Joe's

The Bhoys Win! The Bhoys Win!

2006-11-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

The shot that launched a thousand jokes

2006-02-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

A Christensen in Cuernavaca

2006-01-22T19:14:00.000-08:00

My sister is studying Mexican for the summer in Cuernavaca which is a little south of Mexico City. Apparently her arrival was less than smooth, but she's alright. Hopefully she'll grace us with a report on her arrival and first impressions soon. She'll be blogging at La Exploradora, so tune in from time to time; she's a good kid.

Dear Reader,

2005-03-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

Joe's Ideas, this blog, has been euthanised. Thank you to all two of you who have faithfully visited its bedside while it suffered quietly, too quietly, from the diseases of pretentiousness, opacity, and lack of focus. We can only hope that eventually the undiseased soul of Joe's Ideas will find a suitable vessel for its reincarnation. Its name will change, but that small, infrequently glimpsed kernel that was genuinely interesting will persist and someday reappear.

The family asks that any memorial donations be made to a charity of the donor's choosing.

Sincerely,

The Bereaved

2005-03-16T21:59:00.000-08:00

Angel of Darkness. Glasgow, Scotland. This is in Glasgow's Necropolis. I lived a stone's throw from the graveyard for ten months and it became perhaps my favorite place in the city. Greenspace is hard to come by in Glasgow. I'll be posting some more. As always, click for a larger version of the picture.

2005-03-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

Sinn Fein Headquarters. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Saturday Links--March 12

2005-03-12T04:44:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker:The Current Cinema:Beginnings-one of the best movie reviews I've read in recent memory about one of the best movies I've seen in recent memory. "Head On" is the English title of "Gegen die Wand." Anybody have any ideas why they didn't translate it literally? "Against the Wall" would seem to be a very fitting title for this movie, connoting as it does in English a situation where there is no hope of a way out, that things are going to come to a head.

Stephanie Pommez Photography-very good photography. In that way, a nice contrast with what I've been putting up.

Judging Our Ancestors: Lessons from the Criminal Law

Remembering Francis Crick-touching essay written well by Oliver Sacks in the NY Review of Books.

Ephilosopher :: Philosophy News, Research and Philosophical Discussion

Leiter Reports: John Cleese: Britain to Revoke U.S. Sovereignty

A Prescription for Senile Liberalism

Für Deutsch-Leser
NETZEITUNG PEOPLE: Camilla ist «unattraktivste Frau der Welt»

Towards an attempt to justify the title of this blog

2005-03-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on the philosophy of language.

But the idea theory of meaning has lately been defended in new form. Called the theory of prototypes, it suggests that classes are formed on the basis of ideas of a particular, ideal token. For example, the category of "birds" may have the idea of a robin as a prototype, and then the limits of the meaning of bird (for example, a penguin) are sorted out through further experience and observation of like characteristics between robins and other similar animals. This theory has been defended by contemporary cognitive scientists Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff.

Philosophy of language - Wikipedia

This seems very plausible to me. My ideas of things are elastic, expanding and contracting, shifting into other categories through experience. It seems that the categories of intermediate breadth would be last to come. For example, the concept of mammal would require extensive experience and a certain degree of artificiality while the more specific category of bird would begin to take shape after seeing a handful of birds, as would the broader category of living things. Artificiality is the opposite of being self-evident in this usage. Perhaps the articiality is due to the number of essential characteristics in play for a classification. If something has a beak, it is very likely a bird. If something moves volitionally, it is very likely alive. The concept of mammal requires more, and less obvious, observations.

This also seems compatible with my inchoate ideas about the importance of probability in thinking and perception. Probability must be at the center of any attempt at adaptive learning and language. Probability allows for an infinity of expression within a finite vocabulary and for neologisms. If one isn’t committed to saying things like “Only moving things are alive.” are certainties, then one allows for the mutability of definitions where definitions is meant as membership of a class. Things can move in and out of classes as knowledge or observations accumulate and things acquire more specific and more subtle categorizations and cross-categorizations. An example of a cross-categorization would be mammal which categorizes across the more specific and more self-evident categories like dog, cat, etc.

P.S. Yes, it's the same George Lakoff who came up with the empty-shell ideas of Don't Think of An Elephant. As his serious work has apparently led to his very silly ideas outside academia, I will remain skeptical.

2005-03-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

Life Underwater. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

2005-03-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

Independence and Socialism. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

2005-03-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

Escalator. This one was published in the UI undergrad arts review, Earthwords. You could see it on their website if only their archives weren't out of commission. Plus, I don't trust them to be true to my artistic vision in their presentation. Who would?

Saturday Links

2005-03-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Saturday Links: a new feature in which I will provide links to the most interesting web sites and articles that I've come across during the week. For the convenience of my fellow ALDaily readers, I've marked with *...* the articles/sites that are not linked to from that page as far as I know.

Foreign Policy

Inside the Committee that Runs the World-Foreign Policy
*The Myth of Alan Greenspan*-Foreign Policy
*Taking on Tehran*-K Pollack in Foreign Affairs
*'The Crisis':Reading the Future in Tehran*-K Pollack in NY Times
*Syria Comment*-Josh Landis, blog on Syria by a professor spending a year in Syria : there has been a lot of insight about the Syrian reaction to the Hariri assassination.
*No Beirut Spring*-spiked-online : often clear-eyed spiked goes selective, shrill, and ideological in an attempt to maintain contrarian bona fides. The selectivity and shrillness will be apparent to any reader. What I mean by ideological is that the writer indicates that current opposition in Lebanon has no right to call for Syrian pullout because those people now in the opposition at one time or another in the past had supported Syrian presence. That's just silly and seems to indicate an ideological reason for condemning pragmatism.
*The Tharwa Project*-"The Tharwa Project is an independent initiative that seeks to provide a forum for identifying the aspirations and addressing the concerns of the various ethnic and religious minorities inhabiting the Arab World." It was founded by the Syrian dissident who maintains Amarji-A Heretic's Blog. The blog is intensely personal and has lately shown the conflict between dissidence and having a family.

Philosophy

On Bullshit-Harry Frankfurt
*Dissoi Blogoi*-new Ancient Philosophy blog from a professor
*Idiocentrism*-quasi-blog by John Emerson, a disgruntled philosopher/generalist

Arts & Culture

Sign and Sight-summarizes and links to articles in the arts and culture sections of German newspapers. At the moment they have a roundup of the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, for you film buffs.
*Al Jadid Magazine*-"A Review of Record of Arab Culture and Arts"
*The Forager Blog*-infrequent, but smart posts on movies
*The Language Exchange*-"writing on history, language, and contemporary culture"
*The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art*-very cool site with the audio tour that a visitor to the museum would hear.

Für Deutsch-Leser

*Perlentaucher*-Bücher, Kultur, usw.
*Überraschung im Libanon*-taz
*Was ist dran am legendären Optimismus der Amerikaner?*- :-) tagesschau
*Unser Fundament bleiben die USA*-(The USA remains our foundation) Merkur

I may try to translate that last one because it's a very good article.

2005-03-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

Special of the Day

2005-03-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

Behind the Neue Wache. I've had this one up before, but I like it, so here it is again.

2005-03-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

Kitchen Table Still Life

2005-03-01T19:06:00.000-08:00

Rathaus Stralsund. (click picture for larger version) I promise there will be more than just pictures of buildings. The sky cooperated in this picture better than the last. It's learning, slowly.

And I repeat

2005-02-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

I've been going through some of my pictures and I might actually post some more of them as I promised to do months ago. Strangely, not a single person from the adoring hordes held me to the promise. I'm going to try to post at least once per week. We'll see. Maybe that Canadian will decide he wants to collaborate and I'll really start blogging again. First order of discussion in the joint yet-to-be-named blog: P.G. Wodehouse is not a good writer. Or shall we answer the perplexing question, What is Canada without hockey? Or maybe, How to be a military free-rider in the 21st century: the Canadian experience.

2005-02-26T04:37:00.000-08:00

A picture I faux-pretentiously like to call 'Layers of Berlin.' And when I say 'Layers of Berlin' I move my hands in a post-modernist gesture that indicates the mysticism of the multiple and obscure meanings that defy straightforward interpretations. Man, I wish it hadn't been so cloudy that day.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Secret Genocide Archive

2005-02-23T23:11:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristof-NY Times

Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.

These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.

This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.

The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person's clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."

It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

The same is true this time. Web sites like www.darfurgenocide.org and www.savedarfur.org are trying to galvanize Americans, but the response has been pathetic.

I'm sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn't in printing pictures of dead babies - it's in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered.

During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.

Death of a Salesman

2005-02-20T23:01:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005

The English language is missing a word

2005-02-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

This word would concisely and fully describe the relationship between two conclusions that are incompatible, one arrived at with evidence to support it, the other lacking this feature. It should also not be Latin. It shouldn't have elitist connotations. This word would replace 'disagree' in contexts like the following:

Report: EPA pollution plan won't cut it

The EPA's Office of the Inspector General said the rules should be written again after an "unbiased analysis" of how much mercury plants should be allowed to emit.
...
Agency spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman disputed the Inspector General's report, saying the inspector general simply "disagreed" with the EPA's approach. She said the agency would not redo the proposal and would make the rule final by mid-March.

Press Gaggle with Scott McClellan--Aboard Air Force One January 14, 2005

Q Does the President disagree with the report's conclusion that the war and the uncertainty on the ground has created a breeding ground for terrorism?

Press Gaggle with Scott McClellan--Aboard Air Force One November 20, 2004

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we would strongly disagree with any characterization that suggested or implied that the way detainees are being treated at Guantanamo Bay are inconsistent with the policy that the President outlined. I'm not going to get into discussing specific reports by the International Committee for the Red Cross. These are confidential reports that are provided to the commanders on the ground -- and the incidents you're talking about, it would be to commanders in Guantanamo Bay. And we stay in close contact with the Department of Defense on these matters and issues that are raised, and to make sure that the Department of Defense is following up, or following through on those issues that are raised.

And finally, this longer bit shows why we need this word.

Press Gaggle with Scott McClellan--White House June 17, 2004

Q It is not consistent. They said this business on the nexus -- sinister nexus is not so.

MR. McCLELLAN: Where did they say that?

Q It's in the story.

MR. McCLELLAN: Okay.

Q No collaborative relationship.

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Terry.

Q Well, I'll pick up on that, if I may.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well -- and we never said that there was operational ties involved in attacks on the United States. Let's be very clear about that. The President talked about that just a short time ago.

Q What are people supposed to conclude, that they're having lunch with each other?

MR. McCLELLAN: A short time ago in his remarks.

Q You talk about deep, long-standing ties. What is that supposed to mean?

MR. McCLELLAN: Saddam Hussein supported and harbored terrorist groups --

Q Why don't you just say the commission is wrong?

MR. McCLELLAN: All right.

Q Well, because the terms that you did use, "deep, long-standing ties -- sinister nexus," and the President himself saying, "By removing Saddam Hussein we have removed an ally of al Qaeda," that means they are working together. Did Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda work together, where and when?

MR. McCLELLAN: I disagree with your characterization about --

Q Well, what does "ally" mean?

MR. McCLELLAN: But Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda had a common enemy: It was the United States of America. And when you talk about a regime that has a history of supporting and harboring terrorists, and has a history of using weapons of mass destruction on its own people and on its neighbors, and then you look at the world through the lens of September 11th, the President made the absolute right decision to go in and remove that regime from power.

Q That's an argument. Those are not facts.

MR. McCLELLAN: One of the most dangerous --

Q That's just an argument. The facts as determined do not bear out that argument.

MR. McCLELLAN: One of the most dangerous threats we face in this day and age is the nexus between outlaw regimes with weapons of mass destruction and --

Q But you didn't find any.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- terrorist organizations. And the President acted, based on the information that we outlined, and that you can go back and look at. It's public information. Secretary Powell speaking before the United Nations --

Q Who has repudiated his own testimony.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and Director Tenet testifying before Congress about these ties.

Q And just to button this down, the President stands by his statement that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were allies.

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, if you go back and look at the facts --

Q I'm asking what the President would say today.

MR. McCLELLAN: He stands by saying that Saddam Hussein's regime had ties to terrorism, including al Qaeda. And the basis of that is what I pointed out in Secretary Powell's remarks and Director Tenet's remarks. And that is consistent with what the September 11th Commission said. The relationship and contacts go back over the last decade.

Free Media, Schmee Media

2005-02-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say

The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech.

It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday.

The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

That took guts

2005-01-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

I admire the people who turned out for the Iraqi elections today. We Democrats need to get our ideas straightened out so that they don't conflict with praising wholeheartedly an event like today's. Criticism has to be smarter than simple opposition of and attempts to undermine Bush. Things like this from Senator Kerry don't cut it:

No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation, and it's going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in. Absent that, we will not be successful in Iraq.

Enveloping History

2005-01-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

I've had some things to say on the topic of German WWII guilt in Memorials and Memory Holes. Via ALDaily is this excellently written article by Theodore Dalrymple The Specters Haunting Dresden.

On no city does history weigh heavier than on Dresden. It is 60 years in February 2005 since the bombing that forever changed the basis of the city’s renown. Overnight, the Florence of the Elbe became a perpetual monument to destruction from the air, famed for its rubble and its corpses rather than its baroque architecture and its devotion to art. And then came communism.

You meet people in Dresden who, until a few years ago, knew nothing but life under Hitler, Ulbricht, and Honecker. Truly the sins of their fathers were visited upon them, for they brought neither the Nazis nor the communists to power, and there was nothing they could do to escape them. For such people, the sudden change in 1990 was both liberation and burden. Avid to see a world that was previously forbidden them, they took immediate advantage of their new freedom to visit the farthest corners of the globe, the more exotic the better. But the liberation brought with it a heightened awareness of the man-made desert of their own pasts, seven-eighths of their lives, truly an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Never was Joy’s grape burst more decisively against veil’d Melancholy’s palate fine.

He goes on to talk about how the bombing of Dresden is used by Holocaust deniers and anti-semites to equate the two sides and, as if on cue, this story from Reuters today German Far-Right Fracas on Eve of Auschwitz Ceremony includes this,

The far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) provoked outrage on Friday by walking out of a minute's silence for Nazi victims and referring to Allied strikes on the German city of Dresden in 1945 as a "bombing holocaust."

2005-01-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

"I'm not Mahmoud Abbas, but I could play him on TV." The irony that the Mueller-Stahl screen capture was taken from Jakob der Lügner has not escaped me.

For Brennan and the Trinkteufel

2005-01-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

A bit of bingeing can be good for you - from spiked-life. No pun intended.

It is the grown-up thing to do: stand on your own two feet and get legless

My name is Mick, and I am a secret binge drinker. So secret that even I didn’t know I was one, until I looked up the official definition of a “binge” and discovered that I am a menace to society.

I was watching Dateline or some other fear-mongering news magazine the day after Christmas and discovered that I too was a Binge Drinker and had binged in front of my young niece and nephews on Christmas no less. I've since called their parents, my brothers, to beg forgiveness and attempt a start at reconciliation. They did not oblige and I've been excommunicated from my family who understandably cannot bear the disgrace of having a Binge Drinker among their members. Blogging may be sparse as I attempt to find an internet connection out in the cold and lonely winter snow. Oh how I rue the day of my first drink.

Give me seasonal schmaltz-Times Online Comment

2004-12-25T18:18:00.000-08:00

I have lived in America long enough to know that I should never grasp the hand of colleagues or friends and wish them the joy and peace of the newborn king in case they turn out to be practising Zoroastrians. But it has got to the point where I worry now about upsetting fellow Christians if I proffer them a limp handshake and that flaccid salute to mushy multiculturalism: “Happy Holidays”.

And yet the truth is I rather like this annual Christmas controversy. For one thing it helps to debunk one of the more absurd myths about America that the rest of the world clings to — that it is firmly in the grip of some theocracy in which schoolchildren learn creationism by rote and White House officials slaughter the fatted calf before drawing up their foreign policy plans.
...
At other times, I can’t quite take all this American idealism and sentimentality. It is just a bit too much at odds with a complex world. As the country’s critics never tire of observing, it can lead to a little too much certainty and self-belief and a deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error.

But, at this time of year, a bit of simple faith, a bit of uncynical joy and a bit of human hope induced by that unfathomable miracle that happened a couple of thousand years ago, is right on the mark.

A great essay

2004-12-20T11:03:00.000-08:00

Via 2Blowhards.

African Union Says No End to Violence in Darfur-Reuters

2004-12-19T20:09:00.000-08:00

More of the same:

Fighting between Sudanese government forces and rebels continues in Darfur despite cease-fire promises, the African Union said on Sunday, saying one of its monitoring helicopters had come under fire.

"One of our helicopters has been shot. They are firing on our helicopters. This shows that the cease-fire is not being observed. They did not comply. They have not stopped fighting," AU spokesman Assane Ba told reporters on Sunday evening.

Back in Des Moines

2004-12-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

I moved this weekend. Things are pretty stressful and I don't have internet service yet. The library is my conduit to the world, but only for 60 minutes a day.

Brennan, a Canadian, writes to ask: Do your ballots actually say Kerry/Edwards and Bush/Cheney or not?

Why yes, Brennan they do. In Boone County, Iowa at least. I specifically looked for that when I voted. In some places, however, I believe there is some fine print that says that you are actually voting for Electoral College voters who will subsequently vote for either ticket. That is technically what people vote for even when it doesn't say that on the ballot as in my precinct. A person votes for one of two groups of Electors. These Electors then cast the Electoral College votes which are what decides the presidency. So, you and Eva are both correct. Which means that I win the bet.

Psychology Today: A Nation of Wimps

2004-12-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

An interesting article about the effects of over-coddling, over-protective and over-regulating parents. I'm sure glad there was no danger of me being over-coddled as a kid.Psychology Today: A Nation of Wimps:

From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it's in play that cognitive agility really develops.
...
In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences.
...
Virginia's Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in--less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.
...
Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they've maintained over their children. The goal of parenting, Portmann reminds, is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later, he says, most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity.

Another article on the word 'liberal'

2004-12-10T13:19:00.000-08:00

I've said my piece on this before: here and here. Here's another article talking about the word's decline. I think it exaggerates the pariah status a bit.

My mom, drug-buster

2004-12-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

My mom has worn many hats in her day, but this past weekend she put on a new one. She was working at the nursing home when the cleaning lady approached her and asked her to come look at something in the bathroom. "I thought she was going to show me that some resident had, you know, 'decorated' the bathroom," said Mom. Instead, the cleaning lady showed her a pouch that had fallen--during cleaning--out of the locked medicine cabinet that is used only for employees. One of the two zippers on the pouch was open when it fell and inside were small zip-lock bags with some sort of powder in them. My mom, aka Sherlie Holmes, took the pouch, locked it away, called the administrator who called the police, and then told the cleaning lady, "We'll just wait and see who starts to get anxious." Well, someone got anxious and went out to their car three times, searched the lockers and break room and asked co-workers if they had seen a little pouch that held medicine.

The police came and took the person away. This person had apparently had some problems with meth earlier as well. The cop was encouraged, though, by the fact that the person had been worried that some of the residents might have found the pouch and hurt themselves. He said that three years ago this person would never have thought of anyone besides themself. Small victories.

The Report from Riceville-December 7, 2004-Elmer Fudd Edition

2004-12-07T18:52:00.000-08:00

So I went up to Riceville this past weekend to go deer hunting with my brother, Dave. It was my first time. I arrived on Friday night and we put together all of the things I would need for the morning: boots, extra socks, insulated coveralls, vest for warmth, orange vest for safety, digital camera for memories, cell phone for time and emergencies, fingerless gloves for quick shooting, granola bars for the munchies, wallet with hunting license and deer tag, scarf for chilly low-lying areas, orange stocking cap for warmth and safety, and twenty deer slugs. My brother Will brought over my 12 gauge shotgun.

At 5a.m. Dave woke me up and we had a coffee and cinnamon roll together before putting on all the gear. It was still completely dark as we drove to his father-in-law's to meet the other hunters. On a clear night when you drive through Iowa it's difficult to tell where the sky begins and the earth ends. The sky is full of crisply shining stars poking through the darkness and the countryside is dotted with the yard lights from every farmhouse among the black.

Keith, Dave's father-in-law, was waiting for us at the kitchen table. He had drawn up a map of the property we would be hunting, his mother's farm. He had labeled it with the geographical terms of a man who has grown up with the land. Here was 'The Old Crossing.' Here 'The Sand Pit.' There 'The New Crossing.' 'The Switchgrass' was north of 'The Oaks.' He explained where he planned to put all the hunters. "Dave, you'll be pushing along the creek. Andrew and I will push toward Joe. Joe, I put you down in 'Keith's Chair.' John will drop you off at the bridge east of Mom's. See, here. Just follow this little creek up until about thirty yards from where it flows into this bigger creek. That's Crane Creek. There's an old fenceline down there and you can move all along there. There's one of those trees where it's like four trunks grew up out of one tree. You can sit up in there, too. Those deer will be coming from ever' which way. They're bedding down in that grass there by the road. You'll probably scare up three or four on your way in. Try to be quiet. You might get one on your way in."

I was too confused trying to figure out when other hunters might be in my line of fire to ask him what 'Keith's Chair' looked like. At around 6:45 John dropped me at the roadside. I loaded my gun and headed into the woods, following the creek. It was still quite dark, but my gun was poised and my reflexes were on notice for whitetails in the grass. No deer were scared up on my way in. Also, Keith's Chair was nowhere to be found in the dark.

I did find the tree with four trunks. The four trunks were like fingers growing out of a hand and two feet from the ground they formed a flat palm where they met and I climbed in, deciding that being surrounded on three sides by tree trunks was a good place to be if chunks of lead started flying around.

At around 7 the first shot was fired in the distance. Six or seven more followed within a minute. It was time to kill some deer. About ten minutes later, I saw my first one. Five of them. I heard them running across the grassfield that was adjacent to the woods I was in. They ran into the woods fifty yards from my position, but on the other side of some thick brush and I lost them for a few seconds. I jumped out of my tree, ran in a direction to give myself a good shot when they came from behind the brush. All five appeared from behind the brush and stopped forty yards from where I stood standing still. A big doe was showing her whole side. I shot. The blast was shockingly loud. I pumped my gun. Shot again. All five were gone before I could shoot a third time.

My other encounters with deer during the rest of the day proceeded much the same way with the same result every time. Later in the day, Dave and I both shot at a doe running at top speed through a grass field. Dave was in the same area the next day and said he saw a blood trail and thought that I had wounded it. He was trying to cheer me up. But I didn't need cheering-up. I had a great time.

Hi, Atus. Where have you been?

2004-12-03T23:39:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything. Apologies to the adoring hordes who come here every day looking for entertainment, insight and peace of mind.

I'm back in the Ville for the weekend. I'm going deer hunting with my brother and his in-laws. It's my first time hunting deer and I'm really looking forward to it.

Robbing the library

2004-11-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

I went out for a walk around the town today and stopped into the library where they were having a book sale. I bought these books:

Shakspere [sic] - Julius Caesar (1919)
H.W. Longfellow - Longfellow's Poems (no date of publication and I can't find it on the internet, but from other books advertised in the back, I figure circa 1900)
Charles Schultz - As You Like It, Charlie Brown
Aleksander I. Solshenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
ibid - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Byron - Poetical Works
The NY Public Library Desk Reference
Daniel Defoe - Roxana
Edmund Morris - Theodore Rex (biography of Teddy Roosevelt)
Tom Wolfe - The Purple Decades
James Joyce - Ulysses
Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
John Berger - Ways of Seeing
Henry Nash Smith - Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
Ernest Hemingway - Men Without Women
E.M. Forster - A Room With a View
Anna Boschetti - The Intellectual Enterprise
Ludwig Wittgenstein - On Certainty
James Fennimore Cooper - The Deerslayer
All Granada (a book of 150 beautiful pictures from Granada)
Photography (historical and instructional)

I paid $6 for the lot of them.

Happy Turkey Day

2004-11-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm thankful for my loving family without whom I would be living on the street and eating banana peels. I'm thankful for my curiosity which makes unemployment more bearable. I'm thankful for public libraries and the internet which let anyone find out about anything. I'm thankful for having a life to live without having to worry about basic necessities like health, shelter, food, and love. I'm thankful for the country I live in and that we can change it for the better if we convince enough people we're right. I'm thankful for music. I'm thankful that young men like my little brother and I aren't forced to go to war. I'm thankful for our stupid dog and for my computer and for the people who listen to me on here and in the real world.

Please feel free to let me know what you're thankful for and don't feel like there's any pressure to say Joe's Ideas. Peace out, my people.

Privacy? Oh come on, you don't really want that.

2004-11-21T13:53:00.000-08:00

If in fact you do, you should read the following.

GOP embarrassed by tax returns measure

Talking Points Memo

Bulland al-Haydari

2004-11-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

Below are the first and last stanzas of a poem by the poet above. He was born in Baghdad to a Kurdish family and was active politically in exile. The poem reminds me of what is at stake in Iraq and that we must succeed. The kind of success I'm talking about seems to be getting further away, not closer. When I said something similar to a friend before the election, he said it was simply impossible that we would lose. Obviously this is true militarily, but a war fought in part to make the lives of its citizens better must do just that and if it doesn't is unsuccessful. People who call for patience are obligated to show that things are headed in a direction where patience would be justified. These weeks and months after the re-occupation of Fallujah will likely tell us a great deal about the wisdom of the present course and whether patience is justified. This poem talks about the absurd evil of Saddam killing his own people, but Iraqis are still killing Iraqis and we're killing them too. Lancet's estimate of 100,000 killed civilians may be too high. The Iraq Body Count project has high standards of proof and it number killed civilians between 14454 and 16604. That the military doesn't even attempt to count is shameful IMO because it says that the deaths of civilians is in operations is not up for consideration. The fact is, contra far left-wing commentators, that the military does consider civilian casualties, but the military, or more accurately its civilian policy-makers, seems oblivious to the disdain not keeping a body count implies. The importance of body counts to the citizens of a country is best demonstrated by the sanctity that the number 3,000 holds in this country. Keeping a civilian body count would open them to criticism about the price of the war, but not keeping one has the effect of adding to a building reputation of America as an inhumane power. Abu Ghraib was the biggest factor. The shooting of the unarmed insurgent/terrorist recently will also add to it. Being a humane power exacerbates the difficulty of certain aspects of the operation, but creating the impression that we are an inhumane power or worse being one in fact will have long-term effects that dwarf the difficulties created by humanity.

The City Ravaged by Silence
by Bulland al-Haydari
Translated by Hussein Kadhim and Christopher Merrill

Baghdad, that captive, forgotten
Between the corpse and the nail.

Baghdad was not besieged by the Persian army
Not seduced by a mare
Nor tempted by a hurricane nor touched by fire.

Baghdad died of a wound from within
From a blind silence that paralyzed the tongues of its children.

...

We will be executed in Baghdad's main square
With a signboard larger than Baghdad on both of our chests
(Understand . . . you may not be executed . . . understand . . .
you may be spared)
You are forbidden to read . . . to write
To talk . . . to cry . . . even to ask
What Baghdad means
What it means to be human or an animal
To be more than a stone forgotten in Baghdad
You are forbidden to be more than the two legs of a harlot
Or the two hands of a pimp.

Baghdad died of a wound inside us . . . of a wound within
From a blind silence that paralyzed the tongues of its children
Baghdad was ravaged by the silence
So that we have nothing in it, it has nothing in us . . . except death
And the corpse and the nail.

A couple of long essays

2004-11-19T04:40:00.000-08:00

Those dastardly, conspiratorial neo-conservatives are at it again. Formulating ideas that seem really persuasive to me, that is. Robert Kagan delivered this lecture ominously entitled The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World. In it he outlines the conflict between liberal modernism which promotes the rights of the individual and Westphalian ideas of sovereignty. I have mentioned my less than reverential view of sovereignty in this space before. Sovereignty just doesn't seem to fit very well with my ideas of the responsibilities of a state which is illegitimate in my view when it actively ignores those responsibilities. My support for the Iraq war has roots in this idea among other considerations.

If you're in the mood for reading long essays today, I would recommend reading Democracy as a Universal Value by Amartya Sen. It's a good complement to the Kagan essay. It's a couple years old, but is a good defense of the universality of democracy, particularly in answer to critics who say that authoritarianism is necessary for stability and economic development as well as those who say that regional and cultural differences are not compatible with democracy. It is an essay so it's more an outline of his positions on those issues than a detailed argument. He also has a new essay in the NY Review of Books called Passage to China which I haven't read yet, but which I can heartily recommend based on what I have read by him. Even if you don't agree with everything he says, he's a great writer and his knowledge is impressively broad.

Quote of the Day

2004-11-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

From the standpoint of sexual selection, the mind is best seen as a gaudy, over-powered home entertainment system, evolved to help our stone-age ancestors to attract, amuse, and bed each other.
-Denis Dutton

And, in the "Excuse me, is that a large vocabulary in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" category:

As a telling example of the human self-created overabundance of mental capacity, consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have up to twenty distinct calls. The average human knows perhaps 60,000 words, learned at an average of ten to twenty a day up to age 18. As 98 per cent of daily speech uses only about 4,000 words, and no more than a couple of thousand words at most would have sufficed in the Pleistocene, the excess vocabulary is well explained by sexual selection theory as a fitness and general intelligence indicator. Miller points out that the correlate between body symmetry—a well-known fitness indicator—and intelligence is only about 20 per cent. Vocabulary size, on the other hand, is more strongly correlated to intelligence, which is why it is still used both in scientific testing and more generally by people automatically to gauge how clever a person is. Such an indicator is especially telling in courtship contexts. Indeed, extravagant, poetic use of language— including a large vocabulary and syntactic virtuosity—is associated worldwide with love, being a kind of cognitive foreplay. But it is also, he points out, something that can “give a panoramic view of someone’s personality, plans, hopes, fears, and ideals.” It would therefore have been an essential item in the inventory of mate selection criteria (Miller 2000).

I'm so proud

2004-11-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

My younger sister, with her finger ever on the pulse of Young America, cleverly parses the categories of the MSN handle.

4. Deep thoughts. For example, "Death is the only race you don't want to finish first." But shouldn't it be "Life" since you never actually finish death...you're just dead?

5. Movie lines or song lyrics. I like the movie lines, they crack me up. And I've been guilty of the song lyrics a time or two...but really...who wants to talk to someone whose name is "WHAT'S COOLER THAN BEIN COOL, ICE COLD ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT"? Poor Outkast.

2004-11-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

From U Wisc

Nextbook: Current Features

2004-11-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

Nextbook: Current FeaturesAn interesting interview full of nuggets like the following which mentions the self-righteousness of European political criticism that I noted in a post a while back. "I think Europe ought to be much more directly responsible and helpful in world affairs, and much less moralizing and telling others how they ought and ought not to behave. Europe could have been a lot more helpful than it is in many, many troubled parts of the world." He also notes that there were attitudes and policies in place even before the Holocaust that abrogate a right to present-day self-righteousness.

My parents, my grandparents, they were not the people who drowned with the Titanic in the big, big catastrophe, no, they were the people who were thrown into the ocean in the dark, from the decks of the Titanic, while the dancing and the dining and the ball was still going on and everybody was happy. They never recovered from it.

In addition, Mr Oz tells how he deals with the transformation of the stomping grounds of his younger days into something unrecognizable which I wrote about in my second "Report from Riceville." He says:

I don't have the slightest problem with the fact that places change. The Kerem Avraham of my life is in my book, not where you have gone for a walk. It's in my memory, and it's in my descriptions, just like those shtetls in Eastern Europe where my parents came from. They no longer exist, and yet they do exist in the collective memories of those who came from there. So no, I am not going to lament the fact that my world is gone. It's not gone, it's elsewhere.

Coolness.

2004-11-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

Via Viewropa: Graffiti animation.

Back

2004-11-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

I had a good time hanging out with my brother's family, especially teaching my nephews some finer points of football. Everyone was down at my mom's for Thanksgiving this weekend because it's so hard to come out on top of every one of the holiday scheduling conflicts of the sisters-in-law. Yesterday I had a job interview. We'll see.

Via ALDaily is this article from its editor, Denis Dutton, reviewing a book about evolutionary psychology applied as literary theory. Interesting stuff. I wish I'd known of this kind of thinking before. I might have been very satisfied with my English studies.

Evolutionary psychology has typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into the cognitive content of stories and art.
...
Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself. This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian, music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means.

Update: Also, if you found that as interesting as I did, read his entry, Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology, from The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics.

The Report from Riceville-November 9, 2004-Demographic Dilemmas edition

2004-11-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

Brain drain is a problem for Iowa. Most of the very top students either leave the state after high school to study elsewhere or after college never to return for much longer than it takes to eat a turkey or shoot off some fireworks. Lack of economic opportunity is at the bottom of it. The problem is magnified at the level of the small town. The engine of the small Iowa town is, in almost every case, farmers and the ag industry.

In most towns the story is one of traditional farming communities struggling against the pressures put on them from the modernizing urban centers which has been going on roughly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Farming equipment developed with new technology is increasingly efficient and increasingly expensive. The incresed efficiency means that fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of agricultural goods resulting in a declining population. The increased expense means that only the wealthiest farmers are able to directly reap those gains in efficiency; only they can buy the more efficient machinery. This means that less wealthy farmers are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage and sooner or later they lose the farm to the bank or sell it to their more successful neighbor. This also puts downward pressure on population.

The population decline has a number of effects. The small town school is one of the first to feel them. Declining enrollment means declining money for teachers resulting in fewer of them and less competitive salaries to attract the best of them. Less competitive salaries can result in a situation where older, experienced (higher-paid) teachers are encouraged to retire early making room for recruits fresh from college who take the low salary, but leave after a few short years to market their experience to a better-funded school. Teachers do a great deal for the culture of small towns and losing them or having a new batch of them pass through every few years is harmful to establishing and fostering the kind of social and intellectual community that might be useful in retaining more of the brightest kids. Teachers are college-educated; their kids are more likely to go to college; with familial ties to the community, those kids are more likely to grow up and contribute to the growth of that community.

I could go on at length about some of the other economic and cultural tectonics that are occurring in rural Iowa in general, but this is the Report from Riceville so I’d better return that shining city on a hill. The interesting thing about Riceville is that, unlike other towns whose chief threat to their existence is the inability to adapt to the aforementioned pressure of modernity, Riceville must also adapt to the pressure of antiquity, counter-modernity in the form of an increasing Mennonite population beside an already existing Amish population.

Before I go any further I want to make perfectly clear that I mean to cast no aspersions on either the Mennonite or Amish communities. In my experience with them, members of both sects have been some of the most courteous, respectful and genuinely nice people I’ve come across. An Amish acquaintance of my dad’s visited him when he was sick and Mennonite carolers came and sang for him at Christmas time. My dad even took me once to a Mennonite church service when I was very young. Mennonites have been the most entrepreneurial people in Riceville in the last five years and could add a great deal to the town life.

Mennonites are, however, distinct and their self-segregation adds to the downward pressure on population among non-Mennonites. They will not attend the public school, but administer their own schools instead. Even when a farmer loses or is forced to sell his land the house is often occupied by someone who has or could have kids who would go to the public school whose centrality in the life of the town I touched on above. If a Mennonite were to buy the same tract of land he would also live in the house but would send his kids to the Mennonite school. It seems to me that the pressure on population from this phenomenon would be significantly smaller compared to those I talked about a few paragraphs ago, but many in Riceville see this as a big problem. (In a small town, unfortunately, this is more of a zero-sum game than elsewhere. That is, there is relatively little available property and few available businesses so when a Mennonite buys something it is seen as taken from the column of the traditional townspeople. In a larger market individual purchases would represent smaller portions of the whole pie and hence would not be as contentious.) The problem is not with the Mennonites as a group. My experience of them as nice people is typical. There is some resentment that they are buying a lot of land, but the problem is less with Mennonites (and Amish) coming into the town as with the ‘native’ culture dying. People in Riceville are worried that the town they know will cease to exist.

What Riceville needs of course are smart, entrepreneurial people to start businesses and create jobs. It does have some things going for it. A few years ago the school received a hefty bequest from an area farmer that gives students who enter agricultural, medical and technological fields a $2000 per year scholarship. This will probably increase since enrollment has declined in the four years since it was first disbursed. The school has also produced the Dinger ambassadorial duo and, most importantly, is perennially good at football.

The Report from Riceville-November 7, 2004-Maple Leaf Chili Cook-off edition

2004-11-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

I’m spending a short week in Riceville with my brother and his family and in blogging hope to treat it as a bit of vacation from political topics. We’ll see how it goes. Watch out for sentimental and nostalgic writing that tends to the superficial. I may not be able to control myself outside the cynical world of politics.

Tonight my brother David and his family and I went to the Chili Cook-off at Maple Leaf Lutheran Church. My uncle, Dan, is the pastor there, having moved back to the area to be close to the rest of the family after his four kids graduated from high-school. Maple Leaf has been attracting some new and former attendees since his return and a bit more life in the church and a few more cars in the parking lot are helping the old country church continue to outlive half-century old pronouncements of its inevitable demise.

Recently there was discussion of building a new Maple Leaf Church. The proposal was to build a handicap accessible, one level church on the other side of the parsonage, currently part of a cornfield (The church truly is a country church, the parsonage being its only companion in the sea of soybeans, corn and grain.). This plan to build anew was taken up because the costs of installing an elevator in the current church were prohibitive, but was rejected after one of the members found a chair lift on auction for two-hundred dollars. Those against building a new church also argued that the church wouldn’t be around in twenty years anyway so it wasn’t any use building a new one. My brother said that the same argument was raised fifty years ago when the current building was remodeled. He seemed annoyed at the defeatism, saying that he would not be surprised at the church’s decline if the building was allowed to deteriorate without a replacement being built. There are similar attitudes regarding the eventual closing of the school and the death of the town. Beside those mourning the foregone conclusion of these eventualities are also those who are working toward avoiding them.

The Chili Cook-off was held in the basement of Maple Leaf. There are kitchen facilities on one end of the single room basement and young people from the youth group, the beneficiaries of the ten-dollar fee for entry of a dish in the competition and five-dollar fee for entry of a person through the door, served up a few spoonfuls of each of ten different varieties of chili via a tray full of miniature plastic cups. Also to be picked up for judging were a plate full of bite-size portions of twelve different desserts and another with four types of salad and yet another with five different breads because in truth this was not a one-front battle for the best chili, oh no, but rather a two-front war for tops in chili and dessert with additional minor skirmishes in the third world of breads and salads.

The chili itself was less diverse than I might have hoped with three of the ten barely differentiable from each other. My uncle Dan made his with lamb, which turned out to just not be quite the right meat for chili. Another’s makeup was literally ninety-five percent beef, but despite that promising constitution lacked flavor. Without knowing it was hers one of my nephews picked his mom's chili which made her pretty happy. In the end I cast my ballot for number ten, a spicy number with just the right consistency and tasty tomatoes, but not before I considered writing-in Ralph Nader.

Cuz Stone Cold says so

2004-11-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

About Andrew McCarthy's review on NRO of Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command:

As usual with partisan writers the adjectives and adverbs do most of the talking. McCarthy sarcastically describes Hersh's reporting as 'tireless,' General Taguba's report "which Hersh selectively praises" as 'aggressive' and former Secretary of Defense Schlesinger's probe as 'exhaustive.' Also, lest we remain unconvinced that the military and government are the paragons of objectivity and impartiality we are reassured that "the abuse is being vigorously prosecuted." These examples are culled from a single paragraph of the article.

McCarthy's liberal use of adjectives is not what bothers me about his article. Such style is found on either side with equal frequency. What bothers me is the claim that runs through the article, other articles defending Bush, as well as many public statements from the Bush administration and campaign in which something amounting to "cuz Stone Cold says so" serves as a refutation of criticism.

I would be the first to welcome a state of affairs when a politician's word was his bond and no more investigation was necessary. Even if such a state of affairs were achieved it would remain somewhat dubious as a mode of arguing to say that two plus two equals five because President Trustworthy said so. The final reckoning is always in the examination of whether or not five is in fact the sum of two and two.

McCarthy calls on the say-so of authorities that uniformly align with what he thinks while savaging Hersh for relying on the testimony of his own experts. Having dismissed unnamed sources by virtue of their anonymity, McCarthy dismisses all Hersh's named sources thus: " while the few sources he [Hersh] does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven." These agenda-driven people are excluded from offering analysis based on their association with the Democratic Party (Wes Clark), Human Rights Watch (Kenneth Roth), The New York Times (Anthony Lewis), and the UN (scott Ritter). Richard Clarke is disqualified because he wrote an election-year bestseller which must be mentioned because he isn't directly associated with any of the other associations which serve as shorthand for "people whose information we will use only if it supports our ideology." Hence "everyone in the world thought Saddam had weapons" can be used as a defense of invading Iraq while to cite the UN's estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq would be a mind-blowingly craven, irresolute, and moreover, liberal thing to do.

During the campaign such appeal to the say-so of the Bush administration was peddled as an answer to the draft question. The fact that people on both sides of the aisle were saying they didn't want to have a draft was never in question. What was in question was whether Bush administration policies would eventually create the need--which is quite different from the desire of politicians--for a draft. This was never explained. A draft is unlikely, but an explanation was in order to diffuse the fear of one, not a mere statement by George W. Bush, a uniter, not a divider.

A couple articles...

2004-11-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

on the values debate.

David Brooks attacks the post-election conventional wisdom that "has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them." This broadens the condescension beyond intellectual snobbiness and I think it's well founded. The liberal line seems to be that we need to talk about poverty, the war in Iraq and health-care in moral terms and in so doing unmask the immorality of the so-called morals voters. Brooks says that the country is simply more conservative which is not the same thing as saying more religious. If so, and it would probably be a natural reaction to 9/11, the liberals have a great deal more work to do than reframing. That said, I'm not sure all this rending of garments is called for. Solutions such as building up institutions seem the most level-headed approach. Such institutions have value regardless the number of one's supporters. There are so many voter blocs within the majority the Republicans won that it would be stupid to go after just one of them, even if it is the biggest (though Paul Freedman debunks that idea here.)

Mick Hume resumes a line he has taken before (probably where I got the idea that ran through yesterday's post) and attacks what he sees as racism against 'white-trash.' This line is near to what I meant by the Britney Spears loving proletariat: "Those who pour public scorn on 'American idiots' are parading the latest version of the socialism of fools." He gets 'American Idiot' from the Green Day song. "The contemptuous tone of this campaign is captured by a song I keep hearing called American Idiot, by the punkish American band, Green Day: 'Don't want to be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information age of hysteria/I'm not part of a redneck agenda'." I'm going to a Green Day concert in Minneapolis on Friday. It should be fun. Also at spiked is this article, a review of a movie similar in tone to 'Super Size Me' and Michael Moore's stuff. "But the more political films could also be described as feel-good movies, in that they make viewers feel part of something greater than themselves. Instead of class-based solidarity, The Corporation offers the kind of shared consumer experience pioneered by the very corporations it attacks." I would actually argue that class does play a part in that the 'white-trash' class is what Moore lovers seek to define themselves against. One can belong to the same economic class as 'white-trash' and still disdain 'white-trash'. To define oneself out of the 'white-trash' class by adopting the liberal ideas that attack the 'white-trash' class is to attach oneself to the educated and higher economic classes. Everyone talks about Howard Dean as a wild-eyed liberal, but one thing he wanted to do was break down this condescension and bring 'guys with confederate flags on their pickups' into the party.

Moore condescension

2004-11-05T18:08:00.001-08:00

Kevin Drum gets at one of the reasons that people in red states like Iowa vote for Republicans.The Washington Monthly

Now, needless to say, I don't agree with Wolfe that our sense of morality is "twisted," but I do agree that we probably lose a lot of support we don't need to lose because of a very real — and often dripping — condescension toward anyone we consider less enlightened than us.

...

In other words, they disagree with us, but not so much that they can't be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.

There are a lot of Democrats and liberals who seem completely perplexed that lower-income voters vote 'against their self-interest' i.e. for the Republicans. A guy named Thomas Frank has written a book to this effect called What's the Matter with Kansas?. I haven't read it yet. This elitism has a lot to do with it I think.

Michael Moore plays the part of populist, but in fact much of his vitriol is directly or indirectly aimed at lower middle-class people who disagree with him. He condemns corporations, but also the ignorant people ignorant who keep buying their products despite his revelations of their misdeeds. They are the pre-occupied proletariat who can't hear the calls of revolution because they are listening to Britney Spears.

In Bowling for Columbine, for example, the corporate targets are the gun industry, the NRA and K-Mart. The indirect targets are people who own guns and belong to the NRA. These people, through Charlton Heston, are portrayed as callous bastards who have no empathy for young victims of violence. The conventional wisdom is that people who belong to the NRA are the same kinds of people who go to church every Sunday and vote for Republicans. [sidenote: I would like to find some statistics on gun crime among NRA members. If you know where I could find some, do let me know.]

Moore aims to condemn both corporations and their working-class, non-Democratic customers. In the same way, the condescension that Kevin Drum describes is not only aimed at people who eat at McDonald’s and shop at Wal-Mart, but also against those corporations. One of the roots, IMHO, is in academia with everyone from Anthropology to Chemistry departments and students not even bothering to mask their contempt of the Business department and students (There are certain departments like Political Science and occasionally Economics which seem to be slightly more friendly to the Business department.). It is not surprising then, that business people and working-class people find themselves on the same side.

Will Wilkinson, also an Iowa boy, has been intelligently discussing the same thing from a libertarian perspective for the past few days.

Darfur Increasingly Unstable, U.N. Envoy Warns (washingtonpost.com)

2004-11-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

Darfur Increasingly Unstable, U.N. Envoy Warns (washingtonpost.com)

Pronk said that the Sudanese government is losing control of the Arab militias it equipped and recruited last year to counter black rebel forces and their kin, and that the militias have killed thousands and forced more than 1.8 million from their homes. But he blamed the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army for stirring up the latest round of violence by stepping up attacks against local police and robbing Arab traders of their camels, which are vital to Arab tribes. 'They are provoking the militia to attack,' he said in an interview after the meeting.
Pronk appealed to the 15-nation council to increase pressure on Khartoum and Darfur's rebels to strike a political deal ending the violence at a rare council meeting in Nairobi scheduled for Nov. 18-19. The meeting is being organized by John C. Danforth, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to encourage Khartoum to sign an agreement with a separate rebel force it has been battling in another part of Sudan for more than two decades. Danforth hopes that such an accord will help lead to a peace deal in Darfur.
Pronk said that although the links between Sudanese authorities and the militias are becoming "blurred," Sudan's military has incorporated police and Janjaweed militias into its operations in Darfur. African Union monitors are also investigating reports that Sudan bombed villages with attack helicopters in violation of commitments that the government has made to the United Nations.

Politics as High School Pep Rally

2004-11-04T16:28:00.000-08:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Two Nations Under God: "The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on."

Calling Woodstein

2004-11-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

QaQaa update: LA Times--Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

"We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out," said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

"On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave" so looters could come in and take munitions.

"It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots," another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.
...
"We couldn't have been given the assignment to defend a facility unless we were given the troops to do it, and we weren't," said one National Guard officer. "[Objective] Elm being protected or not protected was not really part of the equation. It wasn't an area of immediate concern."
...
During the same period, Marines came across another massive ammunition depot near the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniya, the senior officer said. They sent a message to the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad seeking guidance on how to keep the site from being plundered.

Commanders in Baghdad responded that the Marines should attempt to blow up the depot. The Marine officers responded that the site was too large to demolish.

Commanders in Baghdad "didn't have a good response to that," the officer said. "There was no plan to prevent these weapons from being used against us a year later."

Wednesday Night at the Movies

2004-11-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of past two-term Republican Presidents, I'm consoling myself by watching All the President's Men tonight.

Amen.

2004-11-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

Amy Sullivan at Washington Monthly:

I gotta say, it doesn't help much when exit polls and sloppy reporting use terms like "moral values" and "moral issues" as shorthand for very narrow, divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage, feeding into twenty years of Republican rhetoric. Opposition to the war in Iraq is a moral issue. The alleviation of poverty is a moral issue. Concern about abortion is a moral value, yes, but you can stay at the level of empty rhetoric about a "culture of life" or you can talk about how to actually reduce abortion rates, which is what most people care about more. (Did you hear once during this election season that abortion rates have risen under W. after they fell dramatically during Clinton's eight years in office?)
"Religious" does not mean Republican. And "moral" does not been conservative. There's going to be a lot of discussion about all of this over the coming weeks and months, and it's incredibly important to make sure we're neither sloppy about our terms nor overly broad in how we characterize "the faithful."

One of my friends (you can read his blog which is to the right under Friends' blogs) is a youth pastor and he voted for Nader. We've been having some discussions about the religious right and their interesting relationship to morality. If we come up with something useful I'll share it.

Shock and awe

2004-11-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

It's tough to know what to say. I have nothing useful to add at this point.

As a baby's bottom

2004-11-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

I voted with my mom and sister this morning and it couldn't have been more smooth. Most everyone knew each other so when one of the election officials said to a guy, "Hey, you're at the wrong polling place." everyone just laughed. Ah, sometimes it's nice to live in Normal Rockwell America.

Free lunch

2004-11-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

Via Viewropa:

Par Blog: The current edition of Restaurant Magazine has an article on a restaurant in the suburbs of London where there are no prices on the menu. Customers pay what they think the meal was worth. It is called Just Around the Corner and has been around for 17 years. From what I saw when I went to help photograph it for the magazine, it serves old fashioned French food of an average standard (soup, chicken supreme, profiteroles...).

When people don't pay what the owner thinks appropriate (about £20 a head) We just thank them nicely and give them their money back. These people know they don't belong here, they try you out and by giving them their money back nicely, you ensure that they never return.

I would like to see what a population of free-riding college students would do to this interesting arrangement. For my London readers the address is 446 Finchley Road and the name of the restaurant is Just Around the Corner. Enjoy.

It's over

2004-10-31T16:20:00.000-08:00

Via Crooked Timber:

In every Presidential election-year since 1936, if the Washington Redskins lost their last game before the election, the incumbent lost as well. In today’s game, the Packers beat Washington 28 - 14. A late rally by the Redskins in the 4th Quarter couldn’t save them. This is the strongest spurious evidence yet that Kerry’s going to win on Tuesday.

How to handle a terror tape

2004-10-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

Kerry will be jumped on if he tries very hard to directly tie Osama's reappearance to Bush. However hypocritical this would be of the Bush campaign (from whom I received a mailer plastered with images from 9/11) it's still unavoidable and must be taken into account. Kerry can actually do some constructive political things with this tape while avoiding the indignation of the Bush campaign. I think he can do this by addressing Osama bin Laden. Talk past George Bush directly to Osama. "I have a message for you, Osama." type of thing. If done right it would make him look tougher than he has been and avoid direct criticism of the President.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

The most interesting thing about the Osama tape is the reference to My Pet Goat. That business was, even when Michael Moore did it, closer to being a joke than a serious argument. So now Osama's cracking jokes at our expense. He's not afraid, he's not injured, he's not on the run, he doesn't worry that the courier that delivers his videotapes might betray him, or that the local government wherever he is is going to find him. He's sitting -- wounds healed, shura council reconstituted, ideological network growing -- and he's laughing at us.

Capturing OBL is not the be-all and end-all of the war on terrorism, but if you want to know what kind of weakness invites the wolves in for supper, then you saw it right there on video. A man plots and organizes the slaughter of thousands of Americans and three years later there he is, distributing his latest threats and boasts over a global satellite network. Laughing at us. At all of us. And all because the president couldn't be bothered to nab him.

Bull Moose is great

2004-10-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

T.R. thought for the week is about the patriotism of criticizing the President.

The Iranian question

2004-10-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

I've been hanging out in some German blogs lately and I dropped a comment in one of them yesterday to the effect that Bush hamstrung the US in how it can deal with Iran and North Korea through the way he dealt with Iraq and that the cost of the war in Iraq could climb steeply in human and monetary terms if one of those countries does something.

Anyway, after a couple self-righteous comments from Germans, an Iranian left an interesting comment which I translate thusly:

let me tell you an iranian joke: what does the so-called 'critical dialogue' (initiated by mr kinkel 1992/1993) mean in practice: "be nice to the mullahs and when they ruin it again, then just be even nicer"

we iranians know what it's about for europeans: make a deal and look away. now and then give a pseudo-moral declaration and then back to making deals and looking away. (or can germany afford in its present economic situation to say that the mullahs money stinks)

i fervently hope that the mullahs will be destroyed. and help from the US in that is fine by me.

by the way, as a follower of american politics in iran i know that a military invasion is not an option from the american perspective (ledeen, rubin, gerecht, pletka) but rather a moral/logistical/financial strengthening of the democratic opposition in iran (from reformers to decided opponents of the regime)

meanwhile the germans and french delegations compete at gatherings of the beggars in teheran [i'm not sure about that sentence-joe]. only the economy becomes worse for us iranians every day. who benefits from these trade agreements is completely obvious (for example the iranian GDP declined one-third from its 1979 level)

so we iranians are thankful for help in destroying the mullahs, from all the four corners of the earth. if it's not the europeans, then it shall be the americans.

-reza

I'm not a big fan of anecdotal evidence, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless because it is in line with other anecdotal evidence. Here is the original which can be found here:

lassen sie mich einen iranischen witz erzählen:
was heisst der sogenannter "kritischer dialog" (initiiert vom herrn kinkel 1992/1993) in praxis:
"sei nett zu den mullahs und wenn sie es mal wieder vermasslen, dann sei eben noch netter"

wir iraner wissen, woran es den europäern liegt:
geschäfte machen und wegsehen. ab und zu eine pseudo-moralische erklärung abgeben und dann wieder geschäfte machen und wegsehen.
(oder kann sich etwa deutschland mit derzeitgen wirtschaftslage behaupten/leisten , daß das geld der mullahs stinkt)

ich hoffe inbrünstig, daß die mullahs gestürzt werden. und da ist mir hilfe aus usa nur recht.

übrigens als ein verfolger der amerikanischen politik in iran , weiss ich, daß eine militärische invasion aus den augen der amerikaner (ledeen,rubin,gerecht,pletka) keine option ist, sondern die moralische/logistische/finanzielle stärkung der demokratischen opposition in iran (von reformern bis zu den entscheidenden gegnern des regimes)

währenddessen
konkurrieren die französischen und deutschen delegationen beim stelldichein der klinkenputzern in teheran. bloss uns iranern geht täglich wirtschaftlich noch schlechter.
wer der nutznießer dieser handelsverträge ist wohl offentsichtlich (z.b. beträgt das iranische bruttosozial-produkt eindrittel des vom 1979)

also wir iraner sind für hilfe, aus allen herrenländern zum sturz der mullhs dankbar. wenn es nicht die europäer sind, dann sollen es die amerikaner sein.

Still going

2004-10-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Talking Points Memo still on top of it including this and David Kay's appearance on Aaron Brown.

Today Di Rita brought out an Army major who says his unit removed and destroyed roughly 250 tons of equipment, ammunition and explosives from somewhere in the al Qaqaa facility in early April 2003 -- that would be after the first US troops arrived but prior to the arrival of the news crew that apparently filmed much of the explosives on April 18th.

Was it the stuff in question? Di Rita kept trying to answer the questions on the major's behalf. But the major made clear that he had no idea. Did he see any IAEA seals? No, he said, he didn't.

The Fox reporter at the news conference tried to coax the major into saying more than he was saying. But to no avail. He would only say what he knew. And there was very little that he knew that pertained to the relevant question.

The other reporters on hand, apparently weary of being lied to all week, preferred to put their questions to the major directly, rather than to Di Rita. And he, the major, was straightforward enough to say that all he knew was that he had taken stuff from somewhere at al Qaqaa and destroyed.

Not seeing any seals is important because only the HMX and RDX were under IAEA seal. It's good to hear that a lot of explosives from there were destroyed, but the film crew was there after this major and was with a group of soldiers who broke IAEA seals to get in to film material that David Kay, as positively as possible, identified as the explosives in question.

Reality check

2004-10-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias with a little criticism of Josh Marshall:

I must say that I find Josh's apparent faith that the fact that the facts prove Bush to be totally wrong about Al Qaqaa and Kerry to be totally right will somehow affect the media coverage of the campaign to be somewhat naive. The only news that really affects the campaign at this late date is the coverage provided by the Associated Press that runs in the local papers in the battleground states, and today's AP article, in typical fashion, gives no sense of the accuracy of various claims and counterclaims being made about anything. As we know from PIPA, the majority of Bush supporters have managed to somehow not discover the most elementary facts about the past four years, such as that Iraq did not have advanced WMD programs. The notion that the press is somehow going to suddenly start jamming minor things like accurate information into their heads is sadly out-of-touch with the realities of the current media and political climate.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

2004-10-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals.

Now, in this particular case, could the White House get lucky and it turn out that the al Qaqaa munitions were actually carted off to Mars?

Sure. Even though no evidence adduced to date suggests anything but that they were looted because they were not secured.

But that would hardly change the essential issue. The administration didn't deploy adequate troops to secure these facilities and didn't even have a plan to do so. It wasn't even a concern until late Sunday evening when the issue blew up into a political firestorm and they began desperately trying to come up with some rationale, any rationale, to shift the blame off themselves.

Nor is that all.

Why was the mission so undermanned?

Part of the explanation comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's and his staff's view of military transformation, one that puts a heavy emphasis on high-tech weaponry and airpower over ground forces.

That's not the biggest reason, though.

The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.

Still unravelling

2004-10-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

EXCLUSIVE: 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS video may be linked to missing explosives in Iraq
The video was shot 9 days after the fall of Baghdad by a local TV news crew.

Bull Moose--Elephant panic attack

2004-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

Bull Moose

What has knocked the President and the G.O.P. off balance? It all started when the Qaqaa hit the fan about the missing munitions. Kerry pounced on the allegations that the explosives disappeared after the beginning of the war. The G.O.P. countered that they vanished before the war. And Bush suggested that Kerry was criticizing the troops.

No, Mr. President he was attacking you and your cronies. It is a neat trick by the President - every time his Administration is criticized on the handling of the war, he responds that the Democrats are disparaging the soldiers. But then again, how could the paragons of perfection in this Administration ever make an error!

The Moose Intelligence Services cannot determine whether the weapons were missing before or after the invasion. But, what he does know beyond any shred of doubt is that the Administration (yes the Administration and not the troops) consistently failed to heed warnings about the need for more troops to secure Iraq. The dump at Qaqaa has resonance because it has become a metaphor for the overall chaos in Iraq.
...
But, what really has got the G.O.P's dander up is that the press is actually reporting on the situation on the ground in Iraq. The press was a virtual lap-dog for the Administration leading up to the war, and for four years the Bush Administration has stiff-armed the fourth estate.

Now, the Bushies are paying the price, and it hurts so bad.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

2004-10-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:

Again, Di Rita and his associates in the Bush campaign certainly don't know what happened. Nor are they trying to find out what happened. What they're trying to do -- a la Rather and Mapes in those ugly days -- is try to come up with something, anything, that will provide an alternative, exonerating explanation of what happened. And as each new piece of evidence or explanation gets knocked down, they look around for something else.

The Washington Monthly

2004-10-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Washington Monthly

THE TROOPS DID IT....Via Atrios, this is truly revolting. A mere one day after George Bush tried to pretend that John Kerry's criticism of him was actually denigration of U.S. troops, Bush campaigner Rudy Giuliani blames the al-Qaqaa fiasco on....the troops:

"No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"

Do these guys have any shame left at all?

Yahoo! News - Cheney Says Kerry Wrong on Iraq Explosives

2004-10-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Cheney Says Kerry Wrong on Iraq Explosives

Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said Thursday that John Kerry (news - web sites) had gotten the facts wrong in criticizing the Bush administration for the disappearance of several hundred tons of explosives in Iraq (news - web sites).

Well, if the Vice-President says it, it must be true.

Update: My point is not that the VP is necessarily wrong. As the story unfolds it is becoming more complicated and it always was more complicated than merely the headlines. My point is that the VP claiming this gives it absolutely no credibility boost whatsoever.

Election break

2004-10-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

Tonight I share one of my favorite parts of Paradise Lost to remind us that our house is not yet completely divided and hope that our President for the next four years will prevent such a thing as follows from happening. I don't mean to call the US heaven (a certain state in the Midwest gets that designation), but life is pretty good here.
Paradise Lost--Book VI ll. 568-614

So scoffing in ambiguous words, he scarce
Had ended; when to right and left the front
Divided, and to either flank retired;
Which to our eyes discovered, new and strange,
A triple mounted row of pillars laid
On wheels (for like to pillars most they seemed,
Or hollowed bodies made of oak or fir,
With branches lopped, in wood or mountain felled),
Brass, iron, stony mould, had not their mouths
With hideous orifice gaped on us wide,
Portending hollow truce; at each, behind,
A Seraph stood, and in his hand a reed
Stood waving tipped with fire; while we, suspense,
Collected stood within our thoughts amused,
Not long; for sudden all at once their reeds
Put forth, and to a narrow vent applied
With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,
But soon obscured with smoke, all heaven appeared,
From those deep-throated engines belched, whose roar
Embowelled with outrageous noise the air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul
Their devilish glut, chained thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes; which, on the victor host
Levelled, with such impetuous fury smote,
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks, but down they fell
By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rolled;
The sooner for their arms; unarmed, they might
Have easily, as Spirits, evaded swift
By quick contraction or remove; but now
Foul dissipation followed, and forced rout;
Nor served it to relax their serried files.
What should they do? if on they rushed, repulse
Repeated, and indecent overthrow
Doubled, would render them yet more despised,
And to their foes a laughter; for in view
Stood ranked of Seraphim another row,
In posture to displode their second tire
Of thunder: Back defeated to return
They worse abhorred. Satan beheld their plight,
And to his mates thus in derision called.
O Friends! why come not on these victors proud
Ere while they fierce were coming; and when we,
To entertain them fair with open front
And breast, (what could we more?) propounded terms
Of composition, straight they changed their minds,
Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell,...

I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but Satan loses in the end.

Nobody's home

2004-10-27T19:26:00.000-07:00

I was away from the computer all day. Talking Points Memo continues to have analysis of and links to almost all the major follow up stories on al Qaqaa.

Andrew Sullivan endorsement

2004-10-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Why I am supporting John Kerry.
Risk Management

Bush's comparative advantage--the ability to pull the trigger when others might balk--will be largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean it hasn't come in handy. Without Bush, Saddam would still be in power. But just because the president was suited to fight the war for the last four years doesn't mean he is suited to succeed at the more complicated and nuanced tasks of the next four. In fact, some of the very virtues that made him suited to our past needs now make him all the more unsuited to our future ones. I am still glad he was president when we were attacked. But that doesn't mean he's the right leader for the years ahead. And one of the great benefits of being a democracy at war is that we can change leaders and tactics to advance the same goals. Dictatorships are stuck with the same guy--with all his weaknesses and all the hubris that comes from running successful wars, hubris that almost always leads to fatal errors, hubris that isn't restricted to tyrants.

I agree especially with the fact that we're not electing John Kerry in 2000. This is about the next four years, not the last four.

This is not, should not be, and one day cannot be, Bush's war. And the more it is, the more America loses, and our enemies gain.

That sounds familiar(That rightful place includes a policy on terrorism which is an evil that must be, will be, and is being fought by Democrats and Republicans alike.). Is Andrew Sullivan stealing my stuff? It would be nice if someone was.

The explosives

2004-10-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall is following and adding to the explosives disappearance story. He has a number of both analytical and informative posts up including a discussion of the NBC story that these explosives were already gone when they reached that facility with the 101st Airborne.

WSJ piling on

2004-10-25T19:01:00.001-07:00

The most indicting articles for the Bush administration are not Kerry endorsements on the editorial pages, but the straight news pages carrying stories on Iraq. Opinion-makers are not influencing the election so much as fact-reporters. The latest such entry comes from that left-wing rag The Wall Street Journal which reports about the different scenarios to take out Zarqawi that were scrapped for political considerations. If we bombed Zarqawi the link between Saddam and terrorist would be all the more tenuous. Laura Rozen has some excerpts of the article.

Update: Crooked Timber has some more analysis of this fiasco.

We can, I think, dismiss the idea that an attack on Zarqawi would have led the UN not to pass resolution 1441 demanding that Saddam admit weapons inspectors. As Ted points out here the US was bombing Iraq throughout the leadup to the war and had conducted many similar attacks on terrorists (notably including Clinton’s failed attempt on bin Laden). In any case, the final proposal for an attack on Zarqawi was rejected when the inspections were already under way. There was no way that the UN Secretariat could have withdrawn the inspectors without authorization from the UNSC where the US and UK could have vetoed it, in the unlikely event it was proposed.

I think two considerations were decisive. First, an effective attack would probably have required co-operation with Kurdish ground forces. But, right up to March 2003, the Administration was trying to get Turkish participation, or at least basing rights to allow an attack on Iraq from north as well as south. Strong hints were given that if the Turks came on board, the US would keep Kurdish demands for autonomy in check. Obviously, a joint operation with the Kurds would have wrecked the negotiations. As it turned out, the Turkish Parliament rejected the deal, but not until the war machine was already rolling.

The second point relates to intelligence. Defenders of the Administration’s position have made much of the fact that they didn’t know for sure whether Zarqawi was there, but this hasn’t stopped previous attacks on terrorist leaders, some of which have been successful and others not. A more difficult point for the Administration was that they had made propaganda points out of the claim that Zarqawi’s Al-Ansar group was manufacturing ricin, a poison used in assassinations. By a rhetorical sleight of hand, this could be equated to “WMDs in Iraq”. But, by late 2002, and certainly by early 2003, it must have been pretty obvious to the hardheads in the Administration that all their intelligence on WMDs was worthless - the failure to secure al-Tuwaitha after the war was indicative of this. Regardless of whether Zarqawi was caught, an attack on the Kirma camp would have come up blank on WMDs, and this would have undermined the broader case being mounted by Bush and Powell.

White House Press Gaggle

2004-10-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

McClellan:

Now, if you go back and look at the Duelfer report that recently has come out, according to the Duelfer report, as of mid-September, more than 243,000 tons of munitions have been destroyed since Operation Iraqi Freedom. Coalition forces have cleared and reviewed a total of 10,033 caches of munitions; another nearly 163,000 tons of munitions have been secured and are on line to be destroyed. That puts this all -- that puts this all in context

I would like to know what percentage of the total munitions in Iraq this 406,000 tons represents (McClellen changes the second number to 363,000 tons later in the gaggle so the total could be 606,000, but I arbitrarily took the first number because there are no good reasons to take either one.).

One of my dad's favorite sayings: "Just about" doesn't count.

The 380-ton straw that broke the camel's back

2004-10-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

If I'd been wavering the explosives story in the NYT would probably have pushed me decisively into the Kerry camp. I'm not sure if it's true but I was listening to NPR on the way back from IC today and it was reported that "A Bush spokesman dismissed the claims of Sen. Kerry [about the explosives] saying that no nuclear material had been stolen." What the hell is that supposed to mean? Not only is it immaterial and unresponsive to the danger that conventional explosives (380 tons of them!) can pose to our troops, to Iraqis and to Israelis, but we found out a couple weeks ago that in fact a lot of the equipment useful for making nukes was stolen before that. A non-answer on top of an untruth.

Disappearing pictures

2004-10-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

Bear with me. I'm trying to improve the appearance of the blog.

Liberals

2004-10-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

The other day I wrote that it was wrong for liberals to demonize the word 'conservative' and vice versa, but didn't say much about the efficacy of the Bush campaign's attempt to do just that in this election. Peter Beinart (Unfortunately only available to subscribers. Lucky for me I have LexisNexis through the UI.) weighs in on why it hasn't been particularly stinging to call Kerry a liberal arguing that it's about race, taxes, cultural elitism, and the war on terror.

Liberalism used to be tied to racial politics and taxes because of the perception that liberals would dole out money to racial minorities and be soft on crime. This changed with Clinton who reformed welfare and was tough on crime. Also,"Today, it's a different story. When Bush says Kerry can't pay for his health care plan without raising taxes, he's implicitly conceding that Kerry will spend tax dollars on health care, something swing voters support." And the critique of liberals as cultural elites is no longer potent because it doesn't motivate swing voters. Now to verbatim Beinart:

That leaves terrorism. It is possible that September 11 gives the L word a salience it lacked in the '90s. And Bush is trying to update it to mean someone who would require a "permission slip" from other countries to defend America. But the danger of attacking Kerry as a liberal, rather than as a flip-flopper, is that it focuses the national security debate away from character and toward policy. A liberal, unlike a flip-flopper, is someone with clear views about national security. Those views may not be particularly popular--voters may indeed suspect Kerry would be too deferential to other countries. But, given voter dissatisfaction over Iraq, it is no longer clear that Bush's views are very popular, either. The flip-flop attack worked in part by appealing to a slice of the electorate that didn't like Bush's foreign policy but liked his steadfastness in carrying it out. By reframing the national security debate in ideological--rather than characterological--terms, Bush risks losing them.

I hope he does not only because of my electoral preferences in this particular election but also in the hope that 'liberal' as a term of contempt will be permanently deflated and its proper place within the moderate range of politics can be properly solidified. That rightful place includes a policy on terrorism which is an evil that must be, will be, and is being fought by Democrats and Republicans alike.

More exceptional America

2004-10-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

American exceptionalism is a type of nationalism, but it isn't necessarily a malignant nationalism. Yesterday I noted at the end of this post the kind of American exceptionalism that can be a force for good and recognizes "the fact that we've played a special role in defending liberalism, both our own and others." This exceptionalism is intimately related to the discussion of Bush's faith rising out of Ron Suskind's NYT Mag article because Bush believes (or creates the impression that he believes) the US is uniquely blessed by God and as President he has a unique role to play in the fulfillment of the goals of the US and God. I linked to and excised parts of a post by Bull Moose Blog that cautions against grouping Christians with Bush.

Today I found an article entitled God's Chosen People that manages to both decry American exceptionalism and throw Christians in wholesale with Bush. The Christians:

This campaign, I would argue, is one of the last convulsions of angry, real American men, fighting desperately (and well) to hold back the time and tide of the new—the un-white and un-Christian, and girlie-men, too, who sooner or later will be America.

American exceptionalism:

I said, with appropriate respect, that I thought Bush was ignorant of history and was doomed to repeat it. I added that I thought his secretary of State was incompetently presiding over the rape of diplomacy and that his secretary of Defense seemed to be crazy enough to actually believe that American invaders and occupiers would be greeted by dancing in the streets. There was applause for that.
But the next question was different: I was asked about how history might view this Iraq war. I answered that one possibility was that President Bush might be overreaching and that history could one day judge that this was the “beginning of the end of American empire.”

A hundred people, maybe more, in the crowd of 1,750 people began to boo. Some people walked out, too, or maybe they just wanted to get out early to avoid traffic as the parking lot emptied. Before applause drowned out dissent, some guy yelled, “Go back to Russia, you bum!” I loved that; it made me feel like a kid again. There was something encouragingly American about the scene: The crowd, or at least some of it, would let me demean the president and his men but not diminish the country or its actions, right or wrong.

The idea of America has always been powerful in the world. The idea of American righteousness has always been powerful at home. “Avoid foreign entanglements,” said George Washington. “The last best hope,” said Abraham Lincoln. “A shining city on a hill,” said Ronald Reagan. That is what professors call “American exceptionalism”: We think we are not like other people because God did shed his grace on us. A lot of Americans, Reagan one of them, have always believed, simply and deeply, that we are better than other people. That is a key to President Bush’s rhetoric. The old story: We are going to save the world, whether or not the world wants to be saved.

The belief in American exceptionalism is not rooted, at least for me or anyone I know personally, in anything close to a feeling of genetic or national superiority. I don't believe, and know it not to be the case, that I am better than other people. My American exceptionalism is rooted in a few unavoidable empirical facts. The United States is the most powerful nation on earth, it is the richest nation on earth, it was one of the first democracies, and the primary language of its people is the primary language for business, culture and science in the world. This is not a comprehensive picture of the US. Slavery is not forgotten, nor the more than hundred years of black subjection that followed. American exceptionalism, recognizing that our country occupies a unique place in the world , does not mean American supremacy in a white supremacy, nazi supremacy type of usage. Neither does it mean that we believe ourselves to be specially ordained by God, God's Chosen People, the title of the article cited above whose subtext seems to be that Jews who believe this are also necessarily racist in the same way Americans are nationalistic To understand the US is exceptional is not a supremacist belief, but if the world needs saving in a conventional sense, i.e. from military threat, the US has a decent record at it and is now alone in its capability to do so.

To get some of the background of how and why American 'nationalism as exceptionalism' differs from the pathological European 'nationalism as fascism' I recommend The Two World Orders, an insightful article from this summer. His argument more broadly concerns international law and the reluctance to accept it here and the opposite being true for Europe which he traces back to the fact that nationalism (as fascism) destroyed Europe--twice--but nationalism (as exceptionalism) based on the constitution was what mobilized the public in the US against fascist nationalism and brought about its defeat.

ABC News: Air Force to Help Ferry Sudan Peacekeepers

2004-10-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

ABC News: Air Force to Help Ferry Sudan PeacekeepersI haven't been paying as much attention to this with the election nearing, but this looks encouraging. I don't know if it's all the logistical support the AU was asking for, but it's something.

Language Politics

2004-10-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about the demonization of the 'liberal' label which is closely related to the right wing language wars exemplified by the "Healthy Forests Initiative," "Clear Skies," and so on. Well, not to be outdone in warping peoples' thought processes the left has their very own professional language abuser. He calls it 'framing.' George Carlin has lost the war. We are all the worse off for it. The guy's answer to the possibility that he is a propagandist:
How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must)

MJ.com: Yet I imagine for some liberals, when they hear you talking about needing to reframe the issues, they think, “Oh, we have to create propaganda. There’s something dishonest about that.”

GL: I’m not saying that we should do that at all. But there’s a very important other message there, which is: the conservatives know that they’re weak. If the public agreed with them, they could have called it the Dirty Air initiative. Why not? Well, they knew the public wouldn’t like it. What this means is that they’re weak. If they know they’re weak, they can be called on it because the public is on your side.

I'm not sure exactly how to deflate the language abuses on either side, but his answer seems somewhat non-responsive, or at least incomplete. He doesn't explain how he proposes to avoid descent into propaganda. He talks about 'framing' in a way that means 'distorting' not the morally laudable 're-injecting truth' that he hints at here. n.b. Also the blurb for the headline article on the MoJo homepage: " We're less far than we might imagine from a world where an Orwellian formula like "illusion is reality" could pass muster." Satire can't beat reality.

Bull

2004-10-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Bull Moose Blog is great. He just re-launched his blog yesterday and has been posting original (not the cheap quoting that I'm always doing) and well thought out pieces like there's no tomorrow. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo recommended him. Today he hits on the danger of having an Islamic fundamentalist government which would apparently "disappoint" our current President, but "democracy is democracy." But before we get to Bull Moose a bit from JS Mill who has seniority over the born-yesterday Bull Moose. John Stuart Mill-On Liberty:

...for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person's voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any future use of it, beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free; but is thenceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favor, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free.

That is why we cannot allow a truly fundamentalist government to take power. (I don't have the time or energy right now to argue fully for what I am premising the previous sentence on, that is, why I think democracy and fundamentalist Islam are diametrically opposed, but I will certainly keep my eyes open for such an argument from someone else that I can post here. In the meantime I'll rely on empirical examples such as the Taliban.) And now, finally, here is what the Bull Moose added to the discussion today:

That is what came to the Moose’s mind when he read Robin Wright’s lead story in today’s Washington Post, “Religious Leaders Ahead in Iraq Poll.” The story cites a poll taken in Iraq by the International Republican Institute, which no one can claim is a French-loving left-wing outfit.

The IRI poll found that the most popular politicians in liberated Iraq are Iran-supported pols
...
Since the end of the war, Iran has been extremely active among the Shia. While attention has focused on the violent Sunni Triangle, the real long-term threat to the anti-terrorist cause may be the emergence of an Iranian client state with support drawn from the majority Shia based in the relatively peaceful south.

Bull Moose also goes on to say that one should be careful not to throw Christian babies out with the Bush bathwater.

In short, Suskind attributes President Bush’s ideological intransigence, arrogance, hubris, triumphalism and lack of self-reflection to the fact that he is a devoutly religious Christian with a born-again experience. The Moose suggests that it could also be due to the fact that the President is intransigent, arrogant, full of hubris, triumphant to the max and is not introspective. He is not a religious fundamentalist but rather a militant anti-empiricist.

Yes, some people who possess these qualities are religious. And some are secular. But neither the Moose nor does anyone else have a window into the President’s soul. Religion may actual temper these destructive qualities in the President. Or, the President may simply not be faithful to his faith.
...
Yes, we should oppose this President’s overweening arrogance and hubris. But, let’s keep religion out of it. As matter of fact, it wouldn’t hurt if we got some religion ourselves. If the President is re-elected, we may desperately need it!

Like I said, Bull Moose is great.

Bonding Time

2004-10-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

The ability of the US to run a deficit because of the willingness of foreign countries to buy treasury bonds was a frequent point of discussion and occasional resentment in my International Political Economy of Finance class in Potsdam so the following is perhaps not as interesting to my readers as it is to me.

Doug Merrill of A Fistful of Euros posts the following:

Earlier this month, when Edward wrote

The alarm shot was given by Dalls Federal Reserve President Robert McTeer when he declared in a speech in New York last week that whilst overseas investors now “finance” the US current account gap, “theoretically some day that process will come to an end, the flows will turn against us and there will be a crisis that will result in rapidly rising interest rates and a rapidly depreciating dollar.” This prospect, which currently seems remote, should not be taken lightly. It is real, and it is there.

I noted that this prospect had been around for a long time (close to ten years at least) and asked what would constitute a sign that this time might be different.

continue reading

This could be it:

On Sept. 9, as it must frequently do, the U.S. government turned to Wall Street to raise a little cash, and Paul Calvetti bet that demand for $9 billion worth of long-term Treasury bonds would be “huge.”
But at 1 p.m., as the auction opened and the numbers began streaming across his flat-panel screens, the head of Treasury trading at Barclays Capital Inc. slumped in his chair. Foreign investors, who had been voraciously buying Treasury bonds, failed to show up. Bond prices cascaded downward, interest rates rose, and in five minutes, Calvetti, 38, who makes money by bidding on bonds at one price and hoping market demand lets him quickly resell them at a profit, had lost $1.5 million.
“It’s amazing,” he gasped, after the Treasury Department announced that Wall Street traders, not foreigners, had been left to buy virtually the entire auction. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before.”

Losing the favor of the bond market can be laid squarely at the foot of the present US administration. The move from surplus to record deficits in just three years, abandonment of fiscal discipline, a view that economics don’t matter in the face of politics, policy choices that mean deficits as far as the eye can see, refusal to be honest about the cost of those policies; all purely voluntary choices, and the price may have just arrived.

One thing that has protected the US against an earlier reversal is the perception that future US growth will be stronger than future European growth. In the face of massive fiscal irresponsibility, differing growth prospects may not matter as much to international investors. Rapid flight from Treasuries is not in anyone’s interest. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

In fact, Mr Vice President, deficits do matter. While you're over at A Fistful of Euros, do check out this very interesting economics/business post on inventory in the music/book business in the digital age.

The market for books that almost no store carries is as large as the market for all the books that a store has in stock.

Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg - Policy Review

2004-10-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

I continue to be attracted to neo-conservatism in theory (though not in practice and I have a strong aversion to many of its salesmen at the Weekly Standard. This article is well thought through.Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg - Policy Review, No. 127

I think it is not unfair to describe the neoconservative conclusion as follows: Reality is such that efforts to alter it result in its mugging you -- often enough, that is, to render such efforts dubious at best. One should reduce one�s ambitions accordingly.

He presents it as a politics of common sense and sets its central goal as "the conservation and extension of liberalism", but it falls sadly short in reality. But here is a bit that I couldn't agree with more as I said the other day.

As it happens, the story is more complicated than that. After all, a worse outcome than an authoritarian regime is certainly possible in some cases. For example, holding an election might result in empowering an Islamist government bent on smothering all liberal sentiment under a blanket of sharia. Or an authoritarian government, under pressure to liberalize, might lose its grip altogether, resulting in a failed state prone to lawlessness, warlordism, and misery.

But, of course, to say this is merely to say that one must be prudent in pursuit of the advance of liberalism — one must be realistic and take local circumstances fully into account; one must be attuned to the difficulty of introducing a balance between the desire for freedom and the desire for equality in places that have little or no experience of the two in relation and may not, in any event, wish this liberalism for themselves. One must not shrink from rejecting such illiberal wishes: Universal liberalism means nothing if it grants exceptions in principle — though, clearly, certain prudential accommodations may be necessary. In the end, however, it is the resolution of disagreement as “agreement to disagree” that most securely protects liberalism. This is no less true in the international context than in the domestic context (and, in my view, provides the only adequate account of the “democratic peace”18). If, at home, the politics of the future consists of the conservation of liberalism, abroad the same tendency — whether one wishes to call it “neoconservative” or something else — consists of the prudent expansion of liberalism.

He goes on to say that American exceptionalism concerning our relationship to liberalism broadly defined is just part and parcel of a belief in the universality of liberalism. The exceptionalism comes from the fact that we've played a special role in defending that liberalism, both our own and others.

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Autumn 2004

2004-10-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

This is an idea that I haven't heard from anywhere else, but I find it very convincing.The whole article is interesting to read for a discussion of the troop levels, strain, and wisdom of a draft. PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly - Autumn 2004--The Need to Increase the Size of the Deployable Army

Third and finally, the United States should create various types of nonmilitary units in other parts of the government that would be useful in any stabilization mission. Their specialties should include not only security activities but reconstruction assistance as well. The idea should not be to create capacity that is already found in the armed forces. Nor should it be to pay for large formations of many thousands of police and aid officials who would do little except during such missions. For possible operations in countries the size of Iraq or Afghanistan, where standard police sizing rules would suggest the need for up to 100,000 police, fielding standing forces that were often on standby in the United States would be inordinately expensive.15 Rather, the smarter approach would be to create a nucleus of experts in various fields that could become the core of any larger operation, drawing on reservists and nongovernmental organizations and private contractors to beef up their ranks as needed.

We don't have an exact equivalent to the kinds of professional civilian administrators that the British used in nation building/empire administration. I have no facts, but I assume that Defense and State are filling most of these roles in Iraq as well as private contractors and some spots being filled by people like Ari Fleischer's brother who have friends in high places. An excerpt from Paul Krugman's June 29th column:

In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he's Ari Fleischer's brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

List of prominent politicians and their military service

2004-10-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

This is amazing if true.
Patriot Acts-Greenespace

Pathologizing Conservatism

2004-10-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

Pathologizing Conservatism - Reason An article about some psychology studies. I had to wait to the end of the interesting article for the following, but for my readers I'll spoil the drama of waiting to see whether the author was going to be an unknowing parody of himself or would realize the pathology of these studies.

Reasonable people, such as the distinguished academic researchers cited here, will no doubt agree that until effective treatments can be developed, we should reconsider whether sufferers of conservatism, like other mental defectives, should be allowed freely to exercise the franchise.

I do think that the pathologies of the far right are real as were the pathologies of the far left. I say 'were' because I think that the far left is dead in the US in any serious sense; communist and socialist are terms of utter contempt for most people here and no serious politician could get away with describing himself as such. One of the real pathologies of the right is the pathologizing of the self-descriptions of the left. There is nothing wrong with being a liberal. On some days I describe myself as one while at the same time identifying, self-congratutorily, as a genuinely good guy and a Christian. The right succeeded in this with the aforementioned 'communist' and 'socialist' terms. But in that case there was arguably something inherently wrong with being a communist or socialist if not before WWII, certainly as the realities of life in the communist countries became more widely known. Part of the disdain that these terms hold now is due to the fact that a consensus eventually emerged through argument (and other less high-brow means as well) that communism was inherently pathological. In Europe to call someone a communist or socialist is a description. Here it is a denunciation. The right cannot be allowed to demonize every term of self-description the left chooses. These studies attempt to do that from the opposite direction. Liberal and conservative are good names for the moderate halves of the debate here. Neither belongs in the ninth circle of hell with the communists and fascists. The right ought not demonize 'liberals' and the left ought to be careful not to treat people as if they have some sort of genetic disease if they subscribe to conservatism. To do so is fascist if anything ever fit the term.

Hey, who says the French can't be tough?

2004-10-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

France confronts a surge in racism - World - www.smh.com.au: "A school in the eastern French city of Mulhouse expelled two girls for wearing Muslim headscarves on Tuesday in the first such case since Paris imposed a controversial ban on religious symbols in state schools last month.

The pupils, aged 12 and 13, had refused to remove their headscarves despite repeated meetings teachers held with them and their parents, the school principal said."

Jokes aside, it probably was in fact somewhat tricky politically. It's good that they're following through on this, although it's difficult for me to believe that this was the first violation. I find the law itself objectionable because people shouldn't have their clothing choices dictated to them by their government. I suppose one could argue that the law is similar to school codes that ban risque clothing and things relating to beer, tobacco, etc., but the difference is that exhibiting one's faith is an act of speech of a higher order, with more meaning, than one advertising Budweiser. Disclaimer:The preceding is not a complete summary of what I think about free speech.

Oops-a-daisy

2004-10-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

USATODAY.com - Castro falls leaving speech, but quickly recovers

President Fidel Castro tripped and fell after leaving the stage at a graduation ceremony, but later returned to say that he was "all in one piece."

Stupid. Really Stupid.

2004-10-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Heinz Kerry Asks if Laura Bush Ever Had 'Real Job':

Times (London) Online - Editorial

2004-10-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

And you thought the Democrats were pessimistic.Times Online - Comment - Vote Bush: it's the quickest way to get American troops out of Iraq

Only Mr Bush can plausibly orchestrate withdrawal with dignity. Only he can spin defeat into a sort of victory. Neither the Democrats nor Washington’s military and diplomatic establishment would oppose him. The ranters who got him into this and now cry, “on to Iran, on to Syria”, will be of less account after an election. Mr Bush’s eye will be on posterity, and he is not stupid. He will have Mr Blair egging him on.

Consider instead John Kerry. He wants to involve “our European allies” in Iraq. He would plead with Mr Blair to stay, and plead for his help in securing a wider United Nations involvement. Desperate not to seem weak, Mr Kerry is likely to struggle ever deeper into the Iraqi quagmire. Any move to disengage will be seen as treachery by his enemies, as undoing the work of his Republican predecessors. Rather than hand Iraq over to the unavoidable next phase of civil upheaval and partition, Mr Kerry will postpone and let the mission creep ever forward. The hapless Mr Blair will be dragged along, too. Mr Kerry must make Iraq a success. Mr Bush need only to make it go away. For an early end to the war, I would vote Bush.

The New York Review of Books: Dreams of Empire

2004-10-20T03:33:00.000-07:00

The New York Review of Books: Dreams of Empire

But as Shalikashvili would doubtless agree, it is hard to be a leader if your behavior is not admired, your authority not respected, your example not emulated. All that remains to you is force. Of course, as the neocons are fond of repeating, a good prince would rather be feared than loved; but what they forget is that the same is true of most bad princes. An empire built on fear—fear of terror and the aspiration to make others fear us in turn—is not what Machiavelli (or Jefferson) had in mind.

The challenge facing American voters in the coming elections is not to find a president who can convince the world that the US isn't an empire—or else, if it is an empire, that its intentions are honorable. That argument has been lost and is now beside the point. Nor is it even a question of choosing between being loved and being feared. Thanks to America's performance in Iraq—and our evident inability to plan one war at a time, much less two—we are neither loved nor feared. We have shocked the world, yes; but few now hold us in awe.

And yet the election of 2004 is the most consequential since 1932, if not since 1860. Is John Kerry the man for the moment? I doubt it. Does he fully grasp the scale of America's crisis? I'm not sure. But what is absolutely certain is that George W. Bush does not. If Bush is reelected much of the world (and many millions of its own citizens) will turn away from America: perhaps for good, certainly for many years. On November 2 the whole world will be looking: not to see what America is going to do in future years, but to find out what sort of a place it will be.

OxBlog-Making the decision

2004-10-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

OxBlog:

This broad commitment to anti-interventionism on the left is the legacy of the Vietnam war. I believe that this same anti-interventionism led Kerry to oppose the first Gulf War as well as (to some degree) the second.

But the choice America's faces in Iraq is not one of intervention. We are already there. Our soldiers are already dying. Some might suggest that Kerry would rather save the lives of a few hundreds thane he would ensure the success of Iraq's transition.

I disagree. I believe that Kerry recognizes the danger of withdrawing from Iraq before it is stabilized. And I don't believe that Kerry could accept (let alone achieve) a process of stabilization that isn't democratic.

This doesn't mean that I expect Kerry to consistently make the right decisions about democracy in Iraq. In fact, I fully expect there to be a major struggle within the Democratic Party to define Kerry's agenda should he become President. I will simply do my best to play my small part in that struggle and to persuade as many Democrats as I can that democracy is the answer for Iraq.

Ultimately, I recognize that the arguments made above reflect a considerable degree of speculation about Kerry's motives. Thus, I will not hold it against anyone if they vote for Bush because their subjective assessment of the candidates' motives is different from my own.

Quotation of the Day

2004-10-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.

Karl Jaspers
--The Origin and Goal of History

Crooked Timber-Broadening the Coalition

2004-10-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

Crooked Timber-Broadening the Coalition post riffing on this Newsday article about Muslim countries offering troops. Obviously it didn't happen. The sticking point was that the U.S. wanted to have command of the troops and the Muslim countries wanted either to be under UN command or Iraqi government command. Allawi was ok with having the troops under his command so the argument that the Iraqis didn't want neighbors meddling isn't effective. I don't have any illusions that these additional troops would have been going on any dangerous raid missions or anything like that, but they could have freed up some of our troops from the patrolling, sitting duck missions. Command over the additional troops seems unessential.

Yahoo! News - Bush Talks About Troop Presence in Iraq

2004-10-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Bush Talks About Troop Presence in Iraq:

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, 'I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy,' Bush said. 'If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose.'

Remind me again what Osama bin Laden wanted? How do you ask an American soldier to be the last man to die for a for a fundamentalist Islamic government. Fundamentalist Islam is diametrically opposed to democracy. To allow a fundamentalist government to take power we will have condemned Iraqi democracy to death. The only question is how long it woud take.

Elections choosing a fundamentalist government is a very tough question. How it can be resolved I don't know. It may be prudent to signal like this that we will accept anything, but in the meantime we have to make sure that this possibility has no chance.

Voting in Iowa

2004-10-19T04:05:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for articles that confirm it, but I just heard on the morning news that 95% of all Iowa voters are registered, new registrations for Democrats outnumber those of Republicans 9:1 (!), and overall voter registration has increased by 10%. The 95% is the highest in the country and the increase of 10%+ is only shared by South Dakota.

Update: Chet Culver, SoS, was just on and said that there are only 100,000 unregistered voters in the state so I don't know if that matches the 95% or not. WaPo Both Paties Claim Registration Success:

In Iowa, Democrats have registered four voters for every new Republican voter since 2000. Since this year's caucuses, Democrats have outregistered Republicans by 9 to 1, narrowing the GOP lead in registration statewide to about 8,000.

So it's voters registered by Democrats, not Democratic registrations. That makes a little more sense.

General Reported Shortages In Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

2004-10-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Subtitle softens the blow: Situation Is Improved, Top Army Officials Say
General Reported Shortages In Iraq (washingtonpost.com): "The lack of key spare parts for gear vital to combat operations, such as tanks and helicopters, was causing problems so severe, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez wrote in a letter to top Army officials, that 'I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low.'" via Memeorandum an excellent website that's new to me.