Michael J. Totten: They Ain’t Studying War No More: "The fewer intellectuals there are on the left who study military history and strategy, the less likely any otherwise left-minded person who is interested in such things will want or be able to work with or for liberals and Democrats. What has been happening is a nation-wide brain-drain from the left to the right – at least in certain areas. "
(Via Glenn .)
THESE NINE COMMERCIALS from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival go a long way towards redeeming the town if not the Other Festival. Check them out at Ad Age's BOILED EELS, BASHED SKULLS AND BEER-SWILLING BALLET DANCERS.
Tip via the always rewarding growabrain
A short but touching item at the Belmont Club ("The Death of Minds") contrasts the fruits of two systems, one educational and one, well, not that educational at all in the final analysis. This is the conclusion:
The contrast between the youth at Caltech, striving to touch the face of God and the illiterate Muslim boys in a French suburb striving to touch the underpants of their neighbors is a consequence, not of the difference in their natures, but of the contents of their minds. Nothing in the US Army arsenal has been half so devastating to the Muslim world as the Saudi-funded Wahabi madrassa. For where one can injure the body, the other can destroy the mind. Nor is there help in the land of France for those who have managed to leave Arabia yet are never quite permitted to arrive in Europe. The dole for food and a policeman's truncheon, maybe; but never a candle for the dark; nothing whatever from the condemned store of Western values.But the dark context that shapes this conclusion will chill you.
No such thing as a "small" dose.
"You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
Ah, if you live or if you die."
Officials across the United States are expressing serious concern about a new "designer" drug which has hit the streets across the nation. Unfortunately, this new drug, known as "QuickSilver" or "Baroque" is neither regulated nor even recognized by the FDA.
Reluctant addicts describe the drug as "a mission begging for my commitment" or "it's not too big for me, I can take it." Symptoms of addiction include long periods of somnolent silence and contemplation, interrupted only by serious lifestyle needs such as sleeping, working, or eating. Usage of the drug in the lavatory is common, and sometimes it's major venue.
During a typical "session" (typically begun just before going to bed, or, in bed), the addict quickly finds their world transformed into a medieval world of stultifying detail. The user valiantly continues on, sure that there is something of interest, somewhere. Instead, the session quickly resembles a computer game where "you are in a maze of self-indulgent passages, all alike". Shortly afterwards, the addict gives up, and puts the drug aside.
For that session. In roughly 24 hours, it begins again.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the drug is the drive of it's users to finish it, as if "running out", or "finishing all of it" was a goal. Officials suspect this is an insidious experimental additive to encourage future sales, but it seems self defeating since the user would only have to buy more QuickSilver for at least the next 5 years, something officials admit only the stupidest addict would resort too.
FDA scientists have analyzed the molecular structure of the drug, and determined that it's actually part of a family of drugs which have been evolving since the '90s. The first version, Snowcrash, actually had no detrimental affects, but led it's users to a significant expansion of their thought processes. Indeed, some readers went on to found companies after taking the drug. Repeated use had no detrimental affect, and new users are still appearing.
Later evolutions included Diamond, and Cryptonomicon. Each was similar to Snowcrash, but the latter was already showing the detrimental effects of QuickSilver. Indeed, in a thinly veiled ploy to work through stockpiled product, induces repeated visions of Cryptonomicon, encouraging the user to supplant their addiction with the older drug.
Our own sleuthing has traced these drugs back to a single lab, known in the underground parlance as "Stephenson", "Neal", or even just "Steph's". This shadowy character is apparently a native of Maryland, and our investigators have captured photos here, and here.
Pusher or Prevaricator?
The pony tail is a dead giveaway
Officials are at loss as to what to do. Addicts really want to believe QuickSilver will be as good as Snowcrash or Diamond, but have yet to find it's substance. The biggest fear is that many of them will die of old age before finding out the truth, or just toss their dose out, and live forever not ever knowing if they should have finished it.
As a Public Service, we warn you. You will find this new drug being pushed at bookstores across the nation, and even on the web. We'd like to tell you more, but we're too addicted ourselves to take the time to do so.
Don't buy this drug. But, if you do, please tell us what happens.
Alert First Published at Michael's Web
From family conversation I gathered that, outside of my Yiddish child-world, there were savages who didn’t have much to say but could fix the plumbing. They were fond of animals, liked to go swimming, loved to drink and fight. All their problems were solved when they hut geharget yiddin. Killed Jews. Only the last has been impossible for me to dismiss. Like many other people I have fixed my own plumbing, owned a dog and a cat, gotten drunk, etc., but everything in my life, beginning with English, has been an uncertain movement away from my hut geharget Yiddish childhood. When a BBC poet said he wanted to shoot Jews on the West Bank, I thought, “Epes. What else is new?” His righteousness, his freedom to say it, suggests that he believes he is merely speaking English, and antisemitism is a kind of syntax, or what Wittgenstein calls “a form of life.” But in fact there is something new, or anyhow more evident lately. The geharget yiddin disposition now operates at a remove. You see it in people who become hysterical when they feel that their ancient right to hate Jews is brought into question. To give an example would open a boxcar of worms.From: Threepenny Review: Leonard Michaels, "My Yiddish"
Jonathan Rausch at Reason knows his Presidential produce and some of it stinks: Who Can Win in 2004? Just use This freshness test
Only four candidates have a shot next year. They are President Bush, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. The rest are history. Sorry, Dick. Sorry, John. Sorry, Dennis, Joe, Carol, and Al. Turn off the lights behind you.How do I know? Am I psychic? Mad? Possibly and probably; but in this case I rely on two factors. Following the conventional wisdom, I assume that former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and civil-rights activist Al Sharpton are too marginal to win, though I wish them luck. That leaves Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Their problem is different. They've expired.
As every grocer knows, many products have sell-by dates. Bread lasts a day or two, milk maybe a week. Well, presidential aspirants have a sell-by date, too. They last 14 years.
Palestinians round up suspects in Gaza attack - Oct. 16, 2003
"In overnight operations in the Jabaliya refugee camp, security forces exchanged fire with some of the suspects before detaining them, the sources said. No injuries were reported."Note to Mideast Reporters: Firing in the air seldom produces injuries to those in the immediate vicinity.
Following the publication a couple of days ago of a particularly shocking attack on Hollywood Jews by Greg Easterbrook at the New Republic, Hollywood screenwriter Roger Simon has been particularly outspoken against Easterbrook’s small chunk of anti-Semitism. Simon believes that small eruptions like Easterbrooks signal a larger breakout of anti-Semitism in the world at large. He’s correct. But the metaphoric cause he ascribes it too is “something in the air (residual Cyclon-b).” I agree on the situation but not on the cause.
Anti-Semitism is not a gas, it's a virus. It is the oldest known virus to attack the human soul. The existence of Israel masks the existence of the virus by renaming it ("anti-Zionism"). Through the renaming of this ancient disease as a “political problem,” many people now become infected through their friends, families, at their schools, from their community, church, or nation, or from exchanging infected fantasies with infected ideologues. By changing the name of the disease it has become possible for many to deny that they have contracted the virus. This facilitates the current outbreak. It is a clever virus and this shape-shifting is one of its oldest methods of perpetuating itself.
The origin of the virus is unknown, but many suspect the area to be Bablyon and Sumur with an early leap across borders into Egypt. It was later transmitted through not-so-casual contact to much of the world by traders out of Northern Africa and the Roman Empire.
During the period following the fall of Rome, the virus found traction in early Christianity as a common carrier. In this host it thrived, and was able to survive and spread for many centuries. Of late, many parts of Christianity, now that it has become fragmented, have rejected the virus and those who host it, but strains of the virus can still be found at the center of many subsets of the Christian faith today.
Islam, of course, is the not-that-new major religion to not only host the virus, but to celebrate being infected with it, and to actively take measures to make sure that, within the body of Islam, the virus can thrive and expand. What to do about this new and virulent strain of the virus is something that is now consuming a great deal of the attention and treasure of Western Civilization.
In the past, treatment of the virus involved the application of large amounts of steel and fire, but this age is still experimenting with targeted surgery of the infected parts of Islam to see if a less Draconian cure is possible.
Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.
With the advent of the "Palestinian cause" becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles -- driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies.
The virus, because it is an ancient and clever virus, can lie dormant for years, and like HIV, can mutate around a lot of therapies designed to destroy it.
As noted above, in the recent past, it has been shown that large doses of steel and fire can eradicate the virus in some populations, but only for a time. A cure is promised, but seems to be always delayed. The only measures that work are, at best, prophylactic. Another strategy is strict monitoring to prevent the spread of the virus. This seemed to be holding the virus at bay for decades. Lately, however, this method has broken down. The virus, like terrorism, has recently been able to piggy-back on the world-circling data-stream, and infect individuals and groups previously deemed immune.
But there is, as history demonstrates, no immunity to be had from the virus. The only strategy that seems to work is abstinence. This is accomplished by a rigorous rejection of all attempts by the virus to establish itself within an individual host. Constant monitoring and the suppression through education or other means of outbreaks in groups or ideologies or nations is also required.
Since the virus has been present in human hosts for well over 4,000 years, hopes for eradication in our lifetime are slim. Hopes for eradication in the future are better in civilized countries if, and only if, members of the generations now living and infected with the virus become dedicated to not passing it on to future generations. The virus is found nowhere else in nature except within the human host. If it is denied transmission to the young, it can be eliminated from the world in three generations. But only if.
This one from The Ombudsman at National Public Radio
[A]stute listeners have noted that the name of Ambassador Wilson's wife has never been mentioned on NPR's air.Astute listeners will have spotted more than one instance where the items on NPR seem to come from minds that are high.News Vice President Bruce Drake had this explanation for a reporter:
On issues like these, where there are questions of privacy or other issues that make you think twice about divulging someone's name, I prefer to err on the side of being conservative. In this case, there was no journalistically compelling reason to name her and keep naming her in our news reports, given that she was already put in a difficult position. She is a bystander rather than a player in this story and I don't think that our listeners lost anything in terms of the important elements by not knowing her name.While I understand and would normally agree with this logic on most stories where privacy is an issue, the point of not sharing a name that has been in every other medium seems lost. I think it ill-served the listeners in this case. The unintended consequence of leaving her name out caused some listeners to wonder if there is some nefarious political reason behind this. NPR appeared (to me) to be unnecessarily high-minded in keeping the name out of its reports.
It is not just "the Net of a billion lies" it is also the Net of a million moments of weird synchronicity. No sooner had I posted the item immediately below on the major malfunciton of modern major media mugwhumps, than I clicked over to Slate's "Doonesbury" page. Now I never, ever, bother to read or pay attention to Doonesbury any more -- too much of the "been there, done that, have the T-shirt" quality in that old chestnut. But I had some thoughts about Chris Muir's Day by Day as the Doonesbury of this decade and I wanted to check in on the Trudeau factory and see what it was churning out.
What it is churning out, this week, is this:
You'll have to click and enlarge the image to get a clear idea of the content, but it is exactly what the item below talks about: The ossified intellect of person who came of age in the late 60s, who learned to leverage that sensibility into a comfortable life,and now churns out work in the 21st century that has nothing to do with the times we live in, but everything to do with the times he was young in.
This is no surprise when it comes to Trudeau. He's been struck in an intellectual roach motel ("The ideas check in, but they don't check out!") for over 20 years. But this strip, part of a running "gag", is essential evidence for the propostion that the intellectual ideas of Left/Liberal Americans are, like the American Groves of Academe, stands of petrified forest.
You have the Apocalypse Now 'updated' river patrol, you've got the assumption that the new grunts are the same as the old grunts, and you've got 'Duke' the Hunter Thompson avatar still crazy and still young after all these years. It's tired and it's trivial and it's lacking in new ideas. Worst of all, it isn't funny. At best, it elicits a wry, mocking sort of dry chuckle inside of dry souls.
You can almost hear Trudeau singing as he cobbles this strip together:
V is for the vic-tor-y we blew off!
I is for the inside scoops I got.
E is for the enemy that Jane loved.
T is for the time when I was hot
N is for my ni-hil-is-tic humor
A is for awards that come my way
M is for the money I've been making....
Put them all together,
They spell VIET-NAM!
The word that means
The world
To Me!
So maybe all this really is a bunch of aging media hipsters pining for the fjords of their lost youth. Scanning Doonesbury, buying Michael Moore and Al Franken ephemera, sending in fat checks to Howard Dean... a kind of generational upper-midlife-crisis. That would be one explanation and a benign one. The possibility that they actually still get off on this stuff is too horrible to contemplate.
Mark Frauenfelder asks on Boing Boing:
"Why were computers beige colored? Why were most personal computers colored beige? I seem to remember reading that some researchers (at 3M?) used focus groups to determine that beige was the most non-obtrusive color to use in an office setting, but I can't find a reference. If you know, email me at mark@well.com.
governator "guh-vern-ate-er" Name for Arnold Shwarzenegger after running for governor, mix between a governor and a terminator. "Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for goverator."
Via: UrbanDictionary
HT: Michael's Web
Hey, why invest any part of your corporate brain-stem in figuring out copy protection schemes? In the recording industry's grinding ground war against its customers, nothing works like a lawyer. After all, the suits agree that lawyers are obviously not making enough money scamming the artists out of a phenig of royalties. Besides, what better way to make up for lost revenue than suing widows and orphans?
Meerkat reports:"A Princeton University student has published instructions for disabling the new anticopying measures being tested on CDs by BMG--and they're as simple as holding down a computer's Shift key."
In a paper published on his Web site this week, Princeton Ph.D. student John Halderman explained how he disabled a new kind of copy-protection technology, distributed as part of a new album by BMG soul artist Anthony Hamilton.Under normal circumstances, the antipiracy software is automatically loaded onto a Windows machine whenever the Hamilton album is run in a computer's CD drive, making traditional copying or MP3 ripping impossible. However, simply holding down the Shift key prevents Windows' AutoRun feature from loading the copy-protection software, leaving the music free to copy, Halderman said.
Sung in the key of "You'll Never Drive Alone," is this very dubious innovation in "safe' driving.
Coming soon: cars that can tell when you're not paying attention. Seeing Machines is working on a facial recognition system called FaceLab that uses lasers and dashboard mounted cameras to tell when you're not keeping your eyes on the road or are starting to nod off, issuing an audible alarm to snap you back to attention.
Read... [Gizmodo]
Yesterday, one of the invaluable blowhards at 2blowhards.com noted a terrible truth about the current and deeply sad state of reviewing:
Are you as amazed as I am at the amount of space movie and book reviewers these days devote to plot summaries? It's common for more than half a review to be spent telling the movie or fiction-book's story. Who wants this amount of plot synopsis? I may be an extreme case, but I hate it when a work's story is given away; I want a work's surprises to be allowed to surprise me.In general, we are in complete agreement with this. Plot summaries seem to us to be simply the hapless reviewer's way of saying, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." Still there are times when a plot summary is a gentle mercy, as in this morning's WSJ review of Madonna's book for children when we are given:
Briefly put, "The English Roses" is about an eponymous clique of four girls who out of jealousy behave frostily to a radiantly beautiful fifth girl. The mother of one of the clique members remonstrates with the girls about this. At their slumber party that night, the girls are visited in their sleep by a plump, cookie-gobbling fairy godmother who offers them a glimpse into what they assume is the fabulous and spoiled life of the envied girl. They are chagrined to find that the girl they've shunned is motherless, loaded with chores and desperately lonely. This changes their attitude, and they all become friends and "grow up to be incredible women one day."Here the summary is not only saving a lot of parents a lot of pain and a chunk of change, but, if it were properly employed it would save a lot of children from literary abuse. All a caring parent has to do is to clip this paragraph out of the Journal, whip it out at bedtime, rattle it off, and the child would be up-to-date on Madonna's literary pretensions. Nothing like keeping your kid on the cutting edge without exposing them to toxic prose.
Hoping We Fail: Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq?
"All this hysteria and unrest should come as no surprise given the ambition of our endeavor, which is no less than a war of civilization to end both terrorism and the culture and politics that foster it. Still, let us ignore the self-interest of contemporary parties and reflect on the very scope of American audacity. In little more than three weeks, and coming on the heels of an amazing victory in Afghanistan, the American military defeated the worst fascist in the Middle East. Surrounded by enemies, and forced simultaneously to conduct the war against terrorism in dozens of countries and restore calm on the West Bank, the United States nevertheless sought to create consensual government and order under legal auspices in weeks — rather than the decades that were necessary in Japan and Germany, where elections took years and soldiers remain posted still. The real story is not that the news from Iraq is sometimes discouraging and depressing, but that it so often not — and that after two major-theater wars we have lost fewer people than on that disastrous day in Beirut 20 years ago, and less than 10 percent of the number that perished on September 11.
"It is no wonder that we have almost no explicit voices of support. Most nations and institutions will see themselves as losers should we succeed. And the array of politicians, opportunists, and hedging pundits find pessimism and demoralization the safer gambit than disinterested reporting or even optimism — given the sheer scope of the challenge of transforming Afghanistan and Iraq from terrorist enclaves and rogue regimes into liberal and humane states."
-- Victor Davis Hanson
The Utterly Admirable Goals of 2Blowhards:
"Two beyond-first-rate articles that Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts and Letters Daily, has written for the Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics are now online: "Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology" (here), and "Authenticity in Art" (here). One of our goals here at 2Blowhards is to help people who are eager to ditch the modernist/po-mo/decon straitjacket find threads that are more comfy, useful and sensible -- hence our championing of thinkers like Michael Oakeshott, Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros, Michael Polanyi, Ellen Dissanayake, Frederick Turner, Steven Pinker, V. S. Ramachandran and others. Dutton's at the top of this list, both with articles like these and with ALD itself."
-- 2 Blowhards
"Cruz Bustamante" sounds like a porn star name
-- Bitter Sanity
Jane Galt on Tom Friedman's linguistic anomalies:
[Begin Friedman]"Let's start with mentality. We are not "rebuilding" Iraq. We are "building" a new Iraq — from scratch. Not only has Saddam Hussein's army, party and bureaucracy collapsed, but so, too, has the internal balance between Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, which was held together by Saddam's iron fist. Also, the reporting on Iraq under Saddam rarely conveyed how poor and rundown Saddam had made it. Iraq today is the Arab Liberia. In short, Iraq is not a vase that we broke to remove the rancid water inside, and now we just need to glue it back together. We have to build a whole new vase. We have to dig the clay, mix it, shape it, harden it and paint it. (This is going to cost so much more than President Bush has told us.) [End Friedman]
Behind this metaphor, we suspect, is the ghost of some well-meaning but incoherent sixth grade composition teacher. "Be original!" she proclaimed, and when the children bombarded her with their original, if somewhat inapt metaphors, she beamed like the sun rising over the silver-white beaches of Honolulu on a verdant spring morn.
Original it certainly is, but what does it mean? It gives us uncomfortable visions of what happens in the Friedman household when the flowers have finally gone where the woodbine twineth: there is Thomas, preparing to smash yet another wedding present on the flagstone floor (which has just been installed at great expense); there is his wife, pleading. "Tom," she says, with a voice worn hoarse by years of steady sorrow, "Tom, we don't have to break the vase. We could just pour out the water through the hole in the top."
-- Asymmetrical Information
Roger Simon is getting hungry for the good old Demonstration Days:
"I've been living in California a long time and the recent dust up about Cruz Bustamente and MECHA takes me back to the days when we were all marching for La Raza on Brooklyn (now Cesar Chavez) Avenue with Corky Gonzales and the Brown Berets and Cheech Marin was smoking some "heavy shit, man." Good times and not particularly scary times. The Chicano community was on the side of the angels and the Brown Berets never seemed as extreme as the Panthers for some reason. Maybe it was those East LA tamales (you can get great ones now at Juanito's, although some prefer La Mascota on Whittier Blvd.)"
-- Roger Simon Private Eye Scribe
"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever
invented is the book." --Northrop Frye
Let's review:
1) No "advanced" technology required. Ability to manufacture present in all areas of the globe.
2 ) Crude but functioning units can be made by kindergartners with pencil, paper and glue.
3) Operating system and interface rock solid.
4) All types of information can be stored.
5) Has been demonstrated to be able to retain information in retrievable form across several thousand years.
6) Of the two, the User will often crash first.
7) All parts can be recycled.
8) All or part can be backed-up at any Kinkos.
9) Can be powered for hours with one candle.
10) All users receive up to 12 years of interface training free.
Gay Marriage a Done Deal
Michael J. Totten: Enemies of the Future
Conservatives are going to lose this fight, and they know it. Opposition to gay marriage, which was recently overwhelming, is cratering. If gay marriage isn't stopped soon it will never be stopped. And so they want to freeze the debate right now while they still have a slim majority on their side. That's cheating. It's like calling off a baseball game in the fourth inning, when your team happens to be ahead, and going home and calling it a victory.
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Zen Mugging
Jumped by a Zen master@Everything2.com
Last night, walking home through a particularly shady part of Central Square, I was jumped by a Zen master! He waved a knife at me and said, "I will ask you a question. If you give an unsatisfactory answer, I will stab you four times in the chest. If you give a satisfactory answer, I will still stab you four times in the chest. However, if you do not answer, I will slit your throat. Your question is: tree-nature and branch-nature, same or different?"
===
From Four Quartets
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before.
I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
===
Death Does Not Stop Celebrity Scandal
Lucky Lindbergh, or Lover Lindbergh?Mark Landler NYT Saturday, August 2, 2003
Report tells of a 2nd family, in Munichï¿ŠFRANKFURT Charles Lindberghï¿•s sympathy for the Nazi regime in prewar Germany has long been a stain on his gilded legacy ï¿‘ a puzzling detour in a life of heroic adventure.Now, a prominent German newspaper claims that Lindbergh had more personal ties to Germany long after World War II, through a relationship with a woman in Munich, with whom he had three children, the paper says.
===
You Can Give Him A Cray or Hit the Back Button
I'm looking for one or maybe two more good mainframes. Top of the list would be any machine Seymore Cray had a hand in, but particularly a Cray 1, Cray Research X/MP-4, CDC 7600 or Cyber 175-176-760. As always I'm looking for a complete system. These machines could be a problem because of the dimensions and cooling, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
===
Basic Biology
I'm sure almost everyone has seen the results of the study of Whale DNA, which shows that the diversity in Whale DNA can't be accounted for by the counts of whales provided by whaler's reports during the height of the whaling industry.What's amazing to me is that anyone ever thought that these counts were accurate. It's like telling a 10-year old boy "Tell me how much candy you eat so we can control how much you get".
What parent in their right mind would think they'd get an accurate count?
I'm also a little amazed by stories which claim that this may be a good thing, because we've decimated the top of the ocean's food chain (sharks, halibut, etc), and therefore there are less whales to starve because there's less of them to compete with us for these species.
Hello? Basic biology here! Whales don't eat sharks and halibut. The few carnivourous species eat salmon, seals, and giant squid, and the rest eat krill.
Sigh.
==
MWD Hunt: The Short Form
OBVIOUSLY, THE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL ATTACKS NEVER HAPPENED -- otherwise surely the FBI would have found something by now...
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VW Beetle Bites the Dust
Farewell, Beloved Bug of My Heart
The classic VW Bug was appropriately named because you would have been squashed like a bug if you ever got into a serious accident in one. The model was phased out in most countries, but it lived on in Mexico, where about half-million are still in use. The last classic Bug -- No. 21,529,464 -- was just produced at a VW plant in Puebla, Mexico.
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On the Self in Prayer
David Warren ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES
Note this paradox: that people who are self-obsessed, assume that the pursuit of self-interest is intrinsically wrong. Not wrong when it leads to some specific evil, but wrong in itself. This lying to themselves is at the root of their vanity, their narcissism: they are so self-obsessed that they deny even their own self-interest.I know that is itself a hard thought to assimilate, but worth the mulling, for it helps explain so much of the politics today -- in church, and out -- that is loosely called "liberal"; the fay rhetoric which declares "our side" must be in the wrong, since we are acting in self-interest, or even self-defence. It is near the root of all the nonsense of "multiculturalism", in which we abase our own culture in order to admit the claims of all other cultures, while confusing between the individual and the collective, thus blinding ourselves to what is truly common to all civilized men.
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Death by Environmentalism
The environmentalists' war against Africans Environmentalist concerns for the lives of mosquitos are killing enough people every day to fill seven Boeing 747 airliners every day - "one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually."
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Most Dubious Home Improvement in History
The Screenfridge #Category: Misc. Gadgets Remember that multi-media refrigerator from LG? Well Electrolux has gone even further with its Screenfridge, a prototype refrigerator which has a digital camera inside that snaps pictures and uploads them to a server every time its door closes. Then when you're at the store and want to check what you're out of, you can just check the latest photos on the server using a cellphone or a PC.
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All you need to know about Pirates
Roger L. Simon: PIRATES ON PARADE
The last one on my block, I went to see "Pirates of the Carribbean" Friday night (short review: Johnny Depp--terrific; movie--not so terrific).
We recently received the following memo from an obscure blog on Salon.com. We are not sure it is 100% genuine so we thought we'd share it here so that others might comment.
To: The Central Committee to Make the Pledge Good Instead of Evil and Old and in the Way.From: Newspeak Central
Re: The Way Cool New Pledge
Dudes and Dudettes and Other Cool Persons Between Genders,At your command Newspeak Central has spent some time reviewing the "old and in the way" Pledge of Allegiance. The result, below, is what we have -- after six months of multicultural diversity focus groups and self-criticism sessions -- come up with. It's just a start but we think it is in the right direction. We hope you give us hugs for it.
Original Bad Pledge:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands:
one Nation under God, indivisible,
With Liberty and Justice for all.Stinky, right? Who can say that kind of tripe with a straight face? Nobody cool, that's for sure. So we got our game face on and worked it over to a thing of beauty that MTV could make a video of once Justin Timberlake records it.
Our line and word editing and the our reasons follows;
"I " [ Too narcissistic -- Alter to 'One may or may not"
"pledge" [ Too binding, implies a commitment to something no matter what may happen to it -- Alter to "hereby loan on a revocable basis"
"allegiance " [Just far too antiquated a notion for today's fast time. Change to: "a smidgen of one's attention"]
"to the Flag" [ The Flag? You've got to be kidding. No symbols drenched in blood,
betrayal, slavery, corporate greed, unbridled lust of global domination for us. Let's change it to 'to the rainbow of diversity"]
"of the United States of America," [ No way. We are not really citizens of the USA. We're citizens of the One World!, the, dare we say it? United Cool Nations! They're the only ones that really care and care and care and care. Strike and replace with "of the United Cool Places of One World of Really Well Meaning Persons" "Nations" had to go. See below.]
"and to the Republic" [Scratch that. It was the Republican form of government that got Bush elected. The Republic is so over. We'll go for Direct Democracy where we all vote on everything, every day on the Internet! Delete and insert "and to the Ruling Elite of Technosavvy, Well-Educated, Nice People" Hey, you can't let everybody in. Most people are so uncool.]
"for which it stands:" ["Stands" is much too forthright and aggressive. We need a lighter touch here. Let's say "which it may represent sometimes"]
"one Nation" [ One? Nation? Doesn't everyone agree that the Nation-state is so over? Let's get jiggy here and substitute "many different global cultures and traditions each one just as good as yours", okay? Cool.]
"under God," [ Man, this is the Big One. This is just too much to be believed. All those billions of antiquated, superstitious, unscientific, blindly believing, stupid UNCOOL people who are cluttering up OUR planet with their foolish faith -- when they could be as smart as us and know, absolutely know, that there's nothing going on in the universe except "purposeless matter hovering in the dark!" The UNCOOL have got to be stopped and saved from their own delusion. This one is right out! Insert "under nothing but our own current ideas of what is cool as we choose to understand cool."
"indivisible," [Way too harsh, man. Too strong. Too fixed. Insert "and able to go our own ways at any time that makes us feel good."]
"With Liberty" [We like this concept. Let's flesh it out to: "With Liberty and license and free cable TV and unlimited weekend minutes."]
"and Justice" [ An obvious typo in the original. Revert to "Just Us"
"for all." [Inadvertently truncated in the original. Extend to: "for all those that agree one hundred percent with Me."
Now we've taken all those items, buffed them up, pushed them together and made them sing!
Here it is, the New and Improved "Pledge of Maybe":
"One may or may not hereby loan (on a revocable basis) a smidgen of one's attention to the Rainbow of Diversity, and the United Cool Places of One World of Really Well Meaning Persons, and to the Ruling Elite of Technosavvy, Well-Educated, Nice People for which it may represent sometimes: Many Different Global Cultures and Ethnic Traditions (each one just as good as the next), under Nothing but our own current ideas of what is Cool as we choose to understand Cool, and understanding that Me and You is Free to go our own ways at any time that makes us feel good .... with Liberty and License and Free cable TV and Unlimited Weekend Minutes, and Just Us -- meaning for all those that agree one hundred percent with Me."
You gotta agree that that JUST ROCKS!!!
Stay cool and rock on,
Joe Conason, Head Scribe,
CREEPC: Committee to Re-Elect President Clinton.
Top Ten Reasons Not to Go to France This Summer
And, no, its not the money. We have money.
10. By the time you get there it will be August which means that even the French will have left France. What do they know that you don't?
9. Islamic Terrorists pissed because French Government still dragging feet on conversion of State Religion from Catholicism to Islam. Eager to kill Americans to bring Chirac to heel.
8. No more fine art on funny French money. All boring Euros from Belgium.
7. Nouveau Beaujolais is getting old.
6. Lance Armstrong has been and gone, and the French national sport of le traffic jam leaves you uninspired.
5. The French Riviera is toast... as are four inhabitants to date.
4. Email is required by law to be called "courriel," and when you hear "You've got courriel! you want to check yourself for a body rash.
3. Jacques Chirac remains as Le Grande Fromage; too soft, too runny and too stinky for your Cheese Whiz tastes.
2. You're Jewish and American and don't care to see two sets of cemeteries and monuments defiled, thank you.
1. Dominique de Villepin's 800 page doorstop, " In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire," will be on sale everywhere: "From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out..."
Take my advice: Stay home and stay out of the gush.
Unlikely to be leading troops into battle
Donald Sensing's fascinating One Hand Clapping boasts an item that will bring grief to the hearts of Goths across America. Tattoos will get you barred or bounced from the Army.
I previously related that my eldest son was nearing a decision to enlist in the Army or the Marine Corps. In a conversation with the Marine recruiter, he said that they can get waivers to approve enlistment if a prospect has used narcotics or smoked marijuana, has a record of repeated arrests, or, in one approved waiver, had one leg literally pinned together with steel rods.But absolutely no waivers whatsoever are granted for a prospect who has more than six tattoos or has any tattoo that cannot be covered by the recruiter's hand. Period. It doesn't matter what the tattoo depicts - gang related, drug related, or a full-color American flag, doesn't matter.If I were a member of the Tattoo Lobby, I'd be begging for the draft to come back.
"Today in Literature" reminds us that the creator of America's favorite hymn was born on this day in: John Newton and 'Amazing Grace'
Perhaps Aretha Franklin giveth what Judy Collins hath taken away. In his recent book on Newton, his hymn, and its musical life (Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song), Steve Turner contrasts the night in the early 70s when Collins sang the hymn to her encounter group in order to calm things downï¿‘her record producer was present, and had her include it in her next albumï¿‘with the night Franklin recorded her live, fourteen-minute version, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts. This was in "the long meter style of the Holiness churches where the tune is pulled apart wide enough to let the spirit in,"
Amazing grace-how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
we've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.
See, I told you you'd feel better.
Duke? .... Or Dick?
Yesterday, one of the Democratic hopefuls, Dick Gephardt, treated America to his current view of why he's the kind of man that should be President:
"I'm seeking the presidency because foreign policy isn't a John Wayne movie, where we catch the bad guys, hoist a few cold ones and then everything fades to black.""Diplomacy matters. Burden-sharing matters. Follow-through matters. And yes, sustaining the peace is harder, more complex and often costlier than winning the war itself. No matter the surge of momentary machismo -- as gratifying as it may be for some -- it's short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone."
In a universe long ago and far away... In a universe that people like Gephardt would like the rest of us to forget about; a universe when the fires still raged under Ground Zero, when they still searched for and brought body parts up from the pit, the elegant and eloquent Peggy Noonan wrote on October 12, 2001:
Here's what I'm trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story--you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer--about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, thewater chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That's what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark.
I don't know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.
Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you're a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you'll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.
It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know you are thinking, But it's not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the kind of men who are spoofed on "The Man Show"--babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)
Two distinctly opposite visions of what sort of man our country now needs. Soon enough, we'll have to decide what sort of man we want to lead us.
A hymn to the wonders of Movable Type by that maker of fine hypertext products Jason Kottke:
Movable Type is the new way to do absolutely everything, BTW. I use it for my weblog, my bookmarks, my grocery shopping list, and my address book. I no longer need TiVo or my email application...I run everything through MT. Going to movies these days is easy with MT. It checks my vision, does root canals, makes my travel plans, transports me back in time, and balances my checkbook. Even expensive hookers are a thing of the past with Movable Type (although it doesn't go down as often as Blogger does). Thank you MT, you've made my life worth living again!
In a world of daily- nay, almost hourly - journalism, where every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long.From James Russell Lowell's "Democracy" 6 October 1884
In a brilliant evisceration of Germaine Greer's latest attempt to garner attention, Australian columnist Miranda Devine takes note of a far more insidious bit of recent social evolution in Generation of taboo breakers are a selfish lot:
The eldest of the boomers are now 57, with crooked hips and arthritis. But they still see themselves as the rebels and the taboo-breakers, fighting against the strictures of their parents' generation. It is the young who are supposed to rebel but the baby boomers, selfish and greedy as ever, want to keep such trappings of youth to themselves, along with their groovy hair and taut skin.Instead of moving over for the young, they expect their children to parent them, Saffy-style a la Ab Fab. Fifty is the new 15, in their minds. Hence we have almost-boomer Demi Moore, buff at 40, as she shows off her toy boy, Ashton Kutcher, 25, giving inspiration to all the Botox-laden, youth-chasing old ladies out there who insist on "growing old disgracefully", in the words of former staid gardening writer Mary Moody.....
[I]f the ultimate evolution of Western liberal democracy requires the removal of all taboos, the destruction of family life and religion, [Germaine] Greer's sanctioned pedophilia, sexualised children, and padded bras for eight-year-olds, then who wants it?
I would rather wear a burqa than have my eight-year-old child become a sex object.
"The IAS's eminent historian, George Dyson, has rescued these forgotten images of the first pixels ever made. Source: Institute for Advanced Study, 1954"
The always lucid Andrew Zolli delivers a fascinating history of the Pixel as it apporaches its 50th Anniversary on Core 77 in Pixelvision.
Though it may seem like a more recent creation, the pixel first appeared in New Jersey in 1954, the same year that Elvis cut his first record and the transistor radio was invented. At Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, mathematicians and engineers created the first computer graphic--and the first instance of digital typography--on a computer the size of a Manhattan apartment.
The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine--literally the glowing filaments of the machine's vacuum memory registers--but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world. Over the next five decades, we learned to shape our pixels to better reflect the 'real' world, even as we re-fabricated the world to more closely approximate those phosphorescent dots. The pixel became both a mirror and a lens, reflecting and shaping our reality. The result is a contemporary world more closely matched to the kinds of certainties pixels alone can render.
For years I had a standard speech for authors in who needed to know how to write a book proposal that led to an offer to publish. As an editor and agent, they assumed I'd know. And I did. But I couldn't tell them. Instead, I gave them "the outline." I won't rehearse it here. Suffice it to say, that I could never bear to bring myself to tell them the whole sorded truth about books. They either wouldn't have believed me or it would depress them into silence.
But reality has a way of sneaking up behind idealism and mugging it in the dark night of the soul. Now M. Garrett Bauman has lifted the lid on this can of worms in Textbook Writing 101.
To win a contract, you must create a dazzling book proposal - a 10-page document that demonstrates your expertise, your ability to write simultaneously to a Harvard Ph.D. and the pimply kid slinging burgers at Wendy's, your skill in smearing a patina of innovation over crass imitation, and your firm, unbiased belief that the book will enhance the publisher's reputation as a leading-edge moneymaker. Direct your proposal and several chapters to acquisitions editors. Those people work hard to fill gaps in their catalogs, anticipate new trends, and save their butts. That final item is important because few acquisition editors survive long enough to face the consequences of their decisions. That opens the door for you to become one of their mistakes. How? By understanding Rule #3: A book proposal delicately balances truth and expectation: 10-percent truth, 90-percent fantasy.Hapless authors in search of a publisher should spare themselves the rest of this article, others should wade in and discover that making books and making sausage are much the same thing.
[Found via the invaluable Arts and Letters Daily ]
"It is odd to see sophisticated observers lapse into moral equivalence-as if an elected government, with an independent judiciary and a free press, that is armed with nuclear weapons is on the same moral plane as an autocracy, with no opposition or transparency. It is not the weapons per se that cause fear, but the nature of the government that possesses them." -- Victor Davis Hanson
One of the mildly exasperating things about the plethora of news media available now is having to wade through a much more extensive swamp of fetid posturing and vain prognostications on a daily basis. The stalemate of this in the quagmire of that consumes these imposters. The disaster of beginning weakly and the hubris of winning resoundingly confounds their timorous timetables. The warnings not to be too weak in struggle nor to overbearing in victory erupt from their mouths like gouts of steam from a Yellowstone blowhole ringed round with slackjawed credulous groundlings. The endless whines about the least loss of innocence in the inadvertent slaughter of an innocent slink out of their yawps as dependably as hamsters multiplying in a cage of some kindergarten.
The war must be won in a week! If not, abject failure and the military must go to its room.
The peace must be won in a day. If not, rioters will strip the country bare and another Vietnam will spring up from the desert sands like the ghost of Christmas past.
We must pacify a foreign country and make them love us in a month, or, well, we're just not good enough or smart enough or nice enough.
The usual whining chorus starts these off-key and historically flat refrains, and, like a bad rap group with ears of tin and hearts of slush, repeats it over and over and over again until even the more clear-eyed among us starts to think, 'Humm, it's not a catchy song but since everybody seems to be playing it in heavy rotation, maybe there's something in it.'
The idea here is that repetition creates credibility. But to believe something merely because it is repeated from seemingly different angles and seemingly different sources is not, in general, a solid means by which to develop a view of the history that is now unfolding before us. No, taking something as writ because it is said... that sort of attitude is not the kind that marks the deep thinker and man of conviction and character, but only the man whose mind is a thin and fragile reed, the man who on honeydew has fed for far too long.
And yet who can blame this multitude of wafflerers among us. We've all been feeding on flesh of the honeydew for too many decades. Sweet and soft mush has been the mainstay of our cultural diet since the rise of the Monkees. Not only
that, but a generation that has been drenched in the moist sop of the marijuana and psychedelic cultures, has schooled yet another two generations in the value of tofu over Toynbee and to admire Gurdjieff far above Gibbon. We've been, in essence, on a binge of soft-thinking, soft-hoping, and soft Tofutti covered philosophical slop for so long it is little wonder we haven't the patience of a June Bug in heat when it comes to having, holding and controlling this empire that has fallen to us.
We are deep into the denial/avoidance stage of acknowledging our current role on the world's stage. Why? Because, man, woman, and child, we are just nice guys. We don't want to cost anyone any pain, difficulty, or money in the course of giving them freedom from some of the worst tyrannies in the history of the world. Nope. Indeed, we want to spare them anything unpleasant even if it means bankrupting the nation and sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in bits and pieces over a long period of time. Heaven forbid we do anything that creates less love for America in a world that would cut its throat and pillage its purse if it got a chance.
Over and over we see the weakest among our so-called political and cultural leaders advise more restraint, more sacrifice, and bigger checks sent out into the bottom cesspits of the world. Over and over we see our shabby celebrities plead for their fellow citizens to open up "their" wallets and send "their" sons and daughters out into the world. Not to make the world safe for America, but to make the world love America. Since these celebrities thrive on the fan love they've bathed in for all of their wretched lives, it is little wonder they feel that more love for America means a better world. After all, more love for them means more record, book, or movie sales and hence a fatter payday for their already overfattened egos. Why wouldn't that work the same for a nation? The nation that bases its foreign policy on the thoughts of those good at pretending to be others or on the lyrics of popular songs, is a nation overdue for a mugging at the hands of history.
Over and over we read, see and hear the slack-minded and morally bankrupt pundits of one shade or another counseling more attention to the corrupt United Nations (a grant-in-aid program for the most useless intellectuals of its component members),and working through the wiser and older cultures of the EU (that body that probably hasn't 200 years of stable government among all of its countries combined). Above all, these constipated blatherers counsel the restraint of the American Armed Forces from any duties except stopping floods, feeding famines, and acting as targets for the scum of the earth's many scummy nations and half-baked civic and celestial religions. But then, why shouldn't these career parasites counsel this? After all, they are basking in the attention of a content-starved commentary industry and the increased consulting fees that flow from a five-minute oral slop fest with Aaron Brown. Why would they want to bolt from the trough that feeds their monumental egos and their miniscule intellects so consistently?
With a few, and only a few, exceptions those people who pass for American intellectuals today are just that; passing for intellectuals. Who believes that, listening to someone such as, say, Howard Dean, that they are listening to anything approaching a first-rate mind? John Kerry, that horse faced Lothario of women with more money than discernment, as a person to lead this nation into the encounter with history it has already begun? Hardly. Instead perhaps that fountainhead of Democratic Party future vision, Al Sharpton, can be seen as the man to put the world to rights. Politicians, thinkers, pundits, and palaverers. All weak and empty and capable, at this juncture, of mere repetition of obsolete reformist notions that were due for the ashpit of history by the mid-1970s. If this is the best the Democrats and the Left can muster, and it is, then let the backhoes be brought forth and the burial of this bloating hulk begin.
Those who are passing for "celebrities who think" are also just passing. But in their passing, like comets on a last plunge into the sun, they throw off bright plumes of hot gas against the limitless space of their ignorance. Will Tim Robbins be remembered more for his films or his feeble notions of "free speech?" Neither. He'll be lucky to be a footnote in a pass/fail master's thesis at USC in the year 2022. No, not even the dulcet tones of that aged harridan Barbra can save America for the love she so richly wants to absorb into her far-too ample self.
None of these types, these cheap 25-cents and two Wheaties box-tops cereal premium brains has the wit or the wisdom or the vision to see that their snug little liberal world faded on the falling of the towers, and the only question waiting for America to decide at this moment is whether it is ready to step forward and assume the burdens and gather the rewards of a global empire.
For this is where, at last, the rag-tag haters of America from the Arabian peninsula have led us, and it is a road that now must be traveled. We can travel it weakly and with trepidation -and be killed and crippled as a people and a nation - or we can travel it in strength and with a terrible purpose that brooks no terrorist response without a terrible price being enacted immediately and without reservation.
But will we do this? I do not believe, looking about the landscape of America at the mid-point of the year 2003, that we have yet reached a consensus to proceed as a nation down that path. But soon, with I fear, another brutal and perhaps most costly attack on American soil, we will find within ourselves the commitment to go forward. But we will go as first at least as reluctant imperialist.
We are, after all, Americans. We like to have out little pleasant lives in our little pleasant neighborhoods, villages, towns and cities. We like to have our families happy and our jobs secure and our leisure abundant. We like to have enough money to spend and enough to put away for our old age. We like vacations, and Little League, and puppies and kittens and cute kids. We don't like running about the world, putting out other people's brushfires. We dislike giving people a democracy which, since they didn't have the metal to fight for it, they cannot appreciate. We dislike less sitting around handing out fat checks and getting our soldiers shot as thanks. We'd probably just as soon sit at home and let the rest of the world get sucked down the drain of history which, without the support of the United States in treasure and in lives, would be its fate. We'll have our empire by and by, but what we'd really like is just to be able to have a really nice 4th of July cookout, a day at the beach, about $500,000 worth of fireworks and then early to bed every day of the year.
What we're going to get instead is an Empire. And we'd better start getting good at it.
Instead of nothing but aid going out, we'd better start to see a little tribute coming back in. Time to start to insist on some of those "loans" to the wretched of the Earth getting paid back instead of written off. Time to think about imposing a 30% of all oil profits from Iraq for the next 20 years as a way of showing some gratitude for being saved from having nothing for the next 20 years.
Instead of having our troops getting picked off by scum overseas and picked on by traitors here at home in pursuit of office, we'd better start picking off scum in large numbers by land, sea and air assault overseas, and stop electing those who would put them at greater risk once in office here. It is said that we can't kill all the terrorists in the world, but I have a great faith in the ability of the ammunition factories of this democracy's arsenals to tool up to the task. I think it is about time that, as Empires do, we start to push the general concept towards various belligerent nations with more testosterone than sense that if they don't like our Stealth bombers, they'll really hate our ballistic missile submarines. I hope we will not have to arrange a demonstration, but considering the mentality we are dealing with it would not surprise me if we did.
I have had conversations with various acquaintances about this need to become as Romans and they always caution "Remember what happened to Rome." I remember well what happened to Rome, but it took a few centuries to build and many more to burn. These days I'd settle for a few centuries of Empire. By that time the rest of the world might just have enough time, especially the infant cultures of Europe and the ossified cultures of the Middle East, to grow up into decent, civilized places where all the citizens on God's green earth could have a nice 4th of July cookout without worrying that some demented second-cousin is going to turn up with a couple of pounds of TNT strapped to his chest and a deeply confused notion of God boiling over in his brain.
A decent goal for a decent Empire. For once.
For what seems like several times a week since Sept. 11, I've been heartened and bolstered by the essays of Victor Davis Hanson. I confess that before the 11th I had never heard of him, but in the months that came after I kept running across his work and it always provided both light and insight. Hanson is one of those writers whose "signal to noise" ration is virtually all signal all the time. Hanson comes across once more this week in Victor Davis Hanson on The Surreal World of Iraq in The National Review:
Indeed, intense media scrutiny of Iraqi, not American suffering and discomfort, was the new gospel despite the clear evidence that at some danger to our soldiers we had sought to avoid hurting civilians and their infrastructure. A soldier or terrorist who had shot at Americans, been wounded, and had tossed away either his uniform or weapons was more likely to be tallied by the world's press as an unfortunate civilian casualty than as an injured combatant hurt in the hammer and tongs of battle. Under the new war, using enough force to beat soundly the enemy and convince him in the aftermath to accept defeat - or else - was seen as excessive, while the effort to mitigate the violence of fighting may have suggested to the Baathists that they had not really been beaten after all.Not to be outdone, domestic critics of our military who had forecast "millions of refugees" and "thousands of casualties" and in week one of the war during a sandstorm had continued on with a chorus of "Stalemate," "Quagmire" and "Vietnam"; now post facto paradoxically reversed course. They suddenly played down our own soldiers' competency by concluding (in their infinite wisdom from the rear) that the Iraqi army was a paper tiger -hardly capable of waging modern war after all! In a blink of an eye their horrific quagmire became a bullying cakewalk.
In the first postbellum 100 days, the Americans lost about 60 additional lives in trying to pacify a Muslim and Arab country of some 26 million, wracked by factions, foreign agents, and plagued by thousands of former Baathist fascists who had transmogrified into drive-by shooters and assassins ; all in a post 9/11 world where it has been often difficult to distinguish "moderates" in the Middle East from complacent onlookers who were not especially sad to see two towers full of 3,000 Americans disintegrate.
The always amusing P.J. O'Rourke shines this week in a brutal takedown of Hillary Clinton's dubious book: with Hillary's History.
Reading O'Rourke is not only better than reading the book, you can comprehend Hillary's entire effort in his first paragraph:
IF YOU PLAN not to read this summer, "Living History" is just the book. Hillary Clinton's new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie. A mere ream of paper could not contain the padding that has gone into this tome. Hillary--with the help of at least six ghostwriters--nails the goose of a manuscript to the barn floor and force-feeds it with lint.A more common writer would stop right there and declare his work done for the week, but O'Rourke is just warming up. Later, in a slightly longer paragraph, he sums up the Clinton years with a concision worthy of an entry into the Encyclopedia Americana;
However, it says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures--who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such--now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he'd wake up literate. Conservatives, including most of the Founding Fathers, have always worried that the price of a democratic system would be a mediocre nation. But George Washington and William F. Buckley Jr. put together could not have foreseen, in their gloomiest moments, the rise of Clinton-style über-mediocrity--with its soaring commonplaces, its pumped trifling, its platinum-grade triviality. The Alpha-dork husband, the super-twerp wife, and the hyper-wonk vice president--together with all their mega-weenie water carriers, such as vicious pit gerbil George Stephanopoulos and Eastern diamondback rattleworm Sidney Blumenthal--spent eight years trying to make America nothing to brag about.Unlike "Living History" this review deserves a place on your summer reading list.
"Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another...."And yet there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will...."
From Today in Literature
"Winter's Tale," by Mark Helprin, who was born on this day, 1947. A best seller when first published in 1983, the book's New York setting has won new readers since the World Trade Center disaster; from the chapter, "Nothing is Random":