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February 28, 2006
Saddam's Trial Back On Track
At last some semblance of order has been imposed on the trial of Saddam Hussein. From Captain's Quarters:
Now that the former judge has been retired in favor of one that has much less patience with disruptions, the trial may actually prove beneficial to the Iraqis. Until now, Saddam has had free reign of the press, overshadowing the evidence and testimony provided at this trial, undoubtedly part of his strategy. Hermann Goering tried a similar tactic at Nuremberg [but] eventually found himself drowned in a flood of meticulous Nazi paperwork and the witnesses that even the murderously efficient Gestapo could not entirely eliminate.The Goering option now being closed, Saddam will have little influence over the course of this trial. His hunger strike failed when he got hungry, and his defense team returned when they discovered that the Iraqis would proceed without them. All that will be left will be Saddam's monstrous record of barbarity, and that will remind Iraqis what they can expect in return for an abandonment of democracy.
This is good news. I remember the buzz after Saddam was captured; the idea was that his trial would be a big win for the forces of democracy. Up till now, it sure hasn't turned out that way--the courtroom resembled one run by Judge Lance Ito more than anything else.
Apart from the moral necessity of obtaining justice for the victims of Hussein's criminal actions, the trial continues to be a demonstration of the competence of the new, democratically-ruled Iraq.
Posted at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)The Iranian Influence In Iraq
There is a sobering article by Michael Rubin in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which he traces the way the Iranians are duplicating in Iraq their successful establishment of their proxy Hezbollah as the de facto government in southern Lebanon (hat tip to Rich Lowry at The Corner). While the US obsesses about withdrawal strategies, IEDs and casualties, Rubin asserts that Iran is putting into place a plan that could render our sacrifices moot. All emphases are mine:
Here, though, the White House has lost focus. While journalists concentrate on the daily blood, Iraqis describe a larger pattern which U.S. officials have failed to acknowledge let alone address: Step-by-step, Iranian authorities are replicating in Iraq the strategy which allowed Hezbollah to take over southern Lebanon in the 1980s. The playbook--military, economic and information operation--is almost identical.
Rubin traces the long influence of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in training first Hezbollah and now the Badr Corps in Iraq--and the Guards were had infiltrated Iraq even before the coalition invasion. Rubin warns of allowing these militias to persist:
While Washington wrings its hands over the Samarra bombing, it should not play into Iranian hands and repeat the mistake of Najaf: Following the Aug. 29, 2003 bombing at the shrine of Imam Ali, coalition authorities acquiesced to demands to empower militias for security. Once implanted, militias take root. Iran is patient. While Washington rejoices in short-term calm, Tehran looks to long-term influence.
Rubin notes that intimidation through force of arms is by no means the only tool that Iran will employ: Hezbollah's effective use of social services points up the typical US bureaucratic logjam when it comes to aid money:
[...] In Lebanon, Hezbollah used Iranian money to create an extensive social service network. It funded schools, food banks and job centers. It's a tried and true strategy. When I lived in Dushanbe toward the end of Tajikistan's civil war, babushkas lined up under Khomeini's portrait to pick up food from the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee. Driving through Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, similar scenes unfold. While the U.S. Embassy boasts billions of dollars spent, it has little to show ordinary Iraqis for its efforts. Not so the Shiite militias. [...The] Shahid al-Mihrab Establishment for Promoting Islam throughout southern Iraq [...] distribute[s] food and gifts of money, so long as patrons pledge their allegiance. For impoverished Iraqis lacking electricity and livelihood, it's an easy decision.
U.S. officials have no strategy to counter this. At a recent American Enterprise Institute panel, James Jeffrey, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, said, "We don't believe in bags of money in the middle of the night like [the Iranians] do." In principle this is fine; in reality it is a recipe for defeat: While Tehran understands the importance of patronage networks, Washington does not. While U.S. funds go to Bechtel and Halliburton, Iran-backed groups address Iraqis' immediate needs. And not only is U.S. policy ineffective, but Foggy Bottom ineptitude has bolstered Tehran. Take Bayan Jabr, a Sciri functionary who, with U.S. acquiescence, became Iraq's Interior Minister: He has transformed the Iraqi police into a Badr Corps jobs program. According to one Iraqi minister, he has employed 1% of the Najaf workforce. These recruits do little, they receive a salary courtesy of the U.S. Congress, and the Badr Corps reaps the gratitude.
Rubin concludes with the observation that the US is losing the information war as well. He sharply questions the decision by our Colin Powell-led State Department to vote in favor of a UN Security Council resolution that formalized the US and Great Britain as "occupying powers".
What U.S. diplomats meant as an olive branch to pro-U.N. European allies was, in reality, hemlock. With the stroke of a pen, liberation became occupation: Al-Manar and Al-Alam barraged ordinary Iraqis with montages glorifying "resistance." They then highlighted U.S. fallibility with images of withdrawal from Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.
Tehran has a formula for success in Iraq; Washington does not.
It's pretty damned depressing to imagine that the tragic sacrifices and brilliant work done by our military might be undone by a lack of sophisticated long-term vision our strategic leadership.
February 27, 2006
Those "Anti-Immigrant Extremists"
Like a lot of other conservative Texans I bristle when the MSM applies the term "immigrant" to illegal aliens: the distinction between legal and illegal immigration is so plain that media blurring of the terms is cannot be explained away by mere journalistic sloppiness.
Now the director of a Maryland organization runs day labor hiring centers is invoking the term "anti-immigrant" against protesters who simply want the law enforced, and this director is advocating the stalking of the protestors' children in retaliation.
John Hawkins at Right Wing News highlights the latest campaign by the Minutemen border security group, who are covertly taping employers who hire illegal aliens from the hiring centers run by Casa de Maryland in Takoma Park.
A Maryland organization that runs four government-funded day-labor hiring centers is training volunteer "legal observers" to videotape members of the Minuteman border security group and to picket their homes, places of work and their children's schools."We are going to target them in a specific way," Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa de Maryland told the Maryland Gazette, speaking of the Minutemen volunteers who have set up a surveillance site across the street to discreetly photograph contractors who pick up day laborers at the center.
Going out with their own cameras will only be the first step his group takes.
"Then we are going to picket their houses, and the schools of their kids, and go to their work," Torres said. "If they are going to do this to us, we are going to respond in the same way, to let people know their neighbors are extremists, that they are anti-immigrant. They are going to hear from us."
Mr. Torres is just a little confused. He doesn't seem to realize that one side here is breaking the law, and the other isn't.
Torres' labeling the illegals as "immigrants" doesn't affect the basics of this equation--they are in this country illegally. He could label them "Nobel Prize-winners" and it still wouldn't change a thing.
Is mass deportation of all illegals the answer? Maybe not, but this premeditated misinformation campaign about the fundamental status of illegal immigrants is nonsensical.
Yale's Prized Student
John Fund reports on the kind of student our elite universities are competing with each other to enroll. 1600 SAT scorers? Valedictorians with perfect grades and community service? No way. Yale is battling Harvard over the likes of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban.
That's right, boys and girls, a prized Yale student is a former leading member of a regime that thought nothing of dragging a woman into the middle of a packed football stadium and shooting her in the back of the head with an AK-47, at point blank range, in front of her husband and children.
But corrosive postmodernist relativism continues its drip through the liberal arts academy and into mainstream culture. Fund:
Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last week Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard when it became clear he would lose a no-confidence vote held by politically correct faculty members furious at his efforts to allow ROTC on campus, his opposition to a drive to have Harvard divest itself of corporate investments in Israel, and his efforts to make professors work harder. Now Yale is giving a first-class education to an erstwhile high official in one of the most evil regimes of the latter half of the 20th century--the government that harbored the terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.
I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is on the faculty of a major university--I'm sure he'd be welcomed into the academy by fellow colleagues like Angela Davis and Billy Ayers.
February 25, 2006
European Anarcho-Losers
Cliff May highlights (or should it be lowlights?) a report in US News and World Report on who is funding the insurgents in Iraq. In addtion to the usual suspects (al-Qaeda jihadists, ex-Saddamites) it seems the hard core Euro-Leftists are doing their "part":
Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. [...] The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.
Emphases mine. Before the riots by French Muslims last fall and the more recent anti-cartoon riots, I would have said that these far Leftists had a pretty good chance of succeeding at expanding their backing to more mainstream anti-war groups. Marxists after all have traditionally been expert at using more mainstream groups as fronts for their revolutionary purposes.
But now I wonder if the odd haven't shifted a little. Have the riots awakened the Europeans to the danger of Islamofascism? Or has the systemic political correctness been entrenched too long?
There's no doubt, though, that there are many Europeans (and Americans too) who would gouge out their own eyes before they would credit the Bush administration. In fact I'm sure there are a lot of people who are reflexively against US interests regardless of who's in the White House.
(I heard Bush-hater par excellance Keith Olberman denigrate in passing the Dubai ports deal--never mind that it's the Right who is mainly up in arms; Jimmy Carter endorsed it for crying out loud. I suspect that there are only two thing Bush could do that Olberman would appreciate: resign, or hang himself.)
So it's no real surprise that the Euro-Lefty deadenders are supporting the head-choppers. The interesting question is what drive these anarcho-losers. More on that soon.
Posted at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 24, 2006
Unreported News About The Mosque Bombing
Powerline posts an interesting first hand analysis of the mosque bombing in Iraq, and I think it's worth quoting at length. Reader Haider Ajina provided translations of two local newspaper reports and then provided his own analysis:
Most of our news reports on the bombed shrine and all the damage sustained physically and emotionally. The news further reports on sectarian attacks and demonstrations. While this is true and accurate what is not being reported is the calling for calm and cooperation by all Sunni & Shiite religious leaders (except the young Alsadar who remains a thorn). The demonstrations of national unity. The mullahs in Sunni & Shiite mosques calling for support for injured brothers and sisters, national calm. They do not report on the Shiites standing guard outside of Sunni mosques in the south. Etc...There are two sides to this incident. The side of revenge, anger and the much larger side of unity and support. This bombing in Samarah has brought more unity amongst Iraqis than any other incident since the stampede on the Kahdumiah bridge (when Felujans [mostly Sunni] donated blood for the wounded in Kahdumiah [mostly Shiite] in Baghdad). Iraqi political parties, community leaders, religious leaders, political leaders all are strongly condemning this bombing and asking for national support and help for the people of Samarah. This outpouring of compassion, support and help is what is not being reported.
Emphasis mine. Again, this is not to downplay the accurate reporting of the bad news, but clearly this kind of information is crucial for anyone trying to get a better handle on the big picture.
Posted at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 23, 2006
New Images Of The Father Of Our Country
Even though Washington's birthday was yesterday, I want to highlight this fascinating article describing the new multi-million dollar effort to create realistic models of our first president. The figures will be displayed at Mt. Vernon, and will represent Washington at 19, 45, and 57 years of age--three critical points in his life at which he surveyed the Shenandoah wilderness, assumed command of the Continental Army, and was inaugurated as the first president of the United States.
Check out these images of an energetic, forceful leader.
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How lucky are we that precisely the right man was there when we needed him most?
More On The Ports Deal Hysteria
James K. Glassman has an excellent article up over at TCS (hat tip to Jonah). Glassman points out the interesting fact that Dubai Ports World is merely purchasing a British company, Pacific & Oriental Steam Company, that dates back to the 1830's.
DP World is a firm based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, next to Saudi Arabia and just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. It is a company that knows this business well, currently running what The Guardian, the British newspaper, calls "one of the most efficient port organizations in the world," including deepwater facilities in Turkey, Hong Kong, three ports in mainland China, Australia, Germany, the Dominician Republic, Venezuela and South Korea. "Its port operations are breathtakingly fast and efficient." Meanwhile, Dubai itself is building a freeport hub, "so vast that approaching a fifth of the world's cranes are now to be found at work there."
As far as the security concerns of having an Arab company run some of our port operations, Glassman points out the obvious: Britain itself has its share of Islamic terrorists. And even though a couple of the 9/11 terrorists came from UAE, we shouldn't forget that another modern, democratic, Western country--Germany--played host to 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta's cell. Glassman:
The UAE has been a staunch ally in the war on terror, training security forces in Iraq and helping to cut off the flow of money to al Qaeda.Isn't this precisely what the United States preaches? Don't we want places like Dubai to fight terror and to grow, to invest, to buy, to trade, to adopt Western commercial practices, to expose themselves to the rest of the world and thus become tolerant and moderate?
Instead, congressional leaders are trying to kill the deal, which is set to go into effect next week. Why? "Outsourcing the operations of our largest ports to a country with a dubious record on terrorism is a homeland security and commerce accident waiting to happen," says Schumer.This is rank racist nonsense. Schumer knows very well that responsibility for port security in the United States lies not with DP World or any other operator, but instead with the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs.
Emphases mine. Glassman goes on to quote Theodore Price, who works for a company that provides terminal-operating software: "If you are worried about a bomb in a box going off in New York, you need to worry about who loads the container overseas rather than the terminal operator who unloads it in the U.S." Exactly. What sense does it make to imagine a terrorist group smuggling a nuke into the country, transporting it to a port, eluding the US Customs and Coast Guard and then using a corrupt DP World contact to plant the bomb in an offloaded shipping container?
If there are substantive (that means reality-based) arguments to be made about why DP World shouldn't get this contract, I want to hear them. But spare me the emotion-based hysterics--they're just as bogus coming from the Right as from the Left.
February 22, 2006
Port Deal Fracas: A Lightning Rod For Other Frustrations?
In the process of admitting that he might have jumped to a quick conclusion on the UAE port deal story, Glenn Reynolds might have hit on the explanation of why this issue has struck so many conservative nerves:
But (and this is a separate point from the merits of the decision, or of my take thereon) it wasn't just me -- there were an awful lot of knees jerking on this decision, and the White House, or somebody, should have foreseen that. That doesn't get me off the hook, of course, but it doesn't reflect well on them, either.What's more, this issue resonates so much because there is a huge amount of dissatisfaction out there regarding the Administration's position on border control and homeland security. That's certainly something they should know about, and that made this problem even more predictable.
Emphasis mine. I find this very believable: I think there is an enormous amount of political potential energy that's stored up in both these issues--particularly immigration--and, just as a lightning bolt seeks out the highest point on the ground, this issue has provided a flashpoint for that frustration.
Cue The Evil Theme Music
John Derbyshire at The Corner, on the ports issue:
[...] I find myself quietly wondering why, in this huge entrepreneurial nation of ours, there isn't a home-grown firm capable of putting in a strong bid for the work. Perhaps administering ports is another one of those jobs Americans won't do...
And John Podhoretz has the answer:
You ask why an American company can't run the ports, John. Ah, but there is one. And only one. And it's called Halliburton...
Good Fun With Pointed Sticks
John Bolton continues to act like someone who actually deserves the Nobel Peace Prize--he's doing his level best to get the criminally slothful UN to take effective action to stop the genocide in Darfur (hat tip: Logical Meme). From the New York Sun:
Mr. Bolton signaled America's sense of urgency on Darfur when he elevated the issue to the top of the Security Council's agenda on assuming the council's presidency for the month of February. Just three days into the presidency, Mr. Bolton encouraged the council to issue a statement calling for the replacement of the 7,500-troop-strong African Union force in Darfur with a much larger force under the U.N. umbrella, which would be augmented and strengthened with a mandate allowing intervention to stop atrocities in the region.
Mr. Bolton is president of the Security Council for the month of February. It will be very interesting to see how much real activity he can cram into this short month.
Couple Bolton's energetic and determined activism with this report on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's crackdown on the intransigent partisan careerist bureaucrats in her department (courtesy of Captain Ed), and we can feel pretty optimistic about our foreign policy leadership.
Posted at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 21, 2006
Speak For Yourself!
I'm joining Rand Simberg:
David Gregory, I revoke my proxy.
Posted at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)One More Time: The Importance Of Precise Definitions
AJStrata hits on a topic that bugs the hell out of me, too: imprecise definition of terms. Whether it's "buckshot/birdshot" or "wiretapping/electronic intercepts", it drives me up the wall when crucial meaning is diluted by sloppy writing.
I don't have much of an opinion yet on the port management story, but I agree with AJ that a little prior knowledge might help before one posts an outraged screed.
[...] Incorrect statements that derive from lazy writing, or worse a paraniod prejudice of all things Arab. The inaccuracies are always inflammatory. And the undercurrent is all irrational fear based on nothing concrete.I see phrases like this (emphasis mine):
the sale of control over several American sea portsIt simply confuses ‘operations’ with ‘control’, the latter still in the hands of the Port Authorities and the Coast Guard. Or comments like these, which all misinform the public and smear a group of people without any solid proof a threat (except nationality of the people):
“It’s particularly troubling that the United States would turn over its port security not only to a foreign company, but a state-owned one,” said western New York’s Rep. Tom Reynolds
As AJ succinctly notes, port security is rather a different entity than port operations, which in any event are already in the hands of a foreign (British) company.
It's unfortunate that the opponents of the Left have absolutely zero leeway on accuracy and integrity (not that there should be). It's so hard to gain an inch of ground against the combined efforts of the MSM/academia/Howard Dean Democrats that the kind of conclusion-jumping noted by AJ diffuses, at best, progress made in other areas. At worst, it hands the lib/Left a handy cudgel that can do real damage.
My point here is not whether the deal is a good one or not--it's just that terms like "control" and "operations" and "security" need to be precisely defined by anyone who wants their opinion taken seriously.
Posted at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)Ed School Research: Don't Bet Your Child's Literacy On It
Jonanne Jacobs reports on a troubling, but not surprising, trend in educational research: a continued disregarding of established research methodology. She cites an entry by Douglas Reeves on the Fordham Foundation's Education Gadfly in which Reeves in turn conveys the results of a study by Peggy Hsieh and Joel R. Levin, who documented the declining use by education researchers of randomized experiments, otherwise known as field trials. Reeves:
Hsieh and Levin report that “The percentage of total articles in these four journals [Cognition & Instruction, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Education, American Educational Research Journal] based on randomized experiments decreased over the 21-year period in both the educational psychology journals (from 40 percent in 1983 to 34 percent in 1995 to 26 percent in 2004) and the American Educational Research Journal (from 33 percent to 17 percent to 4 percent).” [...]
Why are randomized experiments being dropped faster than a tainted control group? Hsieh put that question to a number of folks. One “speculated that with the increasing popularity of qualitative methods (i.e., not relying on quantitative data), some researchers may have rejected the underlying assumptions of experimental research in favor of a post-modern, relativist view.” A more cynical interpretation holds that because empirical research is difficult to conduct and yields unpopular results, many authors simply take their studies down an easier path. Why risk tenure by studying the effectiveness of phonics, for example, if a university promotion committee member worships at the altar of whole language? Why bother with multivariate analysis when a feminist critique of patriarchal statistical methods will do?
Emphases mine. Gee, real-world results can be a bitch, can't they? Never mind the fact that our elite universities (not to mention our second and third tier universities, nor our community colleges) are turning out functional illiterates on a daily basis. I just did an Amazon.com search on "whole language" and out of the top fifty books listed, I could find only one that was critical of this thoroughly fraudulent method. Whole language has ruined several consecutive generations of public school students; and the ed-school hucksters continue to dodge the empirical data.
If we don't correct our methods of teaching reading soon, we're sunk. It may already be too late.
February 19, 2006
Who Is Pulling The Strings?
Bluto at The Jawa Report highlights an MSNBC report that details an unsuccessful mob attack on the US embassy in Indonesia; also noted were large demonstrations in Pakistan and Turkey, all with the nominal purpose of protesting the Mohammed cartoons. Bluto notes:
Talk about boneheaded ignorance. No, not the cartoon jihadis; I'm talking about the American mainstream media who thought they could appease these savages by refusing to print the Mohammed cartoons.
There are deeper forces at work here--forces that the MSM wouldn't explore even if they were aware of them, which they probably aren't.
Maybe the Muslim mobs should storm the Reichstag and complete the circle of irony. Just as the Nazis used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to extend their fascist rule, so too are the Islamofascists using the cartoons for purposes far beyond the mere protest of "insensitivity".
Posted at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Rejecting Asymmetrical Tolerance
Check out Tigerhawk's post on the "asymmetrical tolerance" that is apparently endemic to Islam.
Hat tip to Instapundit, who puts it plain:
Tolerance is a two-way street. Those who do not grant it, have no right to demand it.
Anyone want to dispute that?
Posted at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)February 18, 2006
The Hip Hop Generation Versus Aristotle, Newton and Shakespeare
...or Foucault, for that matter.
Professor Bainbridge is striving mightily to ruin what's left of my evening by linking to a report that a bill has been introduced into the Arizona state legislature that would require colleges and universities to
“provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive,” that is, where “a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.”The modest amount of reasoning ability I have is paralyzed with frustration. Is this the endgame of the postmodernist attack on objective truth? After all, this is just the latest in the all-too-familiar episodes in which the majority is held captive by the mere whim of an individual.
As if that's not bad enough, the good professor continues:
I'm betting any number of my fellow conservatives think this is a great idea. After all, we must protect the tender feelings of students from left-liberal professors, right?
Am I missing some subtle satire here? Of course conservatives want nothing of the kind. We don't want lib/Left professors censored or students somehow inoculated against their views--we just want the Leftist stranglehold on the hiring process broken so that an alternative point of view might be offered.
In a more general, or strategic, sense the idea that "whatever you believe is your own personal truth" (and therefore worthy of legislative protection) must also be attacked and defeated. The value of reason and the objective truths obtained through its use have essentially constructed the world we enjoy today. A person's belief that he can climb up on his roof, flap his arms and fly away doesn't mean his belief is the truth.
Are we to relegate Aristotle to the dustbin just because of the protests of any random product of our thoroughly screwed-up public education system?
Posted at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)February 17, 2006
With Friends Like These...
What the New York Times started, US District Judge Henry Kennedy seems intent on finishing: the destruction of any remaining usefulness of the NSA electronic intercept program. Stop the ACLU has the details:
On Thursday, a federal judge decided that Americans’ safety and security takes a back-seat to a left-wing groups’ right to view and promulgate top secret National Security Agency documents relating to the terrorism surveillance program. In this case, one of the left-wing groups has direct ties to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who was forced to step down from his perch on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1987 over allegations he leaked classified information to news reporters.[...]
As a result of this [Kennedy's] decision, the US Justice Department is ordered to respond within 20 days to requests by a civil liberties group for documents about President George W. Bush’s NSA surveillance program. [...]
“Given the great public and media attention that the government’s warrantless surveillance program has garnered and the recent hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the public interest is particularly well served by the timely release of the requested documents,” Judge Kennedy brazenly pontificated from on high as he sat in a courtroom far from the battlefield.
Wait a minute, let's parse this statement a little. "Given the great public and media attention...the public interest is particularly well served by the timely release of the requested documents." Got it? I don't; I believe his assertion that mere public interest is reason enough to expose and destroy the usefulness of this program is utter hogwash.
What a disgrace.
Posted at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)The Spread Of Democracy: Snapshot vs The Trend
Given that the mainstream media constantly partitions current events into such tiny, birdshot-sized bits that any semblance of perspective is lost, it takes a conscious effort to keep the big picture in mind. The MSM's obvious bias is exacerbated by the proliferation of information sources that has effectively reduced the news cycle to a snapshot length. The result is our serial obsession with the micro-story-of-the-day; we ignore the trend of events at our peril.
What's the famous real estate mantra? "Location, location, location"? In analyzing current events it should be "trend, trend, trend."
In that light Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Counterterrorism Blog along with coauthor Nir Boms look at the trend of the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Writing in the Wall Street Journal Europe, they note that elections of varying degrees of fairness have occurred in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and they observe that while the electoral success of radical terrorist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is a concern, the democratic cat is out of the bag:
Certainly the U.S. is in no position, after having peddled democracy as the solution to the region's woes, to put the brakes on this process. Moreover, the trend toward democratization appears irreversible, at least in the short term, and neither Hamas nor the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to reverse it.
[...] The Muslim Brotherhood, despite its strong showing, didn't win a majority of Egypt's parliament. And Hamas faces the danger of the kind of political and financial isolation that could shatter its tenuous grasp on power. Hamas has already come under great international pressure because of the murderous ideology that has long motivated the group. If it attempted to cancel elections, Hamas would almost certainly lose the support of the few remaining countries that have served as its advocates on the international stage. Because the threat of financial chaos and possible international intervention could ensure that Hamas doesn't regain power for many years, Hamas is unlikely to believe that it could cancel elections without facing tremendous consequences. [...]
The moderating effect of democratic politics should not be overstated [...] [O]nce elected, radical groups are in serious danger of losing that power that they worked hard to acquire if they don't make compromises. Voters will remove them from office if they fail to deliver. These groups also have to deal with new areas of responsibility. Hamas's attention can no longer be focused solely on genocidal terror campaigns; it must now be accountable for clean streets, employment and development. While Hamas has previously been able to contrast itself with Fatah through the provision of social services, it has never had to govern and administer the entirety of the Palestinian Authority.
The authors conclude by stressing that the US should strive to support democratic institutions such as freedom of speech and a free press. I agree: it takes more than just elections to make a democracy (an important point gleefully ignored by the Left in their schadenfreude induced by Hamas' election victory).
While Boms and Gartenstein-Ross treat the possibility of foes of the US coming to power through the election process as the sharp backside of a double-edged sword, I still think that both outcomes are positive. Either the Hamases of the world reform themselves when elected, or they hew to their true colors, elevating their terroristic ways to the level of state policy. A Hamas-sponsored suicide bombing would have a much different political effect now than it would have three months ago.
February 16, 2006
Iraq: Then And Now
It is amazing how trivial news can overshadow the truly important stories--see Birdshotgate versus the restarting of Iran's uranium enrichment program, for example.
Another non-trivial story is the release of audio tapes of meetings held by Saddam Hussein in which the concealment of Iraq's WMD programs was discussed. As Ed Morrissey notes, the dull banal tone of the participants is striking--no one wants to stand out as an original thinker when your boss feeds his rivals into shredding machines.
Contrast that picture of Iraq's leadership to one more current: Mohammed at Iraq the Model continues their exemplary reporting of the nuts and bolts of a functioning constitutional government--a government fairly elected by people it governs.
Despite earlier concerns that the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) would dominate the new government to the detriment of the Sunnis and Kurds, as Mohammed reports that the UIA may be feeling the strain of inner conflict:
The other important meeting was the one between Talbani, Barzani, Adnan al-Dulaimi and Allawi in the presence of the American ambassador. In this meeting they stressed on the need to form a national unity government. Not much leaked from this particular meeting but by following several local media sources one can find that this meeting was relatively successful in maturing the idea of establishing a new alliance that is bigger than the UIA in order to nominate another PM other than Jafari.[...]
A lot of the Iraqi politicians said that this option is not far from possible; Khalaf al-Ilayan from the Accord Front said it's possible to form such a large bloc with the participation of the Kurdish alliance under the umbrella of the "united congress for national work" which already has the Iraqi list, Accord and Dialogue fronts in it.
Interest in this direction is growing by the day, the Sunni and Allawi have formed a team from their leading figures to do further negotiations with the Kurds in a series of meetings that will soon follow the first meeting in order to change the idea into facts on the ground.
Emphases mine. No one knows what the future holds for Iraq, but I defy anyone to read Mohammed's account of the political give-and-take that is now occurring and then claim that Iraq is not unimaginably better off than it was while in the grip of the Saddam and his yes men.
February 15, 2006
Ha...Heh!
Glenn Reynolds came up with a hilarious line today. After commenting on the MSM's predictible and rather hilarious overplaying of the Cheney hunting accident, Glenn concludes:
That said, it's also a classic example of the press's instinct for the capillary. This is getting Natalee Holloway level coverage, when there's lots of more important stuff going on.
I'm going to remember that one. And he's also right about more important stuff going on.
Whither Turkey?
In an article published over at Real Clear Politics, Victor Davis Hanson (via Powerline) examines the current state of relations between Europe and Islam. VDH's piece is recommended in its entirety, as always.
One of Hanson's many interesting points is this: The recent spasm of rioting over the cartoons has changed the equation in the EU relationship with Turkey. Turkey has been pushing for admission into the EU but the violent protests of Muslims may have scuttled the image of Turkey as a moderate Islamic democracy.
Europe will still talk about bringing Turkey into the fold of the West, but de facto is horrified at the thought that millions of a religion that empowers so many to go berserk over a few cartoons might soon comprise the most populous nation of Europe. I doubt any European diplomat will invest any political capital at all in restarting in earnest Turkish/European Union talks.
That's a shame because Tukey is a longtime NATO member and the country everyone has looked to as an example of how an Islamic nation can exist in a world dominated by western politics and technology. But the western world is still waiting for strong evidence that moderate Muslims reject the nihilistic anarcho-fascism of the jihadists, and Turkey unfortunately has to pay the price.
Posted at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 14, 2006
Get A Load Of This...
By now everyone's heard of Al Gore's latest unhinged rant. At the Jeddah Economic Forum, Gore let loose with an truly irrational diatribe, claiming that the US government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after 9/11.
Blogospheric reaction has been swift and merciess, as it should be, and I don't need to take any more shots at that pathetic target. But I did notice something that's perhaps even more appalling. CNSNews reports on some of the other speakers at this conference:
Many critics noted that Gore was making the comments in a country characterized by an absence of democracy, religious freedom violations, and second-class status for womenIrish President Mary McAleese and Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, both also addressed the forum, speaking in a venue in which men and women were physically separated from each other. They called for women's participation in Saudi Arabia's political and economic life.[...]
Previous keynote speakers have included former President Clinton, whose 2002 appearance netted him a $300,000 fee, according to the campaign finance website PoliticalMoneyOnline. Clinton returned in 2004.
Former President George H.W. Bush and his businessman son, Neil Bush, have also participated in past forums. Other visitors this year included former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Forbes Inc. president Steve Forbes.
So all these champions of Western democracy are "calling on women's participation" while addressing gender-segregated audiences?
What a crock.
Posted at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Steyn On Birdshotgate
Mark Steyn is, of course, one of the most astute political writers around. Witness (from The Corner):
I can't see how the hunting thing is going to hurt Cheney or the GOP. [...] Already, NBC's David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, has been huffin' an' a-puffin' all over the TV demanding answers - multiple answers - about why he had to wait 18 hours to hear about the accident. Who cares? A "sinister cover-up" has to boil down to more than not giving David Gregory a press release. And, given that the media's spent the last two weeks telling the public why they don't need to see these Danish cartoons, it's hard to take them seriously as sudden converts to the public's right to know every detail, if only when it comes to minor hunting accidents.
Emphasis mine. Steyn accurately identifies another instance in the endless series of examples of the MSM applying a sliding scale of objectivity.
February 13, 2006
You Better Believe It
The latest pithy bumper sticker, hot off the presses (hat tip: Expose the Left and Polipundit):
I'd rather hunt with Dick CheneyThan ride with Ted Kennedy
One of Gary Larson's funniest Far Side cartoons (one that is constantly referenced around our house) has God, complete with white beard and white uni-eyebrow, sitting at a screen with a keyboard. The screen looks down upon some hapless Earth-bound geek who happens to be walking under a suspended piano--and God has his finger on the "Smite" button.
I just discovered today (courtesy of Atlas Shrugs) this narrative of Kennedy's little adventure on Chappaquiddick. If ever there was anyone deserving of a "smiting" for hypocrisy, Ted Kennedy is the one.
Posted at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Buckshot vs Birdshot
I don't hunt and I am a native Houstonian (and thus city dweller). But for crying out loud, you don't hunt birds with buckshot.
Someone needs to tell Mark Levin and John Podhoretz that anyone on the receiving end of a buckshot load from a modern shotgun is not going to get treated and released at the local hospital in time to make an evening dinner date.
Posted at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Internet Hacking For Free Speech
While reading the Wall Street Journal over lunch I found this story that demonstrates computer hacking being put to good use. A Chinese high school student named Zivn, a frequent user of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, had noticed that he was no longer able to access the site--it had joined the ranks of the many websites blocked by the Chinese government. The Journal continues:
Then some friends told him where to find Freegate, a software program that thwarts the Chinese government's vast system to limit what its citizens see. Freegate -- by connecting computers inside of China to servers in the U.S. -- enables Zivn and others to keep reading and writing to Wikipedia and countless other Web sites.Behind Freegate is a North Carolina-based Chinese hacker named Bill Xia. He calls it his red pill, a reference to the drug in the "Matrix" movies that vaulted unconscious captives of a totalitarian regime into the real world. [...]
Roughly a dozen Chinese government agencies employ thousands of Web censors, Internet cafe police and computers that constantly screen traffic for forbidden content and sources -- a barrier often called the Great Firewall of China. [...]
In response to China's [continuing] crackdown, and to restrictions in many Middle Eastern countries as well, a small army has been mustered to defeat them. "Hacktivists," they call themselves.
Hacktivists can be found all around the world, of many different cultures--there's lots of lending of hosts' IP addresses to help Chinese citizens read forbidden sites without being traced, for example.
[But} Freegate has advantages over some of its peers. As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, it uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.Mr. Xia says about 100,000 users a day use Freegate or two other censorship-defeating systems he helped to create. It is impossible to confirm that claim, but Freegate and similar programs from others, called UltraReach and Garden Networks, are becoming a part of the surfing habits of China's Internet elite in universities, cafes and newsrooms.
This is great stuff. I've taken enough computer science courses to know there are some very smart people in the field. It's nice to know that some of those very smart types who also happen to be somewhat (ahem) iconoclastic are using their considerable hacking chops for a very good purpose.
Posted at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Analysis Done Right
Today's must read: Jay Cost has the first of his two-part analysis of the upcoming elections for the House of Representatives. Hat tip to Mark at Decision '08, who refrains from commenting and just says, "Read on." I second that.
Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 12, 2006
Flag Burning Can Should Be Hazardous To Your Health
Andrew Stuttaford over at The Corner relates the story of a guilt-ridden Welsh flag maker:
From the Western Mail: "A Welsh flagmaker last night issued an urgent safety warning to Muslims who are buying up his Danish flags to torch in cartoon protests. [...] "We have experienced a rise in orders for the Danish colours," owner Robin Ashburner confirmed. But he warned, "It has to be pointed out though that a number of modern flags are now made largely of polyester and when they burn they melt. That means if they are whirled around by a protester, his or her fellow protesters could be splashed by flying pieces of burning material. If it got into the eye it could do serious damage so we are about to issue a warning to this effect on our website."
Hey, I've got a solution: Instead of polyester, why not make the flags out of cotton?
Guncotton, that is.
Posted at 01:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)I Like This Guy Already
I've often wondered about the balance a legislator should strike between "constituent service" and service to the nation as a whole. Although it's true that the first job of a politician is to get elected, it's always seemed true to me that members of Congress, for example, should acknowledge by their actions that they are enacting laws for governing the entire nation, not just their relatively few constituents.
Maybe I'm being overly naive: no doubt every elected official will swear that they would never be reelected if they didn't cater to their constituents' whims. Maybe...but maybe not. Perhaps we common folk don't really spend every waking minute tallying up the pork projects our elected officials are winning for us.
In his latest column, George Will profiles the delightfully irascible Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, a rare elected official who doesn't vet his every action against his constituents' real or imagined desires. Coburn recently delivered one of the most stinging political comebacks I've heard in quite a while. Will (emphasis mine).:
Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks -- spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects -- by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.
Recently, when a Republican colleague called to say "his constituency'' would not allow him to support Coburn on some measure, Coburn tartly told the senator that "there is not one mention in the oath (of office) of your state.'' Senators are just not talked to that way under the ponderous rituals of vanity that the Senate pretends are mere politeness.
Perfect. These people are serving a higher calling than just winning the prize for being elected. We would be well-served by having more people in Congress with Coburn's courage.
February 10, 2006
Some Clarity On The FISA Controversy
The FISA controversy stands probably second only to Plamegate in terms of the depth of complex legal and legislative background necessary to fully understand the whole issue. From what I've absorbed so far, my position has been fully supportive: I think the President has the constitutional authority that trumps any congressional edicts; and in any event, congressional leadership was informed of the program long before now.
Having said that, I freely admit that I haven't mastered every argument and counter-argument on the issue. But Jed Babbin's article in the American Spectator (hat tip: Legal Redux) makes a very strong case for those who might be justifiable foggy on the details--practically every sentence in Jed's piece is capable of standing on its own:
The NSA operation is not a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because the president, as the courts have held, has the power to order warrantless surveillance of this type -- outside of FISA -- to gather intelligence. FISA is used, according to the Justice Department officials, whenever both sides to a conversation are in the United States.FISA is an act of Congress. Because the president's authority to order this surveillance is granted by the Constitution, an act of Congress cannot limit it. FISA, moreover, is unsuitable to combat terrorists because its requirement to demonstrate probable cause cannot often be met. The NSA program is not directed at gathering evidence admissible in a court of law. It's directed at capturing, killing, or disrupting terrorists. [...]
But the mere fact that your telephone number or e-mail address is found on a terrorist's electronic accessories, by itself, would not constitute probable cause justifying a FISA warrant to tap your phone or read your e-mail. It may suffice if other evidence is known that connects you to terrorist operations. But the time it takes to assemble the evidence and seek a FISA warrant can be days or weeks. By the time the FISA court acts, the opportunity to gather the intelligence is probably gone.
Empases mine. Now on one hand we have Hillary Clinton accusing the Bush administration of "playing the fear card" (so Hillary, do you think it was termites that felled the World Trade Center?) and on the other hand we have the revelation today of a 2002 al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked commercial airliner into the tallest building in Los Angeles.
"The NSA program is not directed at gathering evidence admissible in a court of law. It's directed at capturing, killing, or disrupting terrorists."
Exactly.
Posted at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 09, 2006
New York Times In The Twilight Zone
Ed Lasky at The American Thinker has discovered something very, very weird in a New York Times editorial. From the Times:
In an extraordinary show of global unity, the International Atomic Energy Agency has overwhelmingly approved a tough resolution on Iran, reporting its troubling nuclear behavior to the United Nations Security Council for possible action in March, unless the Iranian government can be persuaded to change course before then.
This one vote won't be nearly enough to prevent Iran from completing its drive of the past two decades to build nuclear weapons, or even to delay it. But it is a significant step in the right direction, and Washington deserves credit for agreeing to the modest and cosmetic compromises necessary to build such a broad diplomatic front. Tehran is now certain to use every conceivable ploy to try to shatter that hard-won unity. It should not be allowed to succeed.
Emphasis mine. So here we have the nascent neo-realist approach of the Bush administration actually bearing fruit, at least by the determination of the strident and incessant harping of the "progressive" multi-lateralists. Yet nowhere in this editorial is George W. Bush mentioned by name; rather the word "Washington" appears instead.
What a nice little passive-aggressive ploy: the Times can easily claim that this is an imagined slight--after all, the author referred to "Tehran" in the same manner.
Technically correct, I suppose. But still very strange.
February 08, 2006
Public Education: The Status Quo Must Go
John Stossel relates the story of how newly-elected governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford came to introduce legislation that would allow South Carolinians to use tax credits to help pay for private schools for their children. After Sanford and his wife Jenny moved to Columbia, they felt they could not in all conscience place their own kids in their locally zoned middle school--the S.C. school system graduates from high school less than half of those that enter.
Neighboring districts with better-performing schools offered to make an exception and accept the Sanfords' kids. They refused, citing the basic unfairness of the preferential treatment, and did what so many of us do: they found a good private school and wrote off their tax money paid for public education as a total loss. But what about the governor's plan?
From the uproar the governor's plan generated, you would think that South Carolina had a great school system in place and that the governor wanted to demolish it. But it doesn't, and he didn't. South Carolina has a school system [...] so bad that the state's first lady thought that sending her sons to their zoned school would "sacrifice their education." And the governor didn't propose to abolish the public schools. He just tried to introduce competition. Public schools that could convince families they were providing a quality education would still have had plenty of students. [...]
The governor announced his plan last year. Thousands of parents cheered the idea. But most public educators and politicians didn't.School boards and teachers unions objected. PTAs even sent kids home with a letter saying, "Contact your legislator. How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been proven?" [...]
The teachers union paid for ads that argued schools were getting better. Legislators obediently voted down the governor's plan, 60-53.
The state superintendent of schools, Inez Tenenbaum, was relieved. "It was an unproven, unaffordable, and unaccountable plan," she told me.
It may have been unaccountable in the bureaucratic sense -- lacking the arbitrary supervision of some appointed head honcho -- but it would have been the essence of accountability in a much more meaningful way: Schools would have had to satisfy students and parents, or they would have lost their customers.
So the state school system is wallowing in miserable underperformance, and the superintendent is resistant to an "unproven" plan? I don't think outrage is called for (though I certainly fume every day while spending an hour driving my son to the nearest quality school); I think both sides are well aware of the situation--the super is just making the noises expected of her.
No, outrage is not the answer--we need to engage in a cold, calculating war of annihilation against the educrats and "progressive" educators who are merely extrapolating their personal politics into education policy. We need to channel Winston Churchill: magnanimous in victory (there are plenty of good teachers who happen to be Democrats) but ruthless and merciless against the defenders of the status quo.
CNN: Paragon Of Ethics In Journalism
John J. Miller over at The Corner notes that CNN is refusing to show the controversial cartoons that feature a Mohammed-like figure. The network says that it is censoring the cartoons "out of respect for Islam."
Miller then poses the Pertinent Question of the Day:
Has CNN ever chosen to censor the news "out of respect for" a religion before now?
Better make that Rhetorical Queston of the Day.
When it comes to ethics, we can always count on CNN to do the right thing.
Posted at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 07, 2006
Go Figure
Isn't it interesting that--given that it was the big bad United States that destroyed the Taliban, deposed Saddam, and weathered the Abu Ghraib and Gitmo PR disasters--it was the mild-mannered Danes who managed to finally ignite the Arab street?
Posted at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Grace And Class
While searching for source material for my previous post, I came across Ollie North's column in the Washington Times in which he writes about war reporting--specifically the idea that the personal danger rises linearly with the quality of the reporting.
North mentions the recent wounding of ABC newsman Bob Woodruff and his cameraman Doug Vogt, and notes Christiane Amanpour's overheated reaction. But North continues with a quote that I've seen nowhere else--neither in the MSM or the blogosphere:
All but ignored in the "noise" was the poignant and extraordinarily sensitive statement of Bob Woodruff's wife Lee: "We realize that our family is going through something that thousands of military families have experienced over the last three years since the war began and throughout our history. Bob's name may be more recognizable, but his story is no more important. He would be the first to insist that the attention should be focused on the members of the U.S. military whose heroic actions he has reported on for years."
You can write Lee Woodruff's statement down as the definition of grace and class.
Posted at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 06, 2006
Asking The Right Questions
I'm certainly not the world's most astute critical thinker, but many times while surfing the blogs or watching Fox News I want to yell, "You're asking the wrong question!" or "Your premise is so bogus my seven-year-old could spot it!"
For one example see Christiane Amanpour's recent diatribe on Larry King's CNN show: she makes the obvious mistake of making the number of casualties in Iraq the determining factor for judging success or failure of the entire mission. Clearly there are more variables to the equation than the number of people killed--remember, in World War II the US lost nearly 7,000 men killed at Iwo Jima alone, then within a matter of weeks we lost another 19,000 killed on Okinawa; the US 8th Air Force lost 26,000 killed in bombing operations over Europe. Yet almost everyone living in the US at the time accepted that there was a threat that superceded the agonizing loss of life.
The point is not to diminish the loss of these lives--far from it. Amanpour misses the connection that as blindingly horrific as death in combat is, there might be a goal that makes the loss worthwhile. The question Amanpour fails to ask is, "Should the combat death toll be the sole measure of success or failure in Iraq?"
Adam Graham (via Free Republic) asks another obvious question that is getting precious little attention: "Does Islam want peace?"
In the quest for peace and coexistence with Islam, an important question has never been asked or its never been asked by the right people. Does Islam want peace?It is clear, for example that the Israelis want peace. After all, they've been willing to surrender land which was won with Israeli blood in order to achieve it. The International Community cares enough to pressure Israel into making the most absurd deals imaginable with a group of people that have never kept one commitment to end violence and terrorism. However, given the recent election of Hamas, its clear the Palestinian people could really care less about peace.
I have to make the same conclusion about the masses of Muslims marching in the streets of Europe protesting over the portrayal of Mohammad in Cartoon form. The US State Department condemned the cartoon and the newspaper apologized, which isn't enough for the raging Muslims as they torch embassy after embassy, in their attempt to bring Denmark to its knees.
When only one side wants peace, what is gained is not peace, but capitulation. Like a store owner being blackmailed by the mob, you know they're going to be back next week, wanting more and they'll keep taking from you until they've taken it all away.
Seeking peace from people who have no interest in it will only be seen as a sign of weakness. True peace comes when both sides are tired of fighting or one side has totally overwhelmed the other. In the battle against radical Islam, quarter must not given that is not asked for.
Seeking peace from people who have no interest in it. When will we learn to heed the lessons of history? Bruce Walker, again from Free Republic:
Today, this day, sixty years after Hitler began his opening moves toward all the evil which came out of the Second World War – he occupied the Rhineland unopposed in 1936 - new Nazis reign in Iran. These Nazis in Teheran may soon have nuclear weapons. These new Nazis deny the Holocaust. They, like the Nazis and Soviets, propose Jewish concentration regions. The Nazis proposed Madagascar and the Soviet created the autonomous region of Birobidzhan at the landlocked extreme of eastern Siberia. These modern Nazis unabashedly hate America and the ideals of Western Civilization, just like Hitler and Stalin.
Human nature, and thus the patterns of history, are unchanging.
Monday Quick Picks
Ace of Spades says mark your calendars for February 17th. That's the day we may get a glimpse of what's contained on the captured files of the Iraqi Intelligence service--and possibly get more light shed on the question of whether or not Saddam's WMDs were sent to Syria. Key quote:
John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, said a civilian contractor who has been among those examining the Mukhabarat files has found audiotapes of meetings in Saddam's office where WMD was discussed.
Chicago Boyz highlights an interesting article about cooperation between the US Navy and the British Royal Navy in the Pacific theater towards the end of World War II. Key ideas: "niche contributions", "burden sharing" and "friends in a fight"--still very pertinent topics.
Over at Townhall.com, W. Thomas Smith, Jr. interviews Brig. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team in Iraq, a position that puts him in daily contact with the new Iraqi armed forces. Key quote:
The Iraqis are also great at human intelligence, and not just because they live here. Survival skills under Saddam made folks very good at sorting truth from lies, and knowing whom you can trust. Iraqi raids show an uncanny ability to find the enemy.
Joanne Jacobs has some suggestions on how to improve student math scores. (Here's a big, fat hint: the solution involves "drill and kill", otherwise known as practice.) Key quote:
In the recent LA Times series on drop-outs reveals failure to learn algebra is a major reason students give up on high school. As Klein points out, today's students also move on through the grades without mastering the basics, then find it's impossible to learn algebra without knowing arithmetic.Posted at 03:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 05, 2006
More On Ethanol And Switchgrass
Thanks to Kevin Drum (via The Corner) I found this article by Sam Jaffe in the Washington Monthly. Jaffe provides further enlightenment on the ethanol portion of the flex-fuels question that I wrote about here. I have to admit that I snickered when I heard that GWB had mentioned switchgrass in his SOTU speech, but after Sam gives some background on the subject I can see how uninformed my reaction was. Jaffe highlights two new technologies that might leverage the ethanol industry out of the backwaters of national energy policy:
The first is a method for producing ethanol not from corn kernels, but from the plant's stalk, roots and leaves, known as cellulosic material. So-called cellulosic ethanol has been around for years, but breaking down the cellulose to make it fermentable was inefficient, expensive, and manufactured a fair amount of pollution. A Canadian biotechnology firm called Iogen, however, has developed a genetically-engineered microbe that processes the cellulose much more easily. (A European company, Novozymes, recently reported that it had developed a similar process.) Cellulosic ethanol made from stalks and husks still has to be fermented. But because it uses cast-off waste products of food that's already being grown, Iogen's process saves on both raw materials (depending on wholesale prices, raw corn can represent anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the wholesale price of traditional ethanol) and energy costs.
And switchgrass has even more potential:
Most intriguing of all is switchgrass, a hardy North American plant that can be raised without irrigation and harvested with a low-labor process similar to mowing the lawn. In other words, it requires very little energy to bring to harvest compared with ethanol's traditional corn. According to Cornell's Pimentel, roughly 15 percent of the North American continent consists of land that is unsuitable for food farming but workable for switchgrass cultivation. Given the typical energy yield of switchgrass, a rough calculation indicates that if all that land were planted with switchgrass, we could replace every single gallon of gas consumed in the United States with a gallon of inexpensive, domestically produced, and more environmentally-friendly cellulosic ethanol.
Planting all of that land in switchgrass is not very realistic, but even a fraction of that land would be an enormous amount of acreage and could contribute a lot to a farm-byproduct stream of ethanol.
The second invention might rescue hydrogen power from its discouraging reputation as an impractical technology. Electricity-producing fuel cells using hydrogen have been the subject of massive research with little to show for it, but a new invention might make it possible to substitute ethanol in place of pure hydrogen in fuel cells.
There is, however, a better way of storing the hydrogen needed for fuel cells: in ethanol, each molecule of which bundles six hydrogen atoms, two carbon atoms, and one oxygen atom into a package far more compact than gaseous hydrogen. Until recently, no one could figure out how to unbundle the ethanol molecules in an energy-efficient way. But Lanny Schmidt, a chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota, may now have found a silver bullet. He has developed a glass tube containing a series of metal plates about the size of a Bic lighter. Made out of the exotic metals rhodium and cerium, these plates can suck the hydrogen out of ethanol and feed it into a fuel cell. (Ironically, Schmidt had been looking for a catalyst that would strip hydrogen from plain old gasoline, but the ethanol turned out to work even better.) "We can produce about 85 percent pure hydrogen right now," he says. "And there's no reason to believe that we can't push that up to another 10 percent."
Jaffe goes on to note that the Schmidt's new invention is not only inexpensive, it also has the potential of working well on less-than-pure ethanol feedstock, which further increases its potential.
A slight digression: In the discussion about energy policy reform, I've heard people make statements that invoke the Manhattan Project, along the lines of, "We need to start a Manhattan Project to solve the hydrogen problem." I'm currently re-reading the book I read in ninth grade that started me on the path to an engineering profession: Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Atomic Bomb by Stephane Groueff, thankgully now back in print. Moreso than Richard Rhodes worthy and celebrated classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Groueff's book concentrates more on the purely engineering aspects of producing the bomb.
I would not apply the term "Manhattan Project" to any current-day problem without understanding the main points that Groueff highlights: 1) the sense of urgency that relentlessly drove everyone associated with the entire bomb project, an ugency that originated in the vision of Adolph Hitler in possesion of an atomic bomb. 2) the apparent impossibility of the tasks asked of the contractors involved: massive industrial plants had to be built with no knowledge of the specifications of the equipment they would house, or the the parameters of the process they would run. The super-compressed timetable simply prohibited the usual lab to pilot plant to production plant cycle. The frantic scheduled also required a shotgun approach to evaluation of different processes: instead of investigating the probable success of different methods and then picking one to concentrate on, many times it was decided to go ahead with all of them, and hang the cost. There simply was no time to select the one with greatest probability of success.
What does all this have to do with energy policy in the 21st century?
Even though the "Manhattan Project" term is thrown around from time to time, I don't think we yet have a) the frantic sense of urgency required; or b) the willingness to make money absolutely no object in solving the problem.
It's kind of a shame, because, although the Project was absolutely necessary for our national defense, it didn't pay back in any real sense all the money spent on it. If we were to apply the real Manhattan Project philosophy to solving the alternative fuels problem it would cost a tremendous amount of money, but that money would be paid back in many concrete ways.
I think it would be worth it just to be able to tell the Saudis and Iranians to get stuffed.
Posted at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)February 04, 2006
Moving Goalposts? Make That Vanishing Goalposts...
This time, I think the jig is up. Failure in Iraq is imminent!
From the AP, via today's Houston Chronicle:
The troops on patrol in this city west of Baghdad are Iraqi, part of the U.S. strategy to hand over more responsibility to the new Iraqi military. But the ammo in their weapons and the fuel in their vehicles were delivered by the Americans.
U.S. commanders have identified the lack of an effective supply chain as a major weakness of Iraq's military and say that until one is in place, the United States cannot fully hand over security responsibilities.
Emphasis mine. I saw this article this morning, and I'm still laughing: the MSM game of moving the goalposts is reaching truly ludicrous levels. So the scandalous story of the week is that Iraqi forces don't yet have a modern military logistics system in place? Never mind that there's probably scores of US general officers who specialize only in logistics, along with dozens of credit hours of West Point classes dedicated to this vital subject. In other words, logistics is always a huge and complicated problem in wartime--can any reasonable person expect that the new Iraqi army would have it mastered yet?
The MSM's behavior reminds me of a mental exercise from 12th grade algebra: if you stand in the center of a room and jump half the distance to one wall, and then on your next leap you again jump half the remaining distance, and so on--do you ever reach the wall?
They said the CPA would never hand over authority, and it did; they said the constitution would never be written, and it was; that it would never be ratified, and it was--overwhelmingly; they said there would be a civil war, and Kurds and Sunnis are talking about coalitions. The grinding, pessimistic and cynical mindset of the mainstream media is being matched by the grinding albeit incremental instances of real-world success, some small and some huge.
Now, after all that, is this the best they can do? Here's a newsflash for you, Mr. AP Reporter: the logistical problem for the IDF is a problem only because there are thousands of Iraqi troops deployed in the field. That big whooshing sound is the real story passing right over your head.
Happy Birthday
...to me. Or rather, the Bernoulli Effect. My first post was a year ago today.
I really didn't know what to expect when I started this blog; all I knew was that Rathergate had made it clear that threre was a revolution taking place in the way news is produced, consumed and analyzed--and I wanted participate in that revolution, to whatever extent I could.
And I'm happy with the results--not satisfied, but happy. There are some friends of this blog who have rocketed into the higher realms of the ecosystem in pretty much the same time frame as I've been around--bloggers Mark Coffey at Decision '08; AJ Strata at The Strata-Sphere; and AcademicElephant at Elephants in Academia--and they remain inpsiring examples of what can be accomplished in this new age.
I've still got tons to learn--such as how to increase my blogging time as well as my bike training time. ;-)
It should be a fun year.
Posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)February 03, 2006
Let's Bust The Petroleum Standard
No matter what our personal opinions are of the war in Iraq, or of our Middle East policy in general, I'm sure that all of us would agree that we need to reduce our dependence on oil. Whether you are an anarcho-anti-capitalist who resents the oil companies' increased revenues; or an economist who realizes that there are billions of Chinese who are tired of riding bicycles; or a neo-conservative who wants to starve the terrorist-enabling governments of their economic lifeblood, an energy independent US would be a dream come true.
So what to do? Is energy independence another Big Problem that keeps a lot of policy wonks employed while the solution is stymied by politics? Robert Zubrin writing in The American Enterprise has a solution that seems to click on all cylinders, if you'll pardon the pun: we need to ditch the petroleum standard and adopt the alcohol standard. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
I think this article is important enough to quote at length; all emphases are mine.
Zubrin sets the stage by recapping the considerable negatives to our "addiction" to oil, emphasizing especially the huge increase in oil money that will flow to the middle east governments as China and India ramp up their industrialization.
At currently projected rates of consumption, by the year 2020 over 90 percent of the world’s remaining petroleum reserves will be in the Middle East, controlled by people whose religion obligates them to subjugate us.
Zubrin then demolishes the conservation lobby by laying out some hard numbers:
Ritualistic calls by utopians, moralists, and environmental absolutists for energy conservation are utterly inadequate and doomed to failure. To see this, simply run the numbers. Every year, about 17 million cars are sold in the U.S.—roughly 10 percent of the worldwide total. Even if Americans were to buy only hybrid cars offering a 30 percent fuel saving over existing models, and none of them drove more, and there was no expansion in the U.S. vehicle fleet, this effort would result in only a 3 percent annual reduction in global gasoline use. [...]
After thinking about these numbers, it's easy to see how Zubrin can compare gasoline conservation to "trying to survive in a gas chamber by holding your breath." He then moves on to one of his most incisive observations: we need to separate our thinking about alternative fuels into two topics: electricity generation and fuel for transportation.
Today’s favorite alternatives to oil are wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but the bottom line is that these are all methods of generating electricity—and electricity is far from the central issue of energy independence. The United States has plenty of coal, and if necessary could easily generate all of its electric power that way.
The key to energy independence, rather, is liquid fuel to power cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. These vehicles are not mere conveniences; they are the sinews of our economy and the fundamental instruments of our military strength. Our civilization cannot be sustained without efficient liquid fuels, and there is no foreseeable prospect whatsoever of cost effective, large-scale generation of liquid fuels from wind, solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear sources.[...]
This is a critical distinction, and it's one I'd never really made before.
I've always been interested in the idea of hydrogen power although I know there are ongoing technological problems with using hydrogen as a transportation fuel. As Zubrin shows, there are big conceptual problems with hydrogen as well--namely that H2 must be made, and the making requires more energy than the product provides.
The bottom line is that hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is a carrier of energy, and one of the least practical carriers we know of.
Consider: [...] a car that runs on compressed methane will be able to store more than three times the energy, and travel three times as far, as the same car running on hydrogen. In addition, the methane would be cheaper.
In short, from the point of view of production, distribution, environmental impact, and ease of use, the hydrogen economy makes no sense. Its fundamental premise is at variance with the most basic laws of physics. The charlatans who are promoting hydrogen as a solution to our energy woes are doing the nation an immense disservice.
So, is it possible? Obviously, when gasoline hits $2 a gallon a lot of technologies come into play.
Congress could make an enormous step toward American energy independence within a decade or so if it would simply pass a law stating that all new cars sold in the U.S.A. must be flexible-fuel vehicles capable of burning any combination of gasoline and alcohol. The alcohols so employed could be either methanol or ethanol.
The largest producers of both ethanol and methanol are all in the western hemisphere, with the United States having by far the greatest production potential for both. Ethanol is made from agricultural products. Methanol can also be made from biomass, as well as from natural gas or coal. American coal reserves alone are sufficient to power every car in the country on methanol for more than 500 years.
Ethanol can currently be produced for about $1.50 per gallon, and methanol is selling for $0.90 per gallon. With gasoline having roughly doubled in price recently, and with little likelihood of a substantial price retreat in the future, high alcohol-to-gasoline fuel mixtures are suddenly practical. Cars capable of burning such fuel are no futuristic dream. This year, Detroit will offer some two dozen models of standard cars with a flex-fuel option available for purchase. The engineering difference is in one sensor and a computer chip that controls the fuel-air mixture, and the employment of a corrosion-resistant fuel system. The difference in price from standard units ranges from $100 to $800.
The main drag on this becoming practical is that alcohol is hard to find at gas stations; this is the basis for Zubrin's argument that a Congressional act mandating the capability of vehicles to burn alcohol.
And the production of ethanol from agricultural means would help the greenhouse gas problem, deny huge revenues from the terror-enabling middle east governments, and help US/Third World trade (not to mention the boon to the farmers themselves).
Most of the publicity for alcohol fuels has centered on ethanol (because of the powerful farm lobby), but Zubrin says it's critical to plan for the use of both alcohols because ethanol alone cannot sustain the production levels required:
[I]f we are to use alcohol fuels to achieve energy independence, a broader resource base is needed. This can be provided by methanol, which can come from both a broader array of biomass materials and also from coal and natural gas. Methanol production from coal is particularly important, since coal is America’s, and the world’s, cheapest and most prevalent energy resource. The United States could power its entire economy on coal for centuries, and large reserves also exist in allied countries. Current coal prices stand in the range of three cents a kilogram, much cheaper than agricultural products, so methanol can be made from coal at low cost. By mixing it at various rates with ethanol over time, we can increase supplies, reduce prices, maximize environmental benefits, and vastly increase the flexibility of our alcohol economy. Insisting that future vehicles have the capability to burn both alcohols is thus critical.
To sum: conservation is a dead end (and the road to that dead end is a very inefficient one) because ultimately we are in the same leaky boat as before; and the numbers behind the practical use of hydrogen power just don't add up. Zubrin concludes:
If we are to win the critical energy battle, there is only one way to do it. We must take ourselves, and the rest of the world, off the petroleum standard. Only by doing this can we destroy the economic power of our enemies at the very foundations. Only in this way can we transfer control of the future from those who take their wealth, pre-made, from the ground (and therefore have no need for education or freedom), to those who make their wealth through hard work, skill, and creativity (who thus must build free societies which maximize the human potential of every citizen).
I think this article needs to be sent to every single representative, senator and governor in the country.
February 02, 2006
A Genius By Any Other Name
Austin Bay highlights a fascinating essay in the New York Times science section that examines the common link between great art and great science.
Professor Arthur I. Miller focuses on Albert Einstein's passion for music--specifically the music of Mozart--and in doing so empahsizes the common thread of sublime creativity that is found in the highest achievements of both fields. Miller:
Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.
I've always it to be true that Einstein and Mozart (or any other great artist) were very similar in creative abilities--they were just working in different fields. I remember reading that the Theory of Relativity was a work that arose from a spark of pure imagination. Scientific progress is usually incremental: new discoveries are built upon the work of others, and if one person misses a conclusion there are usually others who will soon get it. Although important preliminary work had been done by guys like Maxwell and Lorentz, Einstein's achievement still required a jump of pure originality--if he had not discovered the theory there was no guarantee that someone else was waiting in the wings. It could easily have been years before the discovery was made.
Very interesting stuff.
Posted at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)February 01, 2006
"That one, silly, inaccurate metaphor..."
When I heard about the President's statement that we are "addicted to oil", I immediately thought, "How did that ever make it into a state of the union speech?"
The word addiction conjures up images of a craving for an unnecessary or foolish thrill; it's just not accurate and it's overly simplistic, too.
Iain Murray over at the Corner notes the predictable worldwide reaction to the comment. Never mind Hamas; never mind Iran; the leviathan is greedily consuming all the world's assets...
Some speechwriter dropped the ball on that one.
TV Tells The Truth, For Once
I missed the speech last night--I was run ragged with household duties. But I did see very brief snippets and I was struck by the surly appearance of the Democrats, and especially with the emphatic statements they made by remaining seated during the traditional breaks for applause. For example Senator Ben Nelson was one of the only Democrats to stand and applaud GWB's call for the Patriot Act to be renewed--so that law enforcement can use the same tools in the war on terror that they already have available to fight organized crime and illegal drugs. Not particularly controversial--but to the majority of the Dems you'd think Bush had proposed building gulags.
Now, I don't expect the Dems to rise cheerfully and applaud in lockstep with the other side of the aisle, but there were several points during the speech where the President made statements that should have garnered bi-partisan support--but of course partisan power-seeking always trumps good reasoning these days.
Daniel Casse over at the NRO symposium on the SOTU speech succinctly summarizes my own observations. It's worth reprinting in full:
Brit Hume reported that the president was interrupted by applause 61 times last night. But I prefer to judge a State of the Union by the non-applause, which can only be appreciated on TV. Think of Rep. John Lewis's refusal to stand up when the president talked about "our love of freedom." Or Harry Reid's tactless decision to remain seated during the acknowledgement of Roberts and Alito. Or Charles Rangel's hand-sitting act when Bush declared that the U.S. will never surrender to evil. Who couldn't enjoy watching the entire Democratic side of the room lock their keisters in place when the words "Patriot Act" or "tax cuts" were mentioned. Or the sphinx-like stare of some unnamed diplomat in Arab headdress when Bush talked about the "unstable" nations of the Middle East. Then there was the tempest-tossed visage and contorted smile of Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana's dysfunctional governor, when Bush riffed on Katrina. Hillary Clinton retained her trademark humorlessness when her husband's name was the punch line of the speech's one genuine joke. And, of course, there were all those idiotic grimaces on Democratic faces when they applauded the failure to reform Social Security. For all these reasons, the SOU has to be considered a success. Even at his most conciliatory, Bush continues to annoy all the right people.
Emphasis mine. How pathetic can Reid get? Everyone talks (with varying degrees of seriousness) about Karl Rove's invisible mind control beams, but if you want a real example of someone dancing to his master's tune just check out sad Harry. The enraged Left and its financiers must have a very heavy hand on the choke collar they've put on Reid's neck for him to act in such a publicly petty manner.
Posted at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Conservatives, Liberals, and the New Media
I was thinking today about the split in the Democratic party--the enraged hate-filled sixties nostalgists pitted against whoever remains of the party of FDR, Truman and JFK. (Of course, if the tax-cutting and strongly anti-communist John Kennedy reappeared today, he'd be labelled a neocon and spit upon by the Democratic ruling class.)
I thought further about the influence of the new media (talk radio, the blogosphere) upon both parties. It seems that, as far as conservatives are concerned the new media had been a godsend, a real source of revolutionary power. The liberal line was dominant for so long, thanks to the New York Times/big 3 network monopoly, that the new media provided a genuine outlet for a supressed point of view.
But I think that maybe the new media has worked to the liberals' detriment. It occurred to me that the traditional entrenched institutions of the liberal media might have acted as a kind of smoothing filter upon the more radical pronouncements from their side. For example, it's taken a long while to become aware of Walter Cronkite's blazing Leftist leanings--in 1969 his bias was utterly unnoticed. HIs pronouncement that the Vietnam war was unwinnable was accepted as mainstream gospel.
But the blogs have worked in opposite directions for Leftists and conservatives. The new media have provided the right with a media presence they never before enjoyed which they have used to gain control of both the Congress and the presidency; on the other hand, new media powerhouses like Daily Kos have given the radical fringe of the Democratic party a leverage out of proportion with the numbers of traditional Democrats.
The outraged partisans who hang out at Daily Kos and DU are a minority of a minority, and their blog-based megaphone only alerts the rest of us to the fact that their mooring line has broken and they're drifting out to sea.
Posted at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)