A Cat can look at a King
Thinking about the Canadian discovery of the cancer cure [see previous post]....

In the past, America was the center of innovation. That isn't true any more. Most of the significant invention and technical development now happens in Japan, Korea, Canada, and other countries less infested by lawyers.

American research suffers from four big problems, aside from the natural and inevitable waste and inertia of institutions.

1. The tenure system was meant to allow free thinking, but in fact it just forces young researchers to spend their brightest years on unoriginal work to satisfy their superiors.

2. Peer review was meant as quality control, but in fact it just stifles ideas outside the narrow orthodoxy of the Left.

3. Fear of terrorism by animal-rights types. Any project involving crops, trees, or farm animals is in severe danger of going up in flames.

4. Fear of litigation, as implemented by university Ethics Committees, aborts new ideas before they can even be considered. Any research idea involving human subjects must pass through the Ethics Committee; if it might cause slight discomfort to the subject, or if it might show a distinction between sexes or a distinction between ethnic groups, it is dead on arrival.


With those endemic problems, it's no wonder the original work is happening elsewhere.

=====

When I started thinking further about the fear of litigation, I bumped into a couple of truly strange exceptions.

An Ethics Committee never has a problem with embryonic stem-cell research. Wonder why? Oooohhhh, I see! The Committee is made up of leftists who enjoy poking Christians in the eye, but most of all, embryos don't have lawyers.

Even stranger, the European nuclear research center is preparing some experiments that could collapse the Earth or the universe into a black hole. Where's the Ethics Committee on this proposal? Oooohhh, I see again! After the universe has collapsed, there won't be any lawyers, so no problem! (O consummation devoutly etc.)

=====




With all this in mind, Polistra the Cat looks at the King of the Church and asks:

Meow, Your Holiness! You've spent your life, as Professor and Pope, thinking about the connection of faith and reason. Faith expands reason and reason expands faith. Faith protects reason and reason protects faith.

You've also talked lately about reciprocity.

You also know, far better than I, that the Church invented universities as places where serious thought can be protected from superstitious witch-hunters and rough criminals; and where serious thinkers can be protected from their own strong tendency to use thought for devilish purposes. Works both ways.

I know you have divisions of lawyers at hand these days, because of the priest sex-abuse mess, which was part real and part witch-hunt.

And you know, far better than I, how much money and property the Church has lost in that mess.

So, Your Holiness, consider this modest proposal:

Mobilize those divisions of lawyers and SUE THE BASTARDS!

Join the Duke lacrosse players in suing the university and Kidnapper Nifong, on grounds that Duke failed to follow the old Catholic principle of protecting students from false imprisonment.

Sue Governor Arnie and his legislature for subsidizing human sacrifice in the form of embryonic stem-cell research, and sue any companies or universities that accept Arnie's blood-money.

Sue EarthFirst, ALF and other enviro-terrorists, and all politicians who support them.

Sue the European Hadron Collider for attempted murder of the entire time-space continuum.

Sue Planned Parenthood, the AMA, the UN Population Organization, and any other institution that spreads abortion.

Sue the Supreme Court "justices" who voted for Roe v Wade, and/or their heirs and/or legatees and/or testamentees and/or executrices if decedent.

Oops, this legal stuff gets addictive.

Anyway, Your Holiness, that's the proposal.

Reciprocity.

Protect the thinkers from devilish outsiders, and protect the thinkers from their own devilish temptations.

Your church invented this civilization; it's time to guard the patent.

And best of all, you just might win back some of the money you've given to the witch-hunters.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 9:24 AM

  Probable cure for cancer
Worth waking up for...

Wouldn't you think a nearly complete cure for cancer would be big news? You'd think so. But in our drawkcab news media, it's much less important than lip-smacking prurient coverage of the hot schoolteacher making it with the quarterback.

Nevertheless, it's real.

Dichloroacetate, a fairly simple organic chemical. Minimal side effects; already approved by FDA for another obscure purpose, and it definitely kills most tumors.

It's being developed in Edmonton, so the Canadian media are covering it, but I couldn't find any mention in any major US news organization.

Why no mention? Because it's so simple it can't be patented. So there won't be any exclusive profits for one company.

Check this story.

Or this one.

= = = = =

Aside from news, you'd also think governments would be clamoring to fund this development, for the sake of bragging rights. And you'd think scientists and foundations would be doing the same. Nope, the governments and the scientists are only excited about putting billions into embryonic stem cells. More proof, if any were needed, that our governments and scientists are firmly in the grip of Gaia-worship. For modern Commies, the thrill of sacrificing innocent unborn babies is a religious requirement and a blood fetish, and it takes absolute precedence over such minor uninteresting scholastic trivialities as curing cancer.

= = = = =

And I should add the name of the discoverer: Evangelos Michelakis. If this works as well as it appears, the name of Michelakis will belong in the Pantheon of medicine, along with Galen, Pasteur, Jenner, Fleming and Salk.
  ¶ 6:16 PM

  Resting again



I've got a couple of small but paid graphics jobs to work on, so I'll let Polistra rest for a while. Part 2 of 'Cr, Dr' will just have to wait....
  ¶ 9:39 PM

  Huckabee
Listening to a C-Span interview with Mike Huckabee, former Ark governor who is running for Pres, or maybe he's actually running for Vice-Pres. I've been trying to figure out what's so odd about this guy, and I finally caught it. He thinks America has been acting too much like a bully. He thinks we need to lose weight and pay attention to our diet. He thinks we need to support art and music in public schools. He thinks everybody needs to Just Get Along. He agrees 10000% with Al Gore on the need to sacrifice the human race to Gaia.

In short, Huckabee is running as a woman.

What we need at this point in history is a man, no matter how he's dressed. And since Romney has gone squishy, the only man among the likely candidates is Hillary.
  ¶ 4:21 PM

  Cr, Dr


Polistra has been wandering around the Middle Ages lately, trying to pin down the time and place where Western Civilization took off. Where and how did the Jewish and Christian world start its long and impressive flight into art, music, science, commerce, and decency, while the Mohammedan world stayed on the primitive ground in all those areas? If there is a common factor, will it help in reforming or converting Mohammedans? Or if that's impossible, will it help in defining and reaching Victory?

We've already talked about the art and music, and about the religious area, but we haven't connected the two.

First, as a sort of disclaimer, let's factor out the constants. All major faiths include a cross-section of humanity, from good to evil, smart to dumb, rich to poor, pious to hypocritical. The good end of the human spectrum will do noble things in the name of religion, regardless of the religion's teaching or tenets, and the bad end of humanity will do evil things in the name of religion. All major faiths claim to follow their scripture, and all fail in various ways. All of them try to answer two big questions: How do we get to Heaven? How do we deal with the material world and the varied forms of humans?

Those are the constants. The variables are: How does each faith answer those questions, and does each particular answer lead to understanding, prosperity and morality, or to stagnation and savagery?

In the modern Western world we have four contenders for the future of civilization, which we can abbreviate as Rome, Mecca, Willowcreek, and San Francisco. Here in the Middle Ages we have only Rome and Mecca; the other two will join the battle later.




We'll focus on a major invention of the 1300's: double-entry bookkeeping. The basic idea of DEB is that you record every transaction on both sides of the book, distributing the money value of each transaction into proper categories. The left column is labeled Dr for debitur meaning "it is owed". The right column is headed Cr for creditur meaning "it is believed" or "it is expected". In the simplest sense, the Dr records what you pay, and the Cr records what you receive. [In reality it can get rather more complicated, but we'll stay basic here.]

For instance, you pay a contractor for labor and materials to build a desk. The amount of the check shows up in the Dr side, showing value paid out; the value of the labor and materials are placed into separate sections on the Cr side, indicating value of labor received and value of materials received.

When you sell the desk for more than you paid, the received check goes on the Cr side, the original labor and materials are 'taken out' on the Dr side, and a new entry appears on the Dr side, representing an abstract 'payment' to the account called Profit.

At intervals, let's say every week, you total up both sides. If the Dr total equals the Cr total, you know that you've entered things properly.

In the world of commerce, DEB made it possible for businesses to grow larger and to engage in more risky endeavors. By keeping a firm handle on the flow of values in both directions, DEB allowed owners to analyze the risks and benefits of a new venture. And new ventures, funded by a reliable system of banking and borrowing, are the source of expanding wealth.

= = = = =

In the realm of religion we have a flow of values as well.

All Christians believe that the main or infinite exchange has already happened, when Christ was sacrificed on the cross, in exchange for the chance of eternal life for his followers.

Christians differ on how we partake in that original exchange, but all of them agree that it is infinitely sufficient and infinitely 'divisible'.

The Roman approach is distinctly DEB-ish, with its constant back-and-forth flow of sin and confession, penances and indulgences. A hundred Ave Marias in the debit column equals a credit of a year in purgatory. Every week you run the balance in the confessional box, and you know where you stand.

Luther objected to this religious bookkeeping, which had become a tool for plain old corruption in his time. He took a columnless approach, in which we pay exactly once for our share, with a single leap of faith, answered by God with an infinite reward. [Benedict refers to this as 'low-cost salvation'.]

Calvin raised Luther's proportion even higher: You may perform leaps of faith, but they don't matter. If God wanted you to have a portion of the original value, he's already put it in your hand. Your job is to polish it up and make it shine.

Now what about Mecca? The Mohammedan approach is entirely different. There is no original sacrifice, no infinite store of value to be distributed. You have to make your own sacrifice. You get to Heaven by performing Jihad, which means sacrificing yourself in a perfectly literal sense to expand the territory under Mecca's control. Territory and control are again perfectly literal: church and state are identical by definition. Your chances are even better if you sacrifice some infidels at the same time, thus decreasing the non-Mohammedan population. It's a zero-sum game with payment at the end. The entire burden is on you, with no indulgence or forgiveness.

= = = = =

This primary difference translates to other parts of life.

Rome takes the position that material things are part of Creation, and has a long-standing habit of 'sacralizing' material things and human habits. You can be comforted by things, if you use them moderately and reverently. You are encouraged to create beautiful art and music, for the glory of God. Troublesome human habits can be turned into sacraments (i.e sex ==> marriage), and Rome takes advantage of special tendencies by creating religious orders. Every debit and credit in the human domain is thus placed where it can be used best, and each can be paid or received against your heavenly account. Logic and reason are also part of Creation, and expanding the realm of knowledge is thus a form of sacrament.

Mecca forbids the charging and receiving of interest, which means that creating new wealth is impossible. (Of course it still happens, but in an underground and corrupt way.) Mecca forbids most art and music. Because Allah is arbitrary and unreasonable by definition, expanding knowledge is pointless.

So it's really no mystery after all.

Rome has figured out how to use and balance the debits and credits of human behavior. Everything that advances civilization is considered as a debit to the glory of God, and God enters a credit on our heavenly account. Small failings can be forgiven by debiting a penance, which clears guilt and resentment from the earthly books.

Mecca simply forbids the most important activities of civilization, and requires unquestioning obedience to an unfathomable god. Guilt and resentment are explicitly cultivated as engines of Jihad.

= = = = =

Note: I intended to add a Part II, comparing Mecca and Rome to the more modern faiths of Willowcreek (ie Prosperity-oriented protestants) and San Francisco (ie the strange Western merger of Lenin and Mussolini that is normally called "progressivism"). I got distracted by bad weather and other bad events, and lost the chain of thought. I did return to the point more recently, but without the inspiration that illuminates Cr/Dr. For instance, here.
  ¶ 9:49 PM

  Stay the Course part deux
There's a whole lot of high-pitched discussion about George W. Vichy's latest speech. Why, I don't know. It's totally unsurprising.

Fact 1: A 'cycle of violence' only ends when [at least] one side is so thoroughly destroyed and discouraged that it gives up.

Fact 2: The best way to keep a 'cycle of violence' running is to introduce 'peacekeepers' whose job is to damp down the violence. This prevents either side from making the conclusive strike that would convince the other side to give up. You can see this phenomenon among kids on the schoolyard, among criminals in prison, and among primitive quasi-humanoids like Arabs. When teachers, prison guards, or peacekeepers are watching, you can fight at a moderate level without ever killing enough of the enemy to reach a conclusion.

Fact 3: Worst of all, the teachers, prison guards, or peacekeepers can become a common enemy, and end up taking most of the violence.

This is exactly how the UN functions, and exactly why the UN keeps wars going instead of stopping them. Adding more 'peacekeepers' only spreads out the moderating effect, allowing the 'cycle' to continue even more widely and kill more of the 'peacekeepers'.

So the New Way Forward is just more UN-style thinking from the man who felt he had to justify the Iraq war in a way that would satisfy the UN. It's simply Stay The Course Part Deux, improved and enhanced with even more American casualties.

= = = = =

Afterthought: The three examples (school, prison, Iraq) have something else in common, which I didn't intend, but which shows the other way to break up a cycle of violence.

All three are cases of forced mixing, Stalin's favorite trick. 1. Find groups that can't stand each other. 2. Push them together. 3. Let the fighting run for a while, then bring in the authorities to calm down the fighting. Guarantees that the pre-determined "victim" group will love the authorities, no matter how brutal.

In the case of Iraq, the mixing was done by Britain in 1920, probably without Communist intentions, and Saddam took full advantage of the phenomenon. It appears that the Shia and Sunni subspecies are very quickly doing their own de-mixing, but our fantastically stupid (or just Stalinist) insistence on maintaining the mix will get in the way of this natural calming process.
  ¶ 6:28 PM

  Rabinowitz is back
Dorothy Rabinowitz, the only investigative reporter in America, has finally weighed in on Kidnapper Nifong's witch hunt.

Mr. Nifong is no anomaly--merely a product of the political times, a prosecutor who has absorbed all the clues about the sanctified status now accorded charges involving rape, child sex-abuse and accusations of racism. Which has in turn ensured their transformation into weapons of unequalled power. Like others before him, the DA quickly grasped the career possibilities open to him with such a case and proceeded accordingly--denouncing racism, and the rape and assault of a helpless black woman, and the Duke athletes guilty of these crimes in every media interview available to him (and they were many).

For all the public shock and fury over his behavior, there is little that is new or strange about Mr. Nifong. We have seen the likes of this district attorney, uninterested in proofs of innocence, willing to suppress any he found, many times in the busy army of prosecutors claiming to have found evidence of rampant child abuse in nursery schools and other child-care centers around the country in the 1980s and throughout most of the '90s. They built case after headline-making case charging the mass molestation of small children, and managed to convict scores of innocent Americans on the basis of testimony no rational mind could credit. Law officers who regularly violated requirements of due process in their effort to obtain a conviction, they grasped the special advantage that was theirs: that for a prosecutor dealing with molestation, and wearing the mantle of avenger, there was no such thing as excess, no limits to what could be said of the accused. In court, rules could be bent, any charges presented, and nonexistent medical evidence proclaimed as proof positive of the accusation.

Rabinowitz, all on her own with no media support, broke the spell of the previous witch hunt. This time around, the cable channels have been on the side of the angels (albeit slowly and reluctantly), so the work of Rabinowitz wasn't so desperately needed.

What we really need is a complete overhaul of our court system. We won't get it, though; our criminally insane political class still operates under the bizarre delusion that our court system is "the best in the world", and the even more bizarre delusion that the legislature and executive have no power over the courts.

We will get the overhaul when the Caliphate is complete. Count on it.
  ¶ 8:17 AM

  Enlightened Moderns? (part II)
The discovery that amniotic stem cells are just as good as embryonic stem cells is the big story today. It's certainly big news, because it drives the final silver nail in the embryo-sucking vampire. (Or it would if anyone had any common sense.)

Big news to be sure, but it turns out this discovery isn't new news!

One of the scientists responsible for a breakthrough in stem-cell research has reported that he encountered heavy resistance to the publication of his work because it used stem cells obtained from amniotic fluids rather than from embryonic tissues.

Paolo De Coppi told the Italian ANSA news agency that a groundbreaking paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology had previously been rejected by four different journals. "It took seven years to get our paper published," he said.

Yes, that's right.

SEVEN YEARS.

Just one more proof, which we didn't really need, that the main job of 'peer review' in scientific journals is to enforce Leninist orthodoxy.
  ¶ 8:16 PM

  Chomp, chomp, chomp


The city of Spokane actually responded to my email about water pressure, and actually fixed the problem!

Here's their response:

Thank you for notifying us of this problem. The cause of your varying water pressure has been traced back to a failing pressure reducing valve located at the Waste Water Treatment plant. The faulty valve is being replaced by city crews. Your water pressure should return to normal once work is complete.

I don't know if others had reported the same problem, and of course the "local" TV "news" didn't say anything about it. The "local" TV "news" was too busy, as always, with far more urgent matters, namely the usual series of meaningless and false "scientific" "studies" about breast cancer, cholesterol, breast cancer, cholesterol, breast cancer, cholesterol, breast cancer, cholesterol and breast cancer.
  ¶ 12:52 PM

  Smelly buildings, wiggly water
Listening to reports of the mysterious mercaptan smell in NYC. The Fox folks aren't quite thinking clearly. They stated that people were smelling the gas inside buildings, and that people were going out on the sidewalk to get fresh air. Then they talked about how the smell could be drifting north from Jersey City or somewhere. Good old drawkcab swen again. If you're smelling it INSIDE buildings and you have to go OUTSIDE for fresh air, this means the smell is not drifting in from OUTSIDE. It's a problem with the natural gas distribution system, possibly an overpressure in the pipes?

I've been noticing an odd phenomenon here for the last three days: a variation in water pressure. Not flow, pressure. Of course increased pressure causes increased flow, but I know it's essentially a pressure variation because I can hear the water heater singing various notes, unlike its normal steady howl when turned on. Varying water pressure can be dangerous, because flushing a toilet when the pressure is at a low point can lead to "siphoning" of the tank water back into the pipes.

= = = = = =

Putting these together, I wonder if someone is experimenting with a new way to sabotage city utilities?

(I've emailed the city water dept twice, but no response. Not surprising; in Spokane you don't count unless your name is Cowles.)
  ¶ 9:11 AM

  Wind, rain, snow
Wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, rain, snow, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, wind!!!!!!!!!!!!!

= = = = =

I'm exhausted.

Last night another big gale. Not quite as bad as the previous one, in terms of hours anyway.

Telegram for the Democrats: If you want to lock in your majority again, follow FDR. Just as the previous peak of bad weather in the 1930's went beyond the ability of private companies and local governments, this decade's similar peak is doing the same. FDR insured total Dem loyalty by using federal resources to solve some of the problems of the time.

Today's problems are somewhat different because we're mainly urban, but the idea is the same. Electricity and water flow are still the areas that need most fixing. Replan the electric grid. Rewire vulnerable areas with underground wiring. Clear-cut urban forests. Rethink dams and levees. Replan the arrangement of airport hubs. Do more research on weather control, including steering jet streams and busting up hurricanes.

All these big projects are possible, and all would be even more possible if we weren't spending big money and big resources on big projects in Baghdad, which will only serve our enemies when they take over again. More precisely, the savage primitive camel-fucking Arabs will not even use the projects. They will simply steal the copper and iron and sell it for scrap.

Dems, you can roll over George W. Zero in this field if you dare to think big.

Think FDR.

= = = = =

Afterthought: Interesting that I didn't even consider begging the Republicans to take on this idea. Didn't even enter my head until I re-read the message and spotted the missing choice. It's not a question of ideology; just competence. Begging the Rs to do anything at all would be like begging a mouse to win a chess championship. No, that's not a good analogy, because the mouse could conceivably push just the right piece into the right spot on the board by pure chance. The R's are so firmly committed to idiocy that they wouldn't even allow a random act of competence.
  ¶ 11:07 AM

  Steve King's great idea
Steve King of Iowa, the best only competent member of Congress, is talking right now on C-Span. He is proposing an extremely interesting idea.

Acknowledge the power of the blogosphere to act as "auditor" for the government, by placing several Rescission Bills in each session of Congress. Each Rescission bill would start out as a "shell", and each member of Congress, responding to constituent "auditors", would be able to add items to the bill. The items in this bill would be subtractions, not additions; each item would be like a line-item veto for some appropriation in other pending bills.

He's calling it the CUT act, which isn't the best possible name, but it is certainly the best possible idea.

Bravo, Steve!
  ¶ 12:49 PM

  Enlightened moderns?


Just started reading a fascinating little book by James Woods, How the Catholic Church built Western Civilization, about the early days of science and universities.

Opened it at random and immediately hit this passage:

A glance at the history of the medieval university reveals that conflicts between the university and the people or governments of the town were not uncommon. On one hand the university was a boon for local merchants and for economic activity in general, since the students brought money to spend, but on the other, university students coud be irresponsible and unruly.

This hasn't changed at all in 800 years! Hate the students, love their money: remains true from 1207 AD to 2007 AD!

In 1231 Pope Gregory IX issued the bull 'Parens Scientiarum' on behalf of the university at Paris. ... In this document, the Pope tried to establish a just and peaceful environment for the university by granting a privilege known as 'cessatio', the right to suspend lectures and go on a general strike if its members were abused. Causes for such a strike included refusal to fix ceiling prices for lodgings, an injury or mutilation of a student for which suitable satisfaction had not been given, or the unlawful imprisonment of a student.

Having lived much of my adult life in college towns, I can appreciate the 'ceiling price for lodgings'!

Far more important, note the last phrase. Compare with Duke University's response when its students were unlawfully imprisoned by Kidnapper Nifong. Instead of declaring a 'cessatio', Duke aided and abetted Kidnapper Nifong by expelling the students and cancelling the entire Lacrosse team.

Maybe it's time to let the Church take the universities back from government. The Church has certainly done a better job with K-12 education, as every competent big-city parent knows only too well.
  ¶ 2:59 PM

  Yes, St Francis is appropriate......


Polistra has been listening to Boehner and Pelosi doing their little love-dance.

Pelosi cited St Francis of Assisi as the patron saint for the new session, and unfortunately Francis is exactly the right saint. Not just for the House but for the George W. Vichy Government as well.

Francis, who lived in the 1100's, went on a Crusade because it seemed like the proper thing for a wealthy young gentleman of the times. Somewhere along the way he got "turned out", decided to give up on defending Christianity, and instead tried to bring as much Mohammed as possible into Christianity.

Here's a lengthy passage from Francis's life as given in Abraham's Tent.

Francis then took a companion, Illuminatus and set out, unarmed and filled with love for his "enemy" brother, to visit the Sultan of Egypt, Malik-al-Kamil. The men of the Sultan's army captured Francis and Illuminatus and dragged them, beaten and exhausted, before the Sultan - just as Francis had wished.

The Sultan, for his part, was receptive to these two unarmed messengers from the enemy camp. St. Bonaventure, in his Major Life of St. Francis, described the event, "The sultan asked them by whom and why and in what capacity they had been sent, and how they got there; but Francis replied intrepidly that they had been sent by God, not by (humans), to show him and his subjects the way of salvation and proclaim the truth of the Gospel message.

When the sultan saw (Francis') enthusiasm and courage, he listened to him willingly and pressed him to stay with him" (quoted in St. Francis and the Foolishness of God, p. 85).

Today, evangelization is not seen as appropriate inter-religious dialogue. In Francis' context, however, his enthusiastic desire to share his "good news" with the Sultan, without insulting Islam or refuting Mohammed, was unique and disarming.

= = = = =

My interruption: When Benedict XVI talks of "dialogue" with Mohammedans, I wonder if he means this Franciscan form of "dialogue", i.e. surrender?

= = = = =

In the encounter between them, both Francis and the Sultan were changed. When Francis finally left to return to Italy, the Sultan showered him with many gifts and treasures. Because he had no interest in worldly wealth, Francis refused them all, except one special gift: an ivory horn used by the muezzin to call the community to prayer. On his return, Francis used it to call people for prayer or for preaching.

Francis also shared with his community his new and deep respect for his Moslem brothers and sisters, breaking down the cycle of enmity and misunderstanding that fueled the Crusades.

Yes indeed, the perfect patron saint for Pelosi, Boehner, and G. W. Vichy.
  ¶ 11:21 AM

  Forward!


A little blast from the past, showing the proper way to treat an enemy with respect. Yes, that's right, respect. No condescension here. We portrayed the Japs as ugly, nasty, horrible people who needed to be defeated totally. Smashed, crushed like rats in a trap. They were not shown as poor dumb misguided folks who would be nice if they just had the right to vote in elections monitored by Jimmy Carter.
  ¶ 9:48 PM

  Ledeen's excellent thought
I rarely spend time and space reprocessing other blogs ... especially when the other blogs have thousands of regular readers and I have at best 3 irregular readers. Rather pointless use of bandwidth. I'm making an exception in this case, because Michael Ledeen has made a tremendously important observation, which doesn't seem to have generated a significant response.

Ledeen said:

It's a commonplace in the study of mass murder—especially the Holocaust—that it's a lot easier to kill lots of people in a relatively antiseptic way (bombs, usually) than to kill an individual one-on-one. It's not easy to find an executioner, it's easier to find a guy who programs a bombing run on a computer. And it's easier to find a technician to run Nazi gas chambers.

Technology made it easier to set up these antiseptic killings. It separated the killers from the killed, the killers didn't have to watch or even inflict actual death, they didn't have to harden their hearts as their enemies suffered death agonies. If you dropped a lot of bombs on Germany and Japan in the war, you knew innocents would die, but you never really faced those people, and it was, after all, part of war, wasn't it?

But then the wheel turned once more. Weapons became amazingly accurate, and "precision bombing" became possible. And when that happened, it suddenly became necessary to face all kinds of very complicated targeting decisions. Lawyers were brought in to approve each and every target. And when the technology failed, or some guy at a computer or in an airplane or on the battlefield failed to get it exactly the way the lawyers had stipulated, there was suddenly hell to pay. War crimes, etc.

So paradoxically technological advance made mass murder easier, and now it's made it much harder. Which is to say, even the most lethal technology isn't either all good or all bad. Sometimes it pushes us in one direction, sometimes in another.

= = = = =

My insignificant response:

Obviously our enemies understand this point better than we do. The term "asymmetrical warfare" is normally taken to mean that Jihadis use guerrilla techniques, hit-and-run bombing, etc, because they can't face the "massive force" of a Western army.

In fact the asymmetry is the other way around. Our enemies are willing to use 20th Century anonymous mass bombings (like 9/11) because we're pinned down by our 21st Century precision and fussiness, which makes our "massive force" totally worthless.
  ¶ 11:57 AM

  !drawkcaB
The first of the negative utopias was a rather tame book written by Samuel Butler in 1871, called 'Erewhon'. ('Nowhere' spelled backwards.) The main premise was that in the land of Erewhon, morality and criminality were inverted. [Incidentally, Erewhon's copyright long since lapsed, and it's available in full form online.]

I think Butler would especially appreciate our public treatment of Saddam's hanging. In the forward world, the job of a news report is to show you what happened. In our drawkcab world, the job of a news report is to show you other people witnessing and discussing a news report of the event, which you won't get to see.

The first major example of drawkcab swen was the idiotic Robert Novak vs Joe Wilson affair, in which the 'news' reporters knew exactly what had occurred but told us a tangled story about the attempt to figure out what had occurred, which was supposedly a mystery.

In a forward nation at war (like the US in 1943) we saw and rejoiced at every detail of an enemy leader's death. In the drawkcab swen of 2007, we see Iraqis watching their cell phones and rejoicing at the death of our enemy, but we don't get to see the enemy's death. In a forward nation at war, anyone who failed to taunt an evil man would be at least suspect; we'd assume he was on the side of the evil man. In the drawkcab "legal system" of 2007, the people who taunted Saddam are arrested.

We cannot win a war this way. We cannot even function this way.
  ¶ 10:43 AM

  Cover it properly



Since we're doomed to watch the Ford coffin zooming around the country for the next several years, at least it should be on the right network.
  ¶ 2:44 PM

  Polistra salutes Ethiopia.
[Expanding on an entry a few days ago....]




Ethiopia deserves a special salute, and needs to be viewed as an example for the world.

It is in many ways The Original Place. Anthropologists think the human species radiated from that corner of Africa, and the Ethiopians have maintained their own brand of Christianity in unbroken form since the time of the Apostles. Among all the countries on the map of Africa, Ethiopia has the longest continuous independence. It was known in Biblical times, and it was only colonized briefly by Italy, in the 1920's and 30's.

Now Ethiopia is fighting the Jihadis in Somalia on its own, with no aid from us, no aid from the UN, and no aid from the various African organizations. Despite all this, or rather because* of all this, Ethiopia has defeated the Jihadis.

Mark Steyn says it best:

In the last few days the Ethiopian military has swept through the country and the Islamist forces have crumbled before them. Both Somali troops and various foreign jihadists have thrown off their uniforms and melted into the general population. Granted, that's what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, too: They're shrewd enough to understand it's not worth engaging superior militaries on their terms; better to wait awhile and grind them down in a dirty messy insurgency.

Well, we'll see about that. One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren't fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some "war crime" or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they're just getting on with it.

And, given the potential for Islamist destabilization of their own country, they were wise to do so. The "international community" has reacted in the usual ways: calls for immediate cease-fires so that an ineffectual U.N. force of peacekeepers can go in and enjoy their customary child sex with the locals while propping up the Islamists. The Ethiopians can't be blamed for not taking the U.N. seriously. To be sure, the alternative to the jihad boys is a bunch of thugs. But that's the reality of much of the map today: a choice between being an outpost of the global jihad, or a patchwork quilt of warlords, or a bit of both with some feeble, half-hearted multilateral force mediating between the two. I don't know whether the Ethiopian intervention will work in the long run, but, if it does, the best hope for squashing the jihad might be to outsource the fight to Third World regimes less squeamish about waging it.


*Polistra's first law of human nature: "When you hear despite, think because."

= = = = =

Later, after a bit of reading: Ethiopia's Christianity started in the 4th Century, which wasn't quite Apostolic but still in the era of the "Church Fathers". Over the long years, Ethiopia's Christians have been fighting Mohammedans constantly, and mostly winning. They never gave in to dhimmitude, though they did retreat to the wilderness for a time. Here is a well-written short history of the Church and its battles with the Army of Allah. And here is a photo essay on Ethiopia's medieval cathedrals, built somewhat differently from the European version!
  ¶ 4:48 PM

  Madame Polisztra channels J. Edgar ... again



Madame Polisztra found a message waiting in her crystal ball this morning. It's J. Edgar again, this time with a New Year's message.

Listen to the real J. Edgar Hoover, coming through the mysterious ether from New Year's Day 1948.
  ¶ 10:55 PM

  Wishy-washy tour
There's something terribly peculiar about Gerald Ford's coffin zipping around the country, making cameo appearances at All The Old Familiar Places.

In an earlier era before radio and TV, the coffins of assassinated Presidents like Lincoln and Garfield were hauled around in railcars, so that the grieving masses could say their last goodbyes. Such a tour is unnecessary today, and seems out of place for a nice decent President who was neither greatly loved nor hated.

Will he show up at James Brown's funeral?

Will James Brown's coffin reciprocate?

Will the roadies and groupies get free "Final Wishy-washy Tour 2006" T-shirts?

Will this be remembered as "The day the moderation died"?

Lord, let it be so.
  ¶ 1:59 PM

  Comes in mighty handy


Oddbody: Oh no, we don't use money up in heaven.

Bailey: Comes in mighty handy down here, bub.

= = = = =

I'm reminded of this scene when I think of the Pope's peculiarly mixed-up response to Jihad.

On one side the Regensburg speech, showing a clear understanding of the problem, and his quiet but steady construction [he is the pontifex, after all!] of an alliance with the Orthodox branch of Christianity. These moves make sense for the leader of the Church Militant.

On the other side, his moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine, and now today's idiotic criticism of hanging Saddam. These moves are not good Catholic thinking or even good Socialist thinking; they are just hippie-dippie shit.

= = = = =

This war is unquestionably a religious war. If you believe in Jehovah or Allah, you must take a side. If you don't believe, you still must comprehend that the war is being fought between the champions of Jehovah and the champions of Allah, and you must see that Jehovah's side is the source of civilization.

Regardless of belief, if you prefer the 21st Century, you must take the Jewish and Christian side. If you prefer the 11th, you must take the Mohammedan side. There is no middle ground.

= = = = =

Benedict has a powerful, nimble, and subtle intellect. So, like a dog watching a human drive a car, I'll acknowledge he may well be thinking in ways that are far above my mental pay grade.

Still, he doesn't seem to appreciate that he has "armies" and "divisions" beyond his own Church, who need to see him holding firm... who need to see him as a consistent leader who takes the side of Jehovah at all times.

In his conversations with heaven, he may not need to worry about the alignment of earthly forces, but those forces come in mighty handy down here, bub.
  ¶ 11:55 AM

  Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh .... Rope.


Those Kurds have a very long record of bringing, shall we say, the proper gift for the occasion.

They also have a long record of persecution by tyrants and betrayal by Americans.

We owe them.

Perhaps we owe them even more than we owe the Jews.

As of this minute, Saddam is officially gone.

We should have killed him in 1991. We should have killed him when we captured him.

The Kurds have finally done it right, despite our best efforts to do it wrong.

And our pussy-ass enemy-collaborating media can't find the guts to show us the full hanging.

We'll find ways to see it, but not through our pussy-ass enemy-collaborating media.

Anyway, Saddam is gone.

This miserable year is now redeemed.




Polistra shouts: THANK YOU, KURDS!

[A footnote in case the title reference isn't clear: Though the Gospels don't specify their origin, those "Magi from the East" are believed by scholars to have been Medes, which is the old name for Kurds.]

  ¶ 6:04 PM

  Cultural sensitivity
Listening to an interview with Interior Sec'y Kempthorne about the proposal to add polar bears to the "endangered" list. One of the criteria he mentioned was that the Eskimos have a "cultural requirement" to eat the polar bears, and thus the Eskimos can be granted absolution for harvesting a certain number of the bears. I think that's what the Comrade Secretary said; the whole set of ideas is so anti-civilized and garbled that it's truly hard to make anything logical from them.

Nevertheless, this special cultural exemption from the Established Religion of Gaia Worship gives Secret Agent Polistra an idea.

Gather up a glob of endangered fungus, and encourage it to grow on an endangered cultural object like a cross or a Ten Commandments tablet. Since High Priest Kempthorne is absolutely committed to preserving the Holy Fungus, he will reluctantly have to give an indulgence to the otherwise blasphemous Christian object, because removing the cross would remove the Holy Habitat of the Holy Fungus.



  ¶ 8:01 PM

  Wrong, Mitt, wrong.
Human Events interviewed Mitt Romney. On the most important question, Romney ducked and dodged.

Q: Do you think right now the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq?

Romney:The term is overly charged, I’m afraid, and so I’m not going to try and define who’s winning and who’s losing. I don’t think we’re making anywhere near as much progress as we had anticipated we would make.

There’s no question the administration was surprised by the fact that after the fall of Saddam Hussein it was a much tougher road than they ever expected. Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld, as you recall, said we’re just sweeping up a few dead-enders. Well, it turned out to be a lot more than that. We had insufficient troops in place. We had insufficient plans. We did not have the appropriate rules of engagement in place. Obviously, there were management lapses — events such as Abu Ghraib make that clear. For all those reasons, we did less than the entirely effective job that we would have hoped to be able to do. And as a result, we’re in a difficult position right now.

But to assess whether we’re making progress or not, I would presume we’re making progress, but certainly not at the rate we were hoping to make progress and, in some respects, that is disappointing.

= = = = =

Bad show, Romney. Your advantage is clarity of vision and clarity of leadership. If you're going to evade the most important question, you're not qualified to lead.

"Events such as Abu Ghraib": The only problem with Abu Ghraib is that we pussied out and stopped when the traitorous media spotlighted it. If we were serious about fighting a real war, we would have given medals to Lynndie England, and we would have recommended the "events" of Abu Ghraib as a shining example for other soldiers.

Hillary is starting to look mighty good.
  ¶ 12:16 PM

  Random
1. Ethiopia, hardly a major player on the world stage, and not generally described as our "ally", is doing more than any of our "allies" for the Christian cause. Ethiopia's little army is quite competently pushing back the Jihadis who are taking over Somalia (again). Amazingly, George W. Vichy is not protesting against Ethiopia's violation of "due process". Maybe he hasn't noticed it yet.

2. Pakistan, always described as our "ally", is clearly not. Musharraf has been playing us for a patsy since the start. Why are we so concerned about keeping him in office? His "democratically elected" government is not on our side, but the pretense of "alliance" prevents us from going in and wiping out al Qaeda. In other words, his presence serves the enemy, pure and simple. We should be helping his assassins, in order to have an accurately described enemy regime.

3. Conventional wisdom on Robert McNamara is that he was responsible for developing the Edsel when he worked at Ford, and he was responsible for developing the Vietnam War when he worked in Washington. It turns out that both of those stories are flat wrong. Automotive historians have found that Mac believed the Edsel was a bad idea from the start, and tried to sabotage the managers who were pushing it. He didn't quite succeed, and the bad idea went ahead and proved its badness. A program on C-Span yesterday featured some of LBJ's taped phone conversations, in which Mac clearly and persistently argued against escalating Vietnam. He didn't quite succeed, and the bad idea went ahead and killed many Americans in a useless war.

I feel the need to apologize for the record, since I had joined the chorus of Mac-haters. Too bad; he's such an easy man to dislike ... but despite his generally obnoxious nature, his judgment was proved right in both of those cases.

Hmm. Maybe that's why he's so obnoxious. When you're right, but can't erase the conventional stories about your wrongness, you're likely to get bitter.

4. Via NRO: Stuart Taylor, hardly a right-wing hack, has written a powerful summation of the Nifong fraud at Duke. Unfortunately, Taylor starts out with a conventional-wisdom statement that can easily be disproved.

It's no secret that hugely disproportionate numbers of the innocent people oppressed by abusive prosecutors and police in this country are African-Americans.

Even without detailed statistics, this statement can be proved wrong. All you need is one fact: Most crime occurs in black neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods are vastly more dangerous (for the innocent black folks) than white neighborhoods. This tells us all we need to know about the prosecution. If the police were arresting too many blacks, the black-neighborhood crime rate would be lower than the white-area rate. The continued high crime rate tells us that the police are still not arresting enough black criminals.

5. Mark Belling, subbing for Rush this morning, is trying out a pretty good argument for getting out of Iraq. Essentially he's saying that we've already accomplished all that we could practically accomplish; we've passed the point of negative return. I wonder if he's trying out the argument on behalf of the government, or purely on his own? This approach certainly runs counter to Rush's perpetual team loyalty.

6. Both sides in our political structure misunderstand the Laffer Curve, either deliberately or accidentally.

Let's start with the basic fact: Tax cuts increase government revenue.

Granted, this isn't 100% absolute; some changes in tax code will either be neutral or opposite. But in terms of the 'hot button' or major changes, Laffer is valid.

Now another generally accepted pair of facts: Lefties want to increase the size of government, and righties want to decrease it. Again not absolute, because righties want the gov't to serve mainly as defender against enemies, which can require a huge budget in wartime. But in domestic terms, we can say that R wants small, D wants big.

Logically, then, R should want to raise taxes, which gives gov't less money to work with, and D should want to cut taxes, which gives gov't more money to work with.

Why doesn't this happen? John Kennedy is the only politician who seemed to understand this point properly and consistently.

I truly don't know whether the politicians since JFK are just ignorant, or playing a deeper game.
  ¶ 9:14 AM

  Rohrabacher on OKC
Rep. Rohrabacher has just issued a report on his committee's investigation into possible Arab connections of Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh. Rohrabacher concentrated on Nichols's Filipino connections, and received no help at all from FBI or Philippine authorities.

It's been clear for some time that Nichols was not just visiting his mail order bride's relatives, and that he learned something about making bombs in Cebu City.

The Rohrabacher committee has filled in the picture with several new facts, but still no conclusive proof.

The report covers some familiar territory; here are the facts that I haven't heard before:

= = = = =

On his first trip to Cebu with Shelton Paradise Tours, Terry Nichols was initially introduced to tour guide Daisy Gelaspi. They spent about four days together and, in a sworn signed statement to police and investigators, Gelaspi claimed that Nichols asked her if she knew anyone in the military or anyone else who could help him make a bomb.

Additionally, on his final trip to the Philippines just months before the Oklahoma City bombing, Nichols had with him a bomb-making book entitled The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives. Nichols’ interest in bomb making during his trips to the Philippines raises some doubt about whether he was genuinely there for a wife, or whether he was there to network with underground criminals and terrorists.

Terry Nichols’ behavior prior to his last trip to the Philippines in November 1994 also raises questions. He left a sealed note for his ex-wife that instructed her to open it in case he did not return. She opened it almost immediately and found a letter from Nichols telling her where he had hidden $20,000 for her and their son.

When asked directly about this by the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, his answers were not credible; Nichols suggested the $20,000 came from babysitting money.

.....

In the December 1994 and January 1995 time period when Ramzi Yousef and Nichols were in Cebu City, it is not known where Yousef stayed; however, items found one month later by the Philippine National Police in his Manila apartment suggest that he had either stayed at or visited the Sundowner Hotel, where Marife and Terry had met years before and where Tom Shelton ran his tour-guide business. The opportunity for a Yousef-Nichols link-up during this time is clear. The proof, however, has not been established.

Note: Nichols hastily departed the Philippines immediately after the Yousef bomb operation was discovered and Murad was arrested in Manila. Shortly before, Nichols had arranged his reservations to leave at a later date. Inexplicably, his plans changed the day the Manila bomb plot was broken up. All this justifiably leads to speculation that the Bojinka bombing plot may have been tied to a more grandiose scheme. Had the Bojinka plot and the Oklahoma City bombing occurred in the same time frame, it would have been a spectacular worldwide attack on the American people. Evidence is circumstantial but serious questions remain.

= = = = =

Especially interesting:


Ramzi Yousef was in the United States for about five months prior to his attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. His cell phone records from that time period show that he placed three phone calls to the residence of a Filipina in Queens, New York named Mila Densing, with one call lasting approximately 30 minutes. At the time of the phone calls, Densing was living in the same row-house apartment building as Adora and Ernesto Malaluan, close friends and neighbors, who were also from Cebu City. Ernesto Malaluan is the cousin of Marife Nichols and owned the boarding house in Cebu City where Terry and Marife lived during their last trip to the Philippines.

= = = = =

The committee also looked into John Doe Two, who was seen with McVeigh by many eyewitnesses in OKC and in Junction City.

Within minutes of the Oklahoma City bombing, local television reporter Jayna Davis was at the scene of the crime interviewing witnesses. In the weeks and months afterward, she continued to investigate the bombing and, in her television broadcasts, asked viewers with information to come forward. She was particularly focused on the FBI’s original sketch of John Doe Two. There are multiple witnesses in Oklahoma City who placed Timothy McVeigh with another person at the scene of the bombing. The description of this accomplice offered by the witnesses at the scene closely resembles the sketch made of McVeigh’s companion when he rented the Ryder truck. The hard fact remains that witnesses saw McVeigh with a man leading up to and on the day of the bombing. Authorities still contend that McVeigh was alone. The belief that the FBI dropped its search for John Doe Two prematurely appears justified.

Davis has presented evidence that John Doe Two, who was with McVeigh in the Ryder truck on the day of the bombing, was a recent Iraqi immigrant who lived and worked in Oklahoma City. The Iraqi in question, Hussain Al-Hussaini, was one of a group of Iraqis hired to do odd jobs for a Palestinian landlord, Samir Khalil, who owned properties throughout the area. ...

More alarming is the discovery of a published list of un-indicted coconspirators from the first World Trade Center bombing that includes the name Samir Khalil. This subcommittee asked the Department of Justice to determine if the man’s name on the unindicted coconspirators World Trade Center bombing list is the same man in Oklahoma City. A letter responding to this request stated that such a task would be too "burdensome". This unwillingness on the part of the Justice Department to look into a possible solid link between the Oklahoma City bombing and the first World Trade Center attack is extremely disappointing, bordering on dereliction of duty.

= = = = =

I suppose we won't know the truth about this until the Caliphate is fully imposed; at that time McVeigh and Nichols will be celebrated as Heroes of Jihad, and their stories will become part of the curriculum in our madrassas.
  ¶ 11:12 AM

  2006 Word Awards



Professor Polistra has been gathering up annoying words and phrases during 2006.

= = = = =

A few mispronunciations that seem to be spreading like wildfire:

DIStriBUTE. Appears to be a slop-over from the stress pattern of Distribution. A common occurrence in language, but Polistra wonders why the same change hasn't taken over CONtribute as well.

Affectionado for aficionado. Interesting because it's an unconscious translation of the Spanish back into English.

Kalishnikov. The word is spelled Kalashnikov. No excuse for this one. Russian can be difficult, but there's no reason in Russian itself, nor any reason in the normal English way of pronouncing Russian, to sound /a/ as /i/. Possibly an error in the dictionary that provides the phonetic spellings on Teleprompters...?

= = = = =

Next, a few strange or overused words:

Robust. A robust diplomatic initiative, robust economy, robust protocol. Nuff said.

Concerning (as predicate adjective). Polistra finds this one especially concerning.

Efforting. Polistra is efforting a lookup on this one.

= = = = =

Finally, the phrases.

1. Is the self-answered rhetorical question an epidemic? Absolutely. Is it annoying? Absolutely. Can we get through one hour without hearing it? Absolutely not.

2. Does Polistra wish people would avoid the self-answered rhetorical question going forward? Absolutely.

3. The X's and O's. Polistra confesses that she finds this phrase totally meaningless. She suspects the folks who use it don't know what it means either, but it's certainly common enough.

4. Homicide bomber. Specialty of Fox News and several other conservative commentators. Both redundant and inaccurate. Redundant because the concept of homicide is already contained in 'bomber'; everyone knows that a bomber intends to kill. Inaccurate because the whole reason for creating the original phrase 'suicide bomber' was to distinguish the Mohammedan bomber from others. The kamikaze is much harder to deter or defend against. Switching the term to 'homicide' removes this special reminder.

5. Can Polistra tolerate one more utterance of "Not so much"? Not so much.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 7:26 PM

  Christmas



Polistra greets Christmas - and you - from the snowy North.

This has not been a good year.

We pray for a better one.....

In the meantime, a musical reminder that other years have been worse, and America somehow pulled through.
  ¶ 9:23 PM

  Duke
The side of truth is being carried well by the defense attorneys and many commentators..... I have only one small 'correction', one thing that isn't being said. What makes Nifong's fraud so destructive is NOT that he is assuming the defendants guilty and forcing them to prove their innocence. There's nothing wrong with that assumption. As I've said 634567853 times here, "innocent until proven guilty" is not in the Constitution, and the direction of the assumption really doesn't matter. In fact we do start by assuming guilt; that's what an arrest does.

What distinguishes a tyranny from a decent justice system is not the assumption. In a tyranny, the evidence doesn't matter at all. Whatever the authorities SAY is truth becomes the truth. And that's what we have here. Assuming these boys to be guilty would be just fine, if the system responded to the evidence by deciding them innocent. But Nifong has operated AGAINST all the evidence, for his own purposes. (One tantalizing comment by the defense attorney hints that Nifong's motives may be more complicated than vote-seeking.)

= = = = =

Zooming out for a wider view: It's clear that our entire court system no longer works. Jury trials developed over the centuries as a way to reach important decisions with credibility and broad-based respect, given a near-total lack of physical evidence. The latter condition no longer holds true. Since the advent of DNA, we can include or exclude potential suspects with 100% certainty. For any case where physical evidence is relevant, we no longer need the 'social certification' that a jury formerly provided. And for any presumed violation of law where physical evidence is not relevant, we should seriously ask whether the law itself is proper. A 'crime' that cannot be determined by physical evidence is by definition a thought-crime, and a nominally free society shouldn't be prosecuting thought-crimes.


  ¶ 1:07 PM

  Random
1. The power of the Big Story. Mount St. Helens is showing a plume of steam today. Though old Helen has been puffing and snorting rather regularly in recent years, the scientists on site say this isn't even a steam puff, let alone an eruption. It's just a fog cloud caused by cold water vapor hitting the hot surface. Fox News is breathlessly watching the cloud, waiting for the eruption.

Fox never paid attention to old Helen before, but this week's BIG STORY is those (now presumably dead) idiot climbers on Mt. Hood. Mt. Hood is a Mountain. Mt. Saint Helens is a Mountain, so it must be part of the same BIG STORY. This level of logical thinking is typical of cats; most dogs and nearly all humans can do a better job of separating facts.

2. Another piece of atrocious logic, this one doing real damage. Comrade Paula Zahn at CNN has decided to destroy the town of Vidor, Texas because it had a reputation of being unfriendly to black folks back in the old days of segregation. What does this have to do with current events? Here's the connection. The Kramer asshole brought racism back into the news, so CNN needs to destroy Vidor, Texas. Is the Kramer asshole a Texan? No. The Kramer asshole is pure 100% New Yorker, like Comrade Zahn. Has the Kramer asshole ever been to Texas? I'll bet he hasn't. So it's all perfectly logical. What's that you say? The Kramer asshole's eruption says more about the racism of modern New Yorkers than about the racism of an earlier generation of Texans? Huh? What a silly idea. Everyone knows that the Kramer asshole's eruption logically requires the destruction of Vidor, Texas. Case closed.

3. Meanwhile, thousands of people are still without electricity in Washington and Oregon. Six have now died from carbon monoxide, and many older folks are on the edge of survival.

Story? Nope, no story here.
  ¶ 3:00 PM

  The chase
Andy McCarthy at NRO has done a good job of laying out the desperate mindset of pro-war Americans. I've said pieces of this before, but McCarthy ties it together eloquently:

I am personally opposed to leaving Iraq right now, but I believe there are good faith arguments for doing so being made by a lot of patriotic people. They are not "cut and run" types (quite the opposite), and they hardly believe we have met our match or been defeated by our enemies.

Instead, they say: This is a broader war than just Iraq. The administration's narrow focus on bolstering a dubious Iraqi government does not recognize, much less provide a strategy for winning, the greater war against militant Islam and its state sponsors.

Many (but by no means all) of these people also believe a major problem we face is Islam itself: i.e., that in its most authentic and dynamic form, it is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-West, and anti-Semitic.

Consequently, these folks collectively believe that the imperatives the Bush administration has made of supporting the Maliki government and democratizing the greater Muslim world – Iraq being a test-case thereof – are unwise. They see popular elections (which the administration tries to sell as democratic elections)raising Islamists to power, they see Maliki supporting Hezbollah and making nice with Ahmadinejad, and they say: Why the hell are we putting our best and bravest in harm’s way for this?

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Here's what it feels like:







We bought this Bushmobile on false advertising, claiming that it was a high-powered conservative vehicle that would take the war to the enemy. The slogan was "Either you're with us or you're against us." Now we've got two years left on the 8-year lease, and we've unfortunately found the Bushmobile has about 20 horsepower and seems perfectly willing to yield to all enemies, internal and external. We tried to make it go faster; we bought bonds, supported, campaigned and voted for the party, and expressed our opinions. All of the legal methods have been tried, and still it just putters along.

There are two possible outcomes.

One, we pull off the road and let the enemy take us with as little bloodshed as possible.

Two, a third-party candidate with enough fame and credibility emerges, and figures out how to release the parking brake.

Even then, it's not at all clear that our system would let him act or survive.

When the correct course of action is absolutely obvious from history and human nature, and when the existing government has proved itself to be totally incapable of pursuing the correct course of action ... at some point people will work outside the existing government to get the job done. That point hasn't arrived yet, but it will sooner or later. (Yes, we do already have people like Jimmy Carter working outside the existing government, but they are working for the enemy.)
  ¶ 12:20 AM

  Irritated
While a million people in Washington and Oregon are suffering the effects of last week's hurricane (Yes, I know it's not officially a hurricane, but the physical reality is identical) the media are still telling the story ONLY in terms of those three idiot climbers on Mount Hood. While hundreds of houses are damaged or destroyed, while a million people are still without power, the only thing that matters is how the weather will affect those three idiots.

What makes this especially peculiar is that the networks are ignoring the human-interest stories that would normally be the center of their coverage. This clip from KING-TV in Seattle, for instance. A rather sweet family of Somali immigrants, unaccustomed to urban living and certainly unaccustomed to cold weather, used a hibachi grill to cook their food when the electricity went out, and ended up with carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily they all survived.

Ordinarily, the networks would take this story and run with it: Where is the Federal Government? Why does Cowboy Bush hate these Mohammedan immigrants so much that he doesn't fly directly to their apartment and help them? Nope, we don't hear any of that junk. None of the usual concern for poor people, which might actually be appropriate here. Nope, it's all about those three rich dickheads who put themselves into a position of risk, and all about how our military is wasting its resources to rescue them. Except that the stories are not calling it a waste of resources; if anything they are wishing for even more military waste.

[Incidentally, I didn't lose power or suffer serious property damage this time, thank heaven. For some reason this part of Spokane wasn't affected as badly as other areas. In most storms it's the other way around.]

-----

Update on Monday: Fox's Shep Smith, bless his syntactically peculiar heart, is finally giving some decent attention to the 'powerless masses' in Seattle.
  ¶ 11:22 AM

  Memory puzzle



Got a letter from the Manhattan High reunion committee; they're preparing the 40th reunion of the Class of 1967. The head of the committee added a personal note at the end of the form letter, which has given my memory cells a true workout.

Here's the note:

"Hi David - saw Mr. Guest recently - he always asks about you - we laugh about the 'Applesauce' sign." --- Linda.

I remember Linda, the head of the committee. She wasn't among the nerds or hoods, so I didn't spend much time with her, though I knew just about everyone in the class on a speaking basis. Linda was one of those nice solid mature types who clearly wouldn't change much upon reaching adulthood.

The rest is more puzzling. Mr. Guest was the sixth grade teacher at Lee School; he was about 40 then, so he must be about 85 now.

Linda's reference to Mr. Guest without explanation or context would indicate that she was in the same class.

But what in the world was the "Applesauce sign"?

After digging through piles of dusty neurons, I finally caught a glimmer of the event. Mr. Guest liked to have the students prepare and recite speeches, debates, and poems. I remember the poetry sharply because it required hard and satisfying work, but the speeches have faded from lack of recharging through the years. For one of those speeches, I decided it would be funny to use Applause and Laughter signs at appropriate points, and I must have finished off with an "Applesauce" sign replacing the "Applause". It must have been funny at the time, at least by 6th-grade standards!

What's really strange about all of this is the realization that somebody else remembers part of my life better than I do.

"I was there, so I should remember it best" seems like common sense, but it obviously isn't. In this case, the last year of plain uncomplicated childhood was probably swamped out by the next three years of extreme stress (i.e. puberty and junior high).
  ¶ 9:00 PM

  Gusher, maybe for real this time?




Keeping up the tradition: It appears, astonishingly enough, that both the House and the Senate have acted in concert this time ... no cute games ... to open up more of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling. The Senate approved the omnibus package including the drilling by 79-9. Of the 9 No votes, 8 were 'Republicans', which means the 'Democrats' can no longer be called the anti-drilling party.

Still no action by either Congress or the Vichy Government on opening up Alaska.
  ¶ 5:32 AM

  And speaking of...
While I'm thinking about rediscovering things that were hidden through the 20th century, and while I'm thinking about Italian scientists....

An Italian archeologist has uncovered the tomb of St. Paul, underneath the altar of the Roman basilica of St. Paul-outside-the-Walls.

Archeologist Giorgio Filippi confirmed that his team has completed excavations around the altar of the ancient basilica, discovering the sarcophagus located there.

St. Paul-outside-the-Walls was built in 390, on the site of St. Paul’s tomb. The sarcophagus was visible until the 19th century, when the basilica was destroyed by fire and rebuilt, with the new altar on top of the site where the old crypt was located. In 2002, the Vatican authorized an archeological dig to recover the tomb of St. Paul and make it available to the public for veneration. (from Catholic World News)

This isn't truly a discovery, since the tomb was known to be there. Still, it's a nice bit of synchronicity, and may reveal some interesting artifacts. Scientific techniques have certainly improved even if theories haven't!
  ¶ 9:02 PM

  Water, water, everywhere



Based on the last information sent by the Mars explorer vehicle, it now appears that Mars has water on or near its surface... which means that Mars may indeed have some kind of life.

The question of water on Mars is among the very few subjects I still remember from high-school science classes. We learned that Schiaparelli had "falsely" seen water flowing on Mars back in the 1870's, and that other astronomers had later debunked the claim. Ha, ha, ha, we learned; those early scientists were so dumb and ridiculous, and the great 20th Century Scientific Consensus is always right.

Well, old Schiaparelli has the last laugh. Mars has water, and thus possibly life.

In the end, we'll see that most of these Great 20th Century Scientific Consensi are wrong, and that the 19th century understanding of most subjects, including human behavior, atoms, and climate, was right after all.

= = = = =




Meanwhile, saline water also appears on the floor of Congress, as the Republicans illustrate graphically their complete failure to learn anything at all. They have spent the last few days serenading their departing colleagues, complete with tears, sniffles and nose-blowing. Between the weepfests, apparently as a bit of comic relief from their extreme passion, they pass desperately urgent and important laws naming the Post Office in North Sasquadaucus, New York after Mrs. Thelma Hogbert Knowles.

You'd think a losing party would want to start repairing its reputation, but no.

These idiots only show us even more dramatically why they had to be kicked out.

= = = = =

An afterthought: I've knocked NASA early and often for its continued waste of money and time on manned exploration. (Let's go to the moon! What, you mean we already did that? 30 years ago? Wow, I don't remember that!) But the robotic explorers, on Mars and other planets, have contributed hugely to science, with minimal expense. So let me say a heartfelt Bravo to the robotic side of NASA, which is doing a wonderful job.
  ¶ 8:26 PM

  Teddy speaks ... in his own voice.



A couple weeks ago the folks over at NRO were discussing whether Newt's voice would be a disadvantage in running for President. They quoted historians to the effect that Teddy Roosevelt had a "squeaky voice" and was nevertheless elected.

Since Polistra is a fan of both Newt and TR, she decided to settle the question.

Oddly, recordings of TR are not easily available online; at least not directly via Google. So the invaluable OtrCat comes to the rescue.

Here is a brief sample of Teddy Roosevelt speaking. Apparently this was first recorded on an Edison cylinder then transcribed later to disk, and finally to digital form. Doesn't sound squeaky at all! A low tenor, pretty much the same range as Newt's voice. It does sound strange to modern ears because TR was using the sing-song intonation common to all American political speeches in that era. This 'music' was still common in the '40s; it didn't fully disappear until Reagan brought the style of radio announcers into political speech in the '50s.

Listen!
  ¶ 3:01 PM

  Accuracy


Polistra hates mislabeling and mis-description more than anything else in this world. Any step that leads to accurate descriptions and accurate perceptions is a good thing, regardless of its other consequences.

For instance, Democrats taking Congress is a good thing because Congress has been acting in a purely leftist direction. The alleged Republicans, especially George W. Vichy, have been intentionally confusing the voters by doing exactly what Teddy Kennedy would do, then claiming to be 'conservative'. The voters weren't fooled. If Teddy Kennedy is going to be emperor, we need to have his name (or his party's name) on his decisions, so voters can see who stands for what.

And in today's news, Bolton resigning as UN ambassador is a good thing, because it explodes Vichy's peculiar delusion that the UN can be reformed, or that the UN can be used for our purposes. What did Bolton accomplish? He did say some things that need to be said, but in the end he didn't change the UN by even one millimeter. The only thing we should do with the UN is ignore it and de-fund it. Let it rant and rave without our support.

= = = = =

In a war for the survival of civilization, we cannot base our actions and strategies on delusions.

= = = = =

Later: The new SecDef Gates seems to appreciate accuracy. His statement that we are "not winning in Iraq" is refreshingly accurate, after all the nonsense we've been hearing from the Vichy Government. I found another of his statements, less publicized, to be even more interesting. He observed that the intelligence community under Negroponte is still functioning poorly; that several heads still need to roll within CIA; and that he (Gates) would work with the President to "help" Negroponte in rolling those bad heads. Since Gates was formerly head of CIA, he speaks with considerable authority on this subject. About damn time.

  ¶ 11:32 AM

  Knocking down Rangel
Charles Rangel's argument for the draft has occupied the news discussion yesterday and today. Rangel says that we wouldn't get into bad wars if the elite had sons and daughters in the military.

This argument can be knocked down utterly and completely with just one sentence, but I haven't heard anyone use this knockdown. [I was waiting for Rush to reach it this morning, but he hasn't yet....]

So here goes:

It didn't stop Vietnam.

In 1961, the draft had been in use for a century, and its effects were deeply infused in our culture and emotions. Government officials knew that any man could be drafted - though they had always been able to protect their own sons to some extent.

Despite that, they got us into an elective war, and proceeded to fight it incompetently so as to grind up a maximum number of draftees with a minimum of results.

It was the incompetence that led us to shun elective wars from then on. If we had fought properly, the 'Vietnam Syndrome' wouldn't have evolved.

Same thing now, unfortunately. If we had killed Saddam, then established Kurdistan as a base, allowing the Arab savages to continue killing each other for sport, we would have a genuine victory. Our soldiers would be available to fight other battles. This availability by itself would deter enemy actions, thus requiring less work for the soldiers.

But because George W. Vichy has acted with breathtaking incompetence, violating every long-standing rule of war, strategy and common sense, we are firmly back in the 'Vietnam Syndrome'.
  ¶ 9:40 AM

  Worth waking up for.....


Mitt Romney has just done something unprecedented. He is forcing his legislators to follow their own oath of office.

In his own unique and elegantly crafted words:

=====

It’s quite an interesting view I get from those windows.

All I have to do is glance this way to see the stream of tourists. They come in duck boats, trolleys, and as foot pilgrims.

They’re not here for the beauty. They’re here for the history.

For this was the place where an astounding idea was born. It revolutionized America, it revolutionized the world.

The idea was this: our nation would be guided by the voice of the people.

This nation would trust the voice of the people rather than the wisdom of a king, or anyone else.

The idea was embodied in the first Constitution, written by John Adams, here in Massachusetts. It established how the voice of the people would be heard – through elections and votes, petitions and initiatives, representatives and senators.

Lincoln said that as elected leaders, we promise to follow the law, to follow the Constitution. He called this “America’s political religion.”

Last week, 109 legislators decided to reject the law, abandon the Constitution, and violate their oath of office.

For the Constitution plainly states that when a qualified petition is placed before them, the legislature “shall” vote. It does not say may vote, or vote if its procedures permit a vote, or vote if there are enough of the members in attendance. It says “shall” vote.

A decision not to vote is a decision to usurp the Constitution, to abandon democracy and substitute a form of what this nation’s founders called tyranny, that is, the imposition of the will of those in power, on the people.

As I listened to the debate in the legislative session last week, I was struck by the irony, and the hypocrisy. Legislators so energized to protect the newly discovered gay right to marry had no compunction about trammeling the long established, constitutional right of the people to vote.

The issue now before us is not whether same sex couples should marry. The issue before us today is whether 109 legislators will follow the Constitution.

Tomorrow, I will send these 109 a copy of the Constitution and of their oath of office.

And this week, we will file an action before the courts, calling upon the judiciary to protect the constitutional rights of our citizens.

Let us not see this state, which first established constitutional democracy, become the first to abandon it.

=====

Unlike the feds, most state governors and legislatures do follow their constitutions most of the time. But this is the first time in living memory that an executive has decided to require his own criminal legislature to follow its own laws and oaths.

Compare this to George W. Vichy, who verbally criticizes criminal sabotage by judges and then meekly obeys the criminal "decisions".

O Lord, how do we get Romney to serve as President NOW?
  ¶ 8:27 PM

  Time for a rest




Two weeks of illness followed by an unending stream of atrocious weather has thrown me for a loop. I've decided to focus less on the uniformly dismal realms of war and politics, in order to cut stress.

At the same time, I need to turn my 'graphic mind' toward the next edition of speech & hearing courseware, which is starting to take shape.

So it's only polite and proper to give Polistra a good long rest. Until she has something to say, of course!
  ¶ 10:20 PM

  Brief comments on election...
Well, this is what I wanted and what I voted for. It would be tremendously better if America had three or four parties; in that setup each party could carry a meaningful message, and you could replace something bad with something clearly better. Given the two-party setup, the only way to knock some sense into one brand is to pick the other one.

Joe Lieberman could form the core of a new party.

Another thing I'm watching: Rick Santorum and J.D. Hayworth were (rather surprisingly) defeated. Santorum and Hayworth are tough-minded independent thinkers; Hayworth probably the nearest thing to Teddy Roosevelt in today's setting. With both of these guys thoroughly disgusted by party antics, and free of party loyalty, they will be speaking even more freely.

The media and the parties are still discussing politics in terms of The Issues. It's blazingly obvious that The Issues were not nearly as important to the voters; what the voters want is just plain competence. As in GET SOME DAMN THING DONE. JUST ONE DAMN THING WOULD BE FINE, IF YOU ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH IT.

For example, a subject I've mentioned here often: opening up more territory for oil exploration, in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. More than once the House and Senate approved ANWR, each time cleverly understanding that the other house would turn it down. Net result: Zero. George Vichy also had a chance to accomplish these goals by executive order. Net result: Zero. All of them were more concerned with continuing to Have The Issue.

We don't give a happy horseshit about your continued ability to hammer the opposition or make clever ads. JUST GET ONE DAMN THING DONE.

-----

Interesting observation by Scarborough on MSNBC just now... says that the replacement of Rumsfeld marks the end of the idealistic Wilson approach. From here on, he thinks, Bush will be listening more to hard-nosed realists who don't give a damn about 'young democracies' or 'transforming the Arab world', and who care mainly about defending this country against its enemies.

Lord, let it be so!
  ¶ 9:04 AM

  Teddy speaks to us....


Polistra has been reading a 1916 book by Teddy Roosevelt, meant to persuade Americans that Wilson's pacifism was idiotic. Some of the details are obsolete but most of it works beautifully today.

On "war settles nothing":

A sillier falsehood has never been uttered than the falsehood that "war settles nothing". War settled the independence of this country; war settled the question of union, and war settled the question of slavery. Pacifists pretend to speak in the interests of morality. It is a poor thing for professed moralists to rest their case on a falsehood. Many of the greatest events of history have been settled by war. Many of the greatest advances in humanity have been due to successful wars for righteousness.

Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment, solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa, in addition to being rent asunder by sectarian animosities, had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Mohammedans were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, and on up to and including the 17th century, had not possessed a millitary equality with, and gradually a superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan, and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.

On the supposed conflict between militarism and "moral values", or in modern phrasing, the idea that we must win hearts and minds by being "better than them":

The real question which modern peace-loving nations have to face is not how the militaristic or warlike spirit within their own borders will affect these "values", but how failure on their part to resist the militarism of an unscrupulous neighbor will affect them. Belgium had a very keen sense of the "preciousness of human life" and of "the need for the care of child welfare" ... But all these "social values" existed in Belgium only up to the end of July, 1914. Not a vestige of them remained in 1915. To discuss them as regards present-day Belgium is sheer prattle, simply because on August 4, 1914, Belgium had not prepared her military strength. ... At this moment the Armenians, who for some centuries have seduluously avoided militarism and war, and have practically applied advanced pacifist principles, are suffering a fate, if possible, worse than that of the Belgians; and they are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors the Turks have not been pacifists but militarists. They haven't the vestige of a "social value" left, to be "affected" by militarism or by anything else.

More later....
  ¶ 10:26 AM

  1.5 Cheers!

For the record, I should cheer the fact that the Iraqi court actually managed to give Saddam a death sentence. I wasn't at all sure this would happen. Now they need to run through 13 more trials.

What I'm actually cheering about, though, is the fact that the judge had the guts to kick Ramsey Clark out of court. Too bad we don't have any judges like this ... all of ours are enthusiastically on the same side as Clark. Maybe we should import some Kurds to serve as judges.
  ¶ 9:12 AM

  Do GEICO ads work?
Spokane is getting its first noticeable snow of the year right now. Won't amount to much, judging by the radar. When I poked my head out the door to check on its progress, I saw a couple of kids trying to play with the snow. One of them was singing "It's snowing. It's snowing. It's my birthday. It's my birthday ..." to the same tune as the Geico ad featuring Real Actor Vern Troyer. [The midget wearing sunglasses.]
  ¶ 3:19 PM

  "We are sleepwalking toward disaster."
An invaluable short speech and discussion by Winston Churchill's grandson, in the Seattle City Club. WC3 finishes off the Bush/Wilson fantasy of applying democracy to Mohammedans. For instance: In two generations, France will be majority Mohammedan. No ifs, ands or buts; existing birth patterns ensure it. At that point democracy will bring Sharia law to France.

Separate audio and video links (the audio is probably sufficient, because there's not much happening visually!)

Audio

Video
  ¶ 1:00 PM

  Peters catches on
Ralph Peters, who should be Secretary of Defense, has finally and grudgingly admitted that Iraq is broken.

Since I'm ill with some kind of flu this week, I'm not up to snuff on writing... so I'll "reprint" something I wrote in June of '05, leaving out some bits that referred to immediate events.

=====

Reprinted:

On a deeper level, this is what happens when an aphasic administration starts a war without communicating the real reasons for fighting. The real strategy is quite logical and comprehensible, given what we knew at the time, but for reasons I can't begin to fathom, Zenmaster Bushi decided to explain the war solely to the UN, using reasons crafted to appeal to the UN. In a republic, the President's job is to get his own country behind a war, not to gather support from permanently hostile nations like France.

George Friedman (not Tom!) in his book America's Secret War, lays out the underpinnings of our strategy and how it came about. Friedman is harshly critical of our mistakes, but he differs from the [Leninists] in that he actually wants to see us win.

In super-condensed form: Partly we were still fighting the last war. All of our strategic and intelligence forces were still totally nuke-minded. When 9/11 happened, the paralyzing fear was that Osama would hit us next with fission. At the same time, CIA took a new look at its sources, and decided to pay close attention to those who had been predicting 9/11. In late October, two of those sources independently said that Osama had a suitcase nuke already in place, ready to take New York. "From that briefing onward, the entire strategy of the war was changed. The obsession with WMD and nuclear weapons became an obsession that changed the war permanently." Then more nukes were discovered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.
In hindsight, the whole thing was entirely too neat; but "given the zero-risk premises of the Defense Department, how could the United States ignore the report?"

Again in hindsight, this appears to be an effort by Pakistan to grab full US support in its perpetual feud with India, which at that moment (early 2002) looked like a potential small nuclear war. Bush gave Musharraf a choice. If he wanted our support, he had to kick out the pro-Osama elements in his own government and help us. (It appears now that this bargain has worked fairly well.)

So it was in that atmosphere of total nuclear panic that we took the word of Chalabi and others who were serving their own ends. Bush never told the American public how awful the world looked at that moment; if he had, he might have gained a wider sympathy for the mis-aimed effort, and critics might have been more inclined toward helping instead of harming.

There were other reasons for taking out Iraq, which make good sense but have never been officially stated. "The central dilemma the US now faced was how to get the Saudis into the war. The Saudis did not think the US was going to win this war. They understood the region and their own country far better ... and the US did not terrify the Saudis nearly as much as Al Qaeda did. Somehow the US had to demonstrate just how serious and frightening it could be, and then be in a position to put massive military and political pressure on the Saudis. This was the origin of the US decision to invade Iraq. There were other strands, such as fear of WMD, concern that Al Qaeda was collaborating with the Iraqis, and a genuine feeling that Saddam was a monster. But to understand the American decision to invade Iraq, it is essential to understand the American concern with the course Saudi Arabia was taking amid growing evidence that the Saudis were financing Al Qaeda."

(End Friedman, back to me.) This line of reasoning still makes sense, and could be fleshed out by good rhetoric, if Bush had any desire to help Americans understand what he's doing. I have to conclude that he has no such desire.

Still, errors or no errors, we now have Saddam out of power (though not dead, which to my mind is a huge error) and we have large parts of Iraq turning toward a new kind of governance. If we're smart, we'll separate the three parts, wall off the Sunnis, and let them continue being Arab savages. We owe a lot to the Kurds, who have been developing a civilized little country since 1991. They don't deserve to be dragged down by Arabs. (However, I'd be happy if events prove me wrong on the need for separation!)

=====

End reprint.

Well, events have proven the 'separationist' view to be right. Arabs have shown themselves to be utterly incapable of assuming any aspect of civilization. This shouldn't have been surprising.
  ¶ 9:33 AM

  Kerry reveals
Amid his snarky "corrections" of what he "meant to say", Kerry accidentally revealed that the supposed "real meaning" just wasn't there at all.

What he said (shortened a bit): If you don't study hard, you'll get stuck in Iraq.

His "correction" was: "I forgot to say us. I meant to say they got us stuck in Iraq, not they got stuck in Iraq.

But the original sentence wasn't about any they, it was about you. He was speaking to students, advising them about their futures.

Let's try his correction: "If you don't study hard, they got us stuck in Iraq."

Nobody, not even a clumsy talker like Kerry or an aphasic like Bush, would speak that sentence. It's beyond ungrammatical; it's simply impossible for any native English speaker to produce that sentence.

Okay, so let's skip the they entirely and just plug in the us:
"If you don't study hard, you'll get us stuck in Iraq."
This could make sense if you know in advance that one of the students is going to become President, but the problem is that we're already stuck in Iraq.

Well, does the they got construction belong on the sentence Kerry claims he was trying to say?

"Because George Bush didn't study hard, they got us stuck in Iraq."

Nope, doesn't work either.

There is simply no way to reach what Kerry claims he meant from what he said, by any combination of missing words or clumsy locutions.

I suspect Kerry's mind is still on Vietnam, not Iraq. In the case of Vietnam, several presidents got us stuck there, in an incremental process, so they makes sense referring to Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
  ¶ 3:29 PM