Plus ça change ....
At least among American Commies.

Here's a 20-second segment from the 1952 radio show "I was a Communist for the FBI", overacted but largely factual stories drawn from the experiences of a double agent. In this episode, the Commies were planning to protest the House Unamerican Activities Committee. You should be able to recognize precursors of Comrade Gore, Comrade Sheehan, and Comrade Kerry in this short bit.

Sidenote: I think "Plus ça change" must be the single most popular title for blog entries. I googled the phrase in order to paste the cedilla character without having to dig out my old ASCII documentation. [This trick works well for all sorts of diacritic characters, because Google searches by the unmarked character but shows the marked.] Google gives 25 million responses to the phrase, and the majority seem to be blog entry titles!
  ¶ 8:06 AM

  Yup.

Can't say it any better than Andy McCarthy at NRO.

Increasing the size of the Caliphate is Osama's goal, not ours. Or so I naively and mistakenly thought.

To be sure, sometimes you have to retreat or avoid an important battle for tactical reasons. But finishing one stage of the war by giving the enemy exactly what he wanted is not a tactical detour. It is self-imposed defeat.

And when America and Israel commit partial suicide at the same moment, Allah is ecstatic.
  ¶ 8:39 AM

  More seriously, I'm astonished to hear all the great gray experts, including the big-name Neocons, saying things like "Well, of course, the burden is now on the Palestinian leaders to fulfill their side of the bargain."

Burden? Burden? Their only burden is to gather enough weapons and external support to retake Jerusalem.

Funny, all these years I thought "Never again" was shorthand for "We will never again allow Jews to be pushed around." Obviously I was wrong. When spoken by the establishment, it obviously means "We will never again go to the trouble of protecting those pesky Jews."

-----

Fair & balanced update... Michael Medved, in attempting to defend Sharon's actions, makes a couple of worthy points. He says (1) trying to rule over Gaza was a tremendous burden for Israel, using military resources that could have been elsewhere. (2) The scattered Jewish settlers were in effect serving as hostages, making it harder for Israel to strike at terrorist supporters in Gaza. The latter point will be worth watching. It will require some fast and lethal proof to counter the sense of Arab momentum, though.
  ¶ 9:57 AM

  The Sharon Solution
Wow! What a refreshing new non-linear idea! Surrender your country to the enemy to gain peace! Say! If it works for Ariel, why won't it work for George? Let's do it!

The central part of this map, still confusingly marked as "United States", will actually be given to the Original Tribes to divide among themselves, after disarming all the non-Original settlers.




[Just in case there's any doubt at all, I am being sardonic here. Given the infinitely literal-minded nature of many Webizens, this type of disclaimer is necessary.]
  ¶ 9:10 AM

  Guinness book of suckers. 5. He trusted Democrats.

4. He trusted Saddam.

3. Nuff said.

2. He trusted Hitler.

1. New entry: He trusted Arabs!!!!!!  ¶ 7:03 AM

  Hot & Cold Running Science
Here's a little quiz. What do you think will happen to the car at the end of this repeating clip?




Do you think it will go up like this?



Or down like this?



If you chose Up (A), congratulations! You are either a six-week-old kitten or a Professional Climatologist!

If you chose Down (B), you are more likely a full-grown mammal with some experience of the way the world works.

Granted, the last hill is slightly taller than the previous ones. So a full-grown human with some knowledge of history might ask if we've been on a taller hill before, and if so, what happened then? Well, we have been on a taller hill before, around 1000 AD. And some interesting things did happen in that period. Northern countries became more friendly to human habitation. Mohammedans took over most of Europe. After several decades of dillying around, Christians picked a strong Pope, and Christianity finally fought back. (Sounds familiar, for some reason.) Christians were also starting universities, and the Renaissance was just popping up. Was Africa uninhabitable? Not 'ardly. There was a high civilization in Mali, of all places. How could that be? Well, for one thing, Karl Marx wasn't born yet, so Africans hadn't been hopelessly ruined by his evil philosophy.

-----

Here's a set of graphs scanned (atrociously) from a 1976 National Geographic, at a time when science was still science. That is, scientists were capable of reading graphs, asking questions, and waiting for the data before answering the questions.

At that time, the consensus was that we were heading for a cooling trend, because the last little piece of the graph was going down. But that consensus was not a Religious Axiom, and there was no Inquisition in academe.


Zoom
  ¶ 8:28 PM

  The Old Tone
Listen.

This is a 2-minute segment from the end of Fibber's radio program, NBC's top-rated comedy, marking V-E day in May of 1945. Note the explicit Christianity; note the appeal to continue our efforts until the whole thing is done; note the mention of Gold-Star mothers. At that point, it looked like we might need one or two more years to finish off Japan. Luckily, the miracle of fission shortened that time.

Now compare with any 2 minutes of today's enemy-occupied media, lionizing traitors, weakening our morale, and turning Gold Star Mothers into a vicious mocking slander.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.

  ¶ 9:22 AM

  Polistra's Plea to the President
Replace Spokesjelly Scott McClellan with Gordon Cucullu. Give Cucullu free rein.

Now.

It's probably too late, but at least you can stop further damage.

Read my lips:

  ¶ 7:53 PM

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Listening to the Fox Sunday morning discussion on Traitor Sheehan. One of the reporters just mentioned that he had talked with Sheehan, and that she was 'engagingly naive', stating that she knew very little about the intricacies of politics and didn't want to influence people on those other subjects. Absolute bullshit. Reporter, you're the naive one. "Oh, I'm not really political; I just happened to get passionate about this one issue" is THE OLDEST FUCKING LEFTIST GAMBIT IN THE GODDAMN BOOK.

Rosa Parks wasn't a housemaid who happened to get tired of sitting in the back of the bus; she was a long-time leftist activist. Betty Friedan wasn't an abused housewife who had an epiphany; she was a lifelong Stalinist. And on and on. Among the serried ranks of American Commie heroines, the only one I can remember who was not a Commie first was Karen Silkwood.

More generally, why in the fucking hell do we expect a wartime President to be the National Counselor and Psychotherapist? Why do we expect any President to pay attention to any individual? His job is to protect the Nation. Doing that job properly, especially in wartime, requires ignoring and even coldly sacrificing individuals. He will do far more for national morale, which happens to include individual morale, if he concentrates on HARD AND FIERCE fighting, if he tells us about our successes, and if he honestly explains what he is doing and why. I don't know if any of those things are happening; if so, the information isn't reaching this neck of the woods. This is why Traitor Sheehan has resonance.
  ¶ 9:25 AM

  Random notes [Introspection alert!]
Dreams

Over the years my dream mode has changed, presumably reflecting changes in daytime brain usage. Up till age 33, I was doing jobs with low mental requirements and engaging in considerable social activity on the side: traveling, volunteering, hanging with friends. Dreams were quite dull and standard: houses, womb-escape symbols like narrowing stairways, naked in public, falling, all that textbook stuff.

At 33, after encountering a PC with a primitive sound card, I jumped feet first into graphics programming, which absorbed 100% of my mind for the first time. Suddenly dreams became more structured and closer to reality. Before that point, a naked-teaching dream would have used a superficial childlike view of technical matters. Circuit schematics would look vaguely like circuits but would be meaningless. After that point, if I was nakedly drawing a circuit on the blackboard, it would be fully genuine and often helpful to my current project.

A second change happened around 1998, as my work transitioned toward more graphic design and less programming. Some dreams became fully plotted, with original characters and story-lines that I'd never encountered in books, and often with Lucid segments.

One of those this morning. The world was divided into psychics and non-psychics. The psychics were called sorcerers, wore flowing black robes, and had special privileges. (I've never done any of that role-playing stuff, nor read any books of that type, so have no idea where this came from!) I was a lowly non-psychic; toward the end of the dream, I was cleaning a coffeepot, wishing that I could have the privilege of drinking coffee. At that point I thought, Wait a minute, dammit, this is a dream; if I want coffee, all I have to do is wake up and go into the kitchen. So I did.

--

Semi-related:

After about 5 months of building this illustrated blog, I notice that it makes time slow down in a pleasant way. The Theory of Geritol Relativity is well-known: Time accelerates with increasing age. [Also known as the Lorentz-Welk Contraction.] The previous two years, when I was working hard on courseware projects, ran entirely too fast -- as seen in the rear-view mirror, anyway. Since I started this blog, time has regained much of its old mass and substance. Each of these 5 blog-months feels as solid and long as one courseware-year. And, as Martha would say, that's A Good Thing. Not sure why it's different, though. Described objectively, the work involves the same set of skills. Maybe it's a question of 'dailiness': on the previous projects, I had a year or so to complete an entire blob of stuff, so spent that year in a cycle, adding pieces here and there, debugging the result. With a blog, each day's bit of text and image is new. That's one theory anyway.

-----

Just-onces

Just once I'd like to see a news item relating to Marilyn Monroe that does NOT use the Happy Birthday JFK clip.

Just once I'd like to see a President do the State of the Union the way it was supposed to happen: a document sent to Congress. It was not meant to be a circus.

Just once I'd like to hear a Bush speech that doesn't include the word 'strong' in every sentence.

Just once I'd like to hear Bush talk about economics without using that mysterious technical term 'gooderservice'.

Just once I'd like to get a letter from a charitable organization that doesn't use "Changing the world one _______ at a time" for its slogan.

-----

Busy signals

The Web, for all of its wondrous complexity, still gets along without the clear and predictable signals of the good old landline phone system. On the telephone, a busy signal means busy; a fast busy means a busy trunk line; a continued ringing means the party isn't answering; a 'disconnected' voice message means the phone is disconnected. The Web has dozens of specific-sounding error messages, but none of them predictably signal the condition they nominally describe. Any one of the messages could, and often does, mean 'temporarily busy'.

=====

Later sidenote about dreams: Most dreams feature familiar people, not original characters. But the familiar characters are an oddly restricted set. They are drawn from the people I knew in the 1970s, or more precisely 1966-1979. People I knew only before high school never appear, and people I met after 1978 never appear, even in dreams that are otherwise set in the present.
  ¶ 8:54 AM

  Weldon and Able Danger
Rep. Curt Weldon is unquestionably the man of the hour. While the Administration continues to kowtow to State and CIA, following the atrocious New Tone rules which leave it unable to call evil by its correct name, Weldon is telling the story that desperately needs to be told.

In the blog world, Captain's Quarters is master of the story.

Considering that Iraqi intel agents were working in Germany at the same time when Atta was working in Germany, I'm inclined to think CIA's denial of Atta's Prague meeting is a classic piece of misdirection. Sort of like "No, Mom, I didn't break Mr. Wilson's window on Tuesday morning at 9:30", or "I didn't have sex with That Woman in the Oval Office." As long as everyone is arguing about Prague, nobody bothers to ask whether they could have met in Hamburg, which would have been considerably easier.

Update 8/16: seems to be a lot of backtracking, handwashing, and mea-culpaing on this question. I'm going to stick with Weldon. Over the years, living on both sides of the political spectrum, I've learned a few things. First, the authorities almost always have some kind of informers or double agents in troublesome groups. Second, the presence of such informers makes it hard for the authorities to state the full truth. Third, when a story gets as fuzzy and contradictory as this one, you can be sure the gov't is tripping over its own feet because of such informers. Fourth, we knew a whole lot about Atta and his buddies immediately after 9/11. If they were strictly a surprise, it would have taken months to gain that much info.

Now, at this point in the argument, a leftist would take off into the stratosphere of screechy rage, blaming the gov't for "creating" al Qaeda. That's nonsense, of course. I just wish the gov't would get over the whole Watergate phobia, and find a positive way to acknowledge that it does gather internal intelligence, and that we are generally safer because of such information. Wouldn't it be refreshing?
  ¶ 7:29 PM

  Sorry, wrong number


News item: "Scholars studying a newly discovered fragment of the oldest known copy of the New Testament have determined that the Mark of the Beast is actually 616, not 666."

What a waste. All those centuries of paranoid brainpower devoted to finding 666 in the names and serial numbers of people and things.... and all those gallons of tattoo ink and spray paint wasted by young would-be Satanists marking their bodies and neighborhoods.

Hmm... If a real Satan wanted to protect his pet number, so that his marked minions could do their dastardly deeds undetected, wonder how he'd do it? Hmm.
  ¶ 6:22 PM

  Towels and nickels
I heard this little story from one of my father's K-State coworkers when we moved to Manhattan in 1956. Supposedly this had occurred the previous summer, so it's 50 years old now. As far as I know it's never been published anywhere; if the WPA Writers Project had still been active then, I suspect they would have appreciated and included this story. Probably true, possibly apocryphal, certainly iconic.

Integration was a hot topic in 1955.

The city of Manhattan had a separate black high school, which was merged immediately after Brown vs Board. But the city swimming pool wasn't affected by that legal change. Blacks were still relegated to Douglass Pool, down by the railroad, while whites had the nicer pool in the City Park.

K-State, though, had been integrated from the start, and had graduated important black scholars and writers as early as 1880. In the '50s K-State, being a world-class engineering and agriculture school, had a wide variety of foreign students. (Cosmopolitan Kansas? Yep.) K-State also had a long history of contrarian tendencies, dating from the Abolitionist origins of northeastern Kansas. Aggies were protesting long before protesting was cool.

So a group of college contrarians decided to do something about Douglass Pool, and decided to do it mathematically. One fine summer morning, they gathered up a dozen nice clean-cut foreign students, made sure each of them had a towel and a nickel for admission, and walked them down to the city pool.......



  ¶ 8:28 PM

  Well, poop. A while back I noted some potentially good news from Oklahoma, in the form of a plan to rejuvenate two oil and gas refineries that had been dormant for years. Turns out I should have stuck with my initial skepticism. The planner has disappeared, leaving behind nothing but unpaid rent.

A former refinery manager, Paul Nicholson, said he volunteered much of his time and effort to Winkelman's plans to reopen the Thomas refinery after Winkelman initially contacted him early this year.

Nicholson said his skepticism grew more and more as Winkelman told him he was securing financing from Texas underwriters to the tune of $400 million, yet in the same breath told him he was getting around Enid on a bicycle.

"He (Winkelman) pulled the rug out from all of us. Apparently he was a dreamer. He has done a lot of things to the wrong people. He left me high and dry," Nicholson said.

Grrrrr.

He doesn't appear to have gained any money from the whole scheme, though, and I don't see how he could have gained money without actually building things.
  ¶ 12:42 PM

  NRO's pin-dance
Podhoretz at NRO observes this morning:

What astonishes me in the course of this discussion (to judge from the blizzards of e-mails and other blog items done on this debate) is that I, a relatively secular person, am arguing the position that we cannot understand the mystery of life without faith -- and that a great many pro-llfers, whose commitment to life is religious in nature and whose religion plays a far more central role in their lives than it does in mine, are arguing with me on the grounds that the whole business can be discerned entirely through reason and science.

What should astonish him is that he's essentially taking the leftist side in this discussion. The crossover itself shouldn't be astonishing; Reagan discussed it in the early '80s.

Plain fact: Fundamentalists do agree with science on this point, and secularists, or more precisely 'bio-ethicists', disagree with science. The only possible scientific position is that an egg tells us it's human when it starts dividing. After that, it's human until all signs of organismic function are gone.

This doesn't mean we must say that every death is murder. We don't do that with regular macroscopic visible adults, after all; we can separate death by old age, by disease, by accident, by an unintentional act of another human, by a fully intentional act. Within the latter, we also make various fine distinctions. We've been doing this as long as we've had any form of law.

So we don't need to describe a miscarriage, or the normal slough of menstruation, as murder. Those are natural deaths. We unquestionably need to treat a deliberate abortion as illegal, though we don't have to call it murder. Some abortions have the character of self-defense. And so on. Law already contains the mechanism to make these distinctions.

But any definition, whether allegedly 'scientific' or legal, that gives a less-than-human status to any intermediate stage of life, is religious, because it depends on some notion of ensoulment. And any such definition leaves the field wide open for thanatophiles like Felos and Kevorkian.

[I've discussed this overall point before.]
  ¶ 7:50 AM

  De leg bone connected to de womb bone....
A fairly large discovery in the realm of stem cells. [From 6 Aug paper issue of New Scientist; I don't see it in the online edition.]

Women have long been told that they are born with a fixed number of eggs that eventually run out, triggering the menopause. But now it seems that there may be a way for a woman to replenish her egg stocks. More surprising still is where this egg recharge comes from: stem cells lodged in the bone marrow. If the researchers can show that these bone-marrow-derived eggs can be fertilised and produce healthy offspring, the implications for fertility treatment are huge.

The theory is that germ-line stem cells in the marrow make immature germ cells, which travel through the bloodstream until they hit the ovary, which grabs them and nurtures them into eggs.

Implications for cloning and stem cell research are also huge; if you can develop an egg from bone marrow, you don't need to harvest "genuine" eggs that were "intended" to become actual humans. No zero-sum game, in other words. It will be interesting to watch the ethicists juggling this one.

Hmm... wasn't there something about this in a considerably earlier journal? Something about ribs developing into humans?
  ¶ 10:30 AM

  Hit the 'Undo' button on 1920.
Still thinking about symmetrical vs asymmetrical. Concluded that the ant model is not a bad idea; trouble is, we haven't really implemented it. We've kicked over some piles of dirt, and flushed out the upper layers of one nest, but we've made it crystal clear that we won't kill the queen.

Our original strategic reason for doing Iraq was (1) To show Iran, Syria and Arabia that we can exert force in their back yard. (2) To rig up a base of operations in their back yard.

Iraq was the best choice for such a base because it was central to those three countries, we were already operating in the North, and we had plenty of reasons to revoke Saddam's probation. So okay, now we have the base, but because we didn't have enough sense to kill Saddam when we captured him, we're dealing with constant irritation by Arab ants, which prevents us from exerting the force that was the original reason for the whole business.

I never understood why we didn't explain the operation along those lines, instead of the nonsense about WMD and women's rights, but that's irrelevant now.

Fall back to the original idea. Separate Iraq into its three natural parts, since the 1920 British 'welding' of those parts was a major source of the problem.

Let the Brits have a protectorate on the Shia South, extended over to cover the Syrian border.

Let Kurdistan be a US protectorate. The supposed "reason" for not separating Kurdistan was a bunch of Kissingerian bullshit about stability and Turkey, which never made sense; and Turkey gave up any right to consideration when it refused to help in this war. On top of all that, we owe the Kurds a big one, after Bush Senior's betrayal of their help in 1991.

Fence in the area around Baghdad, cut the pipelines, and let the Sunnis return to their primitive ways. Fill the North and South with tactical nukes, ready to throw outward or inward. Any time we hear a rumor that Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, or Baghdad is funding, supporting, or thinking positively about terrorist activity in the civilized world, we give the appropriate city a U-235 beauty treatment. Remove unsightly blemishes, leave an attractive glow. After three such makeovers are necessary, we toss in a free bonus: transform the queen (Mecca) into a lovely mirror-like pool of glass.
  ¶ 11:47 AM

  Fatwaaaassssup?
For twenty years now, Mohammedans have been striking at American and European interests in the West, without any apology or protest from the allegedly 'moderate side' of that religion.

Suddenly we get heaping helpings of unconditional no-buts apologies and anti-violence fatwas all over the place.

Some trusted experts say that the fatwas are fatuous, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.

What's changed? Why now? The London bombing wasn't the biggest attack by any means, nor the only one that killed fellow Mohammedans.

Polistra has an answer, and a plea to American authorities, in musical form:



Karaoke, anyone?

----

Later (8/5 morning) It's being reported that the International Assn of Police Chiefs is endorsing shoot-to-kill as well. The story as given on TV is a bit misleading, though .... turns out the Assn. actually recommended shooting kamikazes before the London bombings, and they were following the lead of the DC Capitol Police who recommended the procedure a year ago. So the idea began here, oddly enough. Still remains to be seen if any US city police forces will publicly join the crusade. Here's a well-organized collection of stories on the subject.

-----

Benchmark: July 2005 will be remembered as the moment when WW4 was really joined by the West. Up till now, this war has been asymmetrical. Mohammedans in Western countries have mounted a crescendo of attacks for 20 years with no direct response. When we responded at all, it has always been in the Middle East. The London 'shot heard round the world' marked the first symmetrical answer by civilization, the first return fire directed at the local savages. Until now, we were throwing our bullets elsewhere in a peculiar form of lethal ventriloquism.

-----

Yet another irrelevant addendum: Just realized that my own mindset has been changed. Until now, I appreciated the ant analogy: easier to kill the nest than to stop the ants from entering the house. Now that I see the dramatic results of killing ants just before they sting, I'm more inclined to favor the latter method.
  ¶ 11:05 AM

  Random notes
American police, at least in big cities, view their job as protecting criminals and serving the ACLU. The Brits have a radically different view: protect law-abiding citizens from criminals. On the ground, the difference may not be so striking, but the public utterances of police officials are dramatically opposite.

Is there no equivalent of the ACLU in the UK? If there is, how do the police avoid doing its bidding? Could this be a consequence of the British loser-pays system in civil law? Less monetary temptation for anti-civilization forces to take down the police?

-----

Watching the BRAC hearings on C-span is edifying, and not just in terms of statistics about military installations.

From the usual network coverage of Congress, you get the impression that the Party of Treason owns all the articulate speech and oratory, while the Republican 'party' just sits there cowering, or at best stumbles and stutters. You also get the impression that corporate and military leaders are dull and dumb.

BRAC shows an opposite picture. Retired generals and admirals speak with passion and brilliance (and even a few unfeigned tears) about the places and troops that they love; obscure politicians of both parties are articulate and organized. Only a few of the 'big names' appear in these hearings, and they are surprisingly dull and unprepared.

The difference is not primarily media bias; it's more a matter of self-selection. The 'big names', who are mainly Dems, are driven to find cameras with global reach to satisfy their grandstanding addiction, while the executives and generals know that their best loss-cutting strategy in those situations is silence. In BRAC, the networks aren't watching, so real work happens. The back-benchers get a chance to do precisely what they were elected to do: protect the interests of their districts. And they do it magnificently.

It's refreshing and heartening to see that democracy does in fact work.... sometimes. Especially when the legislature is taking responsibility for its own proper job, instead of handing it off to commissions and courts. So why do we need the commission in the first place?

-----

Great news: China has withdrawn its bid for Unocal. This is also heartening, and more evidence that Congress can be effective even without making laws. As a non-social technical type, my first instinct is to discount the power of words: if it ain't concrete action, it ain't nothing. Good to be reminded now and then that I'm wrong about this!

-----
  ¶ 9:09 AM

  Steven Vincent, RIP


I've written to the Murrow Center at Wash State Univ, suggesting that Steven Vincent would be an ideal recipient of the next Murrow Award... posthumously, of course.

Hard to think of anyone in the modern world who comes closer to the tradition of Murrow's London reporting.

Email address:

murrowsymposium@wsu.edu


  ¶ 10:05 AM