Rants and Raves

WE'RE MOVING!

2009-10-26T11:52:00.001-07:00

Yeah! A good bud Joshua has set me up with a brand new site with my own domaine name.

Henceforth, all posting will be done at http://www.stephenwbrowne.com/

So please bear with me while I learn the bells and whistles of the new system.

Expect more photos, easier-to-read text, dancing girls...

Another Ah-ha! moment

2009-10-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

In my review of Thomas Sowell's book, "A Conflict of Visions" I described reading it as one of the great Ah-ha! moments in my life.

(See: http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/04/review-conflict-of-visions-by-thomas.html )

A commenter in Peru agreed, "I have read in 1996 the Spanish translation of the 1987 edition. It was also an Ah-ha moment for me."

Well I caught Rush Limbaugh on my pickup radio the other day talking about his blacklisting while trying to buy a football team.

Rush said, "If the NFL can be politicized, what makes you think a liver transplant can't be?"

Ah-ha!

Take the jab!

2009-10-18T07:37:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting at home writing this, with a temperature of 101 and diffuse aches throughout my body. I'm cold, in spite of layers of thermal underwear. My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton wool and my throat feels like it's been swabbed with sandpaper. And though I'm not coughing much, when I do it feels like two guys with baseball bats have laid into both sides of my lower ribs simultaneously.
In other words, I have the flu.

What's worse, I have no excuse for it. A few weeks ago I covered a drive-through flu innoculation our city/county health personel put on at the county highway department barn. How difficult would it have been to pay the fee and get the jab myself?

Well, maybe I didn't want to spend the money, and maybe I'm kind of chicken about shots.

Apparently lots of people are, our City/County Health director said while the event went very well as a preparedness exercise, turnout was disappointing.

I guess the joke's on me. I had to spend the money and get blood drawn anyway.

Not that that did any good. My doctor said everything was normal in my bloodwork, which simply ruled out a number of other things I didn't have and confirmed what I knew already. It's flu.

So I said, "Bed rest, plenty of fluids..."

"That's right," he replied, "everything your grandmother would have told you. And, don't take anti-fever medication unless it gets above 102. Fever fights infection."

That's one of the reasons my father, a retired physician, says medical services are overused in America.

"Things that used to be treated with a mother's kiss are taken to the emergency room these days," is how he put it.

So now I've paid the co-pay to confirm what I already knew, and done my bit to raise the insurance premiums of my co-workers next time around.

In the meantime, I can't hug my kids (and I could use a hug right now,) I can't kiss my wife (and she's going to kill me if she gets sick while the play she's in is running,) and while nausea is one of the symptoms thankfully absent, nothing really tastes good either.

So do yourself, your family, and your co-workers a favor and take the jab!

When deadly force is a duty

2009-10-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

Dumb moments in journalism

If you go here:

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/669521/76c2a9da/haatbaarden_in_engeland_tegen_wilders.html

you'll find a Dutch website* with a video of British press interview with a raghead (observe the gutra on said head) about the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, speaking in a good solid English working-class accent - the accent I associate with the salt of the earth, saying:

"...in Islam, the punishment for anyone who insults the prophet (Arabic phrase which means "peace be upon him,") — is capital punishment. He should take the lesson from Theo van Gogh and others who've faced the punishment."

The journalist (not on-camera, only his microphone appears) then breaks in to ask, "Is that (unclear) be construed as a threat?"

Is the Pope Catholic? Does the bear shit in the woods?

After which the interviewee goes on to elaborate that, while he wouldn't necessarily be the one to carry it out, short answer: yes.

Well, perhaps the fellow was just double-checking. Perhaps it was an example of English reserve. And perhaps the excerpt wasn't long enough to show how he undoubtedly had penetrating questions about how could the interview subject expect full rights of citizenship and rely on the hospitality of a free society, and yet demand the right to annul those very freedoms which made that country such an attractive destination for immigrants?

Now go on and listen to the speaker with the megaphone express his hatred for democracy in every country in Europe, and "this dog Wilders."

"Islam will dominate... So no matter where he runs... Islam will come, and it will conquer... Islam will enter the house of every person in this world...We will see the European crusaders destroyed..."

You get the drift.

And, this takes place outside the Houses of Parliament, the "Mother of Parliaments."

Interviewer asks, "So you consider this a victory today, that you've prevented him from speaking?"

I vote clueless.

Listen a little longer and you'll hear another speaker loudly trumpeting his invitation to Geert Wilders to come out and be murdered by the mob. And moreover, expressing his indignation that the British police won't allow them to come in and get him.

I don't know about you, but it's my strong impression that these fellows mean what they say. (How's that for English-style understatement?)

I suppose some fellow-libertarians (those not members of the "libertarians with cojones" caucus) are going to call me names again for this, but there are times when a government of free men must be willing to shed the blood of its citizens.

This is one of them. That mob of savages should have been read the Riot Act**, ordered to disperse, and if they didn't they should have been treated to mass volley fire.

You don't like tyrannical government supressing free speech? So do you think the tyranny of a bloodthirsty mob is an improvement?

Now that I've stuck my foot in it, let me think of a few other occasions when I saw government clearly failing in its duty to use deadly force.

For those preparing angry comments calling me a racist, try this on for size.

A few years back, a mob in a German town besieged a hostel for immigrants. In the course of the riot, the mob set fire to the place and burned to death several Turkish women and children.

The police pretty much stood by wringing their hands.

Their clear duty was again, order the mob to disperse and give them a "first, second, third warning..." followed by volley fire. Then form a skirmish line, sweep through town and shoot/bayonet anyone carrying an incindiary.

Case three, requiring more subtlety.

A while back I saw a news video of English soccer hooligans in a stadium with two tiers of seating. The upper tier was quite high above the lower tiers.

The lager louts were ripping up the wooden seating and throwing it onto the heads of the spectators below.

From that height, throwing heavy objects onto a crowd is attempted murder.

Obviously, volley fire is not an appropriate response in crowded conditions. Snipers are.

"If you are not prepared to use violence to defend civilization, you must be prepared to accept barbarism."
--Thomas Sowell

*To show you something about education in the Netherlands, the web site text is in Dutch, but the video is of course in English, but with no translation or subtitles. The Dutch audience is just assumed to understand English.

**From Wikipedia: The Riot Act[1] (1713) (1 Geo.1 St.2 c.5) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which authorised local authorities to declare any group of more than twelve people to be unlawfully assembled, and thus have to disperse or face punitive action. The Act, whose long title was "An act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters", came into force on 1 August 1715, and remained on the statute books until 1973.

No longer on the statute books. Pity, it's kind of classy.

"Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!"

Point being, you get a warning. Von Hayek pointed out years ago that one of the essential qualities of the laws of a free society is not that they always make perfect sense, or be perfectly just (if there is any such thing this side of heaven,) but that they be consistent. You've got to know from day to day what to expect from the law.

Sue the bastards Rushbo!

2009-10-17T05:52:00.000-07:00

How could you say these vile things Rush Limbaugh?

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed."

"I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

Oh, you didn't. In fact they were made up. By people who were not mistaken, but deliberately lying.

But here: http://newsone.com/obama/top-10-racist-limbaugh-quotes/

You can find a site which still claims El Rushbo said them all - and cites sources!

Please take a minute to go there, and click on the SOURCE buttons under each quote.

Back now?

OK, notice that each source is secondary. Among the sources are the book "101 People who are Screwing up America," by Jack Huberman, and CommonDreams.org (a say it very softly, communist - shhhhh, front organization.)

(OK, spare yourself the trouble, I'll say it for you, "MCCARTHYITE PIG! WITCH HUNT! WITCH HUNT! WITCH HUNT!" There, don't you feel better now?)

Not once is a written source or an air date for these alleged quotes cited.

So what? This is a tinfoil-hat-wearing blogger so who cares?

Except that supposedly "professional" types at CNN and elsewhere are refusing to apologize, some (such as one Rick Sanchez) offering lame excuses of the "Well if it ain't true, it oughta be" kind.

The wittiest living man writing in English, Mark Steyn, pointed out the single, obvious fact that should have given the lie to this. If Rush had made these statements, does anyone seriously think they would only have been brought public attention now?

The occasion of these particular slanders/libels* is of course, Rush's attempt to buy a football team.

I could give a crap except for one thing, this time the slanders have evidently achieved their purpose. They have derailed what was a purely business deal.

Bingo!

Rush, I think you just won the lottery.

Libel laws in the U.S. I'm told, rest on two legs, 1) the assertion must be false (in America truth is absolute proof against libel**), and 2) there must be demonstrable damage.

Nowadays "mental anguish" has been accepted as damage, and defined down to "hurt feelings." Dumb and dangerous to free speech. But Rush actually suffered an aborted business transaction directly attributable to these slander, as documented by the football bigwigs' public statements.

Sue the bastards Rush! Sue them down to their underwear! Sue everybody in sight!

As a libertarian I've always been a bit uncomfortable about libel laws (and I'll present my Free Market Anarchist alternative later.)

In a civilized society, a gentleman falsely accused of making statements that vile would send a designated gentleman around to the slanderer with a polite request for either a public apology, or a meeting on the Field of Honor.***

One could of course, say no. And thus be revealed as a coward without the courage to defend one's lie. And of course, no jury would award more than a slap-on-the-wrist fine and a hearty handshake for the slandered party when he met the offender on the street and caned him. (As Sam Houston once did on the Capitol steps to a member of Congress who made a vile - and racist, insult, then haughtily refused him a duel.)

But we don't have a civilized society, so sue them Rush!

P.S. I'll point out here that I have been sharply critical of Rush Limbaugh in the past here: http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/11/libertarians-emerge-as-spoilers.html
when his mouth ran ahead of his brain.

But read the post and see that what Rush said on that occasion was an intemperate, and uncharitable interpretation of something that was admittedly true.

Note also that the insults I delivered to Rush for satirical purposes, "fat, deaf, junkie," were also true at the time.

*A lawyer friend once explained the legal difference between libel and slander to me: slander is spoken, libel is written. That's it.

That definition held for centuries until broadcast/recorded media made it a bit more complicated. The modern convention seems to be to use the term 'libel' for everything.

**In the U.K. startlingly, this is not the case. Which is why London is a favorite destination for libel tourism.

***Am I kidding? Even I don't know.

All eyes on the prize

2009-10-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Note: A slightly different version of this was the weekend op-ed in my newspaper.

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows:...and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
--Last Will and Testament of Alfred Nobel

Norway, with less than five million inhabitants and a military smaller than many states' National Guard, has managed to do what Russian might, terrorist ruthlessness, and Latin American tyranny could not.

They've made the president of the United States a laughingstock.

In 2009, a record 205 nominations were received for the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize was awarded to President Barack Obama, nine months into his term. Worse, nominations closed on Feb. 1, which was less than two weeks after Obama took office.

Of course the Nobel Peace Prize Committee did not mean it that way. They obviously chose Obama because he's the anti-Bush, and to influence U.S. foreign policy in a direction more to their liking.

But Obama supporters and detractors alike realize there is no upside to this. They only difference is whether they're reacting with delight, or dismay.

Obama said he was, “surprised and humbled.” I suggest a better adjective is “humiliated.”

If you doubt this, imagine yourself in large public gathering introduced by a speaker who heaped the most fulsome and effusive praise on you, which you knew for a fact you did not deserve.

Heck, it's embarrassing enough for any man with self-respect to listen to when you do deserve it.

If someone is heaping abuse on you, you can ignore it and look above it all. So how do you deal with sickeningly sycophantic praise without looking rude and graceless?

So why would the awards committee make such a gaff? And one at such odds with their intended purpose?

Well, to begin with the Peace Prize is awarded by an entirely different set of people than the other Nobel prizes. The Nobels for Physics, Chemistry, and economics are awarded by a committee from the Swedish Academy of Science, the literature prize from the Swedish Academy.

The Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament, roughly representing the political makeup of that body. This year that's three from left to far-left parties and two from conservative parties. The chairman of the committee is the notoriously gaff-prone Thorbjorn Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway. (A.k.a. "The Joe Biden of Norway.")

For another, the prize has always been inconsistently awarded.

Teddy Roosevelt won the prize for brokering the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese war. And both sides agreed he deserved it.

On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin have been nominated, Yasser Arafat actually won it, and Jimmy Carter only won his twenty years after he negotiated the peace between Israel and Egypt.

Mahatma Gandhi (nominated 5 times!), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Václav Havel, and Corazon Aquino never won.

In 2007 the committee nominated Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children during the Second World War. She was tortured and left for dead by the Gestapo, and later imprisoned by the Communist government.

That year Al Gore won it for his Power Point presentation on Global Warming.

The fact is, the Peace Prize has always been a poor relation coasting on the reputation of the other Nobel prizes given for real, substantial accomplishments in literature, science, medicine, and economics. (With a curious exception. There is no prize for Mathematics.) So I wouldn't take this prize too seriously.

Still, though I have my differences with Barack Obama, that's the President of the United States you're patronizing you lutefisk-eating Euro-weenies!

How about a “public option” for newspapers?

2009-10-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

Note: This is a rare, in fact unique example of an op-ed that I was asked to hold. Not spiked, just asked to hold and rework if I liked.

I was not offended. In fact, I was delighted when I thought about it.

Why? Because it scared the $#!+ out of my publisher and editor. What they said was, 1) "We sometimes make mistakes" is a damaging admission. Manifestly true, and we're not trying to hide it, but it's the kind of honesty that can hurt you if it ever comes up in court.

And 2) they thought some people would actually say, "Hey, what a great idea!"

But most of all, because given the premises of the health care argument, the logic herein is inescapable - and that's scary.

So..... SATIRE ALERT!

*******************************************************************************

Wednesday night President Obama gave a speech to congress outlining his ideas for health care reform. Mostly it was a recap of what he's been pounding away at for a while, with a couple of minor surprises.

The president did give a nod to the lawsuit factor driving health care costs up. Baseless accusations of malpractice too-often force health care providers to practice “defensive medicine.” By ordering every diagnostic test under the sun they try to avoid winding up on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Since the president has so far studiously avoided the subject of tort reform this was praiseworthy, however offhand and half-hearted the mention.

Another surprise was he didn't quite insist on a “public option” in health insurance.

He didn't have to. Once a large enough fraction of the health care industry is pulled into the government sector, the rest will fall into place.

The president said, “But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. Let me be clear - it would only be an option for those who don't have insurance. No one would be forced to choose it, and it would not impact those of you who already have insurance.”

How could anyone object to that? He's not proposing to nationalize the health insurance industry after all.

In fact, this sounds so reasonable I have an additional suggestion. How about a public option for newspapers? We could try it right here in our city.

We at the newspaper are aware that local government is sometimes not entirely happy with our coverage. We sometimes make mistakes. Some accuse us of being one-sided or unfair, or of only reporting bad news. We often give coverage to people they regard as troublemakers with nothing constructive to say.

And, we have a quasi-monopoly in our county as it's only daily newspaper. And let's not forget that advertising can be pretty expensive. Why should only big, rich businesses be able to afford full-page ads? What about small mom-and-pop businesses? Don't they deserve quality advertising?

So why not start a tax-subsidized newspaper to create some competition in the local newspaper business? And maybe a radio station as well. After all, if the people are paying for it, it would serve the people and not some private for-profit interest.

Using the president's logic, “But an additional step we can take to keep newspapers honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the media. Let me be clear - it would only be an option for those who don't have access to news and advertising. No one would be forced to choose it, and it would not impact those of you who already have newspaper subscriptions and advertising accounts.”

A tax-subsidized newspaper could afford more reporters and photographers, more color pages and more comics. A not-for-profit newspaper or radio station could offer free or greatly discounted advertising.

This wouldn't affect your present newspaper or radio station. Any business which preferred to could keep their own paid advertising in the privately owned media.

Of course, more people want their particular news interests published than any newspaper has room or any radio station time for. But you shouldn't worry about news and ad rationing. Public option media would have an impartial board of prominent citizens appointed by the government to review submissions and decide what is really important and newsworthy.

Isn't that the way it always works in government?

After all, it's not like we're proposing a government monopoly on newspapers.

Reworked Afghanistan post for an op-ed

2009-10-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

Note: Readers will recognize this op-ed I wrote for my newspaper as a reworking of an earlier blog post. I'm posting it because, 1) I post almost all of my published op-eds as a way of filing them in a secure location, and 2) it shows the difference in styles between a newspaper column and a blog post.

The differences are due to space constraints, and the prospective audience. Writing op-eds, you are always struck by how many things you have to leave out. And you know that your audience is composed of a lot of people who don't agree with you, so you have to take a certain approach just to get them to read it.

I'll have more to say about that kind of writing later, after I figure it out myself. So:

I have a very, very, bad feeling about Afghanistan

I have a very, very, bad feeling about Afghanistan, and recent events are only making it worse.

General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama's hand-picked commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is already in trouble with the administration for going public with disagreements over strategy.

Obama picked McChrystal, to replace General David McKiernan in May, 2009 less than a year after McKiernan took command.

Afghanistan is Obama's “war of necessity,” as opposed to Bush's “war of choice” in Iraq.

Certainly a punitive expedition to Afghanistan after Sept. 11 was entirely justified. The planners of the attack were there. The Afghan government said "Nyah, nyah you can't have them" when we asked, so we went in and killed and captured as many of them as we could find.

Comb the history of civilization and find me one which would deny a legitimate cassus belli existed in this case.

But sticking around to practice nation-building on the Afghans strikes me as a long-term project with immense costs and problematic gains.

If you believe western civilization is engaged in what amounts to a long war against Islamic jihadism whether we like it or not, Afghanistan doesn't look like the best place to pin down limited resources.

Whatever you think of that war, Iraq is an ancient civilization near the geopolitical center of Islam. Iraq is rich in resources, and in the hands of a hostile power capable of supplying money and resources to the jihadist campaign against the West.

Saddam Hussein for example was, as our “ally” Saudi Arabia still is, paying substantial sums to families of suicide bombers in Israel.

Afghanistan has always been peripheral to the ancient civilizations of the region. It's importance to the jihadists is basically, that it's a great place to hide.

For students of military science, the critical difference difference between them is the strategically important part of Iraq is pretty flat. Afghanistan... isn't.

As a descendant of Scottish highlanders I can affirm that forcing civilization on mountaineers is very, very difficult. Mostly because they don't want it.

I feel for Afghanis who have to live with the Taliban, especially women who aspire to a life as something more than domestic chattels. But our resources are not infinite, and we have every reason to believe this new kind of war is going to be a long and expensive one.

So at the risk of sounding heartless I have to ask, what's in it for us? What do we gain by the enormous expense in the long term? And might those resources be better applied elsewhere?

Students of World War II might remember Germany lost two sizable armies in Africa and Russia, and possibly the war, because Hitler was unwilling to abandon any theater of operations once occupied by German soldiers.

Students of Vietnam remember that the justification of fighting for a democratic regime was rendered indefensible by a succession of about a half-dozen coups in rapid succession followed by strongman rule. Now it appears Afghan President Hamid Karzai may have rigged the last election.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”

With Afghanistan we have an electorate not fully committed to the war effort, and an administration that has shown itself weak and vacillating on the issue.

If we stay in Afghanistan, the Russians can do to us exactly what they did to us in Vietnam, and what we did to them when they occupied that country. They can supply cheap arms to our enemies at no risk to themselves, while we expend immense sums of money and the valuable lives of our soldiers.

I say if the jihadists base themselves in Afghanistan, play whack-a-mole with them every time they stick their heads up. But unless we're willing to commit to an all-out effort, with all of the resources our field commanders ask for, maybe it's better to fight the jihadists another day, in a place where the outcome is more decisive.

Gilded ghettos

2009-10-08T04:46:00.000-07:00

I'd like to draw your attention to this message from my friend Robert Bidinotto, which he posted on his facebook page. It deserves wider distribution than his mailing list, and his web site is hors de combat after the hosting company fraked up.

Underneath I'm going to indulge myself in some sour grapes. Or at least that's what some may say.

Lest you think Robert is indulging himself in some of those, I'll point out here that wa-a-a-ay back, Robert was the writer who broke the "Willie Horton" story in Reader's Digest during the Bush/Dukakis campaign.

And by the way, Robert NEVER referred to the oft-incarcerated psycho as anything but "William Horton."

Robert wrote:

In Defense of the "Right-Wing Populists"

by Robert James Bidinotto

Jonah Goldberg—the undeniably intellectual author of Liberal Fascism—criticizes those intellectual weenies, both left and right, who attack talk-show host Glenn Beck and other right-wing populists, including Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Partiers. (See his article here: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/10/column-in-defense-of-glenn-beck-.html )

I'm with Goldberg on this.

I've spent most of my professional life within the right-wing think-tank world. Sadly, in my experience, the majority of the wonks and theorists who populate this mini-universe live in the rarified air of theoretical abstractions severed from real-world experience—that is to say, totally inside their own skulls. Many have migrated straight from grad schools into think tanks, without the invaluable rite of passage provided by a job out in the competitive marketplace. As a result, they have become cocooned in a self-selected world of other intellectuals, and many are uncomfortable around those who don't share their bookish preoccupations. This causes an interesting cultural tension for right-wing intellectuals. As a point of ideological faith, they profess to like "Americans," at least in the abstract—but they despise most of the concrete examples of Americans whom they encounter in the streets and shops.

Read conservatives such as David Frum, David Brooks, and Peggy Noonan, or even some prominent denizens of libertarian think tanks. Such right-wing intellectuals are about as disconnected from Main Street America as are left intellectuals. Their alienation from their nation's citizens finds expression in constant, condescending contempt toward people like Sarah Palin and "Joe the Plumber," toward rank-and-file Tea Party activists, and toward the talk-show champions of Main Street America, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin. Such people, they sniff, are so intellectually impoverished, so unrefined, so lacking in Ivy League nuance and subtlety.

I sense that such conservative intellectuals would love to spend hours at a Georgetown dinner party trading bon mots with a smooth and refined progressive like Barack Obama, or exchanging light-hearted barbs with a quick-witted left-wing comic like Jon Stewart. But they wouldn't be caught dead with a beer in their hands at a barbecue hosted by Sarah, Joe, or Glenn.

Many have noted that America seems to be undergoing a political realignment. But I think that's merely one part of a much broader cultural realignment. It's a realignment of American society based on fundamentally clashing values. And this value-conflict reveals itself in a host of other profound differences—in lifestyle preferences, personal priorities, and social-class affinities.

Of course, the most public manifestation of this great divide can be seen in the political arena. There, we're witnessing an all-out attempt by arrogant, technocratic know-it-alls to take over our lives, our social institutions, and entire industries, and to run them strictly according to their pet theoretical systems. Educated at the best universities, comfortably surrounded by other anointed members of the Establishment elite, they believe they know how to manage the lives and affairs of ordinary Americans far, far better than those little people can do for themselves. Meanwhile, Main Street America is righteously rebelling against this self-appointed aristocracy, and popular figures like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin are giving eloquent voice to their cries of protest.

In this pivotal battle for individual freedom, those intellectuals on the right who align themselves with the power-hungry elites, rather than with the beleaguered citizenry, are akin to the Tories who betrayed their fellow colonists and supported the coercive Crown during the American Revolution.

As for me, I'll gladly leave the parasitical aristocrats to their glittering cocktail parties, preferring to stand outside in the streets with the protesting crowds bearing signs, torches, and pitchforks. It's an easy choice, because not only do I know which side is right, but also which side will ultimately win.

The author is online at www.RobertTheWriter.com, www.facebook.com/bidinotto, and www.ecoNOT.com.

I replied:

Robert,

AMEN!

I've refrained from bitching about this too much, because it'd sound like sour grapes, but...

A few years back I returned from 13 years living and working in Eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, with frequent visits to the Baltic States and points east) with a good working knowledge of Polish and street competence in a few other Slavic languages. I was elected an Honorary Member of the Yugoslav Movement for the Protection of Human Rights for my work with Serbian dissidents. I ran money to Belarusian dissidents, founded the Liberty English Camps (now operating in a half-dozen countries around the world,) been in a few truly hairy situations, and have been kicked with honest-to-God jack boots and beaten with real rubber truncheons. (They're not all rubber, they have a steel rod inside.)

I thought, thought I, with my education, accomplishments, and experience, I should be working with think tanks and foundations dedicated to spreading liberty throughout the world.

So I applied in a number of places over 3-4 years. The responses usually went through three stages: 1) initial enthusiasm, followed by 2) rapidly cooling ardor, and 3) excuses for not hiring me.

"Oh Steve, we thought with your experience you'd be bored in this position." (Real example.)

Now, I don't actually know, but it occurred to me that since most of these positions would have had me working for people who in your description, "have migrated straight from grad schools into think tanks, without the invaluable rite of passage provided by a job out in the competitive marketplace," they might have a problem hiring someone who's been some places and done some stuff.

Or as my (Polish) wife asked, "Who are these children who keep calling you?"

I did get a paid internship through the conservative National Journalism Foundation, which placed me at Human Events for three months. I had a ball and made some good friends - but you're right. Inside-the-Beltway people often have more in common with their inside-the-Beltway opposite numbers on the Left than they do with their alleged constituency outside the Beltway.

Victor Davis Hanson called the right-wing think tanks, "gilded ghettos."

Amen. Every time I hear that yet another libertarian or conservative think tank has moved "up" to offices inside the Beltway I think, "Another casualty in the war for liberty."

Or maybe that should be "defection."

Steve

Robert's comment: "Maybe Victor Davis Hanson is so sane because he’s a farmer, as well as an academic, and not afraid to get dirt under his fingernails."

UPDATE:

Robert,

On reflection it occurs to me that the inside-the-Beltway crowd is actually out of touch with the real Washington as well.

Three months in D.C. I stayed in a nice little flat behind the Supreme Court, a five-minute walk away from the office. From Capitol Hill, out to Dupont Circle and Embassy Row in one direction, to Foggy Bottom in another is it's own little world, kept reasonably safe by at least three separate police forces (D.C., Metro, and Capitol Hill P.D.) and innumerable private security agencies.

A 20-minute walk in another direction, or a 3-5 stop ride on the metro, and you were in a different world entirely. (Which then changes back around Silver Springs.) Even within the metro system you are in a different city if you get on the green line.

D.C. is an island of calm surrounded by a sea of barbarism the insiders have zero contact with, and though they're aware of it, they prefer not to think of it. (I was told, "If you live on Capitol Hill, you have to, have to, send your kids to private school." No elaboration needed.)

And weirdly, on weekends inner D.C. has the quiet deadness of a small town on Sunday.

P.S. For those who know D.C. - apologies if the geography is vague. I never got a sense of spatial location there, which kind of makes the point...

Defending that putz Woody Allen

2009-10-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

Roman Polanski got himself arrested and is facing extradtion to the U.S. to face the music after 32 years on the lam, living the life of a hunted fugitive, hiding in posh parties and movie premiers in European capitols.

Hollywood and the artistic community abroad are aghast at us uncultured American barbarians. They've gone public with their hitherto private conviction that artistes are above conventional morality and the law.

In America of course, this gets you a horselaugh. Which is probably one of the reasons disaffected artists and intellectuals are among the most prominent America-haters.

I do think there are... troubling things in the Polanski case that I may deal with later.

Or maybe not. Frankly, this and some criminal cases I've covered lately are making me want to book a place in Our Lady of Perpetual Incarceration convent school when my little girl gets to be school age.

But right now, this is one of those times I have to grit my teeth and defend someone I disagree with, against a specific charge I know is unjust.

Woody Allen signed a petition demanding the release of Roman Polanski.

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

Conservative commentors are having a field day.

L. Brent Bozell said, "Woody Allen, another famous dirty old man in Hollywood, who scandalously carried on a sexual relationship with an adopted stepdaughter 34 years his junior, and then married her."

Married a girl he was carrying on with? Oh heavens to Betsy surely not! All Right-thinking social conservatives must surely disapprove of that.

Bozell is the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley. As I recall, Jerome Tucille wrote in his book about the then-nascent libertarian movement, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, that Bozell in his youth helped found something called The Sons of Thunder.

"Sons of Thunder" is a Bibilical reference to the disciples James and John, sons of Zebedee, nicknamed "thunder."

Evidently these guys wore red berets, carried crucifixes and broke into hospitals to baptise aborted fetuses.

But I digress.

Jonah Goldberg, who really ought to know better, wrote, "No surprise that Woody’s on board, given that he married his adopted daughter."

I once wrote, "Your belief in freedom is tested by your willingness to defend the freedom of people you despise."

This isn't quite one of those occasions. This is more a test of journalistic integrity.

So... ONCE AND FOR ALL, SOON-YI PREVIN-ALLEN IS NOT AND NEVER WAS WOODY ALLEN'S ADOPTED DAUGHTER.

She is the adopted daughter of Allen's previous girlfriend Mia Farrow - who was not his live-in girlfriend either, and Farrow's then-husband Andre Previn.* Allen was never legally or informally a parent-figure to her.

He did father a child with Farrow and they adopted two together. Allen lost any parental rights whatsoever to the adopted children in court, and only supervised visitation with his biological child, who has since cut him off.

But then that's what happens when you don't marry the mother of your child and speaks volumes to the issue of allowing unmarried couples to adopt.

And, he and Soon-yi have been married for 12 years now, have two kids and seem to be doing just fine, thank you very much.

(Evidently Soon-yi isn't the kind to take any of that we-don't-need-a-piece-of-paper-to-affirm-our-love crap. Good for her.)

Bozell, what you're doing looks suspiciously like deliberate misleading - the kind of thing you accuse the Left of doing. You wrote "an adopted daughter" though you didn't specifically say "his adopted daughter" it looks an awful lot like you were trying to slip it by.

Goldberg, you wrote something that is just flat wrong. Since it's an easily checkable error of fact, I'm assuming you simply made a mistake. Plus I like you better and don't want to believe you acted with malice aforethought.

Woody, you're a putz for signing that stupid petition - but everybody should lay off your family.

Note: Since it is known that there is a similar, though not quite as large an age difference in my marriage, the question arises whether I have something personal invested in this.

Not really. We've never gotten any static or public disapproval. If there's been any behind our backs, I've never heard it and wouldn't give a $#!+ anyway.

*For those too young to remember, composer Andre Previn was the husband of Mia Farrow's good friend Dory Previn. Farrow fled to Dory Previn after her marriage with Frank Sinatra broke up, then stole her husband. Dory Previn got a sort of revenge by writing and recording a song about it:

"Beware of young girls who come to your door,
Wistful and pale, twenty and four,
Delivering daises with delicate hands.
Beware of young girls, too often they crave,
To cry at a wedding... And dance on a grave."

"She was my friend, my friend, my friend.
She was invited to my house, Oh yes she was,
And although she knew my love was true, and no ordinary thing,
She admired my wedding ring, she admired my wedding ring."

"We were friends, oh yes we were,
And she just took him from my life, oh yes she did.
So young and vain, she brought me pain, but I'm wise enough to say,
She will leave him one thoughtless day, she just leave him and go away, Oh yes."

The good news and the bad news about the Zazi arrest

2009-10-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

Note: This is my weekend op-ed for the newspaper.

There's some good news and some bad news about the arrest of Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi last week for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks on New York public transportation.

The good news is, the FBI and local police really seem to be on top of things. They've evidently had red flags up on this guy for some time now, and know something about accomplices in Al-Qaeda cells operating in America. And it's a safe bet they know more than they're telling the press, which I find professionally frustrating but personally reassuring.

The bad news is, Zazi was evidently arrested because law enforcement believed he'd started making a powerful explosive by a process so simple, using chemicals so easily available that I'm not going to give it's formal name. I'll just refer to it by its nickname among Islamic terrorists, “Mother of Satan.”

Its chemical name alone gives half the formula for making the stuff. It took me five seconds to find a video detailing the process on the Internet. But I'm going to be responsible and not tell you how to find it. That'll keep you busy for... easily five minutes.

As an aside, a few years back when we were living on the Oklahoma University campus, a student blew himself up near the football stadium on game day with Mother of Satan. There's no evidence he was a terrorist. He was evidently just fooling with the devilish stuff, which explodes at a harsh look.

That's the terrifying thing about terrorism these days. A modern industrial society puts the means of making powerful weapons into everyone's hands. And technology is only going to make it worse as time goes on.

Timothy McVeigh made the Oklahoma City bomb out of fertilizer and diesel oil. The good news is, if you try to buy a whole bunch of fertilizer these days and you're not a farmer, some folks are going to have some searching questions for you.

Not too long ago I'd have considered that a dangerous expansion of government powers of surveillance. Now I'm just fine with it.

But then there's good news, of a sort. Islamic jihadists seem fixated on suicide missions to the point they don't even consider long-term campaigns of widespread destruction in our country through missions which allow for the survival and escape of the jihadists.

The bad news is, I took some time off to think about it and came up with a comprehensive, detailed plan which terrified me.*

But there's some other good news.

What they are doing is not exactly war, in the sense we understand it. Islamic jihadists trumpet their desire to first drive the “crusaders” out of the Lands of Islam (dar Al-Islam) and re-establish the ancient Caliphate under Sharia law; then to conquer the Lands of War (dar Al-harb, i.e. all countries that aren't Islamic.)
This is of course a fantasy, albeit a dangerous one. Both for them and us.

What they appear to be doing with terrorist actions is something like the plains Indian custom of counting coup. Among the horse-riding plains tribes, the highest honor a warrior could win was to do something daring against an enemy, such as riding up to one and striking him with a coup stick in battle, or sneaking into their camp and stealing his horses.

Likewise, a jihadist terrorist is going “nya-nya” to the richer, more powerful Great Satan with terrorist acts that serve no real military purpose. Their purpose is exactly what the name implies, to terrorize. They prove to themselves they are our superiors by making us afraid.

The good news is, to get greater glory jihadists have to top the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And that's really hard to top because for one, we're warned and ready now. And second, actions the size of Sept. 11 requires a large group. Larger conspiracies are easier to catch. Especially when maybe not everyone in the group is equally enthusiastic about martyrdom. (There is some evidence that not all the 19 hijackers on 9/11 realized it was a one-way trip until they were in the air.)

The bad news is, after 9/11 the ultimate coup is a terrorist strike using no-name nukes.

*See, 'If I were a terrorist, part 2' http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/01/if-i-were-terrorist-part-2.html

Sucks to be back

2009-09-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

Note: I emailed this in last Thursday for the paper's weekend edition. Orgeon, Washington, and the northern coast of California are the states to be for those who have a taste for mountains, seacoasts and deserts. You can live on the slope of a mountain with forrest all around, and high desert at your back across the peaks.

I reminded myself of why the late Charles Kuralt had the best job ever.

On the road across America

By Steve Browne

Today I'm on the sixth day of a road trip across the north western states with my son, and preparing to return home tomorrow with the greatest reluctance.

We left Valley City on Saturday and headed west down I-94 to Billings, Montana and from there to Yellowstone National Park.

I last saw Yellowstone when I was about my son's age, so this was a real treat. He'd read about Old Faithful, so he had to see it. We were not disappointed.

Well, perhaps about one thing. We saw elk and buffalo close up, but no bears. When I was a boy bears were begging everywhere along the roads, fed by idiot tourists from their cars in spite of all the signs telling them not to. I was told that doesn't happen anymore. After a few tourists were killed, they really started enforcing regulations.

From there we took old U.S. 20 across the high desert country of Idaho to Boise, where we picked up I-84 to Portland, Oregon.

We've crossed the same territory it took the Lewis and Clark expedition a couple of years and tremendous effort. We've gone through different ecological zones, sometimes in a matter of minutes, and reset our clocks three times.

We've seen the truly breathtaking beauty of the high western mountains, the rugged volcanic landscape of Craters of the Moon National Monument, high plains, deserts, the mighty Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.

When I think about it, I am astounded that we've done this in a matter of days. What a time to live in when such things are possible!

I find myself possessed of a longing for contradictory things. I want to keep on the road for... a lot longer. Maybe forever.

On the other hand, I've seen intriguing little communities I'd like to settle down for a while and get to know better.

There's a little town called Arco way out in the Idaho desert, population about 900. Yet it manages to have a thriving Main Street, and a nuclear submarine museum. Why does this little place seem to thrive when small towns are dying across the country? Could it have something to do with the top secret-looking energy laboratory in the desert.

Arco boasts it was the first town in America powered by nuclear energy.

Then there's Baker City, Oregon, population 9,000. A town of well-preserved historical buildings set between a steep mountain gorge and a fertile valley. We stayed in a motel there one night, because our tent needed fixing.

In the motel office the manager lady had turtles, a ferret, an iguana, and a bearded dragon lizard, literally running around loose.

"Are you a collector?" I asked.

"Not exactly," she replied. "I got the iguana from an animal rescue group. Then when word got around I had him, people started giving me other abandoned animals."

We saw people coping with the recession by starting small coffee and food kiosks. We encountered waitresses in diners who passed a word of encouragement to my son when I had him doing his homework on the table. We met Americans, a people of diverse origins scattered across an immense land, but all still recognizably my countrymen.

Travel writing is a thing of extremes. On the one hand you have John Steinbeck's 'Travels with Charlie,' and William Least Heat Moon's 'Blue Highways." But most is filler for tourist brochures.

It's difficult to describe what you see driving across America and the people you meet. But when you start to travel, it's difficult to stop. It's like a hunger, you want to eat the life of this country.

And that's when you have to remind yourself to slow down, stop and savor the place you're in before you move on.

Well, maybe next trip. We've got a lot to see yet.

The middle class on the march

2009-09-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This is my weekend op-ed for the newspaper. I penned it early because this Saturday I'm headed out on the road again! My son and I are going car camping through the north western states, maybe all the way to the Pacific.

Maximilien François de Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution and architect of The Reign of Terror, was sitting with a friend in a sidewalk cafe in Paris.
Suddenly a huge crowd rushed by. Robespierre jumped up and ran after them.
“Robespierre! Where are they going? What are they doing?” his friend calls.
“I don't know, but I have to be in front. I'm their leader!”

Last Saturday, September 12, a crowd of protesters descended on Washington, D.C., a big one.

They came to protest the massive expansion of government and the national debt.

How big a crowd is debated. News reports first said, “thousands,” quickly revised to “tens of thousands.” Eyewitnesses known to me say, “six figures minimum.”

The London newspaper Daily Mail, estimated at least a million, others as high as two million. To the cautious that sounds a bit over the top.

All of these figures come from eyeball estimates. Counting crowds is dicey at best. You define a square, get a rough count of the people inside it, then count how many squares cover the crowd. Then there's the question of how dense the crowd is. People tend to cluster near speakers, for example.

The National Park Service said they'd have an estimate later this week, based on analysis of aerial photos. The Park Service hasn't done crowd estimates for 14 years, since their 1995 estimate of the Million Man March sponsored by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam turned out so disappointingly low.

We'll see how long it is before they're allowed to do another crowd estimate after this. But from the pictures, no one can doubt this was huge.

From photos and interviews some facts are emerging.

This is not the Republican Party still sore about the election. This is a lot of Americans from all over the country who are really sore about both parties. A sentiment expressed on one T-shirt, “Impeach Everybody!”

There are Republicans trying to ride this movement's coat tails like Robespierre – and they're being told to sit down, shut up and listen. They should consider themselves lucky, Robespierre was guillotined.

Media call the crowd “conservative,” and it may be in the sense that 41 percent of the electorate label themselves. Which means something different from what conservatives in Washington (a.k.a. Big Government Republicans) mean by it. It might be Populist, if anyone could tell me what that means. There appears to be a strong libertarian “leave us the hell alone” streak in it.

These people are not happy about insults they've received, as expressed on one sign, “It doesn't matter what this sign says, they'll call it racist anyway.”

This is the real thing, in that overused phrase, a grass-roots movement. Not “astroturf.”

The pictures show a crowd generally well-dressed though not upscale, orderly, an average age surprisingly high, and contrary to critics not lily-white either. Minorities are represented though sparsely, as are a surprising number of immigrants.

This is the middle class on the march, and I've seen it before. In several countries where people got utterly fed up with their government.*

A people fed up with a recklessly spendthrift Republican administration turned them out of power. Democrats took that as permission to join the Republicans in running up debt to levels many say looks like national suicide. Someone's not listening.

After Sunday an anonymous commenter remarked, “When people with jobs demonstrate, you know something is happening.”

Folks, this is a game-changer. A lot of angry Americans have learned that when you're frustrated, insulted, and feel like nobody is listening, demonstrating is fun.

*In Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania I marched with people who had had enough of their government and turned out in numbers too big to ignore or shoot down; students, professionals, workingmen, little old babushkas and elegant ladies in fur wraps. In Yugoslavia it was a very near run thing. I may owe my life to a police chief who refused to give the kill order – and was killed for it.

Preliminary impressions; the march on Washington

2009-09-13T13:06:00.001-07:00

I've been trolling for news from Washington after the March.

First impression: I am semi-suicidally depressed I wasn't there.

First thing I found out (God bless the Internet!) from people who were there and are known to me, the numbers are not "thousands" of people, but tens or hundreds of thousands. Possibly topping a million.

(Counting crowds is dicey and notoriously subjective. You imagine a square, try and count the people inside it, then count how many squares cover the crowd. Some accounts say the crowd covered about half the area of Washington that were there for the inauguration. Which leaves the question of how dense the respective crowds were.)

First important point: This movement is not a Republican Party surrogate and it is national in scope. I attended a Tea Party in Jamestown, ND (pop. 12,000) a while ago and got the same quote heard there:

"Actually, I'm pretty disgusted with both parties."

Second: There is an attempt by the Republicans to co-opt it - and they are getting told in no uncertain terms to sit down and shut up.

Third: It is not a libertarian movement per se, though it has strong libertarian elements. It might be more on the conservative side. Populist? Dunno, first tell me what that means.

I think it's a "pissed-off movement."

How it'll translate into election results... dunno.

I'm wondering if a suggestion Paul Harvey made some years back could be the basis of a national election plan. What he suggested was that until spending is reined in and the budget ballanced, evey non-incumbent's election slogan should be, "Elect no incumbents!"

There should perhaps be a short list of exception: Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) (yes, I'm aware he's a little nutty on some issues, mostly foreign policy) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK.)

A website could be set up to list who's an incumbent, and the election slogans could be the same for everyone:

(blank) is an incumbent!

Vote for (blank)
He couldn't be worse.

And BTW, go here: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/136042.html

for an account by eyewitnesses.

And scroll down to this perceptive observation:

"When people with jobs are out protesting, then you know the government is really screwing up."

Dangerous numbers

2009-09-12T07:02:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about numbers, specifically demographic numbers.

I've written previously about the potential for chaos caused by sex-ratio imbalance in Asia, and commented on Mark Steyn's wonderfully witty analysis of the demographic decline of Europe in 'America Alone.'

But what I'm thinking about now is something I noticed about the civil war in Ulster (Northern Ireland) some years ago.

The various IRA factions (there isn't just one) were backed by the Catholic Irish, the Unionists by the Scots-Irish Protestants.

In Eire, Catholics amount to around 97 percent of the population, the rest being mostly descendants of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who actually supplied quite a few Irish revolutionaries during centuries of English rule. (Weird? No, just Irish.)

Northern Ireland was kept by the UK because the population was roughly two-thirds Unionist Protestants and one-third Catholic. Actual percentage numbers varied over a couple of generations, and Catholics have a higher birth rate. Higher enough to scare the Protestants.

Without going into specifics of why the decades-long troubles started, it occurred to me years ago this ratio was really dangerous.

In America the largest minority is black people, at about 11 percent. (Now swiftly being overtaken by Hispanics.) That's why Black Nationalism, in either its secular or Islamist version was a fantasy.

Any revolutionary movement based on a population group of only 11 percent is a fantasy. The most they could aspire to (on the light side and dark side of democracy) is power through organized crime or as a swing voting block. And that assumes unanimity of purpose, something almost never achieved within any group on more than a single issue.

To put it very, very, bluntly, the question that dominates majority/minority relations in any time and place, the one we're all to polite to talk about is, "If they grow too troublesome, can we kill them all?" (And I'm putting that in its most extreme form. "All of them" is not necessary, just enough to terrorize the rest.)

Eleven percent? You know the answer.

But one-third? A one-third minority can realistically dream of winning.

Look throughout military history and you'll find plenty of examples of armies who defeated other armies twice as large.

Point: total victory is not necessary.

Mark Steyn, referring to Europe’s growing Islamic population, “(I)t’s not about hitting 50 percent. It’s about the point at which mediating between the Muslim population and the broader population becomes a central and then the dominant feature of the culture.”

And it's not just the numbers that matter, but the age distribution. Steyn pointed out the median age of the Muslim population of Europe is considerably less than the native European population. Crime rates in America are sent soaring by a smallish demographic within the minority population, males between 15 and 35 years of age.

Hint: What demographic do your street fighters come from?

So what does that have to do with us?

Newt Gincrich told a breakfast group I attended a few years back, that all surveys show the committed Hard Left in America is no more than 14 to 16 percent in this country.

Frankly I was surprised it's that high.

So 16 percent max is still only at the nuisance level. And quite frankly, they strongly tend to be wimp academics and intellectuals. Not exactly street fighter material.

(Their birth rate isn't all that high either. That's why they want control of education. They can't breed enough of their own so they want our children. And that's why they want to change the demographic makeup of America by importing illegal immigrants.)

But... what happens when they're reinforced by dissatisfied masses who are basically non-ideological, but whose sense of grievance, real or imaginary, can be organized and focused?

I've said before, any ambitious program to socialize America cannot be done through the electoral system alone. They're going to need a thug corps.

Notice that today, September 12, Americans who resist the idea of turning our country into a fascist state are the ones taking to the streets of the capitol.

A lawyer with the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) once pointed out to me that control of the streets is very important to fascists.

So what kind of reply can we expect from them?

Interesting times we live in, what?

Funny thing happened on the way to an article...

2009-09-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

I got a request from my editor a few days ago.

Reasonably simple, please get short opinions from doctors on what they think about health care.

A vague questions to be sure. Refine it a little. What do you think should be done about health care? About six opinions in a short paragraph each.

So... I got one from a clinic administrator. Another from the county public health director, an RN. One more from an Osteopath who doesn't practice now. (He's busy building attended care homes and such.)

I stopped off at the local Innovis clinic.

"Well, some of the doctors would like to talk to you, but we have to check with HQ in Fargo to see if they'll let us. We'll get back to you."

I'm still waiting.

Doctors in another clinic attached, but not part of the local hospital, were all too busy at the times I called. Messages asking them to get back to me, have gone unanswered.

The short article is on hold. Probably scrapped.

Now, organizations understandably don't want newspaper readers to get the idea that a doc giving an opinion is not speaking for the org. I understand that.

And yet, am I paranoid or does it seem like docs seem a tad timid about expressing an opinion on this issues these days?

The road to utopia

2009-09-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

Note: This appeared as the weekend editorial in the Times-Record.

The utopian ideal, the belief that something close to heaven can be created on earth, has been part of the fabric of the American national character since the beginning of our country.

The colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were founded in the 17th century on differing visions of what a Christian utopia should look like. In the 19th century the Mormons established their own utopia in the west, later brought into the union, not entirely voluntarily as the state of Utah.

Pamphleteer of the American Revolution Tom Paine, expressed that part of our makeup in 'Common Sense,' “We have it in our power, to begin the world anew.”

From the founding of our nation, utopian idealists started to take off into the wide open spaces of the west with groups of like-minded individuals to build models of what the good society would look like. They expected their success would convince the world to follow their lead into utopia.

Their efforts were opposed by Karl Marx, who despised “utopian socialists” and preached the only road to utopia was through world revolution.

There were literally hundreds of attempts to found intentional communities throughout the 19th century. Most failed in short order.

Businessman Robert Owen bought a town from the Rappite religious community in Harmony Indiana and founded the secular socialist community of New Harmony in 1825. It folded in less than three years. The Rappites themselves lasted as a communal sect until 1906 though.

In 1843 Bronson Alcott, father of novelist Louisa May Alcott, founded Fruitlands, whose members ate only fruit that fell naturally from trees and wouldn't bathe in heated water. It lasted until winter set in.

Brook Farm was founded in 1841 on vaguely socialist ideals of combining a life of manual labor with artistic and intellectual pursuits. The community, which included famous members such as Nathanial Hawthorne, was by most accounts a pleasant enough place, remembered fondly by people who lived there. But it fell heavily into debt and closed in 1847.

There were longer-lasting attempts. Some survived for a few generations, some blended into the mainstream of American society, others still thrive as subcultures among America's “peculiar peoples.”

The Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and the Amana community, offshoots of the 16th century German pietistic movement, transplanted to America to escape persecution.

The Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites survive as religious communities. The Amana communities reorganized as a joint-stock company in the 1930s, manufacturing household goods.

The Oneida free-love community founded in 1848 in New York became the Oneida silverware company, whose stockholders and board of directors seem rather embarrassed by their wild ancestors.

Their polar opposites, the celibate Shakers, survive though greatly diminished as one might expect.

The Individualist Anarchist community of Modern Times on Long Island eventually became a more-or-less normal community with a strong tolerance for eccentricity, now known as Brentwood.

It's easy to laugh at these people now. How naive and impractical the intellectuals of Fruitlands and Brook Farm now seem, to dive headlong into farm life without a clue about how to run a successful farm!

Yet, to me there is something appealing about them. Today those who would build the world anew disdain the idea of say, allowing the states to try different reforms of health care, welfare, etc to see which ideas prove workable. They have no patience with local, piecemeal, step-by-step approaches to reform.

Unlike our modern utopians who insist we overhaul our national institutions RIGHT NOW, the 19th century utopians took a more humble approach. They tried to demonstrate on a small scale how their ideals would work first. Most failed, but then that's the nature of experiments.

But the next time you use a flat broom, circular saw, or clothespin – thank the Shakers who invented them. And maybe we should remember that utopia means “no place.”

The passing of "the Liberal Lion"

2009-08-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; Act 3, Scene 2

Well he's dead now, and the coverage is... actually less sickeningly sacharine than I expected.

That's not saying much however. I NEVER expected to hear the word Chappaquiddick, but in fact it got mentioned the very first morning after Edward Moore Kennedy died.

But the networks are treating this as only a little less momentous than his brother John's funeral, and even FOX is scrambling hard to avoid the impression of being mean-spirited by speaking ill of the dead.

Bible-thumping conservative Cal Thomas spoke movingly of his friendship with Ted Kennedy, as did Book-of-Mormon-thumping Senator Orin Hatch.

Many on both sides of the aisle have praised Kennedy's warm personality and capacity for friendship with people of different views. Something growing increasingly rare as politics grows increasingly mean.

Others point out he told vile slanderous lies about Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Teddy justified his famous "Robert Bork's America" speech by saying they needed a strong statement immediately to take the high ground while they did the background research on Bork.

In differing versions of the story, Teddy afterwards told either Robert Bork or his wife, "Nothing personal."

Sorry. Disagree is what free men do. Disagree forcefully is what free men do about issues they feel passionately about. Ridiculing dumb and dangerous ideas is what we should do.

But lying about someone's true beliefs and character for rhetorical advantage?

That's personal. And any man who is a man has every right to resent it.

Some have reminded those too young to remember that Teddy did after all leave a young woman to die in a car under seven feet of water.

Friendlier accounts mention in passing that Mary Jo Kopechne "died," or "drowned" in Teddy's car.

She did not "drown." She died of asphixiation in an air pockect, an excruciating death that may have taken hours. Ample time for Teddy to have gone to the door of the nearest house, which was evidently within eye-shot of the road, and rouse the residents to call for help.

Kennedy influence hurried Mary Jo into her grave without an autopsy. Teddy showed up at the funeral wearing an orthopedic neck brace. Apparently as a fashion statement, there was no medical reason for it. The judge at the inquest said publicly he thought Teddy lied.

I was a kid in neighboring Rhode Island then, and I saw Teddy's speech on TV to his constituents. I thought it was a tissue of lies and sanctimonious ass-covering.

When he said he'd wait and see what his constituents wanted, and resign if that's what the opinion ran to, I thought, "He's toast."

(Or the late-60s equivalent. We didn't use that expression then.)

When he announced public opinion was in favor of him sticking around, I thought, "Phoney! But he'll get turned out in the next election."

He didn't. He was re-elected eight more times and became the second most senior member of the senate and third-longest serving senator in U.S. history.

I've never felt good about Massachussetts people since.

What's my point? Why am I flogging a dead man, and possibly adding to the grief of those who cared for him?

I would like very much to be understanding of a man who made a horrible mistake in his youth, and (perhaps) tried hard to live it down and do something with his life that justified him living on longer than the total lifespan of the one whose life he cut short.

I know... more than a few people who have killed; by accident, in self-defense, war, hot-bloodded passion, and a few in cooler blood by grim necessity. Some had to face legal consequences. Some were outside the law.

All of them paid a price, in one way or another. Sometimes the legal price was the least of it.

But firstly, this was not a single mistake made in a moment of intoxication and bad judgement. This was a series of wrongful actions made over a prolonged period.

And, if Teddy had not been Edward Moore "Kennedy," he would at the very least, been charged with involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide.

Most likely he wouldn't have gone to jail. Most certainly he would have had to serve probation, report regularly to a parole officer, and had his right to vote, own firearms, practice law, and hold public office stripped.

That's why this man's life offends me. After Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before he'd even been charged with anything, Teddy Kennedy asked:

“Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?”

Teddy Kennedy's own life and career answers the question.

We don't live in "Robert Bork's America," we live in Teddy Kennedy's America.

Our national debt

2009-08-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Note: This appeared as the weekend op-ed in the paper.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "If you don't work you die.”

-- Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Something very odd is happening in our country these days, our people have become worried about the national debt.

What's odd about that? (I hear you say.) Isn't it something to worry about?
Indeed it is, but we never worried about it before. Why have we started now?

Our national debt has been mounting ever higher longer than I've been alive. I've read dire warnings of the consequences to come for decades now. Warnings that included hyperinflation, economic collapse, food riots, and possibly a dictator sweeping to power, a la the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1930s.

Thoughtful people did worry about the long-term consequences of rising indebtedness, but generally the only people who got really scared were fringoid types who stockpiled guns and canned goods, and muttered darkly about the Bavarian Illuminati controlling the Federal Reserve.

Intellectually everybody knew you can't keep spending more than you earn, as a household or a nation, and you can't live on borrowed money forever. But it never felt really real, and the inevitable consequences seemed a long way off.

Until now.

Now you can feel it, people are really scared. Ordinary people like you and me, not “Nazis,” not “mobs,” and not “racists,” either. And we're telling our senators and representatives about it in Town Hall meetings across the country, as little as they like to hear it.

What's different now?

I don't know for sure, but I can hazard some guesses.

One: The national debt finally hit the magic trillion mark that had been predicted for years, and it's projected to go into the multi-trillions in fairly short order. We used to think the longer the string of zeros, the less people were able to visualize the order of magnitude. Maybe there's something about 12 zeros that makes an impression a mere nine zeros didn't.

Two: The Democrats read the election wrong. The Republicans were turned out in disgrace at least partly because of disgust with George Bush's massive budget deficits and the first bailout. Then inexplicably the Democrats, rather than returning to the relative fiscal sanity of the Clinton years, took it as permission to max out the federal credit card and send the deficit into the stratosphere.

Three: Personal experience with debt. We live in a self-indulgent age of easy credit, and consequently an awful lot of us now have the experience of opening that dreaded credit statement every month. We've had our “Holy heck, the whole country is maxed out!” moment.

Four: We know who we owe. It used to be the vast majority had only vague notions of what the national debt was. We were reassured with soporifically stupid statements like, “We owe it to ourselves.” Nowadays whatever else you can say about media coverage, there has actually been discussion about who holds the debt. And as it turns out, mostly it's China.

So what's going to happen?

Some place their hopes on a third party to restore fiscal sanity. But there seems to be something in the political structure of our country that makes this unlikely. A third party rising to permanent national status has happened precisely once in our history, when Lincoln led the Republicans to victory in 1860.

Republicans are hoping for a replay of the mid-term elections of 1994 when they swept the House and Senate and taught Clinton the lesson that, “The era of Big Government is over.”

But in the longer run that didn't stop the Republicans from, to put it bluntly, betraying us. Perhaps they'll get another chance, simply because there is no one else to turn to. If so, then God help them if they betray us again. God help all of us.

And after this being accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

My recent "West and the Rest" moment

2009-08-22T07:35:00.001-07:00

I just spent Friday covering the second day of a two-day jury trial, and am currently wrestling with how to write it up.

Apparently I missed all the excitement the first day of the trial.

Thursday I saw a cop car heading up to the courthouse with the siren on. Unfortunatley I was headed in the other direction for a physical checkup.

Turns out a defendant, a Haitian citizen on trial for felonious restraint and simple assault had freaked out in the courtroom and had been removed to another room where he assaulted an officer and had to be put in leg irons. He spent the second day of the trial in his jail cell.

Understand, as far as I could see every attempt was made to include the guy in his defense. A translator was provided and a very intelligent and competent attorney. (Though his skill was severely hampered by the fact that he had zip to work with.)

The defendant had come to our town as part of a program a local enterprise has to bring in weekend shift temp workers recruited from a homeless shelter in Fargo.

A woman who was a night shift supervisor testified how she was impressed with the defendant's willingness to work hard, ambition, and how he always came well-dressed and groomed. Something that evidently made him stand out from the others.

She recounted how she recommended him for a full-time position, found him a room in town and paid first months rent, gave him some money for groceries, and drove him around on various errands to help get him started in town.

This was about four months ago during the flood crisis in our town.

Then the guy snapped.

The proximate occasion seemed to be some minor documentary problems with social security, which everyone was perfectly willing to help him with, and the mandatory closing of all businesses in town ordered by the mayor when the mainsewer system collapsed on a Friday. The defendant wasn't able to access his paycheck over the weekend. B.F.D.

This 60-year-old woman came by on Monday to take this guy to the bank, and was totally unexpectedly subjected to a terrifying ordeal.

He beat her on the head with a closed fist, knocked her down and stomped on her thigh, and at one point locked her in a bedroom.

Of course, she was terrified. At various points she thought she was going to be raped and murdered. She strongly suspected he might have murdered his (also my) landlord and another lodger. (Thankfully, not.)

He screamed, "In Haiti I am a man! Here I am nothing!"

When she asked if she could go he shouted, "No! You are my slave!"

He tormented her by throwing a cell phone on the floor and saying, "Why don't you call the police?" Then jumping up when she moved towards it.

Thankfully, he didn't rape her, but did subject her to humiliation I won't go into.

Then he totally weirded out and said calmly, "I invite you to my wedding. (Evidently an obsession with his landlord's 16-year-old daughter) OK, we go to the bank now."

When she found he had not followed her closely on the way out, she ran for her car, thinking, "Push once, push once." (Referring to her car remote: one push unlocks the driver's door, two unlocks all doors.)

She got in drove down the road, had to turn around, and said to herself, "If he's in the road, I'm not stopping."

She stopped by the first law enforcement officer she found and reported. Later a policewoman found the guy walking down the street jauntily in his pin-stripe suit.

When the officer told him what she stopped for, he cheerfully told her all about how he'd beaten the woman, complete with pantomime gestures of beating with a fist hammer. Backup arrived, and he repeated it for their benefit. And repeated it at length, in English with mixed French or creole commentary, all the way to the police station.

Under questioning he repeated it all again, and again, before and after being Mirandized.

Hold for a point. The victim is still traumatized and broke down on the stand. She was also mortified that this would appear in the paper. I think however the story will be about the defendants bizarre behavior and only minimally about the victim.

I do want to say that I think she acted with good instincts and great courage - and I kind of wish she had had the opportunity to run the son-of-a-bitch down!

A cop I saw on TV speaking about rape victims said, "If you survived, you did the right thing."

Now here's the point of all this. The perp is up for sentencing, max on the felonious restraint, five years. For simple assault, 30 days. But what's most likely is Immigration and Naturalization Service will step in and deport him back to Haiti.

Whether that's better than a prison term in America is another question.

I confirmed with the State's Attorney there had been a psych evaluzaion, and talked to one of the investigating officers.

They are aware that this guy acts crazy by our standards, but maybe not by the standards of his culture.

The translator told the judge (answering a jury question as to whether she could adequately communicate with him) what he'd said while looking at pictures of the victim's bruises.

"They are going to send me to jail for this?" he asked incredulously.

He's explained to any number of people that in Haiti it's perfectly OK to treat women this way.

My take: I think receiving this kindness from a woman was humiliating to him. It put him in the position of being dependent on her. That's the cultural misunderstanding.

My opinion: Back when I was an anthropologist of sorts, I reached a conclusion that may have a lot to do with why I'm not working in the field.

Just as there are insane individuals, there are insane cultures.

Big no-no in social science these days.

So they're wrong - and that's a truth that is not relative, not a matter of opinion, and not "racist," "ethnocentric," or whatever jargon word you want to use.

The wisdom, rightness and effectiveness of "exporting our culture" by whatever means is one of the great debates of our time.

But, what seems beyond debate to me is that we must have the confidence to tell everyone who would come to live with us that you can't bring shit like that with you to our country.

UPDATE: Doing the police reports this morning (the Thursday following the Friday of the trial) there was an 'information only' report from the jail that our Haitian guest had spit in the face of a female correctional officer.

The office deputy commented that this fellow has no trespect for women.

They didn't beat him up and they don't really want him in the North Dakota prison system at all. They just want him off their hands and out of the country.

What to expect when your doctor is a government employee

2009-08-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

Note: A shorter version of this appeared as the weekend op-ed in the Times-Record. It had to be shorter, I could have gone on at consdierably greater length just on examples from people I know personally.

The president and congress seem determined to pass nationalized health care just as quickly as they can, despite 89 percent of Americans saying they like their current health care just fine.

Make no mistake about it, nationalized health care is what they intend, despite claims they only want to “create competition” or a “government option.” Go to YouTube and search “Obama,” and “single-payer.” You'll get videos of Obama speaking at public meetings two and six years ago, in favor of a single-payer health care system.

It is possible the president has changed his mind since then. So why hasn't he said so?

Now search “Barney Frank,” and “single payer.” You'll find Congressman Frank, quite frankly stating that creating a tax-subsidized government insurance plan is the best way to get to a single-payer system by driving private insurance out of business.

Here's just one which excerpts Obama on a number of occasions speaking in favor of a single-payer system.

“Single payer” is what they used to call “socialized medicine,” before the catastrophic collapse of socialism around the world starting in 1989.

There are arguments for socialized medicine articulated by honest, well-meaning people. But what we're getting is a dishonest attempt to pass it without first convincing us through that messy democratic process.

You've heard both sides. Perhaps you'd like to hear from people in countries where doctors and nurses are government bureaucrats?

In Poland a few years back, a lady friend was in a car wreck with her father and grandmother. Her father was dead of a heart attack at the scene. My friend was taken to the local hospital (minus her wallet and watch which mysteriously disappeared somewhere along the way) and treated.

Her grandmother, old and overweight, was left lying on a gurney in a dreary hospital corridor for hours. Finally someone passed by and reacted, “Oh, you're still alive? Maybe we should do something after all.”

She took her two months to die. There's no telling if quicker treatment would have saved her – it's just the sheer callous indifference that's shocking.

A dear friend of ours, a mother with three children, died in a ghastly Soviet-era hospital in Lithuania after eating poison mushrooms. The doctors ignored the pleas of her desperately sick husband to pump her stomach. He tried to tell them she had a life-long inability to vomit and her body wasn't expelling the poison.

Atropine is sometimes given for neurotoxins such as the amanita phalloidia mushroom. Perhaps atropine wouldn't have saved her. We'll never know. The hospital had none on hand and couldn't be bothered to send to town for any, “because then we'd have to do it for everyone.”

When my wife was a child she broke her leg in a playground accident. Her leg was set by a drunk doctor who didn't lay gauze down and screwed up the bone setting. When it had to be rebroken, the cast was taken off with a drill which cut to the bone on her ankle.

Fortunately, quality low-cost medical care is becoming available in the former Soviet bloc countries, as the competent medical personnel abandon government service for private practice.

But that was the communist system. We're told we should look at England and Canada.

Our son's late godmother suffered treatment by Britain's National Health Service on two occasions.

After treatment for a broken wrist, she asked if she could impose on my father (a retired orthopedic surgeon) to look at her X-rays and records. After examining them, my father wrote a scathing letter to the NHS bureaucrats about their “stone-age” treatment methods and “that rag” (the wrist brace) they supplied her with.

A few years later, following an operation for bowel cancer, she lay in the NHS hospital wasting away. They said she, “had no appetite,” and what could we expect, she was nearly 90?

It turned out she was too weak to sit up and eat. She got better after we sent a Polish friend to feed her and look after her at home. That for certain gave her the extra year-and-a-half of life the NHS didn't think she needed.

There are people who think the NHS is just fine. My own sister, a long-term resident of the UK, is one of them. Sis is healthy and rarely uses the service. But with her family history she should have a mamogram every year. NHS rations her to one every three years.

Canada? Ninety percent of their population lives within 100 miles of an American doctor. New York city alone has more MRI machines than all of Canada. Heck, Valley City, North Dakota, population less than 7,000 has an MRI parked outside of the local hospital right now!

Some believe we can create a nationalized health system that corrects all the defects of such systems around the world, despite all experience to the contrary.

Maybe so, but do you think they can do it in six months?

Here's my favorite cartoon

2009-08-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

Yale University Press is publishing a book by Jytte Klausen, entitled The Cartoons that Shook the World.

Among other things, the book is of course about the cartoons of Mohammed published in the Danish newspaper Jylland- Posten in September, 2005, and the aftermath.

However, something interesting (the absurd is always interesting, don't you think?) is going on here. The book will omit the cartoons that are one of the most importants subjects of the book!

Yale University Press Director John Donatich said a committee of experts' "overwhelming and unanimous recommendation" was to withdraw all images of Muhammad.

Of course they gave a reason. And of course it was longish and left out the single word that would have summed it all up - cowardice.

Long-time readers know I try to avoid using vulgarity, satire, and personal insult too often. Not so much from delicate sensibility, but because overuse diminishes effectiveness.

Nor do I usually care to belittle any man's religion. However absurd I may think another's opinions on the Great Perhaps may be, if it gets you through this vale of tears with any amount of courage and grace, more power to you.

So here's my thoughts on the matter: Fuck you Yale University Press. You Ivy League assholes used to produce scholars, leaders, and heroes.

How are the mighty fallen!

And you Yale University Press Director John Donatich and your committee of "experts," fuck you you gutless cowards.

Now here's my challenge:

Fellow bloggers - plaster these pictures on your blogs. Pick your favorite and feature it prominently.

Shame the cowards, and defy those who would tell free-born Americans what they can and can't say or print.

Show them we are worthy descendants of the brawling, lusty, vulgar men who conquered this continent and built a mighty nation!

"Where there are no men - be thou a man."
-- Rabbi Hillel

"Freedom is not negotiable."
-- Andy Garcia

UPDATE: Here http://townhall.com/columnists/DianaWest/2009/08/20/yale_economics_101_crush_cartoons,_get_sharia-backed_gold

Columnist Diana West offers an additional explanation for the YUP decision - greed.
In "Yale Economics 101: Crush Cartoons, get Sharia-Backed Gold," West details why she thinks Yale is whoring after sources of Saudi money that has already benefitted Harvard and Georgetown Universities. The same sources have also openly supported suicide bombing and supported the families of the "martyrs."

Enjoy spening your 30 pieces of silver guys. But if and when the West ever wakes up to realize it's under attack, I wonder how much good your money is going to do you on that day?

I have a very bad feeling about Afghanistan

2009-08-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

It looks like President Obama wants his very own war, and I have a very bad feeling about it.

Long time readers may remember I was cautiously supportive of the Iraq occupation for a couple of reasons. Though recognizing it could go horribly wrong, as it almost did and may yet, my view is that Iraq is a strategically important theater in the Long War against jihadism.

Arguing "Iraq is not Vietnam," I said at the time:

In terms of geopolitics, the situation in Iraq is far different from Vietnam. Vietnam was a minor client state of a rival superpower that the U.S. could not afford to confront directly. Iraq was a major player among hostile Arab nations who resent and fear American world hegemony but cannot confront it directly and can only work covertly against American interests. Vietnam’s patron superpower had less interest in outright victory than they had in keeping the United States engaged in a protracted and expensive war that sapped its strength, created domestic chaos and distracted it from their main interest in Europe.

Iraq is in the geographical center of the struggle against Jihadism. The patrons of fanatical Jihadism are vitally concerned with Iraq and rightfully fearful that a stable, even semi-democratic Iraq would be the beginning of the end of their tyranny and autocracy throughout the Middle East.

That alone should explain my misgivings, but to elaborate...

Iraq is an ancient civilization which at this point in history is in the geopolitical center of Islam. Iraq is rich in resources, and in the hands of a hostile power capable of supplying money and materiel to the jihadist campaign against the West.

(Saddam for example, was with Saudi Arabia a source of payments to families of suicide bombers in Israel. Taking him out possibly reduced by as much as half the substantial bounties paid to families who successfully encouraged one of their own to take one for the team. Unless of course the Saudis are taking up the slack.)

Afghanistan has always been peripheral to the ancient civilizations of the region. It's importance to the jihadists is basically, that it's a great place to hide.

And for students of military science, the first difference that strikes one is the strategically important part of Iraq is pretty flat. Afghanistan... isn't.

A punitive expedition to Afghanistan after 9/11 was entirely justified. The planners of the attack were there, the local government said "Nyah, nyah you can't have them" when we asked, so we went in and killed and captured as many of them as we could find.

Comb the history of civilization and find me one which would deny a legitimate cassus belli existed in this case.

I say if the jihadists base themselves in Afghanistan, play whack-a-mole with them every time they stick their heads up.

Nor do I have moral objections to the nation building efforts afterwards - I just wonder if it's, A. possible, and B. worth the effort.

Thomas Sowell once pointed out how civilization can spread across plains, oceans, and along great rivers - and stop dead at 50 meters of mountain.*

I feel for Afghanis who have to live with the Taliban, especially women who aspire to a life as something more than domestic chattels. But our resources are not infinite, and we have every reason to believe this new kind of war is going to be a long one.

But at the risk of sounding heartless, what's in it for us? What do we gain by the enormous expense in the long term? And might those resources be better applied elsewhere?

And vis-a-vis the point I raised about Iraq, are we sure the jihadists don't want us in Afghanistan, i.e. have we allowed the enemy to choose the time and place of battle?

Steven Vincent, who was murdered in Basra while trying to find answers for the strategic questions raised by the Long War, said victory in Iraq would come when women could go shopping without fear of being kidnapped.**

Is there the same longing in the majority of Afghanis? Answer that question and we'll be better able to answer the others.

* Some of my ancestors were Scots Highlanders, and a pretty uncivilized bunch in spite of 19th century romanticism. Rather more like Afghani tribesmen than we'd like to admit in fact. We did eventually come to appreciate the benefits of civilization. All it took to accomplish this was to locate a civilized nation with 10 times the population and many times the resources next door.

But before that civilizing process was quite complete, Highlanders did good service for civilization all over the world when recruited into the British Army. One wonders.

** I was in email contact with Steven Vincent a week before the day I turned on CNN in the morning and saw he'd been murdered. It was like waking up from a pleasant dream to find a nightmare at the foot of your bed. I'd been hoping to meet him some day and it is one of the consuming regrets of my life I never shall.

Note: My posts on Iraq a few years back can be found here:

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/10/iraq-is-not-vietnam.html

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/11/iraq-could-be-worse-than-vietnam-and.html

The seductive lure of conspiracy theories

2009-08-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

My weekend op-ed in the newspaper.

To conspire,” verb: from the Latin con spirare, “to breathe with”: 1. to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement . 2. to act in harmony toward a common end. - Merriam-Webster

“Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- The First Principle of Conspiracy.

The Daily Kos website recently posted the results of a survey that purported to find that in spite of contemporary birth announcements in newspapers and Hawaiian state documents, 28 percent of Republicans believe President Obama was not born in the U.S. and 30 percent are not sure.

Note however, this is the same website that took seriously columnist Andrew Sullivan's claim Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not the mother, but the grandmother of her child Trig.

In 1997 when I was living in former Yugoslavia a student very seriously asked me, “Do you think (President) Milosevic is working for Clinton?”

After 9/11 a student in Poland asked me, “Is it true that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?”

What is the appeal of the notion events are ruled by sinister groups of conspirators?

For one, conspiracy theories appeal to our sense of self-importance and the thrill of possessing occult knowledge. "Everybody's been duped about how the world really runs but me and a few like-minded comrades. We know things nobody else does."

Conspiracy theories offer reassurance. The realization the powerful are not inherently wiser than we are can be terrifying. The idea those in charge are sinister conspirators is actually reassuring, if the alternative is that no one really knows what's going on.

And then there are people so convinced of the self-evident rightness of their position the mere existence of people who disagree is incomprehensible. They must have ulterior motives for denying what is so obviously true.

For example, the reaction of the proponents of the administration's health care plan to the opposition amounts to sheer incomprehension that so many people could sincerely disagree. Which causes them to, equally sincerely, attribute dissent to “a vast right-wing conspiracy” in Hillary Clinton's famous words.*

Real or not, widespread belief in conspiracies has driven historical events more often than we're comfortable thinking about. Historian Bernard Bailyn has documented how much popular belief in a conspiracy against American liberty motivated the American Revolution. The Nazis claimed a Jewish conspiracy against Germany justified the “Final Solution.”

Calling a claim someone is making a “conspiracy theory” can be used to dismiss, rather than address a position.

The Associated Press recently ran an article stating, “Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.”

Calling it a “conspiracy theory” is disingenuous. In fact, there is a “conspiracy” in the sense of “acting to a common end,” but it's not the least bit secret. It's openly discussed in articles, websites, and speeches by Mexican officials and Mexican-American intellectuals who have never forgotten what Americans never remember – that the southwest quarter of the U.S. was once the northern half of Mexico.

And, sometimes there really are conspiracies. That's why we have criminal conspiracy laws.

“Never be surprised by conspiracy. Conspiracy is normal primate politics.”
- The Second Principle of Conspiracy

* Hillary's dismissal of claims her husband had "sexual relations with that woman" and lied about it under oath.

A pleasant satirical exchange in the morning

2009-08-10T08:20:00.001-07:00

Monday morning I came into work to find the email copied below from a local resident commenting on my weekend op-ed posted below as "Dane-geld."

It was marinated in mild sarcasm, so I responded in kind.

The resident does this kind of thing, and we probably won't be printing the exchange, because once we started doing exchanges, we'd be spending a lot of time and space on them.

I'm posting it, because I'm rather pleased with myself. I LIKE doing satire, it's the Irish in me. My guilty secret is that I love reading Ann Coulter rip somebody a new one.

But... Coulter does it all the time, and I think that makes it less effective than it might be. Using satire is like cussing; for greatest effect it should be used sparingly.

Soooo- the Resident wrote:

"I read with interest your article on N. Korea's release of the two American journalists coming at a price. Obviously the public, like myself, is not privy to some of the things you mentioned or I just missed them by not reading my 3 newspapers closely enough. I thank you for the update.

"Perhaps you can clarify a few things yet. Which "armed and agile nation" were you referring to at the beginning? Both we and
N. Korea are armed to the teeth, whether either country can currently afford it or not, but I am not sure which one or both are considered "agile" and in what sense?

"Being half Norwegian, I have always been interested in the Vikings and how they worked things out with the countries they invaded. In many cases I think the countries or areas felt the Dane-geld paid was a small price to being annihilated or devastated by the Vikings and as long as they got what they wanted, geld, they pretty much "honored" the agreements. The current day idea of "no negotiations with terrorists" just did not work that good back then. Ha I am not convinced it works now.

"In both the recent cases we got our people back and the families reunited. I doubt if that would have happened under the Bush Administration or some others.. It would have been, "You got yourself in that position and you live or die with it. No help from your country.", even if it only meant giving up some people or concessions you had no further use for anyway.

"With the N. Koreans, as with most oriental cultures, (which our government seldom seems to care to know nothing about, like with the Middle East also), saving face is still a big deal. Did you see the big smile on the face of Kim Jong II when he was standing next to the unsmiling Bill Clinton? The man could not have been happier for someone in his health! Happy people are LESS likely to kill like that angry young man in the news the last couple days. A small price to pay I think for those women, but then you obviously know something we don't.

"Like with the Iran deal to get Roxanne out. Until your article I had never heard anything about the "Irbil five" and still have not.

"Did these 5 really kill hundreds of American's themselves? If so, they indeed should have been kept, but I suspect they had served their usefulness to us, if not to the terrorists. Anyone that believes we did NOT have to give anything up to get the two releases is very unaware anyway and probably would believe anything. So no harm done. :-)

"Just who is the SPJ?. Can you speculate at least on all the things we don't know about yet?. If we did give them cash, maybe some of it will go to feed their people. Is that all bad? How would you get rid of the "Dane" Kim Jong II without taking out a lot of other people with him, on both sides? Just curious. Blockades don't work.

"My moment of sympathy for the little girl was not when she met her mother again, where she almost acted uncertain of who she was, but the story by her father of her starting to draw pictures of just him and her and leaving the mother out.. The damage was already being done, but to "save face" for our country, it normally would have continued. I personally hope to see more diplomacy tried or used, then just just the "big stick". Teddy R. advocated both. Was the price really that great? What was the concession exactly N. Korea got other then some recognition they crave? Will they be "nicer" now and talk at least?

"You referenced violence professionals calling it "rewarding bad behavior:. We obviously see it different as I felt it was rewarding good behavior, i.e releasing the women.. N. Korea has long set certain standards. Cross into our country without permission for any reason, even if it might be a malfunctioning GPS unit, and you are toast. Could this have happened here?

"They, like the 3 hikers that ended up in Iran push the envelope in even getting that close to known belligerent countries, but does that mean we should abandon them to their fate or possible stupidity? Will we get them back too "for a price"? Who knows.

"Kipplings shame is just a western way of saying you do not want to lose face yourself. No one does, but common sense has to prevail sometimes. I think the current administration is making the right "adjustments" in our foreign policy. Thanks for listening."

(SIC: All misspellings and syntax are his.)

I replied:

Google "Irbil five." That should get you into the inner sanctum of information I'm privy to.

You said: "What was the concession exactly N. Korea got other then some recognition they crave?"

Perhaps, and I'm just guessing here, it's the privilege of being treated as if they were a reasonably civilized nation that say, doesn't allow a few million of their own people to starve to death to maintain their "face."

You said: "A small price to pay I think for those women, but then you obviously know something we don't."

Read it again. I have no alternative to doing what we did to get them back. There isn't one. Teddy Roosevelt could cry, "Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead!"* but North Korea though tiny, is one of the countries China regards as its tributary/buffer states.

What I said, plainly enough I think - though it goes against the American cultural assumption that all problems have unambiguously good solutions, was that there is a price to pay. Period.

I can say that with confidence because there is a price to pay for everything. It's called economics I think.

You say the price is "small enough." We shall see. My personal opinion is, there are no "small" prices to pay when dealing with mass murderers.

You said: "Happy people are LESS likely to kill like that angry young man in the news the last couple days."

Really? That's an interesting theory. My own reading of history (and personal experience with psychopaths) is that states such as North Korea, the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, etc. are ruled and staffed by people who are really happy when they are bending other people to their will, and hurting and killing them from sheer sadistic glee. In such states they take people like that angry young man in the news and give them jobs.

One of the happiest smiles I ever saw was on the face of a uniformed thug in Eastern Europe swinging a rubber truncheon. (They're not all rubber actually, they have a steel rod inside.) But then it connected with my face and I don't remember much after that, so perhaps I didn't see the remorse after he realized he'd hurt me.

You said: "Being half Norwegian, I have always been interested in the Vikings and how they worked things out with the countries they invaded. In many cases I think the countries or areas felt the Dane-geld paid was a small price to being annihilated or devastated by the Vikings and as long as they got what they wanted, geld, they pretty much "honored" the agreements. The current day idea of "no negotiations with terrorists" just did not work that good back then. Ha I am not convinced it works now."

I'm confused. You say the idea of "no negotiation with terrorists" didn't work that good back then - but in the previous sentence you mentioned that negotiating, buying them off, was precisely what they were doing.

Nonetheless I agree, "no negotiation" is a silly way to put it. "Don't mess with us or you'll die" is a negotiation.

Oh, and as I recall the Danes wound up taking the Saxon kingdom, until Alfred the Great took it back by force. Later a descendant of Norwegian Vikings took England for good in 1066. That works pretty good if you're Norwegian I guess. I suppose it's all in your point of view.

* One of the most delightful things I ever learned was that the central incident of one of my favorite movies, "The Wind and the Lion," with Sean Connery as the Raisuli, Candace Bergen as Eden Pedicaris, and Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt, was based on an actual incident. And Roosevelt really did say, "Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!"

On of the biggest disappointments in my life was learning that Pedicaris was a man.