Boxing Alcibiades

And... We're Back!

2007-12-04T20:46:00.000-08:00

That was refreshing. And now for a nice cold drink of "let's see if Blogger's improved in the meantime."

Wordpress is handy, and has some nice customer support -- but I'm increasingly irked at the extensive lack of editability. We'll see how this goes.

This site is toast.

2006-06-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

And will soon be demolished. Please update your links to

Happycrow's Eyeball Factory

http://www.happycrow.wordpress.com

Soliciting feedback on new site.

2006-06-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

Need to know if the basic idea works.

(I know, the top bar looks ass. I have no idea why the guy designing it liked that smudge effect.)

Blog Port Has Started

2006-06-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

I've just lost too many posts and post edits here, and am jumping ship to WordPress (and hopefully will stay linked up through the Sciolist group). This blog will be kept up for probably the next week or two, as I work out the kinks, and will then Michelangelo except for a forwarding page.

Here's the page, down to fine-tuning: Happycrow's Eyeball Factory

More hypocrisy from so-called "Catholic Intellectuals"

2006-06-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Meet Benjamin Wiker, a man whose understanding far outstrips his ability to muster an honest argument.

Mr. Wiker has a nice little screed entitled Benedict Contra Nietzsche: A Reflection on Deus Caritas Est, in Crisis Magazine.

He starts out well. It doesn't take a genius to see that some intellectuals who are not Papal Monarchists could use Deus Caritas Est (hereinafter DCE) as an excuse to grind their favorite axe, that being whether or not that axe applies. For instance, Mr. Wiker is absolutely justified in pointing out that Bishop Francis Deniau is probably talking out of his butt if he regards this as a wink-and-a-nod towards softening the Papacy's position on contraception.

Now, whether or not the Papal Monarchy has the grounds to tell us anything about contraception, as Deniau would probably argue against, is one thing, and as an obvious PM supporter, Mr. Wiker can argue that the Pope is entitled to regulate our dental floss, for all I care. Because Mr. Wiker is so focused on demonstrating his position's moral superiority to that of the liberal Bishop, and using Nietzsche as his straw-man whipping boy in the process, that he badly distorts the Encyclical in the process.

Enter the world's most-misunderstood philosopher.

For starters, Mr. Wiker needs to actually read some Nietzsche:

"It was quite surprising to have Benedict open with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity. “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink,” Nietzsche quipped; “he did not die of it but degenerated—into vice.”

Well, actually, Mr. Wiker, no, it's not. But that's because every Christian on earth reads the words "God is dead," and assumes that Nietzsche held the same b.s. views his Nazi sister did -- the same sister who conveniently edited his works while he was in a coma. Of course, Nietzsche doesn't attack Christianity at all -- which anybody who's actually read the text with their eyelids open can tell you. Instead, he argued against hypocrites calling themselves Christians, while simultaneously reducing God to nothing more than a Sunday-morning checkbox.

Go ahead, Mr. Wiker. Take off your ideological blinders for a couple minutes, and crack a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Of course the Pope quotes Nietzsche... Nietzsche is probably the most profound philosopher of the 19th century -- especially when one contrasts the Hegelian nightmare of an intellectual world in which he lived -- and is profoundly friendly to the practice of the Christian Faith.

But by all means, Mr. Wiker, never leave a straw-man unburnt and a convenient whipping-boy unwhipped, if that will allow you to smite the unholy liberal.

Can we get an honest argument from a conservative Catholic, please?

Now, by and large, I have no issue with the general argument Mr. Wiker puts forth, or would be putting forth, if he were willing to do the heavy lifting of writing an intellectually honest argument. But this guy is a Senior Fellow of Biblical Theology, not some holy-roller with a bachelor's degree pretending he understands hermeneutics. So when Mr. Wiker writes the following,

The restoration of eros demands that we reject both the gnostic denial of the reality and goodness of the flesh and the materialist, Epicurean denial of the reality and goodness of the spirit.

Mr. Wiker goes beyond the pale. As, unfortunately, is usual for Conservative Catholics lately. Opposing gnosticism? Great! Tossing an equals sign between Epicureanism and Hedonism, because that's convenient for your argument? The holy-roller in the middle of his second semester of philosophy might make that mistake, but Mr. Wiker, you know better.

And so on, until we get to this lovely gem:

Perhaps, then, Benedict begins with Nietzsche as a prophecy. “I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,” declared Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, “I should prefer to be even a satyr to being a saint.” That is, he would prefer to be less than human than to submit to the reality of a spiritual realm, for that would entail the submission of his will to God.

No, as usual, Mr. Wiker, the Pope's a touch smarter than you are. For starters, on the off chance he actually forgot, Benedict has some folks who can probably remind him that Ecce Homo belongs to a six-letter literary tradition beginning with an "s." In case you're having trouble guessing it, I've heard recently that it rhymes with "flat tire."

Well, the argument descends into a generally-worthwhile, albeit completely misdirected, meditation upon agape as a love that descends from above, and eros as a love that rises creatively from below.

Far from poisoning eros, Christianity not only affirms it, but elevates it beyond its wildest dreams. Nothing is lost; all is divinized.

Yeah, Mr. Wiker, no problem. Pity you don't realize that Nietzsche agrees with you, insofar as you're talking about actual Christians, rather than the Sunday-checkbox crowd.

But, no. Mr. Wiker has to add in the traditional, smugly self-righteousness parting shot so horribly common amongst conservative Catholics these days:

If only the satyrs had ears to hear.

Well, the "satyr," as you termed it, can't hear. He's not around to defend himself, and his works were half-hijacked by a Nazi (not that it takes a genius to see where). And he certainly suffered, on a number of levels, and from syphilis espcially.

In fact, his very last conscious act, before lapsing into a syphilis-induced coma, was to literally hurl himself into the street to throw himself between a coachman and the exhausted horse said coachman was literally whipping to death, shielding the horse with his body and choosing to accept the angry strokes of a vicious man's whip while weeping in sympathy for a cruelly-abused animal.

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16 ).

Remove the beam from your own eye, Mr. Wiker, and crack a copy of Mere Christianity: the "satyr" walking down his road of suffering was closer to God than you're ever likely to get up there on your high and mighty edifice.

Kos just GOT OWNED over at Samizdata

2006-06-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

Here's KOS, on the future of the Democratic Party: Libertarian Democrats.
Here's Perry de Havilland, roundly thrashing him for his ignorance.

First and foremost, I've been saying for several years now, what Markos would have been saying if Perry wasn't unfortunately right (i.e., Kos has no clue what it means to be libertarian). A left-libertarian party is the only way the Dems are going to survive, because the electorate soundly rejects their two cores of power, the Soft Socialists (Kos, the Netroots, and Russ Feingold) and the Communitarians (Hillary, John Kerry, etc.) The latter have structural problems with being elected (and their outright rejection of liberty issues hurts them from the starting gate), and the former are dead in the water, because the Reagan Coalition was set up to fight these guys from Day One. The "Progressives" don't have any trouble getting their message out... the electorate hears it loud and clear, and rejects it outright for the semi-authoritarian pseudo-utopian claptrap that it is.

Going a step beyond Perry, Kos, on the other hand, cannot distinguish that there is a fundamental difference between positive and negative liberty. In other words, there is "freedom from" and "freedom for," and Kos is insensitive to the fairly drastic results of orienting oneself in one or the other direction. (Three guesses which orientation appeals more to the Democrats, and the first fifty don't count.) And to make the matter worse, he seems to posit that positive and negative liberty are unproblematically compatible.

That is a bozo no-no error that any freshman college student reading The Republic should be able to avoid.

In other words, Kos fails to walk the walk, because he has no clue how to talk the talk.

Demogogues on Gay Marriage, round two

2006-06-05T06:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a politics junkie. Not theory, per se, though that comes in, but political news. The Great Game. (Yes, Virginia, I'm aware that this is a specific historical term -- I am blatantly abusing it.)

So, with all these things in the news that truly matter: Iranians protesting against abuses of their government while the Basij and religious secret police literally torture students to death (note to Progressive protestors in USA: you're not showing guts by blocking traffic as your preferred means of speaking truth to power, you posers. These kids are showing guts, occasionally as they're pulled slowly out of their bodies by truly evil men. So, show some respect). Vietnam and the US might reach rapprochement on economic issues. The US wonders how to keep its foundering hospitals afloat, when illegals cross the border solely to migrate up for free medical care, and then cross back over -- without losing the politically-incorrect benefits of Mexico essentially selling us their best and brightest citizens...

All this and plenty besides, and we have to talk about Gay Marriage?

Gay Marriage, Flag Burning, what other issues are there that so waste our time as a body politic?
This has nothing to do with conservative vs. liberal or Republican vs. Democrat. A couple of quick sound bytes to the contrary, nobody in the political establishment is taking the gay side in this. The Republicans may be cynical about proffering an outright abuse of the Constitution to achieve their ends, but Democrats are equally cynical about proffering doomed abuses of the court system to make cheap political points claiming to support gays, and then betraying them at the ballot box and "outing" people as a political weapon.

There are conservative arguments for and against Gay Marriage. (Defense of family/Provisions contra ultrapromiscuous, pro-disease bathhouse culture)

There are liberal arguments for and against Gay Marriage. (Marriage as a civil right applying to all citizens/Fairness mandating that all government marriages be labelled "civil unions," given its inherent non-religious character)

There are libertarian arguments for and against Gay Marriage. (Don't use the force of government to dictate social mores/Don't use government as a weapon to force straights to redefine the bedrock institution of their culture).

There. We've said it. There are arguments for it and against it. Now, can we get back to some issue that might actually have nationwide relevance, like the fact that there's a war on?

al-Faisal: would you buy a used textbook from this man?

2006-06-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

Sure, we've got a few bigots, he says, but we're undergoing changes as fast as we can...

Now, the Saudis' role in creating those bigots, and recent reporters' descriptions that said textbooks have not changed at all, doesn't seem to be mentioned. Neither the warning of Tom Holsinger (a frequent Winds of Change contributor -- link at right) that the Saudis have consciously engineered a society of brainwashed welfare lackeys that cannot survive without them, and the perils that creates for when the old clan structures finally do perish...

but, go ahead, al-Faisal, pull the other one...

Tanning update

2006-06-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

Minor score for those who put up with me regularly: I need to put the piece of cowhide into its dressing and get a staking knife -- the cowhide is thick and dense enough that it can't be softened without treatment and a LOT of force... for which a belt knife is simply insufficient.

The horsehide, otoh, has started beautifully, and I may be able to get it done today. A nice excuse to sit outside in the shade while people with better tans than me soak up the sun.

Oh, those poor mullahs

2006-06-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

They're already planning to fight the last war.
The one we've just spent three years learning how to be really, really good at.

I can't tell if this is luck, pitiable sadness, or else Comedy Gold.
Hat Tip: Friday Winds of War.

Also, apparently Kurdistan is really getting it right when it comes to religious tolerance.
UPDATE: It's getting serious in Iran. Check out Gateway Pundit's link to right, and this video clip.

Chivalry is Dead and Alive.

2006-05-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I'm not this Marine, who has to go through the rest of his life reliving what it's like to stab a pregnant gang-banger while she and her thuglet goblin friends are out robbing people at gunpoint.

I had a long argument once with a guy in my salle, who has severe Cannot Hit Women Syndrome. For a long time, I even argued with myself over whether I should be bothered by the fact that I have absolutely zero compunction against laying a woman out if need be, merely because she's got tits.

Yes, in response to the obvious reaction, it's more complicated than that. But those of us following self-defense for a while have noticed that there are a lot of women out there involved in violent and aggressive behavior, and they're not shy about taking advantage of the fact that men's better halves generally tie a hand behind their backs. Their numbers seem to be increasing.

Chivalry is dead.

Simone de Beauvoir noted that a lot of women's foibles that held them back were not really coming from men, but were, instead, conformism viciously enforced by their mothers and sisters. Pity that running around gangbanging wasn't one of those things on Mme. de Beauvoir's list.

So it's going to start getting old-fashioned again. I mean, really old-fashioned. As in, 14th-century old-fashioned, where a gentleman treats a lady very well. So in that sense, Chivalry is still going to be alive, especially because most men are inclined and socialized (usually by other men) to assume that women are ladies until demonstrated otherwise.

Chivalry's alive.

Ladies, thank you for being ladies.
Gangbanging slut goblin-wannabes, be warned.

Marine, be at peace.

Blogging about to slow down a bit pending shift from Blogger

2006-05-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've got an offer, and I'm going to take it soon, as I'm sick of blogger giving me "we don't like your cookie" errors.

That said, I have random thoughts.

1. What kind of coddled, reality-challenged white-bread yuppie scum doesn't know the difference between the sounds made by a jackhammer and an assault rifle?

2. I traded shots with my instructor in the salle on Saturday, and hit the ground so hard I bounced. That rocked. Slowly but surely, martial arts concepts that were fuzzy, generalized statements, are becoming concrete, discrete ideas or even techniques. Unfortunately, this means you have to ask your instructor when you think you may have caught a clue... therefore, I posit that martial arts are an act of dual masochism.

3. I think that the gal on PubliusPundit may have overstated her case slightly... but only slightly, when she points out that one of the reasons we have yet another excuse to hate the Baby Boomer scum is their insistence on chopping society up into age brackets. So, don't trust anybody over 30.

4. The big exeriment I was planning on doing gets more complicated. On the one hand, good physics suggests using a nail as a penetrator, so we don't have to worry about impactor topology (far as I can tell, most of the literature on impactor topology is based on cylindrical or ogival penetrators, occasionally on spheres. Go figure, that's where the real-world application is). On the other hand, that makes the entire thing worthless in the context of medieval armor, because a nail effectively simulates a bodkin arrowhead, thus slanting any test done directly in favor of everything except mail armor. And while bodkins definitely existed, they were by no means the only thing out there, and neither do they conform to the topology of western early-and-high-medieval lance heads (though, oddly enough, it does somewhat conform to those from eastern Europe).

5. I ruined the rawhide Chichester sent me a while ago, b/c what we all thought was the grain, was, in fact, not -- what we thought was the flesh was, instead, parts of the grain that hadn't been removed... which only became apparent when I tried to oil-tan it and I suddenly had horsehairs popping up on what should have been the inside of the horse. So, at this point, probably the only thing I can really do with it is to turn it into lacing.

6. Summer is awesome, nice and hot, but not too hot, and Eason came to town, which warms the little evil cockles of my heart. Part of me still wishes I could get the time of day from recruiters so I could go do evil twisted shit to bad people who deserve it... but with folks having no trouble making numbers apparently age waivers aren't being tossed out like popcorn (Note to the irony-challenged: see random thought#3).

7. Somebody needs to simply flay Phelps and his "Thank God for IEDs crowd." Fucking demon worshipper. Hey, dude, even the biggest, hate-indoctrinated opponents of Christianity admit that "loving your neighbor" is one of its most basic commandments....

And now, I'm going to vacuum and enjoy the nice long weekend. Have a good one, folks.

IRS gets its hand slapped, reimburses us several hundred dollars

2006-05-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Or something like that. Hell, as much as my wife calls Hungary, I'm pretty certain that getting that excise tax back will at least pay for ice cream. Though I know that the schmucks are trying to put the refund on the income tax, meaning that they're probably going to try to reimburse only this last year's worth of illegal taxation.

Pity, that. Over the past five years, we've certainly paid enough on this excise tax for The Bunny to get herself a business suit and a new pair of shoes.

HT-Puppy Blender.

"The mortgage you didn't know you had."

2006-05-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

Debra Saunders out in SanFran gives a chilling little piece explaining why we should care about the national debt. No news to "the good twin," but it's a subject that doesn't get nearly enough attention, and explains quite a bit about Bush's approval rating, more than the Iraq War by a long shot: contrary to MSM spin, 9/11 and the WoT has been just about the only thing propping Bush's numbers up, and was clearly the only reason he managed to get re-elected.

Parts of Bush's "legacy" are going to ring big, over a long time. But the progress we've made internationally, and tax cuts at home, are only part of the problem. If he wants to really have this period shine, he needs to start waving that veto threat every time Congress tries to saddle us with more debt.

Vladimir Putin: World-class Dumbass

2006-05-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

Yep, I just insulted the NeoTsar.

Here's a quick blurb on Russia's collapsing demographics, and thoughts for the same in Europe.
Now, I'm sensitive to this stuff lately, since the Bunny and I started on the trying-for-kids thing very late in the game, but bear with me.

There's one overriding difference, though: Europeans are sufficiently full of themselves that they think they can ignore Economics 101. Go ahead, ask one, he'll tell you. He'll tell you how brilliant European politics and the "social market" is, especially compared to the obvious failures of the heartless and corrupt American system.

That'll last a while. But when push comes to shove, European egotism will give way. The technocrats, unlike the Vampire, aren't stupid. France is already starting to turn around its demographic issues. The French, for all their many serious domestic problems, are smart -- they understand that quality of life counts. They may choose to get there in a way that makes most Americans twitch, and God help them, they may figure out how to actually carry it off... but they know for a fact that you're not keeping a society alive with a QOL in the toilet.

Putin, for all his aspirations to restart the Cold War and dictate to the world from an angular Eurasian throne, doesn't get it. Paying a subsidy to women so that they'll create babies is a start. But the notion that women are going to agree to this for the good of Russia is nonsense. To start with, so is the notion that anything Putin would describe as good for Russia will trickle down to the average Russian subject. (Yeah, I said "subject," not citizens. Citizens have rights.) The Kremlin and its faction runs Russia for its own benefit. Putin and his cronies love to tout their status as an "energy power," but it's all hat and no cattle for international grandstanding and foreign cash... ask the Muscovites who froze their asses off this winter when the weather got a little colder than normal, because the Powers that Be could care less whether there's something resembling a decent domestic gas infrastructure. Why waste all that good gas on the little people?

QOL, Pootie-Poot, QOL. This dumbass, for all his pretentions to worldly glory, still doesn't grasp that it's not 1850, and still doesn't grasp the reasons the Soviet Empire got its ass kicked in the Cold War.

It sure wasn't the CIA. Hell, our intel guys were so bad, we couldn't turn a Polish agent who knew he was going home to be executed. (Then again, whatever the faults of the Poles are, we all know it isn't a lack of balls.) No, much as I hate the phrase, we whipped the crap out of the Soviets, because we had Human Capital. Human Capital let us innovate and grow the Soviets into the ground during the Arms Race (insert giant nod to Reagan here). In the modern world, middle-class civil society is geopolitical power. That's why everybody wants to do business with China, in spite of the banking practices that would be a national scandal here in the US. It's why the Canadians still punch above their weight in foreign policy, in spite of the fact that their military can't make numbers because they're openly despised at home.

And it's why the US still hasn't had quite had its financial meltdown. Our financial markets are two steps away from a serious fiscal crisis as the dollar teeters over a debt-excavated abyss -- but folks abroad know we have a reputation for economic growth and innovation that makes the dollar a decent bet, for all its many documented faults.

Am I waxing brilliant here? Am I saying anything that any economist who's had his morning coffee won't be happy to confirm? Nope. This is all Bozo territory.

So why doesn't this dumbass get it? Hey, Putin: you want some babies? Try keeping your prospective mommies from freezing their asses off all winter, and stop continuing to foster the conditions that keep your prospective daddies at a life expectancy in the low 50s.

Taheri sticks to guns on Iranian legislation story.

2006-05-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

Update here. Apparently, just because it wasn't in the formal legislation, didn't mean that folks weren't seriously mullahing it over.

HT- regimechangeiran

Jeb Bush to run NFL?

2006-05-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

Why make this speculation a public announcement? Has McCain shot himself in the foot so badly that prepping Condi, who's publicly known to be lusting after the job, is the only thing the Elephants have for '08?

Well, Romania is on the ball...

2006-05-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

Can't say I'd like to be one of the poor schmucks under virtual house arrest, but nobody can say that they're not taking H5N1 seriously...

Data Transfers and the Role of Government

2006-05-23T06:40:00.000-07:00

By now, I am assuming that I don't need to post a link for folks to be up on the data theft of 26.5 million veterans' data.

I'm sure I don't need to insult peoples' intelligences by pointing out that the story of how this happened is fishy as hell. (How does one guy get that much info on a disk, and why would he take it home?)

So while I personally suspect that John Q. Dipshit made himself a deal with some crooks in order to score big, and then got caught, let's back up and look at something else.

Government is not a god, not a Superhero, not even a Supervillain. It's just a tool, nothing but violence ritualized. That tool can enable people to do awesome things, or really boneheaded things... but it's still people doing them, whether it's a bunch of suits doing their damndest to destroy America's small farmers in order to give ConAgra and its like a bureaucratic edge, or whether it's thousands of Coast Guard guys kicking ass and saving lives during Hurricane Katrina.

Part of why I'm a libertarian, and not a conservative, is that I have a keen awareness that people can really be boneheads. And to stretch a metaphor, we don't want to loan the car keys out to too many people, and on too many jobs, because one bonehead can take the power of government, and accidentally drive 26.5 million folks right to hell.

So we have powers at the State level, where if folks are going to kick ass and take names, groovy... but if they're going to start swerving mightily all over the road on their Bikes of Government, they're doing it on a 200cc bike, not an 1400cc monster that's so big that even folks riding 650's can't even figure out how the thing manages to keep itself upright. Put a bonehead who's just kinda okay on a 200 onto a 650, and he's going to run that sucker right across the intersection and straight into a wall.

So, asking whether somebody trusts Government is kind of a silly question. The real question is, "what jobs are you willing to trust a complete stranger to do?"

Iran takes first steps to religious genocide

2006-05-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

All muslims to wear uniforms, and non-Muslim religious minorities to wear clothing specifically marking them as Jewish, Christian, or Zoroastrian.

It seems that the 20th century's evils are yet to be scrubbed out in the 21st.

Benedict XVI and Church Reform

2006-05-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

Could it be that Benedict's treading more lightly than some of the Papal Monarchists would prefer because, unlike the latter, he's paying attention to the bigger picture?

It's not really likely that the Vatican will reinstate its armed forces -- but one never knows. As one of the very few universalist, globally-oriented factions in Western Society (the tranzi socialists being very nearly their only competition), they are constrained in ways that states and other societies are not, but also able to act in ways that would be beyond dreaming for others.

Hat Tip: Winds of Change 5/19 Hatewatch Briefing.

Petersen's "Mothras of Texas"

2006-05-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

Holy shiat.

I stepped next door to loan a Petersen's bird guide to the Watercolorist, and BooBoo said "hey, would ya look at that?" (BooBoo's el gato numero dos, so this was in sign language.)

Whiskey Tango, Foxtrot, over.
Now, I know, intellectually, that there are some big moths out there in this great big wide world of ours. I also know, that in over fifteen years around Dallas, I ain't never seen one like this. Usually we get the little grey jobs that eat the hell out of your wool. Since I happen to make felt out of exotic and otherwise hard-to-obtain wool, guess who kills pretty much all moths, on sight, 24/7?

Have alien beings masquerading as harmless third-world villagers planted the Moths of Doom in my house, or what? You know, the ones with the cricket legs who are Secretly Causing Global Warming from their Underground Base in Central America? (No, really, that's the plot of an honest-to-God sci-fi flick, and one of the better ones if you don't mind a little camp.)

Oh, and... she's a girl. Saw the ovipositor, while she was flapping like mad trying to escape me and BooBoo. Fortunately, she ain't real bright, and "flap" seems to be her cure for all problems.

"Flap" is ineffective against orange oil.

But she didn't give it up without a hell of a fight, so ya gotta hand it to her there. This is "Mrs. Flap," during one of her less intense moments, in my hand.

Yes, that's not a little moth bed I cranked out of nowhere... that's my hand, and the whole picture should be rotated CCW by 90 degrees to understand this sucker's true scale. Looks like the cocktail dress is only pretty from the outside; she's all brownish-grey underneath.

I was sleepy as hell on my way home... now, I think I may as well put on a pot of espresso, just so it's official. I'm not easily creeped out by bugs: I have, in fact, eaten a roach, just to seriously mess with a girl's head (she deserved it). But I'm mildly freaked by critters that aren't supposed to be living where they're living.

Gotta look this sucker up. What the hell is this thing, and how did a two-inch-long moth get the hell inside my house without me noticing?

Little monkeys imitate small boys with plastic machine-guns

2006-05-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

Pyow Pyow Pyow! Hack Hack Hack Hack!

Which is apparently monkey for this place is boring, let's go for ice cream.

Also, apparently early chimp-like man interbred with equally early, man-like chimp.

Having been exposed to precisely 9.2 seconds of Farscape Fan-Fic, I find this eminently plausible.

Congress, President, pass tax-cut heroin-pushing bill

2006-05-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

It sure seems that way. Woohoo, we've managed to keep AMT from gutting middle-class America... for one year. We've passed legislation to keep capital gains from going amuck... for two years.

What is this, the 1960s Chevrolet model of tax-cutting? Cut it for such a ridiculously short span of time that it becomes a permanent issue? "Vote for us, or we won't be around to give you another 12-month moritorium against having your paycheck raped by AMT next April?"

Talk about your cynical, election-year ploys. This is ridiculous. At least Soviets pretended to give you a Five-Year Plan.

The Attention-Whore to Sell our Jets?

2006-05-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Let me get this straight. The Attention-Whore of Caracas wants to sell jets to the Mullahs. Our older F16s.

And the Mullahs are willing to pay for them? For jets they can't possibly maintain?

I don't know who's further into the bong-water.

Dems: drink the Kool-Aid with the Politics of Definition

2006-05-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

Oh, Please, Messers. Halprin and Teixeira. Bring. It. On.

Yes, folks, the answer to Democratic malaise isn't
a) admit you're leftists with a populist tinge and run with it

nor to

b) admit that the leftists are politically hopeless and reform yourself into a left-libertarian party.
(Editorial note: shit, it's not? Oh well, so much for the Dems...)

Oh no. The real way to get the Dems into office is to combat our current era's, "rampant individualism" with the Politics of Definition!

Best defined as more social programs directed from DC, lots of government regulation, and a heaping helping of anti-globalist class warfare rhetoric, involving using the power of government to make sure that people are able to get access to the jobs that will get them to be happy, contented, lower-middle-class workers.

How new! How bold! How unlike anything the Democrats have tried in the past six electoral cycles! That's how you'll split the Reagan coalition, with the energizing power of economic populism, bay-bee!

Note to Messrs. Halprin and Teixeira. You're both smart guys, but when it comes to having your fingers on the pulse of American society and what it wants, you've got a serious tin ear. Stop drinking the Marxist cool-aid, and go visit someplace that doesn't automatically associate the word "Progressive" with "morally superior." I promise you, that'll leave you plenty of destinations to choose from.

I may be a libertarian, but at least I didn't need four freaking essays in order to demonstrate that all the Dems have to offer is more Know-Nothing "class-based issues." The Seventies have had it, man.

Ah, such effortless solipsism! And the heady strains

2006-05-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

of reading one of the media pseudo-elite skewer her own in the gut with a salad fork, and pull out the steaming narcissistic guts for all of us to cringe at.

Grunts getting married and social mobility

2006-05-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

Juan's getting hitched in Austin on the 26th. Schmuck. With two weeks' notice before a wedding, that's only slightly better than my family... :)

Juan's going to the Sandbox, and when he gets back, for Physician's Assistant training. Not bad for a kid who used to be a migrant worker -- when he's done being "exploited by the Pentagon" (for those of us not steeped in '68er cant, that translates as "expensively and exhaustively trained") he's going to easily double my slightly-above-average middle-class salary). My buddy, The Lizard Queen, has a doctorate now, and is, in theory, an official member of the intellectual elite.

Her Mom grew up in a bamboo hut.

And people wonder why I have no patience for cringing, whinging, suck-ass leftist whiners who bitterly harp about how there's no social mobility left in this country.

As you may have guessed...

2006-05-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

I'm largely on early-summer hiatus while I try to get a few things done that are keeping me away from the screen...

1. Lots of leather projects, including a vest for The Bunny, possibly a couple knitter's bags, and a really STOUT reconstruction of a Cuman leather caftan (kind of like a buff coat on steroids). This in conjunction with two different short articles to be written up for next year if I can get them done in time: "Archery technique and battlefield geometry," which deals with how archers get deployed and defended against depending on the techniques in use, and "light cavalry, heavy cavalry, horse archers, Oh My!: What abstract definitions don't tell us about 1205 Adrianople." The last one will hopefully be presented at Kalamazoo next spring.

2. Got about 30,000 words on a story that needs to be finished, so I can decide whether or not I want to write another one... if I'm diligent, I should be done completely by mid-June. All the folks who actually call themselves writers are grinning and saying "gimme more," so it sounds like it justifies the time.

3. Ever notice that Mr. Chavez is *awfully* chummy with Ahmadinejad and his fellows? In the Great Huntington vs. Palmer Debate, score one for Palmer and his "ignore ideology, all the tyrants are in cahoots" thesis...

Administrivia:
Updates will come around, but the site will primarily be a linkfarm for the rest of the month while this is going on. In that vein, I'm inclined to add some extra links to the right. Under sci/tech, I'm thinking Speculist and FuturePundit. Any recommendations?

Blogging will be slow for another week.

2006-04-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

bored bored bored... I'm off today, which is why I'm writing this from work...

Yes, I had an Office Space moment, where I took a day off with a week and a half's notice, only to have it more or less revoked at 4 pm the day before.
But on the bright side, we need foundation work and a new roof.

Anyway, I'll be in Michigan at the medieval conference through the first week of May, so, marginal political analysis and crude "oooh, cool" science news will be yours in another ten days.

The Re-alignment is on. Sorta.

2006-04-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

So, as the RNC continues to blithely ignore its constituents' concerns (appointing Snow was maybe a good move, but an overblown one: after all, he certainly didn't achieve anything notable working for the Bush Sr. machine), its foreign policy remains tightly wedded to neo-conservatism.

In other words, the Republicans have, to the dismay of a portion of their base, realigned themselves as Kennedy Democrats, neither faux-pacifist like the Progressives, nor Goldwaterian small-government. In other words, Bush, Lott, Frist, et. al., have said to the conservatives and small-l libertarians, "we own you. Where you gonna go?" As my new byline states, the response is likely to be "out to dinner, chump."

In other words, the Reagan Coalition is dead. Not at the constituent level of the voters, but clearly so in terms of the actual Party. I haven't heard squat to suggest that Sessions, my guy in Texas 32, has exactly covered himself in glory, either.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have two problems. As summed up in the American Prospect, it's not a bad idea to say that they dither between mobilize and inoculate. The "inoculate" solution, where the Democrats actually push small-gov solutions, and, --gasp!-- listen to voters, sounds pretty good. But the analysis at the Prospect fails pretty badly, because while it notes the damage that has happened to the Democratic Party since Clinton, it hasn't noted smething significant: Clinton pushed NAFTA and got on with welfare reform, but also pushed singificantly greater government intervention in several areas: socialized medicine, drastic restrictions on gun ownership, etcetera. Had Clinton played to what is described in the "inoculation" handbook, "stealing issues" from the Repubs, chances are that the 1994 Republican takeover wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was, outright alarm at having Hillary push a medical-reform bill that would send doctors to jail resulted in something very different.

Notice that the "inoculate" provision can be seen as another version of the "small-l" libertarian program, aka the "leave us alone" program. (The actual LP remaining safe in ideologically pure irrelevance based on their foreign-policy failures.)

This suggests that there's some hot air lifting up my theory that the Democrats are essentially going to try to steal the small-l libertarian votes. With 39% of the electorate saying that earmarks and wasteful spending are their most serious concern, and Reid outperforming the Elephants on the issue...

we're not quite to "game on" yet. But Realignment is coming on fast.

The brave new world only a central planner could love.

2006-04-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent intro-blurb in Wired. Much of it is fine on its face, albeit lovingly flocked with fashionable buzzwords -- certainly somebody has to take on the insanity of an environmental movement that seems like it would prefer to send us hurtling back to the 18th century. But... that doesn't mean the author and his buddies are ready for prime-time, either.

"Cities beat suburbs. Manhattanites use less energy than most people in North America. Sprawl eats land and snarls traffic. Building homes close together is a more efficient use of space and infrastructure. It also encourages walking, promotes public transit, and fosters community."

Currently, cities do NOT beat suburbs. If they did, everybody in exurbia would be pining for downtowns, rather than fleeing the idea like extras in a B movie. Manhattanites may use less energy, but quite a bit of that is because other people are using energy to bring things to Manhattanites.

1. What is sprawl, except houses out in the country, built closely together?
2. Encouraging walking is fine in theory... to which purpose?
3. Is public transit an end good in and of itself?
4. Fosters community? How? Every city I've lived in was characterized by people generally ignoring each other, the only exceptions being those areas which are effectively suburbs-built-small.

In contrast, in my sixth-acre stereotypical suburban lot, I can:

1. Shoot arrows in my back yard.
2. Create a rose garden in my front yard.
3. Grow fruit and nut trees which I can then use to make brandy and tasty breads.
4. See the stars at night (not a lot of them, but a hell of a lot more than in the city).
5. Sleep without the constant noise of city buses and drunks.
6. Forget to lock my doors, car or otherwise, without expecting to be robbed on the spot.
7. Create a sense of community that has nothing to do with a top-down urban planner's vision.

And #7 is really the rub, isn't it? Over at worldchanging.com, they've got guys talking about planning communities "that actually work..." when the history of the 20th century tells me everything I need to know about people who assume that me and mine are dysfunctional and in need of change brought about from the outside.

Redesigning civilization along these lines would bring a quality of life few of us can imagine. That's because a fully functioning ecology is tantamount to tangible wealth. Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives - and may even extend our stay on Earth.
It may seem impossibly far away, but on days when the smog blows off, you can already see it: a society built on radically green design, sustainable energy, and closed-loop cities; a civilization afloat on a cloud of efficient, nontoxic, recyclable technology. That's a future we can live with.

Annuities? Dividends? So, tell me again how the imputed value of this vision, which is "tantamount to wealth" (whatever that means -- it clearly doesn't mean "equal to wealth" in any economic sense you can actually falsify) adds quality to my life, rather than simply satisfying a tiny minority's ideology? Of course "few" can imagine it -- for starters, those "closed loop cities" aren't going to get anywhere, in an urban landscape which scorns industry and shuns agriculture, and increasingly prices out all but the fashionable rich few. Manhattanites may use less energy than most North Americans... (why not, let's assume that's true) but so do most Nigerians, and I don't exactly see a massive line at the consulate for would-be emigrants to Lagos. Currently Manhattan is a playground for the wealthy, where it is economically irrational for anybody in the middle class to try to raise a family and retire. Who do these people think are going to do the real work, while Cindy Freaking Lauper, downtrodden working-class janitor that she is, is in court fighting to keep her apartment at a ridiculously-low rent-controlled price? (real-life example from last year) What precisely do these people think "closed-loop" urbanites are going to eat?

It's not that "few can imagine it..." but rather that "few" are so utterly-disconnected from reality that they could take it seriously. Clearly only the clueless leaded-gasoline-huffing mouth-breathers can comprehend economics 101? Once again, we see the classic ideological overreach and handy condescension of those who envision themselves running the system and calling the shots, rather than having to squeeze their lives into the petty boxes of somebody else's utopian vision.

Redesigning civilization? Holy cow, and here I thought I was arrogant...

People who anger me, for various reasons.

2006-04-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

1. The asshats calling themselves "Islamic Thinkers" parading around in New York City with "da Jooooooooos are gonna get nuked for Allah" bullshit. Now, granted, you know, they're demon-infested nutbags.... but do they have to be so freaking STUPID about it? Aren't we supposed to have diabolical, clever evil? I mean, hell, all Bin Laden could come up with was ripping off the plot of a Tom Clancy novel... it's like these guys are under Rovian mind-control purposefully demonstrating in order to rescucitate the Republicans in time for the mid-term elections.

2. Some buttheads in Dallas tortured a sweetheart of a pit bull to death this weak. I know some of you have tender stomachs, so no link. I have no way of finding out who these people are. Good thing, too, because I doubt the ten grand award would cover my legal bills after introducing the perps to a few of the better ideas by the Dukes of Chin.

3. Some political hack leaks classified info. I have one question: why ain't she in jail?

Oh well. Gotta go kick people in the head...

Once more into the Legislature...

2006-04-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

and find some way to cap this blatantly-corrupt property-appraisal tax farming.

We're in special session again to find some other way of funding the public schools besides property taxes. I hope they come up with something, because currently they're using property taxes, and rather than having to actually pass tax increases and suffer the political consequences, they just have their appraisors decide that your house is more valuable. And they can get away with mandating extra value for your house, because they do it all the way across the area.

Five years ago when I moved back into the country, you could get a house in my area and comparable to mine for somewhere in the 90s. Probably high 90s as mine has a finished room in back that slightly pops the square footage, but still nineties. Now my house is worth 142.

This is the Dallas suburbs, not Boston or Fairfax county. The region has had mild house-price increases... but I can tell you right here and now, it's only partially because of demand. There's no way the market here, however healthy it is, justifies the average house in my area appreciating in value by roughly a third in less than five years. From high-90s at the turn of the millenium, you now can't get into a house around here for less than 110-115, and we're not talking comparable properties, but instead houses that need an awful lot of work, like the house down the street we used to call the "crab shack."

It's a mess.

Bill Frist -- a Republican reformer? Nope.

2006-04-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is a guy who can honestly crank out stuff like this on his issues pages:

"There's something fundamentally wrong when more young Americans believe in the existence of UFOs than believe that their Social Security benefits will be there for them when they retire"

And then turn around and heavily endorse Santorum for his involvement with the medicare drug entitlement, yet another fiscal-nightmare nail in the coffin of the Social Security Ponzi scheme.

And the sad part is, I don't think he even gets the irony.
All this is taken off his Volpac.org site. But the blog apparently has the comments disabled except for folks who've stood up to be grassroots volunteers.

Well, that's blogging for you. At least, for the Republican majority leader.

Lord, does Bank of America suck.

2006-04-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Got another one of those lovely Bank of America emails, to all of their associates, blathering on and on about what they're doing to make this place a great place in which to work.

But, as an admin, I'm not actually an associate...

I am when it's convenient, such as taking various forms of compliance training, and conforming to six different kinds of makework bullshit.
I'm not when it's inconvenient... when that would involve performance reviews, cost of living adjustments, that sort of thing. And they're definitely not associates when they try to get training or engage in career-dev-education. My manager stabbed me in the back on that one, and so far as I can tell, every other admin I've spoken to who's tried has ended up the same way.

Which is why I'm the only admin left on my floor who hasn't either relocated or quit -- again.

It's not that the work environment is all that terrible, so long as you don't mind having your nose constantly rubbed in the fact that you're a second-class employee. Basically like working in a law firm, where the human race divides into lawyers and menials. Of course, that's why I don't work at a law firm.

However, this is not merely grousing: I have a plan... to start adjuncting at the community college level this fall, and get enough hours under my belt that I can apply full-time. That's right, college, not junior high. Turns out that there is far too much supply for historians in the local public school market compared to the demand (since many positions are still dual-taught by coaches). But the community college level apparently isn't attracting a lot of interest, perhaps because of the degree requirements and greater responsibility.

That means three-to-four months of twiddling thumbs while starting the adjuncting process, and a longer time before I'm finally able to boost out, which can basically be summed up as "wouldn't it be nice if they laid me off so I could work both local districts as an adjunct time." But, it's a plan, and a solid one, that will continue to support both wife and scholarship in the mean time.

Fever Dreams

2006-04-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

No, it's not the quest for libertarian utopia.

Had to stay home last night piled up with blankets and the like. It must have been tied to sinuses somehow, because I lay on the couch intensely aware of the spaces beneath my cheekbones.

Wish I could remember the jokes that the orange plastic teapot and the rest of the tea set were telling. Although I have a sinking suspicion that it was composed of nothing except the nonverbal equivalent of "wheeeeeee!"

Not that I'd recommend it to just anybody, but that was WAY more fun than anybody's ever told me drugs were...

For those of you who aren't afraid to step into

2006-04-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

the dark amorphous world of foreign policy debate, Winds of Change has had a completely stellar discussion, complete with straw men, explosions thereof, rehabilitations of same, etcetera, of what precisely constitutes our options regarding Iran.

Certain of you who think I'm a cold-blooded bastard will probably shudder to see an array of heartless facts martialed in favor of pre-emptive nuclear war... but as a debate, if you're up on the issue (and you should be), it's well worth your time, even if you tend towards the squishy and squeamish.

Read this and TELL ME science fiction isn't here today.

2006-04-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

BRITISH doctors have revived a 12-year-old girl's dormant heart and removed a donor heart which she had started to reject, hospital officials said late today.

....

Hannah had enjoyed good health until November when a cardiologist found during a routine examination that her body was rejecting the organ which Sir Yacoub had transplanted 10 years ago in a life-saving operation.

....

"We are delighted that Hannah is doing so well," said a spokesman for the cardiac team at Great Street Ormond Hospital.

(link)

Call it the Singularity, call it Sci-Fi, call it God sending Monkeys down on a rope to fill our heads with the blessings of biology... but whatever it is, call it Good.

Blog-ripping utility?

2006-04-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

I need to back up all these blog posts, as my faith in Blogspot diminishes by the week. Is there a can-opener utility out there that'll let you slice and dice web pages for content, rather than hacking all the code out manually?

Well, there's a 2008 contender for you...

2006-04-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

Think Mike Gravel's bid will be turned into a FairTax referendum, or a rehashing of Vietnam-era anti-war and anti-draft activism?

He's an interesting guy, that's for certain. Here's an old op-ed, in addition to the stuff hitting Drudge.

In terms of the referendum process, that's a two-edged sword... it can be a self-defense mechanism for the little guys to defend themselves from the political class, or else an oligarch's best friend and demogogue's shield.

Suddenly, politics on the Democratic side of the aisle has just gotten interesting.

UPDATE: I've been peeking at his site, and you know, when it comes to the bio or parts of the basic ideas... there's stuff I don't like, but I've seen much, much worse, especially from Democratic candidates. I suspect that this guy is basically a left-libertarian... his idea would basically be a means of using an alternate legislative attempt to give the people back something resembling the old jury nullification, but on a massive scale. The critical issue would be in whether it was explicitly democratic or republican in nature -- if the former, it would potentially allow the hive cities to run roughshod over the countryside, with the latter having effectively no remedy. But if the former, a multiplicity of factions would do its own work. Like I said, I've seen much, much worse.

Okay Mr. President, it's leadership time.

2006-04-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

I'm assuming that if you haven't been living under a rock offline all night, you're aware that Iran can theoretically have a weapon in time for May Day.

The world is fundamentally different than the 18th century. Isolationism makes no sense when it is feasible to pay a hundred men to effect an operation that will put a dozen or two on the sharp end of a spear capable of infliciting megadeath. Ahmadinejad has threatened Israel's existence, not that I give a rat's ass about Israel right now, since they're still betraying us and selling our secrets to the PLA), and openly funds the people who talk, in public, about invading the west from within in order to force sharia (spit) upon the world.

We won the Cold War. We made messes in the process. It's time to clean up the messes -- now. Much as I'd rather focus on cleaning up domestic trouble, there are mad dogs in the street: we do not have the luxury of allowing enough time to pass for Iran and any other descendents of AQ Khan to gain plausible deniability for an attack.

UPDATE: and now it gets curiouser. Comments over on WoC (link in sidebar) suggest that Natanz may not already possess that many centrifuges, but will need to build them. In which case... once again, only the players know the score, and the rest of us are wondering whether it's all-clear and the Iranians are playing their traditional two-step, or whether we're already on the express-elevator.

The insanity of modern libertarianism

2006-04-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Libertarians are politically inept and fundamentally insane. We resent being associated with conservatives, especially when they claim to own libertarian ideals while talking smack about libertarian amorality... because the Reagan coalition welding libertarians and conservatives together was so successful that it could concentrate sufficient political firepower to win the Cold War. We resent being tied at the hip to liberals, because it gets us associated with civil rights groups who often overshoot the mark, yet have occasionally risen far above politics to cry foul at abuses in the system we'd never even have heard about on our own. We're nuts.

For starters, what do you call people who run a third party in a representative republic with a winner-take-all system whose raw mathematics guarantees that only two parties will ever be able to vie for power? You call them insane, that's what you call them. And if you're crazy enough to be a Libertarian, you probably believe the following crazy things, too:

We can bring about global freedom and prosperity by announcing to the world that "we're all going home now to found Fortress America, and we hope all you totalitarian maniacs will play nice and maintain a healthy mechanism to keep the international shipping upon which all our advanced economies depend safe and happy."
We can convince the electorate to plunge directly into the icy-cold bracing water of personal freedom and responsibility, because running campaigns with a more moderate platform that would let people "dip their toes in the water"would be selling out.
We can prescribe policy based on ideology, rather than proceeding from principles pragmatically in the hope of accumulating steady small victories like those completely unelectable conservatives and liberals.
We can win elections if we allow people to speak for us who really think that medical marijuana is a pressing issue of justice which deserves to be considered as soon as, if not before, KELO and McCain-Feingold.
We can win votes by educating people on the 'net, not simply spending bazillions on marketing like everybody else, because everything except politics tends to obey economic laws...
We don't see any problem with letting a bunch of batshit-crazy anarchists pose as libertarians and scare people away from the philosophy entirely, because that really helps us win hearts and minds.

We're nuts. We're absolutely, completely bonkers, if we think that these are practices that will gain any traction whatsoever amongst scared "security voters" worried about another 9/11, and folks whose idea of trusting the private markets with money is hopelessly tied up with Enron. Oh, don't get me wrong: in the years since they were put to paper, many of the economic arguments stemming from, say, Hayek and Laffer, for example, have been proven beyond all reasonable doubt -- ask any Irishman what he thinks about the positive economic effects of tax reform. But we expect that people will become libertarians by nodding their heads at the obvious superiority of our arguments and going "uh huh, yup yup, I guess the market really would do a better job than government in almost every case." Because that really makes sense, being based on how people really make life-altering political choices, isn't it?

And we think the Barking Moonbats on the left, and the Myrmidons on the right don't get it?

And I'm one of these guys, no question. Sign me up for my rubber room.

Republican Crackup in Progress?

2006-04-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

I've been watching and waiting for this one. Here's some WSJ-online interview material, and the folks talking generally seem to have it nailed: the President's approval ratings are in the toilet, and Congress' is getting even worse, because the fiscal conservatives (aka, the "small-l" libertarians) are in open revolt.

If the Reagan Coalition cracks up and lets the leftists across the aisle take over Congress, that's bad. But would gridlock necessarily be so? I don't know -- with legislation repeatedly crossing party lines, and Kennedy involved in the process, one can make the argument that there wouldn't be an appreciable difference. If Feingold wants to move to impeach: let him. We need the Dems to go away until they can discover an actual set of principles anyway.

Frankly, if the Libertarian Party can lose some of its shrill rhetoric, with the explosion of domestic spending under this administration, there's never been such a good time to paint themselves as an alternative to the Republicrats. With only the tiniest of exceptions, it certainly hasn't been Congressmen leading the anti-earmark charges. But the LP isn't going to do that because of the war, and because right now you can't be an LP candidate if you're a libertarian hawk like yours truly (not neocon, not isolationist, but "speak softly while hefting a pile of sledgehammers").

It's going to be interesting: much of the crackup has happened because the voters hold power in their hands that has never been held before. This isn't merely blogosphere triumphalism -- when's the last time any Congresscritter was so frustrated with the public casting a magnifying glass over pork that they'd lash out the way Trent Lott did last week? If the social conservatives stay on board b/c of the new Supremes, and the fiscal conservatives are willing to jump ship...then the Coalition is dead. What'll replace it?

The hypocrisy of modern conservatism

2006-04-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

If liberals' arguments lately seem to be based upon a false-charity defense of scorn for one's neighbors combined with outright cowardice in the world, what characterizes the bastions of conservatism these days?

It sure isn't any sort of argumentative consistency. Having embraced the critiques involved in The Vision of the Anointed, conservatives have gone on to embracing all the same rhetorical tricks, this time arrogating to itself the role of Defender of Morals, whether or not that involves:

Opposing gay adoption on the grounds that having two loving parents of the same sex (while admittedly suboptimal), is so much worse than being stuck in an orphanage with no parents at all.
Constantly bashing libertarians for their supposed amorality, when Lord only knows that you can't be interested in Family Values if you're not also interested in having those values run through a filter dictated by whoever's fine, morally-upstanding lobbyists happen to best schmooze and booze their way through Congress (that veritable playground of the angels) this week.
Fighting the War on Drugs to protect society: because we have to let kiddie-rapists and violent criminals walk the street in order to make room for the pot-smoking hippies who are a true threat to our kids' safety.
Pushing laws like the "Three-Strikes Amendment," because we all know that it's really evil to snatch a purse out of a car, then get caught with speed, and then try to lift a watch from a department store, but just kinda bad to beat a woman until she's unrecognizable while raping her.
Constantly stroking oneself in the Warrior's Mirror, because we all know that there's not a liberal or libertarian interested in a strong national defense or willing to serve his country in war. (Contemporary cringing leftists aside, how 'bout that Sergeant York... yeah... what a pussy.)
Castigating liberals for radically increasing the size and intrusiveness of government, thus adding to the tax burdens of hard-working, honest families (while radically increasing the size and intrusiveness of government, thus adding to the tax burdens of hard-working, honest families).
Standing Up for Our Freedoms, including our perennial Congressional favorite, the Freedom to Go to Jail for Burning a Flag.

Myrmidons. People for whom the word "context" is something only an overnuanced schlub like John Kerry could care about, more than happy to slap you upside the head with the Plank in their Eyes, so long as, For God's Sake, Congress can do something about your speck. The People Who Know Best... and know that you're obviously an ignorant Heathen if you don't agree that they do.

Have the Israelis stabbed us in the back AGAIN?

2006-04-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

It's early days, but it looks like they're up to their old crap selling miltech to China. Somebody needs to put the word out to the Israelis that if they don't give a crap about selling our tech to our primary strategic competitor, we're going to have to think very seriously about whether or not we care about Iran's threat to nuke them.

The cowardice of modern liberalism

2006-04-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

You know what I can't stand about liberals' arguments lately, or, perhaps, the arguments of assorted leftists and "progressives" who currently call themselves liberal? (Don't worry, I've got plenty of spit and bile for conservatives and libertarians, too) It's not just that liberals are constantly hunting for a message that will "resonate with the voters,"in the assumption that voters are a largely-inert mass. Nope, I'm used to ill-meaning folks who think that people are sheep to be sheared -- that's just how you define "politician."

No, what I really despise about liberalism, and the liberals I run into, is that now that the basic egalitarian issues have been examined -- successfully, I might add-- all that's left of liberal arguments is the abject cowardice, and the way that so many of their arguments are effectively nothing but trumped up excuses for same... like the girl who's irritated with herself for giving money to bums at the local burger joint, and vocally laments that she's too nice, rather than calling a spade a spade, and saying that the bum intimidated her -- in reality, she wasn't too nice, she was too goddamned scared to stick up for herself.

We have to have universal health care, because having insurance and using it wisely is too scary (for the little people).
We have to run a foreign policy that never uses force in our interests except when it's so late in the game that we've no other choice, because if we kicked the bad guy in the balls back at Step Two, then we might, gasp, become unpopular.
We have to have rent control, because otherwise rich people on the West Side might actually have to pay market rents, which would involve uncertain costs (don't even get me started on how the Beautiful People use rent control to keep working-class schlubs at arm's reach).
We have to have regulations at the anal-probe level, because otherwise, millions of people will be running around doing their thing with no controls on how they run their businesses and lives. Chaos! Madness!
We have to gut-shoot our economy, because fossil fuels are destroying the earth, and our best alternative, nuclear power, is a Godzilla-like radioactive monster that will destroy us all.
We have to create the "perverse incentives" of a halfway-welfare state, because if people are allowed to control their own pensions and the like, some of them might make bad choices.

Cowardice. Fear. A supposedly enlightened sense of concern for one's fellow man, masking outright statements of contempt for one's neighbor and a craven fear of consequences, let alone confrontation (in current duckspeak, "mean-spiritedness"). An abject inability to engage in plain speech, because simple speech doesn't let one duck the incoming missile of truth in a chaff-like cloud of pseudo-intellectual jargon and argument-by-dictionary. The resort to hyperbole and ad-hominem, as if each and every issue that arises is somehow understandable only in millenarian terms involving the Correct Position and various shades of moral troglodytism.

Fnord.

It's pathetic.

Sciolist Salmagundi is back up...

2006-04-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

Check it out.

We're still in flux regarding minor formatting and that sort of thing, but we're back in business. So if you like marginal humor, vague and vaguely irresponsible commentary, and long delays between posts, we're your kinda blog.

Also, if you're an LLP guy, make sure you check out A Texas Libertarian. It's young, but off to a good start.

Today in Sandia, it's a balmy 2 billion degrees

2006-04-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

with a small chance of fusion in the afternoon. Energy outputs will continue to exceed inputs, and tungsten futures have risen sharply. Here's Sauron with sports.

Think big, baby, we're in Texas.

2006-04-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

The inevitable catfights over where the TTC is to run have begun popping up, as North Texas businesses don't want to risk being bypassed. (Of course, yours truly who wants open land is just fine with the recommended route running east of Dallas...)

Oh, you mean you've never heard of the TTC?
Well, here's where all you folks who think Texans are a bunch of posers when we talk about the value of BIG get to stand slack-jawed with awe. The Trans-Texas Corridor is:

separate lanes for passenger vehicles and large trucks
freight railways
high-speed commuter railways
infrastructure for utilities including water lines, oil and gas pipelines, and transmission lines for electricity, broadband and other telecommunications services

Here's the FAQS.
It'll take fifty years to finish it, that's how big it is. And it's looking out fifty years into the future that you can get a sense of why it's needed. Check out this handy map. Now, compared to the coastal Hive Cities(tm), Texas' population is still fairly-well dispersed. After all, we have space to build, so that we can have a big city like Dallas or Houston, and still have the lifestyle benefits of living in an incredibly-large medium-sized city. But that's going to change, and change dramatically, if the international traffic coming into the country from Central America and Mexico (go free trade!!) all have to run smack-dab through Austin and DFW in order to get elsewhere. It'll be a nightmare. Check out 2060 for my neck of the woods... easily 10 million folks in Tarrant, Dallas, and Collin counties, and the only way Denton's going to escape being just as wide is if a miracle happens and the Lewisville Bridge collapses during the bitterly-opposed but inevitable widening process. I'm also pretty sure that area around Houston/Harris county is being counted very conservatively.

TTC rocks. It's even got the runs in for high-speed rail, to keep the environmental pansies happy.

(Gratuitous chauvinism follows.)
Now, don't you wish your puny state (or you NY-Cali wusses... you're punching WAY below your weight class lately) could come up with something like this so that you don't have to play tag with road-trippers and interstate freight during rush hour?

The Cold War/Great Game is "On" again

2006-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Partial Hat Tip: A Step at a Time - follow the internal link to "Korrespondent," which can be Babelfished as desired.

Let's recap this month or so in international relations, US-Russia.

1. Russia moves to occupy South Ossetia for good.
2. Russia sells the Iranians the Sqvall. (Word to Iran -- suckers.)
3. Russia blocks any pretense to serious action/sanctions in the UNSC regarding Iran.
4. Russia gets the paperwork ready on its Soviet Union, Mark Two. (Notable for its language giving inherent majority votes to Russia...unneccesary if it were meant to simply be an EU clone)

Russia's xenophobic foreign policy is at it again, and I think the game is now sufficiently transparent to call a spade a spade. Putin and his ~~KGB~~ FSB buddies in the Kremlin have decided to say "game on." Of course, with an economy the size of Mexico's, supported only by petrodollars (and, word to the world's collective buttheads: as I fueled my car this morning, with gas only threatening to rise seriously, it was already a 10% ethanol mix), there is no way that Russia can do it on its own.

So, the game is being played by taping new paragraphs into the old playbook...

Hungary under massive flooding

2006-04-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

The Bunny has sent pics from Budapest and Visegrad.
I've seen the Duna in flood before, but I've never seen water like this...

Zarqawi "demoted" by Al-Quaeda... more than meets the eye

2006-04-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

Here's the article that Gateway has up.

Now, let's note something. This is Al-Quaeda, the organization of death-loving, twelve-foot-tall desert warriors... and what Zarqawi earns for his numerous failures is demotion to military duty?

This tells you one of two things:

1. Either the crux of the matter is that Al-Quaeda has just announced that it's yet another poseur-Jihadi organization like Arafat's Algerians were, sending off other peoples' young to die while they collected fat checks (and in some cases we already know this to be the case)...

2. Or else, Zarqawi was demoted specifically because of "Al Quaeda in Iraq," and therefore the operative issue is that various AQ heads don't care for the current decentralized "franchise model,"and want to re-centralize the organization.

or,

2.5 Because of Zarqawi's incredible failures, AQ has decided that the decentralized model was too politically naive, and thus ineffective, and political actions (like crossing borders to bomb third parties) are going to be more tightly-controlled from here on out... since any honest assessment of Iraq is that AQ has lost so badly that it can't even maintain a meaningful presence in the field.

Still, small phrases can sometimes speak paragraphs.

Russia shows its seriousness in having an Iranian pawn

2006-04-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Russia has sold Iran the basic form of its supercavitating torpedo.

UPDATE: apparently it's a missile, after all? I start to wonder what the big deal is... can anybody sell me a vowel here?

A third-party candidate in 2008?

2006-04-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

Rumors are swirling.

But then again, how stupid are we? The Republicans suck, but the only third-party that could happen would exist solely to peel away the "hold your nose continent" (and that's me, folks) in order to allow Clinton to squeak into office.

I don't think it stands a chance in hell. Not because independent voters aren't smart enough to see the threat... but because, having been out of political power since Reagan, we have something that neither major party possesses: patience. A lasting political realignment will involve waiting long enough for the Democrats to tear themselves apart on the altar of socialism and government school unions... and for the Republicans to finally have their electoral showdown between the Theocrats, the Country Club, and the Reaganites.

Then, we shall see what we shall see. Anything prior to that is an electoral trap, and a transparent one.

Throw the book at Cynthia McKinney.

2006-03-31T08:58:00.000-08:00

If assaulting a police officer is a felony, then throw the book at her. McKinney thinks she can get away with acting like petulant, spoiled royalty. Most Congresscritters do. McKinney clearly thinks the fact that she wasn't recognized entitled her to smack people around.

Nail the bitch.

Somewhere, a line needs to be drawn in the sand that says to the political class "you exist to serve, not to be royalty."

Yes, Rico... Kaboom.

2006-03-30T12:28:00.000-08:00

Wish I could see this little firecracker when it goes off. Not to belabor the obvious, but if these things ever actually got deployed, you're looking not merely at bunker-busters, but at tacnukes minus the nuke part... here's a good rough simulator. This is serious boom. Overpressure's one thing, of course, but in any situation where we'd likely use this air-to-mud, the "chunky salsa" effect from time-on-target bombardment simply boggles the mind.

.7kt Urban Renewal comes to B.A.'s neighborhood...

But the other part of it is that such damage is actually not all that large, geographically speaking. You could drop a .7kt charge on the middle of DFW airport, and still have buildings standing (not to mention about 340,000 very irritated neighbors). The really bad parts of the blast from 70kt on the same location wouldn't even make it to my house (which is close by). Put that in the perspective of some of the clearing operations performed in Al-Anbar, where civvies were known to have been cleared out of the way prior to engagement, and you can see why folks would like to have this as an option.

Milton Ezrati skips whistling past a plan to bring the Mullahcracy to its knees.

2006-03-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

In this CSM post, Ezrati comments on the Iranian oil bourse, noting it as a complete fantasy, for several good reasons, most of which can be summed up as "who wants to depend on Iranian law?"

But he also provides a very careful little suggestion of how to bring the Iranian dictatorship (for that's what it is -- Iran's rulers use religious extremists who are actually in the employ of the intlligence community to crush their people, no differently than Milosevic used the Chetniks) to its knees: Iran is hardly in a position to make threats regarding oil: he brushes past the obvious implications as if they're hardly there.

And Iran, whatever its political agenda, simply does not have the economic and financial wherewithal to hold back its oil altogether. Petroleum amounts to 80 percent of all Iranian exports, 45 percent of the country's GDP, and 60 percent of the government's revenues. With the economy there already rickety, any shortfall in oil sales would tempt financial, economic, and consequently political suicide for Iran's current regime.

While Mr. Ezrati may feel the need to tiptoe past the obvious, there's no need for us in blogistan to do so... if the US wants to retaliate seriously against the Iranian regime, while drying up the international money that goes to Hezbollah, Hamas, and al Quaeda, and doesn't feel secure about its ability to take down Iranian air defenses... wiping out oilfield infrastructure would be a breeze.

And what's more, such a strategy would not be out of place: if we document Iranian security elements engaged in direct or proxy actions against US troops, we have our casus belli for limited countermeasures, and neither Russia nor China will able to do anything else but make predictable but polite noises in protest. China, because it will follow Russia's lead, and Russia because cannot it afford to lose one of its most effective propaganda levers for the justification of both legitimate defense and military adventurism in the Caucasus.

In this respect, US geopolitical and military strategy becomes quite clear:
1. Allow Iran to gain the lead in the leadership and financing of terrorism abroad.
2. Encourage other entities to cut funding, such that terrorists become dependent on Iranian oil money.
3. Open up the press conferences documenting Iranian proxy war, and declare war on Iran with said Iraqi casus belli, completely bypassing the UN (it's not required, and although NATO troops wouldn't be needed for such operations, the US can, if need be, put NATO in a diplomatic hammerlock on this issue).
4. Chop the oil money off at the kneecaps as soon as Iran takes one step over whatever is determined to be the red line.

Since Iran is completely dependent on imports for its gasoline -- imports that cost money -- its military will be effectively hamstrung. In this respect, Ahmadinejad may be trying desperately to obtain a nuclear trump card... but otherwise, he is holding an extremely weak hand. It is encumbent upon us to force him to play those cards, and sooner, rather than later.

Why all the turmoil in France?

2006-03-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

That's what this insightful little blurb asks. I think we need an outcropping of common sense here.

1. "contra la precarite"... The french students are protesting because they're cowards who are afraid to take a job where they might have to actually do something in order to keep said job.
2. Everybody in France seems willing to put up with these jerks interfering with traffic and shutting down the works in order to let them protest. Sorry, buddy, some old granny's right to have an ambulance arrive on time trumps your right to take a nap on the street. But that would involve thinking through one's actions, rather than simply arrogating to oneself the mantle of moral superiority.
3. The cops were perfectly willing to stand by and let thugs from les banlieues beat the snot out of the whiny little bastards. Marking the worst with paintguns? Where does that come from? If you see somebody in danger of being kicked to death, you pull out your truncheons and you lay it down.
4. And if you're the police superintendent who refuses to back your cops for doing so... well, then you must be in France!

The French are in turmoil, because as a society, the French seem to have lost their flipping minds, and there's not a single contingent stepping forward that seems to have some grip on both sanity and basic testicular fortitude. If you wanted a recipe for how to turn a major international player into an third-world has-been, France seems to be turning into a splendid example. And it's a crying damned shame.

Cirque du Soleil in Dallas

2006-03-29T08:35:00.000-08:00

"Delirium" was a pastiche show, but still very well done.

The opening act, which consisted of world-music by Nitza, not so much. She can belt it out, but the vocals, etcetera, was uninspired and the performance generally self-congratulatory. Good enough for what an opening act is supposed to do -- get the audience paying attention to the stage -- but more like an NPR Sunday-night "also ran." Definitely Nitza's stuff is nothing I'd ever pay money to see or buy on a CD.

Cirque du Soleil, on the other hand, I'd buy on video and leave running for days like we were still in the '80s and it was a favorite screen-saver by Beagle Brothers.

Cirque du Soleil has a good mix and match for a general audience. I prefer a heavier performer mix, rather than the mostly-dance-and-music with performers thrown in, which is how Delirium was constituted. I'm kind of a purist -- I love European circus, and can jazz for days about the raw physical skill involved. I don't even need a set, I'm so enthralled by what these folks can do with their bodies. But for a general audience, it's probably about right, and the song and dance themselves were very, very good. The art involved in presenting the "circus otherworld" was absolutely awesome.

I left totally jazzed. Practically danced all the way to the car. Did car-dance in the parking lot, to the alternating amusement and embarrassment of Those Who Put Up with Me.

Well worth catching when they come into town.

Easy solution to Connecticut "Psycho Kitty" Problem

2006-03-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

Yes, there is a very simple solution to this crazy-ass cat and her sociopathic bitch of an owner. Yes, I called her a sociopathic bitch: when you own an animal that's mauling people and sending them to the hospital, and you simply don't care, then let the shoe fit the foot...

Here's the solution. KILL IT. We are the dominant mammals on this planet, and our proper course of action when attacked by a minor ambush predator with delusions of grandeur, is to KILL IT. In fact, the solution to a major ambush predator getting uppity, is to get five or ten of you together, and THEN KILL IT. Or, do the job with just yourself and your buddies Smith and Wesson. And then have your hunters take it to the skinners, who will make a pelt from it, and have your skinners take it to your cooks, who will see how well it goes with garlic.

By God's design or the steady progress of evolution, human beings are incredibly dangerous predators. We are vastly more dangerous than any other animal on the planet -- mosquitos included. The only reason mosquitos are outdoing us is that at the end of the day, most of us simply aren't annoyed enough to try harder. Bears are incredibly powerful. Tigers have power, grace, and stealth to humble a ninja master. Elephants have brains combined with mass tonnage and a bad attitude. Hippo and rhinos, ditto. Snakes and insects have incredible poisons. We, on the other hand, get the really insidious stuff.

We kill and eat them all. Tonnage is no match for being able to sweat, and therefore hunt all-out for hours under worst blazing sun the savannahs and deserts have to offer. Claws and strength are no match for being able to communicate hunting strategy in complete silence, simply by eye contact and minor motions of the head and face. Poisons are no match for being able to turn a prey item's shelter into a deadly trap. Notice that we haven't even gotten to opposable thumbs yet. Anybody who thinks that human beings pushing other animals into extinction is a new and modern thing needs to start cracking some books.

If you're a yuppie woman who's had all aggression beaten out of you since you were three and kicked somebody in the shins, then sit on it in a violent way. You'll be excused for that when the alternative is being hamstrung by a housepet, and we'll all stand back and golf-clap while you sue Ms. Cisero for every cent she owns.

Blogger ate another post.

2006-03-29T07:04:00.000-08:00

I don't know what's up with these guys, but they're *incredibly* unstable as of late. Not just mine, either. I may or may not have posted to Sciolist: I don't know, I can't actually load it. Happens from home, too. I'm thinking about whether I enjoy blogging as a hobby enough to migrate to a paid service.

Financial jiujutsu for the paranoid.

2006-03-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

So, since I don't prefer to be a peasant my whole life, and want to have a debt/income ratio that lets my wife and I do all the things we currently cannot do, I have a thought. I'm one year and no catastrophes (crossing fingers) from being totally out of consumer non-mortgage debt (a car). That's been a long time coming, and enough paychecks and bonus money signed away into the netherworld to make me want to puke, but it's done.

So, what, in principle, would keep one from doing the same thing with the mortgage? Not much. It's an old immigrant tactic. So, here's a strategy for the paranoid, folks like me who simply don't know if the reports they're reading from various stocks and funds is being reported correctly.

1. Pay down the mortgage (live on one person's check, use the other's to pay it off). Unless you're in Fairfax Co., Boston, SF, or one of those Officially Nutzoid Real-Estate Markets(tm), it shouldn't be that bad. We could do it in three to four years, and would have, had we not been still having to buy stuff that folks who haven't spent the last four years in another country take for granted or have three of. And we're pretty middle class. I knew guys moonlighting in freight yards doing the same thing.

2. Once the mortgage is gone, you're then out a tax shelter. If Congress continues with its current exemptions, which assume that you're paying down a mortgage, no biggie. But if not, you'll want that mortgage exemption. So, pick up another mortgage, and pay interest on it. Since you've got the total asset as collateral, it shouldnt' be all that hard to get a decent rate.

3. Roll the money into 3 or 6 month 25k minimum CDs and the like, for an average yearly return of around 5%.

That's not a stellar rate of return, but it's tax-defended, very liquid if you've staggered your deposits in time, and the returns are pretty-much guaranteed, in stark contrast to stocks, which might get me 8%... but which might vanish in a puff of corporate malfeasance tomorrow. If you're a financial smart guy, you could probably do much better, but anybody can pull this one off, and use their hard-bought asset to at least stay a little bit ahead of inflation.

So, come on, financial smart guys: what's a better strategy?

Just in case it's not totally obvious..

2006-03-27T14:46:00.000-08:00

The Secret Lives of Staff Officers

Ahmadinejad officially embarks upon the Tyrant's Road

2006-03-27T14:42:00.000-08:00

It's not a road anyone wants to travel. But by accusing Khatami of treason and spying for the West, we learn two things:

1. Ahmadinejad is probably very sane. But, if it can be taken at face value, he's rather paranoid. If not, clearly his notions of how diplomacy works are a bit off.
2. I would suggest that this gets viewed through a lens suggesting that the Mullahcracy is in serious trouble, and that the slow cementing of military-intelligence officers in the corridors of power is not long for this world, to be replaced with an outright military state.... aka, a Shia version of a Bathist islamofascist regime.

Alania? Or, the Russian bear goes a-conquering again

2006-03-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

From the Jamestown folks: Russia seems to be planning to "annex" South Ossetia, which is Georgian territory, while daring the Georgians to do anything about it.

This is a disturbingly overt escalation of Putin's long, quiet war to force Georgia to knuckle under and return to being a powerless satellite of the Kremlin. But with world attention elsewhere, it looks like he may get away with it.

UPDATE: and this morning, they note that Russia has just cut off its nose to spite its face by banning Moldovan and Georgian wines and other agricultural products. Since the latter are WTO members, and Russia is a WTO applicant, Georgia and Moldova now have the right to retaliate to a politically-inspired "duh" move by blocking Russian WTO accession until such a time as the trade sanctions are done away with. Since both countries produce good products, the short-term hit is likely simply to hurt average Russians (about whom the Kremlin cares nothing), while spurring the latter two countries to go into high-gear cementing better EU economic ties.

Putin and his FSB cronies don't seem to understand that petrodollars will not save Russia, if he insists on swapping moves that exchange blatant economic self-strangulation, in exchange for internationally damaging and domestically worthless expansionism in South Ossetia. Had Putin developed some actual strength in his country, rather than squashing his population and hitching himself to the "oil curse" in order to implement the traditionally zero-sum Russian foreign policy based on the complete xenophobic domination of all its neighbors, Russia would currently be in a position to be globally dominant. But since "the vampire" still thinks that natural resources are more potent and powerful economically than the development of human capital, we see the Bear playing 19th-century games in a 21st-century world.

Once again, Russian tyrants seem to be snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. It'd be hilarious if it didn't involve suffering people by the million.

Eat your bacon, it's good for you...

2006-03-27T07:31:00.000-08:00

I would now like to officially gloat at all the people who thought I was nuts when I said that eventually they'd engineer meat animals to produce Omega-3 fats...

Hahaha. Can't wait until it hits the market. Now *officially* a part of this healthy breakfast...

And, Russ gets culture.

2006-03-24T13:17:00.000-08:00

Just to make my twin and his Cupcake jealous, I'm going to see Momix in four hours, and Cirque du Soleil in not all that long, too. nyaa nyaa.

Froma Harrop doesn't get it.

2006-03-24T13:12:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent rebuttal piece.

Unfortunately, she makes two assumptions:

1. Minorities are liberals by definition.
2. Conservative = Republican.

Numero Uno -- Now, plenty of minorities are Democrats. Currently, most. But huge swaths of the Hispanic and Black communities are socially very conservative when it comes to family-values questions. It's still a debatable point, but that's a caveat that needs pointing out.

Numbah Two -- by trying to cast matters as Dem-vs-Rep, she misses something important. Yes, better research is required. But the phenomenon itself is fairly widely noted. If you take a poll of people who identify as strongly liberal, and a similar poll of those identifying as strongly conservative... chances are, it's the latter with the kids.

Next time, let the ingrates rot.

2006-03-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

Why on earth would we risk the blood of good British and American soldiers to rescue these "peace activist" ingrates?

Here's their press release.
Yep. Not one word of thanks to the "occupiers" who liberated them.

This is the morally-superior left. Who would tell us that liberating Iraq was a waste of time, and actually evil, and who would instead have us invade North Waziristan.

Wrestle the bear, wheee!

2006-03-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

Just in case today's previous post is a little too heavy for y'all, how about getting your aerobics with Caesar the 650-lb bear?

Oh, and, yes, PETA has formally come out against bears having fun. Or, I guess that'd be PABHF. Or PETABHF. Do you pronounce with a cheek waggle, or by flapping your lips?

Anyway, as long as the bear's having fun, and the people are having fun, sounds good to me. Because it's not like you could miss the existence of a problem, wrestling an unmuzzled hungry abused animal that can fold and spindle you like a pretzel...

Blogger's weird.

2006-03-22T12:16:00.000-08:00

Took the system five hours to load that last post... and a couple weeks before that I got an email asking why I'd denied somebody access.

A.k.a., bear with me if the page does funny stuff.

Orwellian Double-Speak from the USDA

2006-03-22T08:04:00.000-08:00

Well, guess what popped into my mailbox last night from the USDA?
-----------------------------
The following is a response to your inquiry regarding the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).

As a *consumer* I would like to go on record stating that there is much good within the NAIS idea, but that the program's insistence on uniformity is poorly-considered. A commercial farm is *not* the same as a homesteader keeping chickens or rabbits on his back 20.

Or, if there's to be uniformity, let it be REAL uniformity, and let the 4H kids and the homesteaders share in the possibility of using premise tags, rather than having to buy an i.d. tag for every rabbit in the hutch.

If something is not done to allow for the disease-tracking of commercial animals (which I agree is overdue) without providing a regulatory hammer to beat upon small niche producers, then there will be little choice except to organize widespread opposition to NAIS' implementation standards on the state level, as has already begun here in Texas.

Play ball with us, and we're willing to see a lot your way. Write us off, and you're in for a fight. It's that simple.

Thank you for your interest in the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The development and implementation of NAIS has been and continues to be an evolutionary process. The USDA is committed to developing NAIS policy in an open manner that invites feedback (like yours) and input from producers and stakeholders large and small.

[ed.-- Boilerplate, but so far, so good.]

NAIS is currently a voluntary program. The program is now voluntary so that producers of every size and makeup and other stakeholdrs can participate in the design, development and testing of the system. Obviously, the effectiveness of the NAIS will be directly related to the level of participation by all producers and stakeholders to include mid, small and hobby farmers. We are not taking a one size fits all approach to development of the program.

[ed. -- Uh-oh. Doublespeak: NAIS' own site indicates that it is currently voluntary, with the intention of becoming mandatory asap. "....voluntary so that producers of every size....can participate in the design...." a.k.a., if you exercise your freedom not to participate, we will not permit you any voice in how the program develops.]

[ed2. -- Flat-out lie: "We are not taking a one size fits all approach..." This is flatly contradicted by NAIS' own website (link further below in post), which touts program uniformity as one of its primary goals.]

How the NAIS will be applied will vary somewhat among the various species and producer groups. Species working groups have been and continue to work very hard to address the specific issues related to applying NAIS to specific groups of animals. They are working on and forwarding their recommendations to USDA on the types of identifications devices to be used, possible exemptions and what constitutes a reportable animal movement event in the NAIS. We encourage you to get involved with these groups. You can find additional information about species working groups at USDA’s NAIS Web site at http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/.

NAIS is not intended to track, capture and report every time an animal leaves its premises. Trail rides, a fence break through, and 4-H shows, for example, may not necessarily always be considered a reportable event.

[Ed.-- I have not altered this text in any way. This is Orwelllian "Newspeak" at its finest. "May not necessarily always?" In other words, it's already been decided that, not only must you register your house with the feds if you own a horse or a sheep, but you're going to have to tell them every time you take a trail ride.]

We appreciate and are encouraged by your "willing" spirit. We recognize that a system of this size and complexity needs to be developed with the opportunity for input by those affected. Thank you for taking time to share your concerns regarding this important animal health issue. We will keep concerns such as those you expressed in mind as we continue to work with you and all stakeholders to develop NAIS.

Regards,
NAIS Program staff

[ed.-- Translated from bureaucratese, thanks for writing in, sucker, but we're going to go ahead and do what we want no matter what you think.]

So, is there anybody here who doesn't think that this constitutes a massive power-grab by the USDA? I don't know what Glenn Reynolds thinks, but right now, the "Army of Davids" is getting its ass kicked. The State of Texas is dragging its feet a bit, but so far as I have been able to determine, the rest of the state governments have rolled over and stuck their butts up in the air. If you're uncomfortable with this, the time to start inundating your state officials and gutless Congresscritters with mail and email is NOW.

State of the Russ Address, March 16

2006-03-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, a general-purpose personal update:

1. Felt-making continues to progress. I am trying to figure out how to keep the felt as dense as it is when fully wet, and short of building a large press, have resorted to taking the bamboo mat when wet-rolled and sticking it in front of a fan in the garage. Kind of like storing my own Pod People, only likely to be fluffier.

2. All materials are on-hand to start making a vest and skirt for the Bunny out of horsehide. Don't recall whether she prefers the Burgundy, or the Oxblood. But, on the other hand, I've finally figured out how collars work(tm). It's once again something that's very simple once you can bridge the divide between seeing something in three dimensions, and arriving at a two-dimensional pattern for it.

3. I have a dilemma. No, I'm not a rabbi, with the pork loin on sale this Friday. Rather, it's supposed to rain this weekend. That's good, and with the peach and plum trees in bloom, we're glad to have anything to relieve the drought. On the other hand, I have purchased an Arrow "yard-saver" shed I'd like to assemble on the concrete slab in my side yard, so I can get the yard tools out of my garage and put that into some semblance of order. I intend to thoroughly re-organize that sucker, get the power tools set up, and still be able to pull the Jeep into the garage at night.

4. Last weekend, on the other hand, we set up a fantatic, Party-Party scene.. but I forgot a previous promise I made, and had to leave the party early, including stranding The Bunny with only hope of a ride home (it's close, so that was more a guilt thing than a real prospect of stranded-ness), so I could go up to Oklahoma and be a fighter's second in a cage match. THAT was weird: if I get off my ass, you'll see it soon on Sciolist. Said fighter owes me a big one.

5. The job is still untenable, as it is now officially Bank of America's policy that administrative assistants are not entitled to performance reviews. Yes, folks, we're now officially second-class employees. Rather galling, considering that I've re-engineered this job to the extent that I could now literally replace myself with a part-timer without inconveniencing the unit. So, I will either put up with it for a while while re-enrolling in feldenkrais training (contingent on finding crash space in Colorado, which should be do-able), or else getting a teaching gig. There's a job open nearby in Dallas, but I can't get their HR to return any calls, or the actual school's switchboard to even pick up the phone. This score is fairly frustrating.

6. On the other hand, my article on Crecy is not only accepted, but got me back an enthusiastic review, from a pair of guys whose publishing career has revolved around putting out work on the Hundred Years War. My work is mentioned in an equal place with the pros, as "Crecy finally makes sense." Actually, that's not what they said... they said "finally, the events at the Battle of Crecy seem to be rationally explicable." Because, well, they're professional medieval-nerds. Be that as it may, this is the second paper I've kicked out in the past couple of years, and my emphasis on using experimental archaeology to create a "worm's-eye view" approach to medieval milhist seems to be a starter. Now all I have to do is the destructive testing with The Machine, and start paper number three, in which I will make obscenely far-reaching comments on the role of medieval armor.

7. The credit card is paid off. Foundation payments left to go, and then we are almost out of non-mortgage consumer debt. Which is good, because one of the doors has started sticking, and if that keeps up, it may be time for more foundation work. Oh well, eventually the whole house will be done...

8. The yard is looking fantastic, and we're waiting for the grapes that I put in to wake up. I'm paranoid about grapes: I always think they've died on me... and the Fig hasn't woken up at all yet... but it may just be too early. If it's croaked, we'll just put in more Rose Monsters.

9. No bun in the oven, but we're working on it.

10. Was asked whether I wanted to be in the NCAA office pool, and realized that I don't have the foggiest clue how March Madness actually works, and who's got a prayer of winning... all my sports experience tends to be on the playing side, rather than spectating. (Though don't ask me about my lay-up, it's been years and years -- and my chances at "horse" are no better than even.)

I'm sure there's something I've forgotten, but I couldn't tell you what it is... since I've forgotten it...

Syria's out, Iran is in, troop levels...

2006-03-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

are going UP for Ashura, and in the face of the Iranians being publicly mentioned as the problem.

Heh.

For those of you who don't get it, let me spell it out.

1. We never found an unproblematic successor candidate in Syria, and the ground for a democratic "colored revolution" needs serious watering before somebody reasonable could conceivably come to power. So we haven't toppled them, but we've made sure that Hezbollah and the Palestinians can no longer rely upon them.
2. Therefore, the latter two groups shift the purse strings upon which their survival depends (since their leadership is too corrupt and stupid to "grow the pie" and enact the reforms that would be needed to create something beyond a 1700s-level economy on their own) to Iran.

Now, I hear the rebuttal coming: "but now Iran runs the whole show!"
And my answer to that is, GREAT!

Because once we put the kabosh on the Iranian regime, which has much greater prospects for satisfactory regime change than Syria does... the gig's up. All that will be left are a bunch of Pakistani madrassas and the local "Al-Qaieda (sp) in (fill in franchise name here)" chapters. And we are actually very, very good at rolling up these little groups when they try to take over and piss on the locals, as recent events in Yemen and Somalia show.

3. And we're publicly moving extra troops in b/c of Iran's agents sneaking across the border. What signal does that send? Well, signal numero uno is that we're NOT stretched to our limits already, and that the Iranian political calculus has been made with a couple of incorrect values on our side of their equation.

If I were a mid-level Iranian officer without exceptionally-good ties to Ahmadinejad's new "even more loyal than my other superloyalbestestBasijbuddies" units, I'd be a very worried man.

The Fire Celebration is coming... and in spite of their best efforts, the regime is a laughing-stock, and powerless to prevent the Iranian people from celebrating their heritage.

Zahak will fall.

Wait, wait: the Canadian Army has guns?

2006-03-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

And they're planning to use them?

I thought they mostly stood by while people who aren't Canadians get shot and mortared and hacked up with machetes...

Well, um, good for Canada!!

Pardon me, while I stroll off into cognitive-dissonance-land...

Liquid Water near Saturn

2006-03-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

Woohoo! Liquid Water, in view of Saturn's bee-yooo-tiful rings...

Now, all we have to do is:

Launch an Orion ship (Yes, I'm obsessive on this one. Got a better idea?)
Spool down the incredible amount of material required to cement a Space Elevator.
Set up a nuke plant on top of the elevator to produce clean power.
(Profit, w/ sales of energy, elevator, and use of half-tethered "whippy end" for inertial launches)
Send said ship, with spare cargo holds now available, to do some serious asteroid prospecting.
(Profit by "ultimate strip mining")

There. A plan fit for a supervillain. Or, for the bright boy who wants to sell incredibly exclusive vacation trips to the Hanging Gardens of Enceladus.

Body Mechanics Geekery

2006-03-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note... I think the body angle to use is to work off Feldenkrais' observation that large muscles drive large movement, and that the small muscles' work should be reserved for small refinements of movement. You see this all over, but it's very tough to retrain consciously. (Seriously, try letting your forearms be mostly passive while using a mouse, or try signing your checks like a Chinese calligrapher, with the motions coming out of the shoulder. For most folks, including lil' ol' moi, we're talking order-of-magnitude refinement in how one is able to move.)

For the record...

2006-03-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not a very big computer gamer. I play them, unapologetically: you get a lot of bang for your dollar, especially if you tend to pick up just a couple titles and play them forever (I have very specific tastes).

Particularly, in my case, I like to do this for a few hours whenever I need to recharge, and to percolate on ideas that aren't going anywhere. Like taking a hella-long bath, only quite a bit more social. And the percolation works: I've pulled some fairly interesting research ideas out of playing Medieval:Total War and it's successor titles. (For instance: "mechanical artillery was a largely mature technology in the high-medieval world. So why did not a single European medieval power make notable use of field artillery except in relation to siegecraft? Or, put another way, why was it such a shock to the late-medieval world that the Taborites did make use of it, when the wagon-laager had been around as a tactical element in Central and Eastern Europe for centuries?")

And late last night I once again proved to myself that I am a total nerd by looking at Galactic Civilizations 2 and thinking "oh, no wonder I can never seem to get anywhere economically. The economic engine isn't built upon a capitalist model, but a mercantilist one. Duh...." This realization should have reached out and slapped my forebrain around like the former was a 1930s gangbuster, and my brain a sleazy pimp running wood alcohol. "Of course it's mercantilist, you idiot, it's a colonization game..."

And in the course of that, I think I solved a serious issue I'd been having with felt-making. Because that's, um, relevant to far future space opera, yeah, that's the ticket... if I'm right, I have to figure out now how to make a hat-maker's press large enough to produce that kind of felt in large pieces. Once that's achieved, I'll be able to replicate the kind of felt used for cavalry coats in Hungary, and which is largely never seen even in the online felt-making communities outside of people making extremely expensive hats for rodeo folks.

But, anyway, back to video games. If it's quite clear that at the beginning level of development, a mercantilist system is as good as one is likely to get (whether the power receiving raw materials is a government or a corporation), does it not behoove anybody who's serious about strip-mining the asteroids to chunk this silly notion of getting into space with lightweight materials, and instead develop the political will to build an Orion Drive? Forgiveness is easier than permission, and when the world sees a four-hundred-thousand-ton spaceship bigger than the Starship-freaking Enterprise loft into orbit, complete with huge water banks for eating up radiation and giant spherical rotating sections for artificial gravity, nobody will give a crap how it's launched. You want to motivate kids to do well in math and science? Watch those imaginations catch fire, when you tell them that if they work hard, one day they can grow up and work on THAT....

Molly Ivins takes a swing for the "progressives"

2006-03-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

Hey now, you think it's hard to be a moderate, centrist Democrat? Try surviving this during your primary season:

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with
the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating,
straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary
Rodham Clinton.

This kind of thing is good news for Democrats and Republicans both.

For Donkeys: you're either leftist, or you're not. Molly Ivins is a standard Democratic Progressive. Aka, typical Austin-style leftist. There are a lot of leftists in the Democratic Party, and the Dems have a serious identity crisis that is not going to be papered over without a serious party struggle. Any Democrat who tries to sail between the Scylla of the DNC and the Charybdis of Harold Ickes' new database is going to suffer the slings and arrows of "Flip Flop!" But this time, it's going to be from a very loud, very vocal, and thanks to leftist softies with deep pockets and an atrocious taste in ties like George Soros, probably well-financed. The Dems, if they are going to survive as a party, need to decide whether they are the 1930s torchbearers of Progressive Socialism, or whether they are going to reinvent themselves as something else.

For Elephants: short term, anything that divides the Dems is good news. Medium-term, if the Progressives win, the Republicans are likely to wipe the walls with them electorally, forcing the emergence of a new party as the tension between the ideological and the "country club" wings of the party finally can no longer be contained.

Either way, it's a plus for voters, because all of this potential for conflict is predicated on politicians actually paying a slightly higher percentage of lip service to what their constituents want. Rove has the Republicans play to the base for a reason, and had Bush not consistently governed as the Country-Club semi-moderate that he is, he'd have higher approval ratings. Senator Clinton's crowd would govern as socialists... but don't dare actually say that in public... and their constituents who are honest-to-goodness '68ers have finally decided to truly call them on it.

Should be interesting.

Geekery: Body Mechanics

2006-03-07T12:03:00.000-08:00

It's nobody's secret, unless you're one of the poor schmucks who has bought into the JKD mythology, that different martial arts use the body in different ways, and that a punch isn't a punch isn't a punch. Some martial arts styles move from the feet, some from the hips, some from the spine, some from the shoulders. Some transfer their power on a circle, some in a line, some in a combination of the two. An aikidoka rolls by turning his body into a sphere... I learned to roll by turning my body into a ribbon...

but there are certain formative basics which must remain equal, no matter what style of martial arts, or what sport one practices. One of those is the basics of the body. Men have particular bodies. Women, another. Teach a woman to roll the way a man does, and BANG! -- you're looking at a likely injury... because of the differences in the shoulder-to-hip ratio.

One of the things that I'd really like to do in life is get certified as a Feldenkrais practitioner. I think, on top of simply helping older folks re-learn how to get around without help (which would be valuable in and of itself), that I could make a contribution, because it seems that the discipline, which is inherently non-prescriptive, misses a real chance to make a contribution, based on not just movement in the joints, keeping with the functional aspect of the discipline, but by also addressing the specific role of soft tissue -- the "structure" that other folks like Ida Rolf and Michael Leahy observed in order to come up with Rolfing and Active Release Technique.

Is it possible to jump the bridge between them? Using a crude version of ART, I can get somebody's locked-up muscle to let go, and break up some fascitis. Using a crude version of Feldenkrais' hands-on work, I can teach somebody how to move in a way that they couldn't figure out.

This is well and good... but not truly mutually supporting. Function ought to be able to be integrated with structure, since the two are inter-relying concepts. If I know that I have a problem lifting my leg in the air because of tight hip muscles (this is true), and I know that I also have a problem lifting my leg in the air because I'm still learning how to really use the muscles in my lower torso to control the movement of my leg (since, after all, the quad is not REALLY the muscle being used to do this, even though one often feels it tense), both are part of the process. Similarly, if I teach a guy how to move in a way that he no longer shrugs in order to raise his hand, that's good, but it doesn't actually heal the damage caused by years of doing that... and conversely, without re-educating the body, simply fixing the damage isn't going to stop the underlying organization of the nervous system that causes it.

Now, the Alexander Technique *does* do this, at least to an extent... but only to an extent. You won't find an AT guy directly countering fascitis in order to restore soft-tissue function. But AT also makes explicit prescriptive postural assumptions, and while those assumptions are absolutely perfect for, say, taiji, they're not so great for full-court basketball.

I'm sure that this circle can be squared. I *know* it can... and I'd like to be the guy who does it. Now, how, that's another, very, very good question.

The "unconference." Or, "a blogger falls prey to hype."

2006-03-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

David Winer presents a little notion called the unconference, based upon the following premise:

The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum
of expertise of the people on stage.

A laudable observation: I can see why Glenn on Instapundit linked it. However, "Army of Davids" material, this ain't, because the following premise is used to support a terrible conclusion:

Okay, now you have a room full of people, what exactly are they supposed to do?
Choose a reporter, someone who knows something about the topic of discussion (yes, there is a topic, it’s not free-form) and knows how to ask questions and knit a story together.

Oh, dear. So, we're reducing conference sessions to Oprah, only with the Discussion Leader calling on random participants as if they were students at school? What does it mean, to "weave a story?" Well, I can tell you what it doesn't mean:

You cannot hear and form effective, rational judgments based on somebody's research findings.
You cannot visit any session about which you are a neophyte in the hopes of learning from an expert.
You have no means by which to differentiate who possesses specialized knowledge, and who does not.
You cannot present meaningful visual materials, because the topic at hand, given a population of sixty-some active participants, will never remain sufficiently focused.

But what we're really dealing with, is a disastrous assumption, which the author seems to assert as a given good:

I walked into the room and said Time Out, and told the panelists to take their seats in the otherwise packed classroom. I saw Jarvis’s eyes light up — he “got it” right then and there. No crutches. No droning. We’re all equals in this room. No one’s ideas are presumed to be better.

This is the sort of egalitarian promise that fascinates reporters in general -- it plays into their overarching mythology. Sadly, however, it's just not true except in the squishiest conference sessions. We do presume that some people have more and better ideas, or else we wouldn't bother to go to conferences in order to hear them.

We have words to describe what is advertised: for "unconference," substitute discussion. And for "unconferences" involving sufficiently unfalsifiable discussions that everybody's opinion is as good as everybody else's, substitute roundtable session. Yes, roundtables. Aka, ugh. There's a good reason that roundtable sessions are usually poorly attended, and they're precisely the reasons why Mr. Winer seems to be advocating them.

This whole blogging and "Army of Davids" deal rests on a premise: technology is allowing more voices to kick into the public debates. But that is only a virtue because of the generally-untapped reservoir of expert voices who can increase the quality of the general discussion. Simply because there are hundreds of thousands of experts out there, does not imply that all bloggers' opinions are equal. Would I dare to debate Joe Katzman of Winds of Change on defense issues? Nuh-uh. Or how about Michael Yon regarding small-unit fighting in Iraq? Nuh-uh again.

Blogs are nice, and expanding technology has the potential to do us a lot of good. But falling prey to hype isn't going to get us anywhere.

"Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath."

2006-03-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

I will not see you again.

... I need to drop some funds in Totten's tip jar tonight...

First Epistle to Saint James the Apostate

2006-03-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

Why might a person who is theoretically hostile to religion argue that religion is still necessary?

The article has its ideological blinders, to be sure.

The author might have shelved some bitterness at the "patriarchy" by noting the serious burdens that said system places upon men. Men may theoretically become more powerful under such a system, but in reality, they are also drastically more controlled -- and an emphasis on male self-control is a consistent hallmark of traditional patriarchies. There are good reasons why those seemingly bizarre homemakers' tracts of the 1950s seemed to make sense at the time... Technology has changed quite a lot. Even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it took somebody performing hard work (in the 19th century, back-breaking work) in order to keep a home a fit place to live. Ever done a few loads of laundry without mechanical assistance? In the winter?

It seems to me that most of what the author decribes can readily be described as the results of societies that have become fundamentally out of balance. Modern secular dogmas become ideologically myopic to the point of solipsism... and why make a life-altering, permanent investment in the heavy duties of parenthood, if one has no concrete notion of any good but one's own? (For instance, the supposed "activist" who never actually goes out to engage in charitable work, but only critiques others' attempts to do so on ideological grounds. Said activist may remain ideologically pure by his standards, and thus avoid creating harm, but he generally does little to no good, either). Religion tends to become the counterweight by default, since no purely philosophical -- atheistic, agnostic, or even simply apathetic -- system of thought has ever been devised that sufficiently orients large members of societies away from themselves and towards other people the way that healthy religion does. Some of the unhealthily individualistic (and I'm speaking here as a publicly-avowed "small-l" libertarian) ideologies of the 20th century are already becoming known as profoundly solipsistic failures in this respect.

If Mr. Longman wants an antidote to "Patriarchy" as he sees it, he should seriously work to devise a philosophical system that will allow for individualism without the demographically crushing solipsism that often attends it, and which therefore will square the circle, and use a secular argument to preach satisfaction in providing for others. I could devise a philosophy like this off the top of my head in about twenty minutes. Whether such a philosophy would be acceptable to Longman is a bad bet: it would be explicitly futurist and consistently expansionist. Whether it would be accepted, and prove, over time, to be more *effective* than religion, is another bet entirely, and one I wouldn't put much money on. However hostile Longman may be to religion, it is quite clear that, society can measure religion according to secular standards, and discover secular arguments in favor for it.

Religion *works.*

Bosnia vs. Serbia, round three

2006-02-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

For those of you who were in the comments earlier, I found time to get the war crimes post up on Publius Pundit.

Cat in Germany gets bird flu.

2006-02-28T11:38:00.000-08:00

From Yahoo News.

Not inherently troubling on the surface, the problem is that since it's more difficult to track pets, this opens up a serious question:

Will we have any warning if and when the nightmare scenario occurs, and the virus obtains the ability to jump mammal-to-mammal?

Palestinians bite hand that feeds it, suffer consequences

2006-02-27T14:02:00.000-08:00

Gee, all this time, who knew that the only reason Palestine could even pretend to statehood was because the Israelis were paying for it?

I don't know about some folks, but I'm guessing that "tax transfers" sounds an awful lot like "tribute," and am having some fairly serious problems mustering the requisite sympathy. Not that I really give a crap about the Israelis, a bunch of perfidious bastards who sell our miltech out to China (the actual real government most likely to shoot us with it) whenever our back's turned.

But what part of a traditional society, in which the woman are largely not working, has 25% of its population on government "salary?" I'll tell you what kind of a traditional society... a dead one. You're talking about a society that is, in effect, one giant infant at the welfare tit.

If the Palestinians want to be a nation, they can build an economy, just like everybody else. And if they want to put into power a bunch of folks who think that war with the only neighbor of theirs willing to make more than token statements on their behalf -- that's right, folks, even the Saudis are pleding chump-change compared to what the Israelis are about to cut off -- then they can discover that the greatest freedom, as Terry Pratchett says, is the freedom "to suffer the consequences."

(And before the peanut gallery pops up with a chorus of "Mexico!," I'd like to remind everybody that we're getting back a bunch of people in exchange, so that's not an apple-to-apple comparison...)

Iran steadily unveiling its North Korean future?

2006-02-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

Rooz Online chronicles the continuing brilliant strategy of economic power that is Iran. This time, the propaganda machines are saying that about half the business execs in the country are anti-revolution.

Ahmadinejad's political strategies never have seemed to have found a class enemy they didn't like, so the notion that corrupt figures within the mullahcracy would be replaced with loyal Passdaran and Basij members is no giant intellectual leap. Not, of course, that this is going to do anything to improve the condition of the stock market or keep the business community from pulling a Caracas and effectively becoming invisible as it hides from the State. At this rate, as Rooz suggests, it's going to get to where actually making a profit is criminal.

At which point, one wonders... what will Iran do?
Yes, cause trouble. Duh. No kidding, Spanky. But the Iranian regime's ability to act abroad is directly linked to its legates. It has no meaningful legions it can send marching, and the government doesn't trust half its military in the first place. Iran's influence, in short, is primarily due to its financial muscle.

Oil money or no oil money, if the regime keeps killing the goose that lays the golden egg, it's going to slowly wind up where North Korea is, but without a serious military. At this point, nukes may be all that save it, because it is now in the position of being effectively the sole backer of the Sadrists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. If it can't provide monetary support to those pawns on the board, they become worthless, as geopolitically useless to Iran's government as Cuba was to the Soviets in the late 1980s.

And yet, by its very nature, the zahak in power cannot reverse gears and actually allow the policies that would give Iran a thriving economic base from which to truly project power... if matters continue along the time-proven trajectory, it will be no surprise if shortages follow, just as Venezuela, (Venezuela!) is now suffering oil shortages.

All of which bodes poorly for the Iranian people so long as they continue to demonstrate that they crave freedom, but are unwilling to fight for it. As was once quoted in Transylvania to explain why the Vlachs would not revolt against Ceaucescu, "oatmeal does not explode." The regime is relentlessly unpopular, but so far, a bus driver's strike in Tehran seems as close as the Iranians have managed to come to co-locating a match and a fuse. The Iranians deserve better than the prospect of lingering on in Cuban or North-Korean-style misery, if they will only dare to roll the dice.

National Animal Identification System?

2006-02-23T07:37:00.000-08:00

There's a lot swirling around on this, and it's worth paying attention to, even if you're a complete hive dweller without the foggiest idea of the existence of any animal that's not a cat, dog, or sidewalk pigeon that isn't plastic-wrapped and sold by the pound in a freezer section.

Here's the predictably starry-eyed government blurb.

The plan is currently voluntary, but it's explicitly intended to become a mandatory agriculture regulation, which puts this front-and-center as something that needs to be discussed.

Small farmers are up at arms, because whereas the NIAA members responding to "stakeholder surveys" are big producers like Monsanto and Cargill (you know, the folks who run the ugly feedlot farms spreading disease in the first place?), who would only be required to have a "premises identification system," small producers would be required to track each and every animal... a bureaucratic nightmare which they say would effectively put them out of business.
Oh. And the big boys don't have to register their homes with the feds, either.

That's bad news if you raise animals for any other reason than for mass meat production. If they're right, you can effectively write off anybody who's trying to keep endangered or older species alive... and homesteaders (for you hive people, that's "people who raise their own food") would certainly face an undue and unreasonable regulatory burden that would have almost no effect in actually stopping animal disease.

Worse than that, it looks, from the NAIS' own admission, that the folks pushing the program are precisely the ones who would benefit from the mandatory sale of the technology to farmers. This is openly corrupt: not that this should be any surprise, since it is the USDA, after all, but its shamelessness is still galling, even as it has been forced to backpedal from its original idea of maintaining a Big-Brother-like registry of every horse owner and 4H kid in the country.

Luckily, us locals down here in Texas have bitched up a storm, and TAHC is slowing down to take a serious second look about how this sucker gets implemented. Because as the federal version is written now, I have to say that the small-time folks are right: with its emphasis on uniformity whether or not it's actually appropriate, this is at least as much about control as it is about disease prevention.

Media has lost its mind on Iraq, UAE...

2006-02-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

Besides the rampant misinformation and complete demogoguery regarding Dubai ports, as one shell company effectively replaces another, now we wake up this morning to hear the AP furiously getting it wrong on yet another count...

"Iraq on the verge of civil war," the radio news announcer gleefully notes, with a hint of raspberry-lime "we told you so" clearly audible.

It is? Really? Well, not according to Omar at Iraq the Model... it would seem that any one of the things he's mentioned might have been discovered by our AP information betters...

1. Sistani has forbidden revenge attacks.
2. Attacks occurring are predictably Sadrist.
3. Talabani pledged to rebuild the shrine out of his own pocket.

And there's more, not that I'd want to try to steal Omar's thunder... but you'd think that maybe somebody in the media might have clued into at least one of these things, you know, since they have all these resources devoted to finding out what's going on and all, and not immediately jumped to conclusions...

But, nope, that would involve reporters and the news actually doing their jobs.
Put one more on the blogosphere's scoreboard. Unfortunately. (But, good on you, Omar!)

Bush is right on UAE port call.

2006-02-22T06:37:00.000-08:00

Congress needs to collectively shut the hell up.
The process by which the Treasury Department negotiates with port management is available to anybody in the federal government, and to any regular person who's willing to get off his butt and file a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.

The port company's government connections are a non-issue: we do lots of business with corporations with government ownership, and they've already agreed to go a step past the voluntary security practices other longshoremen-management firms would have to do.

I'm sorry, but all this uproar over "Arabs will control our ports" boils down to two things:

1. A truly pathetic attempt by the Democrats to finally seize upon some issue in order to try to look "tough on national security." (It ain't gonna work.)
2. Outright racism.

Yes, folks, I said racism, and I meant it. Here's the analogy: going all Chicken Little because "the Arabs will control our ports" is absolutely no different than some old white lady walking around terrified of black men because the latter have a higher violent crime rate.

Yep, that's it. Sure, the Saudis started The Wahhabi War, and most Wahhabis by historical fact are from the Arab world. Sure, the UAE has occasionally played ball by making calls we didn't like. They also give us basing rights, etc., and squishing this deal would do immense damage to precisely those parts of the UAE which is most inclined to work with us, while simultaneously empowering those who aren't.

But none of that matters. This is a call on basic ethics. If you get your panties in a twist engaging in collective judgment on the entire Arab race, because a subset of them happen to be our deadly enemies (and my three regular readers will know that I am not exactly squeamish where it comes to foreign policy), then guess what: you're making a racist judgment call, and should have the balls to admit it. Congress is wrong. The AM radio geeks are wrong. The newspaper-pundit "chattering classes" are wrong. They're all wrong, wrong, wrong, and the degree to which they act like they don't understand President Bush's position is a reflection on their own moral myopia.

Don't get me wrong: if you're a Democrat making legitimate political hay in an election year... go for it. It's an atrocious foreign-policy call for the sake of scoring a couple of electoral points, almost as bad as Bill Clinton shilling for the Wahhabi assholes and proclaiming on t.v. to Musharraf that the Danish cartoonists should be prosecuted... but atrocious foreign-policy calls are a knee-jerk reflex for the current crop of top-ranked Democrats, and shouldn't surprise anybody.

There's a lot about Bush I really don't like. There's even more on which I quite frankly think he sucks. This isn't it. This is why we don't live in a democracy. The self-righteous mob is dead wrong, and acting reprehensibly. It will be a literal shame on this nation's honor if political grandstanding and racism are allowed to set a precedent of security-justified economic "reverse dhimmitude" and do permanent damage to our relations with the Arab world.

VERY light blogging this week.

2006-02-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not on vacation, but I'm unusually busy both at work (where I often am in hurry-up-and-wait mode) and at home. I'll have some stuff here, a new post upon Putin and Polish/Hungarian politics up on Publius soon, as well as at least one shot over to Sciolist hopefully by Friday.

Educational Apartheid

2006-02-20T06:21:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick note in support for the Lizard Queen's entry on education: "Back to Basics."

My buddy and neighbor being a teacher, and me wanting to be, we've been discussing this. I'm going through the teacher certification process, and one of the things that has been rammed down our throats, time and time again, with reference to study after study's empirical support, has been this simple notion:

Effort, more than any other factor, defines a
student's likelihood of high achievement in school.
We don't have to belabor this. We all know very bright folks in high school (sorry, there's an instinct to call them "kids," but, really, they're not. They're psychologically-deranged adolescents who are adult in every sense of the word except for emotional stability and the accumulation of experience-based wisdom. In simpler cultures, these folks are already shouldering an adult's load, and the fact that they're sheltered from that in ours is simply a sign of the complexity of our society. Okay, off my personal soap box.) -- Likewise, most of us know somebody who isn't particularly bright, but has "made it" in life to a position significantly cushier than their smarter but lazier colleagues... through dint of simply continuing to do their best, and then to make their best a little better.

If every career educator knows that effort is the number one factor... then why has the Education Establishment been so hot-and-bothered to divide student classes between higher and lower-IQ students and track them into "college bound" and "send them to shop class" academic tracks? If our Establishment wanted all kids to go to college, they'd put everybody in the college-bound track, and throw a greater proportion of their resources into helping folks who were having a hard time staying afloat.

Because what it boils down to now, with or without their parents' awareness, is that some bureaucrat is defining what minority percentage of the student population gets to escape a second-rate education and take the classes that will actually prepare them for success in the outside world. The rest of them get to hang out with less funding, less-rigorous standards, and usually less-motivated teachers... certainly less hope of getting into a good four-year school for the training they'll need to make the big money.

Which, btw, isn't a swipe at trades. We need good tradesman, and many a nose-in-the-air liberal arts graduate student would be reduced to tears by trying to juggle the mental burden involved in a plumber's typical day. I know, I've been there, watching some of my peers laughing down their noses at guys who could fold and spindle them into origami birds simply by talking about how you handle different kinds of concrete. Ya wanna talk concrete? Do you have any idea how much there is to know about conrete? This stuff is hard, and that's why a skilled tradesman can command such a high hourly rate. But some of these tradesmen will go through their careers never quite finding their places, because they're kick-ass tradesmen and craftsmen who should have been kick-ass chemists, mechanical engineers, and doctors.

And we need those folks, too. Lots and lots of them. Kids should be getting a schooling that will give them an actual choice in the matter by the time they get to their high-school counselor, rather than being shunted into "oh that's too hard for them-land" for the sake of some administrator's convenience.

SOCOM finally to get relaxed ROE?

2006-02-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

Article here.

If the guy reading Rumsfeld has both his ears on right (and it seems from his stuff earlier that week that he does), it looks like SOCOM's finally going to get its hands untied and be able to do more black-team work.

Makes me wonder whether Robert Kaplan's post-embed briefings and first publication got some attention (since his big theses were by his own admission simply what he was being constantly told by guys at the pointy end), or whether the boys on the Potomac really are starting to get the big picture on their own. Heh.

The sad journey of Arnold Schwarzenegger

2006-02-17T06:38:00.000-08:00

He has finally been beaten-down to where the only policy proposal he can think to make and credibly get taxed is to introduce "price increases" on fuels, in order to fund alternative-fuel research.

Yes, that's right, folks... Mr. Fiscal Responsibility is going to make California more economically competitive by raising gas taxes. He's going to punish the poor bastard in Oak-town who's already paying insane gasoline taxes by raising same, in order to make some upper-middle class politically-correct yuppie feel better about the fact that she's driving a deuce-and-a-half to work on I-80 every morning.

Then he's going to make every company in the state report their emissions. If an accountant on the fourth floor had bean tacos at lunch, what emissions schedule will that fall under, Governor?

Sure, there are environmental groups out there who are terrified at the thought that the world might possibly get as warm as it was in the fourteenth century, where some areas that are green now were deserts (much of southern Italy, for example). But, on the other hand, they were able to raise crops in Greenland, which is now a frozen hell. I'm not too worried.

But I am worried that the collective legislators of our state with the largest economy (perhaps not for long), can think of nothing better to do with their time, and no problem that might perhaps be more important, than screwing over the minimum-wage single mother whose fast-food job doesn't lie on a bus route, in order to make a desperate attempt to keep Greenland frozen.

I can see the bumper-stickers now.

KEEP GREENLAND FROZEN!
What do we want? Frozen Greenlanders! When do we want it? Always!

Tax reform... "Hrm, I know! Let's drive a stake through the heart of the economy!"

2006-02-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

And that's precisely what Senators Wyden and Emanuel propose to do. As unveiled this morning in the WSJ editorial pages, they lay out the rationale for a "Fair Flat Tax."

Of course, the fair flat tax is neither... taxing 15, 25, and then 35% for individuals, and laying down a flat 35% corporate tax. No capital gains tax! What a miracle! Instead, they're going to jump the capital gains into the general income category, effectively doubling said tax, and driving a stake through the capital generation process that is the heart of the economy and job-creation.

What are these two morons thinking?

They're thinking "Our aim is not to soak the rich, but to make the tax system fairer."

(And we'll proceed by defining "fairness" not by reducing the middle class' taxes, but by soaking the rich! Yes, senators, you're right, there's something unfair about a cop making 70k being taxed at 25%, while some CEO is taxed at 15% on his capital gains... assuming we're all sufficiently stupid to buy into this argument and assume the CEO gets no actual salary, the *fair* solution would be to chop the cop's tax rate, not double the CEO's!)

And they're thinking "wealth and income should be treated equally," according to what they wrote in the WSJ... so, wealth should be taxable? Not content with having paid taxes on income once, should wealth now be the standard of taxation?

Some folks just popping by may protest that I'm just beating up on these guys because they're Democrats. Not so. I've got high hopes for Bredeson and others in the Democratic Party, who stand a chance of actually rescuing the party from the gutless, whinging, politically-correct cult-of-Marxism theocrats who have owned the party for the last twenty years. And I hope that they put the continued electoral hopes of morons like this in the trash can, where they deserve to lie until future historians read their writing with as much of a bemused chuckle as folks get when they look at early models of the solar system.

The proposed legislation is fundamentally ignorant, based on leftover, badly-reheated class warfare rhetoric, and, fortunately, is absolutely, utterly, dead on arrival. For which any of us in the actual middle class -- a.k.a, who aren't civil servants -- and whose jobs therefore actually depend upon Economics 101, should be grateful.

Somebody should take both these two senators to the woodshed, and keep them there until they can plot a supply-demand curve.

Arguments for Islamist Governments

2006-02-16T07:08:00.000-08:00

In this editorial, the Telegraph comes close. No banana, but close:

Unlike Hamas and Hizbollah, the Brotherhood does not have a military wing.
Having renounced violence as a means of gaining political power, it should be
allowed a fair crack at the presidency at the end of Mr Mubarak's fifth term in
2011.

Actually, if Churchill is correct about honesty being the best policy, and I believe he is, then the best possible thing that could happen would be for everybody to simply get out of the way and allow Egypt and any other place that wants to be run by Islamists.... to be run by Islamists. I'm sure that my argument has detractors, but here are some quick defenses.

The Competency Defense
Hamas, et al, are fundamentally unsuited to government, and thus the death-fetish "caliphates" of the extremists will be exposed for the adolescent comic-book delusions that they are. Hezbollah's third-rate fascist government can barely keep an economy afloat, and Hamas can't even figure out whether it can form a government, let alone do anything with it.

The Consistency Defense
It's hypocritical to say that "the people should govern, but only if we like what the people have to say." If we stand for freedom, we should stand for freedom. Point-blank.

The Transparency Defense
It's also good to know who your friends and enemies are, so that you are able to act with moral clarity.

The Civilisation Defense
It's said that Islam is incompatible with modernity. Thus far, no openly Islamist government has been able to pull it off... though Morocco is making strides, and big ones, in that direction. If Islamists think they can create a superior society according to those mores, they should be allowed the chance to prove their case.

Seriously, it remains to be seen to what extent a popularly-supported, relatively clean Islamist government -- in stark contrast to the utterly corrupt mullahcracy in Iran, or the toadlike House of Saud -- could produce a superior civilisation than, say, the "secularism = crushing religion" postmodern euro-states, which are militarily helpless and a half-step away from demographic collapse.

Similarly, would such a society be more efficient and thus able to outcompete the Russian Lakedaimonian Despotism (hat tip: Andrew Blair), or the traditional Mandarin Fascism in China?

We'll never know, and neither will they, unless they're given that chance.

The Political Evolution Defense
Once in power, the Islamists have to either root out corruption and fix potholes in the streets, or else:
1. Sink into globally-irrelevant miasma
2. Prop up the regime with foreign adventurism (with historically predictable results)
3. Be replaced by popular dissatisfaction
All of these work out to our advantage in the long term, since properly-running governments with a free citizenry are more efficient, and can easily outcompete despotisms. In fact, 1 tends to lead to 2, which tends to utterly fail, leading to 3... which tends to result in proper popular governance.

The Humility Defense
As an American, I want to see the world in peace and freedom. Under no circumstances do I want this country to try to run the world or preach at it. If the muslim world will collectively get over its death fetish and actually decide to stop murdering all their non-Islamic neighbors... what do I care how they order their societies?

Claude Salhani: misunderstanding geopolitics

2006-02-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

In this post on SpaceWar, Salhani posits that our options vis-a-vis our opponents in the Syrian and Iranian regimes are limited, and that we even need to continue giving aid to the Palestinians, rather than force them into Iran's camp.

Now, maybe it's b/c I'm fighting the last of a fever and my brain hurts, but it seems to me that Salhani doesn't get it. We want Hamas to be utterly dependent upon the mullahcracy, for several different reasons:

1. It increases the overall financial pressure on the mullahs.
2. It increases Saudi concern that the mullahs' version of Islamism will gain influence, rather than their own product, based on the Wahhabi model, and potentially dries up some Saudi funding where they're buying influence elsewhere. After all, it's no surprise that the International Food Bazaar here in Irving (where I used to be a customer) started selling anti-semitic hate literature as soon as the local mosque was completed.
3. By centralising financial support, it makes it all the easier to pull the rug out from underneath the mullahs' legates and janissaries when, rather than de-fanging the snake by taking them on one at a time, we de-snake the fang by freeing the Iranians from the mullahcracy.
4. Transparency, transparency, transparency. Whereas the Saudis are schizophrenic, giving us significant help behind the scenes while simultaneously enforcing an ideology so vicious that their own citizens flee the muttawa on sight, with Hezbollah and increasingly with Hamas, there is simply no doubt. Since the US prefers to solve its problem with a combination of stilettos and nine-pound sledgehammers, any increase in transparency is to our advantage.

But, I could be delirious... wheee.....

Russia and Hamas: it ain't about Hamas...

2006-02-15T06:45:00.000-08:00

As usual, A Step at a Time has one of the best quick analyses I've read on this. There's nothing hard and fast, but it has the unmistakable "ring of truth."