taken matters into their own hands by hiring their own police. A similar phenomenon occurred at the end of the Roman Empire in the West, as groups of people who were no longer protected by the late Roman state from bands of marauders chose to form their own defensive structures which eventually became castles. The castles in turn formed the basis of the new medieval states which arose in response to the decline of the further decline of the Empire. Those who ruled such castles were the significant players in the new states, and that is why nobility was determined by how many manors or fiefs one controlled.

The expansion or contraction of the state is to some extent predicated on technical abilities. Without access to modern computer data-bases it would be impossible to enforce the level of obtrusiveness into the family exhibited by modern human-services departments. Similarly, the ability of Ulysses Grant to coordinate attacks off sufficient force so as to overwhelm the Confederates and maintain the Union was predicated on his ability to use the telegraph and the railroad to direct and move troops without requiring his physical presence in every battle theater.

2004-09-18T21:58:00.000-06:00

The New Social Lies

As identified by Richard McEnroe:

"I'm not anti-semitic, I'm just anti-zionist."
"I don't hate the troops, I just hate the war.
"Some of my best friends are colored people."
"I'm a patriot, that's why I oppose my country."

2004-09-18T20:57:00.000-06:00

A Test

Here's a little quiz for you:

Do you dislike American military action overseas?
Do you think American corporations are willing to exploit American soldiers' deaths in Iraq and elsewhere for political gain?
Do you believe American actions in the War on Terror are driven by imperialism?
Are you sorry that the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center because half of the people inside were Democrats?
Do you believe that President Bush had foreknowledge of 9/11?

These are all beliefs held by Michael Moore. You can see how closely your beliefs match to his. Michael Moore was an honored guest at the Democratic convention, sitting right next to Jimmy Carter. Michael Moore's positions match Kerry's in at least five ways, according to Bill Roggio:

Five memes shared between John Kerry and the Minuteman were easily found: Bush Lied, Bush Was AWOL, My Pet Goat, Saudi Cover-ups and Halliburton is a War Profiteer. If you want evidence that the Democrat party has truly embraced the far Left, this is a good start.

And if you still believe the anti-American propaganda in Moore's film, I suggest you go here to reconsider.

2004-09-18T19:15:00.000-06:00

Truth from Iraq

It would appear that things are going much better in Iraq than we're hearing from the anti-war, anti-American news media. Here's a report from an actual Marine major on the staff in Baghdad.

The US media is abuzz today with the news of an intelligence report that is very negative about the prospects for Iraq’s future. CNN’s website says, “[The] National Intelligence Estimate was sent to the White House in July with a classified warning predicting the best case for Iraq was ‘tenuous stability’ and the worst case was civil war.” That report, along with the car bombings and kidnappings in Baghdad in the past couple days are being portrayed in the media as more proof of absolute chaos and the intransigence of the insurgency.
From where I sit, at the Operational Headquarters in Baghdad, that just isn’t the case....

The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.

You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it – probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger.

I guess that's the problem when the entire news apparatus becomes too concentrated in the hands of a few and starts to rot. We ordinary citizens are only subjected to the "truths" that are in our benevolent reporters' heads rather than the truths that are actually perceptible through the ordinary five senses to the rest of us.

2004-09-18T19:03:00.000-06:00

Help is on the Way

Since, as pointed out by David Brooks in today's Pravda on the Hudson, Kerry is having a very tough time settling in on what his message really is, iowahawk has decided to help him out. Here are some of his suggestions:

I Will Keep Our Enemies Guessing, Too
Projecting American Strength Through Intricately Complex Nuance

The Thinking Man's Self-Confessed War Criminal

Vote For Me or My Running Mate Will Sue

Those Atrocity Stories? Dude, I Was Just Shitting You

I Will Do For You the Many Wonderous Things I Have Done For Massachusetts

Fear Not, America, I Have Deigned to Lead You

I Will Never Recuse My UN Ambassador from the Vote to Ask for a Permission Slip to Defend This Country

The Next Time America is Attacked, I Promise To Open Up a Carafe of Whupass

Post-Emptive Leadership For A Safer World

I Have Three Words For George Bush -- Bring It On

I Have Five More Words For George Bush -- Call Off Your On-Bringers

Restoring America's Seat At The Global Popular Table

Come Home Again, America... No Wait, Stay There Again

There Once Was A Man From Nantucket, If You Get My Drift

Shaggin' Billionaire Bag Ladies So You Don't Have To

Some Look at Things As They Are And Say, 'Why?' Others Look at Things As They Are Not And Say, 'Why Not?', And I Suppose A Few Might Look at Things As They Are Not, And Say 'Why?', and Vice-Versa, and So Forth, And One Might Be Tempted To Look at These People Looking at Things And Ask 'Who?' But This Would Not Be Constructive, Because The Important Thing To Realize Is That Some People Like To Look At Things, And This Is Precisely My Point

2004-09-18T18:33:00.000-06:00

Shocking

Studies show that Dan Ra^ther's minions are heavy contributors to Democratic causes. His daughter is a big activist in Democratic politics in Texas. But I'm sure we can expect Dan and the gang to be superhuman and ignore their real interests while they're ~~blatantly using forged documents to propagandize the country and sway an election~~, oops, I mean report the news.

2004-09-18T17:51:00.000-06:00

Organization Charts the NYT Will Never Publish

The Democrats and CBS are found to be linked in an intricate web.

2004-09-18T17:47:00.000-06:00

CBS Continues the Old Double Standard

From Powerline:

Yesterday, we noted that General Staudt had given an interview to ABC in which he denied that he had pressured anyone about Lt. Bush, and put to rest the claim that he had somehow come out of retirement to do it. In addition, Staudt drove a stake through the heart of the claim that Bush received preferential treatment in getting into the Guard. Staudt said that he was the person who accepted Bush as a pilot, that he did so solely because he thought Bush would make a fine pilot, and that he received no communications from anyone in relation to Bush's application. (Contrary to what is often reported in the press, there was no "waiting list" at that time to become a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard.)
Staudt's testimony would seem to definitively put the lie to CBS's faked memos, but that's not how CBS sees it. Yesterday CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius brushed off Staudt's comments:

In a debate this heated, one can hardly expect Gen. Staudt to endorse the point of view that he exerted undue influence.

So if you slander a man, as CBS did General Staudt, the fact that he has been slandered makes his response so suspect that it can safely be disregarded. And information from a person in a unique position to know the facts, like General Staudt, is immaterial; but Bill Burkett, a long-time Bush hater and Democratic activist who knows nothing about Bush's Guard service, is an "unimpeachable source," while a comment by Robert Strong to the effect that the forged documents sound like something that could have been written in the early 1970's satisfactorily confirms the documents' authenticity, even though, by his own account, Strong has never met President Bush, never spoke to Jerry Killian about President Bush, and has no idea whether the documents are forgeries or not.

But CBS's story must be true. They just know it.

2004-09-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

Daily Press Bias

This article documents the outrageous disparity between the way the Associated Press has handled questions about Bush's past versus the way they have handled questions about Kerry's past. Another good place to look for these sorts of stories is here.

2004-09-17T10:03:00.000-06:00

Free Speech, Take II

In this picture, the Democrats show their true colors concerning free speech. An isolated incident you say? As noted in the citation,

A week or two ago, this partisan violence, once unheard of in Minnesota politics, occurred at the Minnesota State Fair when Democratic thugs roughed up a couple of Republican college students.

The bully in the picture is wearing a T-shirt from the IUPAT union. Here's what they have to say about their political activities:

In 2001, the AFL-CIO named the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades the most effective political organization in the labor movement. IUPAT members quickly became known as the 'Army of Black and Gold' as we attended political events throughout North America in our signature black and gold t-shirts.

Now we know what the Army of Black and Gold does at those political rallies.

2004-09-17T09:41:00.000-06:00

Puppeteer

Roger Simon has an interesting piece up about George Soros, the billionaire bankrupter of small countries. Soros has become important in this election because he is the principal financer of the Democratic 527 group MoveOn.org. The list of top contributors to 527s is here. Intriguingly, there are persistent rumors swirling around Soros that he was trained by the KGB. Among the frequent posters on Roger's blog is one who calls himself "jerry" who seems to have ties to the intelligence community. He has some interesting things to say about this here.

OK, first I want to say the "some say he was KGB trained" piece is actually a fairly widely held position in the non-DO intel community. The DO community doesn’t speculate, they know. I happen to subscribe to the theory that he was intended to be the Hammer replacement because there is another Soviet Jew (actually only on the paternal side) who both Russians, US intel and the Israelis also believe was a KGB project. That is Vladimir "mad Vlad" Zhironovsky...

He clarifies:

DO = CIA Directorate of Operations. And to clarify further I mean they know either way whether stories are true or false.

Interesting.

2004-09-16T23:15:00.000-06:00

Fahrenheit 9/11 Again

Omar of Iraq the Model has a movie review up. It's interesting if nothing else to see an Iraqi's point of view.

2004-09-16T14:48:00.000-06:00

Tell It Betsy!

Here's Betsy's take on Dan Rather's descent into cloud cuckoo land. She says it better than I.

"In an interview with the New York Observer, Rather also uses the phrase "fundamental truth." This is 1960s babble that amounts to saying: I, as a liberal, can tell lies for the greater good; my surface dishonesty conveys a deeper truth. Rather is falling back on the Noble Lie -- the idea that the enlightened are entitled to heap fables upon the hoi polloi for the sake of preserving proper order.

The transcendent truth that mitigates Rather's faked-up memos is apparently that Bush missed a physical examination over three decades ago -- not exactly the justification for the Noble Lie Plato envisioned in The Republic. Why allegations about a missed physical and truncated National Guard service trouble Rather so deeply when Bill Clinton's draft-dodging did not is another question Rather isn't likely to answer. "

Read the rest. It seems that this is the new approach to everything the liberals believe. I see a grand unity here. Kitty Kelley's gossip is fine because it's a core truth. Wishful thinking that the UN and France might support a Kerry-led action into Iraq, despite all evidence to the contrary, is fine because it says something about a core truth about how we might wish to conduct foreign affairs. Post-modern literary criticism far removed from anything the author may have intended is fine because it expresses a core truth about what the reader feels about the book. Demagogic deceptions about outsourcing or Social Security are fine, because the core truth is that liberals care more about the unemployed and elderly. Lies about Christmas in Cambodia are fine because there is a core truth about intervention in Nicaragua that Kerry wanted to make.

We're in the postmodernist world now and truth is really just an elastic concept. Woe is us, if this is true. And, hey, it doesn't matter if it isn't, because it's my core truth.

2004-09-16T14:20:00.000-06:00

Kerry Who?

Why on earth did the Democrats pick Kerry, who seems now to be the worst candidate in modern times? Some of the answer is given here.

2004-09-16T10:36:00.000-06:00

The Truth Shall (Not) Set You Free

The recent polarization in the electorate seems to be based on a fundamental difference in the perception of reality. Now CBS has chosen to weigh in on reality, accusing Bush of a fraud concerning his service 30 years ago in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS has, after a five-year investigation, presented some memos as proof that Bush did not fulfill the requirements. The only problem is that the memos are rather obvious fakes. Apparently this is more blatant lying in order to elect Kerry. Yesterday even CBS admitted that the documents are not "authentic" but says that they are "accurate" in some deeper sense, whatever that means.

CBS seems to be saying "It's true if I say it's true" and the facts be damned. That standard for truth means that objective truth stands for nothing, evidence stands for nothing, and all that matters is true belief. This has always been the standard of the religious fanatic. It's like the old saw "God exists because the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says so."

"It's true if I say so" has of course been the position of Marxists throughout the Twentieth Century. It didn't matter if those Koolaks literally committed crimes against the state because their crimes were true to those who could see. It is also, not coincidentally, the standard for truth among the "post-modernists" who have taken over much of academia: it doesn't matter what Shakespeare said; all that matters is what I say he said. As a formula for raw power, I guess you can't beat it. If you're a person for whom the end justifies the means then this sort of reasoning is tailor-made for you.

"Bush lied, people died." "Bush was AWOL." These statements are now articles of religious faith among some Democrats. There's no nicer way to put it. Whether these statements are true or not no longer matters in the proximate sense because according to the Democratic partisans they are true in the ultimate sense.

As far as I'm concerned, this is complete cloud cuckoo land territory.

Here's what Donald Sensing has to say about it.

CBS News has admitted there is controversy about the authenticity of the forged memos it showed on 60 Minutes II last week, but has never come close to admitting the memos are phonies. Instead, today's statement by the news division's president, Andrew Heyward, lays out the New Truth:

We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate... .

Meaning, of course, that CBSN is really saying: Forgeries, schmorgeries, the memos say Bush was a shirker and that's good enough for us. In the first nightly newscast after the forgery broke and which I recorded, Dan Rather explicitly said that "the key questions" were what mattered, not the documents' legacy. The "key questions" were, of course, solely those casting aspersions on Bush's Air Guard service.

But we cannot bifurcate the memos from their accusations. We cannot separate the message from the messenger. Here's why the memos' authenticity does matter: if the memos carrying the accusations do not matter, then why bother with memos at all?...

The authenticity of the memos is the most important aspect of this whole scandal. If documents can be forged, handed to co-conspiratorial media and used to hammer or destroy a political figure without regard to the fact that the documents are forged, then what the Left has long claimed about America will come true: we are not far removed from a Gestapo regime. Only the Left will itself will have brought it about, and the Left will be the new reichsfuhrers.

But maybe that's the point, do you suppose?

2004-09-15T17:28:00.000-06:00

Big as in Big

How the Han Chinese became the world's biggest tribe. Note that the male genes travelled, the female ones did not. I wonder what happened to the other men??

2004-09-15T15:58:00.000-06:00

Liberal Schmiberal

The words "liberal", "conservative", etc. have become vastly overwrought and essentially destroyed as far as their information content goes but despite all that I still consider myself "liberal". I am open-minded and I view a certain level of open-mindedness to be a necessity of membership in civilized society. Though the (meaningless anyway) words "liberal" and "leftist" are often conflated, I would fain distinguish between them. The "leftist" is a member of the new religion, a Neopuritan, whether he knows it or not. Almost by definition, he does not. This is a person who has an agenda to push and push it he will whether it contradicts itself, whether it changes dramatically from one period to the next, whether it defies the facts, or even whether it defies reality itself. Anyone who departs from the canonical leftist position on even one point is immediately labelled an unbeliever ("conservative") and excommunicated from the Church of the Left.

That liberals differ in kind from leftists is made starkly clear by the necessity for Republicans in New York to remain in the closet. Here is the followup.