Cobb

Cruising

This is only the second or third time I've done a 'cruise' of blogs to find out interesting things others have written and then blogged them here. I've been working diligently on what amounts to financial forensics for one of the three companies that has recently hired me, and I haven't had much time to think creatively.

So I will join the long list of bloggers who do that, thing for which I've been thankfully included. One other note before I do this. I'm tempted to give credit to the blogs which point me to other blogs where the target information can be found, but that's being too courtly. The point is the original content, not that I'm so brilliant an editor....

So here's what I've found on my cruise.

• A haunting journey through the back country near Chernobyl. "Every step toward the little cars adds 100 microroentgen to my geiger counter reading."
  
• The cure to post-modernism. Boobs done properly. And plus she's so nice I decided to mention her twice. Do you know what a 'tinkle winkle' is? Why it's a cheesburger. No wait, maybe it's a padinga. Find out.
  
• Sports vs Activities. Settled once and for all. Fishing is a sport after all, but it's nothing compared to Boxing.
  
• Bionicle saves Lego from certain doom. But can anyone prounce the names of their characters?
  
• Oh yeah and a little nothing about AQ's chemical attack.
  
• Does anybody care about the Kentucky Derby any longer? I do hope, in my retirement to be with the horsey set, but I must confess I can't remember the last time I thought about horses. Well, except for last week's episode of Touching Evil.
  
• Do government officials shoot themselves in the foot? Literally.
  

In Defense of Globalization

Note to self. Jagdish Bhagwati is the man.

Dialog

Speakin On It

Adrian Piper

(from Decide Who You Are #21)

IT'S FINE. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. I DIDN'T NOTICE ANYTHING WRONG. IT SEEMS FINE TO ME. I DON'T KNOW WHY YOU SAY THAT. I DON'T SEE ANY PROBLEM. I'M AMAZED THAT YOU SEE THINGS THAT WAY. I JUST DON'T SEE IT THAT WAY AT ALL. IT WASN'T INTENTIONAL. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHERE THIS IS COMING FROM. JUST CALM DOWN. TRY TO GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF. THIS IS A COMPLETE SURPRISE TO ME. THE THOUGHT NEVER CROSSED MY MIND. I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS. ISN'T THIS A LITTLE BIT MUCH? THAT'S A WEIRD WAY TO THINK ABOUT THINGS. I JUST CAN'T RELATE. WE CERTAINLY DO HAVE DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THINGS. YOU'RE MAKING TOO MUCH OF THIS. NOTHING'S THE MATTER. STOP GETTING EMOTIONAL. YOU'RE BLOWING THE WHOLE THING OUT OF PROPORTION. EVERYTHING'S FINE. WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? YOU'RE BEING PARANOID. YOU'RE OVERSENSITIVE. YOU'RE READING TOO MUCH INTO IT. STOP JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. IT DIDN'T OCCUR TO ME. YOU'RE OVERINTERPRETING THE DATA. I DON'T THINK IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THAT. IT WAS JUST A SIMPLE MISTAKE. IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. YOU'RE SEEING TOO MUCH IN THIS. NOTHING'S GOING ON. I CAN'T IMAGINE WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE REFERRING TO. I REALLY THINK YOU'RE OVERDOING IT. YOU'RE JUST TIRED. DON'T TAKE EVERYTHING SO SERIOUSLY. IT'S NO BIG DEAL. YOU'RE JUST PROJECTING. YOU'RE OVERREACTING. NOTHING HAPPENED. DID I NOTICE WHAT? I DON'T SEE ANYTHING TO GET UPSET ABOUT. I DON'T SEE WHAT YOU'RE GETTING AT. I DON'T UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM. WHAT'S THE MATTER? YOU'LL GET OVER IT. DID SOMEONE DO SOMETHING WRONG? WHAT'S GOING ON? WHAT'S THIS ABOUT? WHAT'S WRONG? STOP MAKING SUCH A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT. I DON'T SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. EVERYONE DOES THAT. SO WHAT? BIG DEAL. WHO CARES? NO, NOTHING LIKE THAT. JUST A MISUNDERSTANDING, THAT'S ALL. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS IS ABOUT. I'M MYSTIFIED BY YOUR REACTION. I DON'T GET IT. SO? WHAT'S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THAT? IT WAS JUST AN INNOCENT SLIP-UP. I REGARD THAT AS PERFECTLY NORMAL BEHAVIOR. I SEE NO PROBLEM WITH THAT. YOU'RE THE ONE WITH THE PROBLEM. THAT'S A VERY UNCHARITABLE INTERPRETATION. IT'S SO UNNECESSARY TO TALK ABOUT THIS. OH, I DON'T THINK IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THAT, REALLY. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? THAT'S SHEER SPECULATION. YOU'RE AWFULLY QUICK TO CAST ASPERSIONS. YOU CAN'T PROVE THAT. I DON'T NEED TO HEAR THIS. HOW DO YOU KNOW? THAT'S CRAZY. YOU'RE IMAGINING THINGS. THAT'S JUST YOUR OPINION. NO, IT'S NOT THAT AT ALL. THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THAT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. WELL, THAT'S A NATURAL REACTION. THAT DOESN'T MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS. THAT'S A SELF-SERVING EXPLANATION. WHY BRING THIS UP? YOU SEE EVERYTHING IN TERMS OF YOUR OWN PROBLEMS. WHY IS THAT OBJECTIONABLE? YOU'RE COOKING UP PROBLEMS WHERE THERE ARE NONE. YOU'RE MAKING THINGS UP. I DON'T BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED. I'M NOT SAYING YOU'RE LYING, I'M JUST SAYING YOUR PERCEPTIONS ARE DISTORTED. IT'S NOT NECESSARY TO SEE THINGS IN THAT LIGHT. YOU'RE TOO UPSET TO THINK CLEARLY. WE'LL DISCUSS IT LATER. NO, NOT NOW, I'M BUSY. STOP MAKING TROUBLE. YOU'RE SEEING THINGS THAT AREN'T THERE. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. SO HOW ARE YOU OTHERWISE? I REFUSE TO DISCUSS THIS. WHAT'S SO WRONG WITH THAT? CHANGE THE SUBJECT. PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES. I'M NOT GOING TO LISTEN TO THIS. YOU TAKE EVERYTHING TOO PERSONALLY. YOU MUST HAVE PERCEIVED THAT INCORRECTLY. I'M SURE YOU'RE MISTAKEN. I'M SURE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN QUITE THE WAY YOU DESCRIBE IT. SURELY YOU'RE EXAGGERATING JUST A LITTLE. YOU'RE BEING IRRATIONAL. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME BELIEVE THAT. THIS IS SO UNNECESSARY. NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR THIS. ARE YOU TRYING TO RUIN EVERYTHING? STOP INSISTING ON THIS IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU. YOU'RE REALLY OUT ON A LIMB. YOU'RE WAY OUT OF LINE. IT'S NOT YOUR PLACE TO SAY THAT. DON'T PUSH IT. YOU'RE GOING TOO FAR. GET OFF IT. YOU'RE SPEAKING OUT OF PLACE. LIGHTEN UP. YOU'RE ASKING FOR TROUBLE. YOU'RE BEING INAPPROPRIATE. NOBODY CARES WHAT YOU THINK. YOU'RE LEAVING YOURSELF WIDE OPEN. YOU'RE CRUISIN' FOR A BRUISIN'. PUT A LID ON IT. CAN IT. STUFF IT. BAG IT. FORGET IT. DROP IT. I WOULDN'T PURSUE THIS ANY FURTHER IF I WERE YOU. YOU'RE REALLY ASKING FOR IT. DO YOU WANT TO GET IN TROUBLE? YOU'RE GOING TO GET IT. YOU'RE STICKING YOUR NECK OUT. YOU'RE DIGGING YOUR OWN GRAVE. A REAL GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT. YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH THIS. YOU'RE DEAD MEAT. I HATE TO DO THIS. I'M REALLY SORRY THIS IS NECESSARY. THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU. I'M DOING THIS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. YOU'LL APPRECIATE THIS LATER. I'M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU. SOMEDAY YOU'LL THANK ME FOR THIS. ACTUALLY I'M DOING YOU A FAVOR. IN TIME YOU'LL UNDERSTAND. YOU'LL LEARN TO SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

The Melancholia of the Slightly Right

Just the other day I took one of those marginally useful political spectrometer tests. This is a few weeks after accepting a leadership appointment in the California College of Republicans, and just before I've been up for a third contract in as many weeks.

Since I value work more than political accolades, and I'm a family man, the choices I have to make with regards to my schedule are clear. I'm going to work hard for my family and not so hard for the Party. But my moderately Authoritarian Right score gives me comfort and unease.

Over the past year it is clear to me that I am a strong right centrist who is attracted to the liberality of Christianity in moderation of my nationalist militancy. I am a conservative attracted to unchanging principles in defiance of perpetual progressivism and indeed social innovation led by consumption of technological increments. I seek reform of capitalism only to the extent that it become more attuned to all sustainable economies, which it should promptly exploit. Since I am scientific, rational and skeptical I am by nature a problem solver and an explorer. I change according to what's provable, but only on the margins.

Today, I'm reading this little bit of sad news for moderate Republicans.

Amo Houghton is a throwback: an unassuming, old-money multimillionaire known around Congress for being a very nice guy. Just as unusual, he's a Republican moderate. And now he's leaving office.

Fellow moderates were dismayed by the decision of the 77-year-old not to seek re-election to the upstate New York seat he has held since 1986. Houghton is the former CEO of Corning Inc., the glassware company founded by his family in 1851.

``We feel the loss greatly,'' said Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., president of Republican Main Street Partnership, a centrist group that Houghton founded in 1998. ``There are not that many of us.''

Castle said there are 40 to 45 GOP House members, out of 228 Republicans, who identify themselves as moderates and ``we're constantly scrambling to find others who believe in our viewpoints.''

Into this gap, I expect my cohort of blackfolks to waltz in. Easier said than done, of course. But it's good to know about the Mainstreet Republicans. I never heard of them - shows what I know. Moderates in retreat doesn't sound hopeful, but I know better than to quit. In my way is a boulder, I've got to push it along.

Silitary Code of Conduct

Bust a gut laughing. Go ahead.

And remember rule 204: NEVER nail a stuffed bunny to a cross and put it up in front of the Battalion Headquarters sign as an "Easter Desecration."

Still, I think if I was in this guys company, I would have kicked his ass by now.

Patriotic Duty

I wasted a perfectly good hour yesterday trying to find out the best way to announce to the world that I am a member of the Victory Coalition. I contributed directly to the Spirit of America via Pay Pal and not through the Esmay sponsored blog contests, and considered the appropriate way to say so short of writing a self-serving paragraph sorta like this. I had something graphically nice in mind. Unfortunately, I lost my CD of Adobe Elements. Poor pitiful me.

However, I think it is important that Americans go ahead and contribute to to one of the funds. It seems to me to be especially important to do so if you hold various gripes and grudges against Bush's explanations. In the end, its the work that gets done in Iraq that matters, not all the political significance we attach to it in our eternal debates.

Be that as it may, I am a partisan and I'm very proud of the right hand side of the blogosphere for stepping up to the plate with some very worthwhile philanthropy.

Stay tuned for some serious red white and blue around Cobb. I'm liking this a lot and I think it speaks very well of our nation. If you haven't already, go give to the Spirit of America. You're not a soldier, it's the least you can do.

UDATE: The guys over at Modest Needs, are pulling their weight too.

Vance

Vance Lawson was my best friend. I never knew he was gay until after he was dead.

We hung out in a post-highschool clique of young adults at the end of the 70s and early 80s. I was 18 and had just dropped out of USC when I started my first full-time working stiff job at the legendary Fedco on La Cienega. Vance worked in the Garden Shop, I worked in Radios. Vance was a tall good looking light skinned brother with hazel eyes. They guy on CSI, Gary Dourdan, could be his brother - they look that much alike. Vance had the problem of most light skinned brothers who didn't have a bad attitude, he wasn't black enough, plus he had a 'faggy' name.

When I met him for the first time, I gave him shit about his name, but he was in a bad mood. His manager had accused him of stealing some tools, which he hadn't. After proving he didn't, he decided after much internal debate that what he would do to get back at his boss was steal some tools. It came down to a single socket wrench. He actually needed it for 'The Ghost', his blue and primer low-rider-in-progress.

Vance was independent minded and funny as hell. Our clique centered around myself, he and Tracy my soon-to-be girlfriend. About 8 of us, all graduates of Dorsey except for myself would regularly get together after work and go to Westwood to see a movie, or the Carnation Company Restaurant on Wilshire. The lot of us were seriously into music and movies and parties and typical young adult stuff. Tracy was the sweet and sensible woman, heart and soul of the clique, Ant was the mechanic and DJ, Brett was our scapegoat and pet, Precht was a part-timer with the clique because he was in flight school (and T's long-distance boyfriend), Caroline was neck swiveling boy crazed one with the firey attitude, Veronica was the BAP with long straight hair, Janice was the bombshell (and my girl) misunderstood ghetto girl, and R. was the other military guy, husky and musclebound with a heart of gold and Caroline's on again off again love. Finally there was Tonya, the ditz with tits, myself and Vance the merry prankster. I always thought of myself as sort of the conscience and the organizer of the crew. I came up with the name Oui Clique.

Vance had a crush on this girl almost exactly like Tom Hanks did on Donna Dixon in the popular TV show 'Bosom Buddies'. Strange irony that, given that Tom Hanks is gay, I always thought of our friendship sort of like the male friends on the show. But he talked about her all the time and was constantly coming up with schemes to get her. She ended up going with some hardhead and he and Vance almost got into a knife fight about it. I remember that he was very depressed about the whole thing. He was a big chilvalrous romantic.

Audie Murphy

If you grew up when I did, most of your heroes were probably astronauts. But I dug Combat, The Big Red One, and The Sand Pebbles, and most of all The Battle of the Bulge. So I understood that there was more than one kind of hero.

A couple weeks back I was rambling on about why I have no need nor desire to go back to school and finish off degree work; one of the reasons I gave was the example of Audie Murphy who never spent a day in college. My friend said, "Who?".

I don't think anybody knows what a war hero looks like, and somebody in this administration is to blame for putting on flightsuits himself and not letting the people who do for a living get some glory. And I mean ticker tape parade glory. The closest we got to it was the briefing from the commander who found Saddam.

There's a lot of people who deserve medals for what they're doing in Iraq. Might I suggest that the President start handing them out publicly? A certain Democratic candidate could be made to look pretty stupid for throwing his away.

Unintended Consequences

Amazon Jewelry

I can't think of anyone who considers haggling over the price of some piece of jewelry to be a pleasant experience who isn't a jeweler himself. So I would like all of my readers who find themselves on the side of the small businessman instead of Wal-Mart to reaquaint us with the romantic values of storefront merchants, jewelers in particular.

When I was a young impressionable kid, we always used to speak about somebody getting 'jewed' out of their money. Although I hadn't much experience myself, I had assumed the origin of the term was in the jewelry trade with only the merest suggestion of the religion of the Jews normally found in that business. Be that as it may, lots of people get ripped off and everybody knows it. The moment you walk into a jewelry store, you're a mark. You may as well be in a casino or a strip joint. They will sell you stuff you don't need and make you think you're having a good time. That may be coming to an end with the announcement from Amazon.com that they are jumping into the jewelry business.

I predict that this is going to kill a lot of mall jewelry stores. I'm not particularly sentimental about it, but I am interested to see if people react in the same way to the passing of this type of vendor.

Scatterbraindedness

I have nothing to say, but I've been a few places.

• Fable
• Vegemite, Yobbos and Wogs
• Race In Transition
• Literary Fansite Madness + Me
• Crackhead Vengeance
• Swipe
• WeFunkRadio

Fezzik, You Idiot

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

VPN Headaches

Well now I've swallowed a firehose. I'm signed up to work on three projects at once. It's nice to have a full plate for the first time in many months. I'm getting into the groove of working at home.

Anyway, I'm getting headaches trying to get my VPN router to work with XP. It's a real pain, and I'm trying to do anything I can not to have to purchase one for the other end, but it's starting to look futile. I've got the Linksys BEFVP41 v2 and it just is pure annoyance.

How is your VPN setup?

The Library of Games Fallacy

Every once in a while I hear this bogus argument about PS2 being better than XBox because it has a larger library of games. This cannot be true of any one person and is fast becoming marginal for the console audience itself. You'll also note that PS2 partisans don't concede that the PC is a better gaming platform because there are more titles available for PC.

I've played something on the order of 100 different games for the XBox and there could be more but I don't remember where I put the list. But this is an insane amount of games representing about $5000 worth of software. (Of course I rented most of it). For any one player or household there is only likely to be a couple dozen games owned. Therefore I say that it's the quality of the best games that makes the biggest difference in the value of the platform, not the total number of games.

Everyone concedes that Halo2 is destined to be a world-rocking affair. Viva XBox!

A Gay Banana Split

I've been arguing against same-sex marriage and for civil unions again. I came to an interesting conclusion after an interesting analogy.

I think gay activists are demanding a banana split when all they really want is ice cream and nuts. I say you can't have the banana split when all I want is to keep my banana and cherries.

If conservatives from the Christian Right and Jehovah's Witnesses marched into the Castro and demanded with bullhorns that gay sinners get married before God, would they go, just to be accepted, just like everyone else? Would they give up their rainbow bumperstickers for Jesus fish and Marriage Encounter bumperstickers? Is what we call marriage what gay folks want?

I think not. I think that gay couples want to express their love for each other in a way that has more social resonance than 'civil unions' and I think that the state cannot offer that. I think the demand for Marriage, above and beyond civil union is an admission that the alternative lifestyle is not self-sufficient and needs more public, and religious acceptability.

Activists for the gay cause must recognize that public and religious acceptability cannot be demanded. These things must be negotiated.

Does America Care That Much?

Larry Diamond makes the case, which I've heard repeated a number of times, that America should double the number of troops in Iraq, and crush 'insurgents' to insure that democracy happens.

Who has the nerve?

Michael Jackson: Going Down

The next trial of the century (in lower case) is about to get started with a new legal team for Michael Jackson. Ofari is pumping up the alternative explanation machine and readying millions of potential victims how they too will be victimized by Michael Jackson's victimization.

I simply predict that he's going down for sure. His legal team has just reorganized. I'm not sure that there is enough public support for Jackson to merit the kind of theatrics we witnessed for OJ. I'm sure even most optimistic people are hedging their bets. That doesn't change the fact that there will be folks spending their public capital explaining how a Jackson conviction means more than what it means.

Some days I wonder what this country is coming to.

Badtz Maru is a Penguin

Not a crow. There I said it.

Racial Resentment

I was just passed this last night. It's a paper entitled Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principle or Prejudice?. I've saved a copy here. Download file
The abstract is quite enough, for I am familiar with the details, having done my amateur research on the web for many years.

White racial resentment – a form of new racial prejudice – is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but its nature remains unclear. Resentment could derive from racial prejudice or stem from ideological principles – two very different bases for white opposition to contemporary racial policy. To assess the nature of racial resentment and its political effects, we examine the reactions of 760 white New York state residents to an experimentally altered college-scholarship program. Program beneficiaries’ race and socio-economic class was varied and the impact of racial resentment assessed separately for black and white recipients to determine whether racial resentment produces greater support for the program when targeted at blacks than whites in line with the prejudice hypothesis, or has a stronger ideological component that drives opposition to the program regardless of recipient race. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to raceconscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans and we suggest that researchers explore other ways in which to assess the political effects of racial prejudice across the ideological spectrum.

In other words, racism has a political component. Which is to say that the thought that some people articulate in their politics is indeed racist. And it comes as no surprise to me in the least that white liberals are showing their true colors. Lest anyone doubt the subtlety here, the experimenters put it in language appropriate to a 46 page paper, while I cut to the chase for the purposes of blogging.

Disentangling Principles from Prejudice: Major Hypotheses Continuing disagreement over the meaning of racial resentment, and the origins of white opposition to race-conscious programs more generally, demands a less contentious method of studying racial attitudes. We adopt an experimental survey design that allows us to test whether racial resentment is a measure of general prejudice by examining whether it conveys racial discrimination in support of a college scholarship program. We test two key hypotheses. First, we examine the resentment-as-racism hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts that racially resentful whites will be less supportive of programs targeted at black than white students, confirming the prejudicial nature of resentment. Second, we contrast this with the resentment-as-ideology hypothesis which predicts high levels of program opposition among the racially resentful regardless of the program beneficiaries’ race, challenging the role of racial resentment as a measure of racial prejudice. Third, we examine patterns of program support and the origins of resentment separately among liberals and conservatives to determine whether resentment is broadly ideological for conservatives and racially tinged for liberals, as a further challenge to the resentment-as-prejudice hypothesis.

It has been a while since I've eyeballed affirmative action, but I was talking about the politics of racial resentment six years ago in my somewhat famous syllogism in the 'Angry White Math' series.

If enough people get to understand this, I think it will be yet another proof that we are not beyond racism, and that African Americans will have yet another reason to abandon the Democrats.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Playing the Gay Card

Once upon a time, I was a feminist. In fact, I spent a lot of time reading Bell Hooks, (excuse me, bell hooks), Gloria Alzandua and Audre Lorde (and others forgotten). I spent almost as much time explaining it to women as I did explaining it to myself. In other words, if you are a man looking for a righteous spouse, chances are the more well read you are in the feminist texts, the more time your date is likely to be checking her watch. Feminist theory makes for a better man in theory. In practice, you spend more time with your own meat. My advice, open doors for the lady, at least that way they understand the respect you're attempting to convey.

One of the annoying things about feminism is that it's very complicated, and most people don't understand it. That which has been popularized is held in disdain by true feminists. It's a two tier system. So any man attempting to satisfy his own appetite for feminism may find himself stuck between the pseudo-feminists that the real feminists hate and the radical feminists that hate men. For me, the instinct for survival won out in the end. But it was not without some encouragement from that school of thought formerly known as the 'Do Me Feminists'. I like that school. Think Salt and Pepa singing 'Shoop' as a DMF anthem. Don't get it? You're not alone.

Aside from feminism's twists and turns, there is the ethics of trying to follow it, which is difficult enough given the kinds of persons likely to give you the thousand mile stare. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, such women are as likely as not to be former victims, ever alert. What is known are the horrors of domestic violence and the ugliness women endure from those our society rightly calls cads. So do not doubt the steely determination of such watchdogs to watch us 'dogs'. The DMF contingent has made peace with male sexual aggression, and it's a good thing as evolutionary biologists are backing them up. But there are plenty who would rather we stick with our own meat. Those would be the radical feminists.

This paragraph might be the one in which I crack wise with something to the effect that every man is a lesbian trapped in a man's body. To the extent that's not a laughing matter, there is generally some undeserved abuse and pain behind the thousand mile stare. Is it not life experience that makes all the difference when it comes to matters of intimacy and violence? Pain, they say, is the best teacher. I agree vociferously. But if one's life is not informed by such pain, it's awfully difficult to make peace with feminist theory as advanced by those who have the worn the bruises and lacerations of patriarchy.

Rock v Chappelle

Books

Today was a daddy day, and so there's been little blogging in Mudville. Aside from that, I keep banging my head in a particular online ghetto in something which I am finding to be tiresome and fruitless.

I'm further feeling particularly nauseated because of a new sort of crappy censor they've got running at stripcreator.com which has taken a bit of poignancy out of the comic I've decided not to run this evening.

So after watching Master and Commander with my boy, I'm going to get into that which I should have last week when I bought it, namely The Confusion.

BTW, UCLA and the LAT should be proud that they are able to generate such thick crowds at their Festival of Books. Nevertheless, I hate crowds, and the very thought of the publicity planning which led KPCC to bring Arianna Huffington to the stage has got me crabby just thinking of it.

..and so I retreat to the battles off Algiers.

Duh!

Kevin Drum wonders aloud (may as well, since what's in his head isn't working) if something could be done to make affirmative action palatable to blacks and latinos if it weren't based on race.

A few posts later he acknowleges with resignation that: "57 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein gave "substantial support" to al-Qaida terrorists before the war with Iraq.."

So let's see if I get this straight. 57% of Americans are willing to be wrong in the politics of war and that's understandably not worth fighting, and yet he expects Americans to come correct on race?

Cannibis is bliss.

People of The Dons

The other night, I met the spousal unit's new partners. I don't want to reveal too much but we're involved in a venture that I think will be heralded from coast to coast. Basically, what happens when you put together a brother like me, barbecue and jazz? If you like that idea and can imagine it happening at a cool spot in Hollywood, then you have an idea about the venture. It turns out that these brothers go way back and are intimate with the lifestyle that was everything exciting about 'The Dons'.

If you are black and know Los Angeles, then inevitably at some point in your life, you had to be overcome by the massive weight of the social scenes generated by the money, brains and style of The Dons, Baldwin Hills, View Park and Ladera. The Dons are basically a neighborhood on the north facing hills of Baldwin Hills. The streets are named Don Felipe, Don Miguel, Don Milagro, etc. Built by the same developers as built Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills and the modern houses on Vie Del Rey in South Pasadena (Monterey Hills), these were where the sons and daughters of the bourgie lived and played. And man do I mean played.

One of the things I haven't done in a very long time, but do from time to time is to remember back in the day to the lives of myself with the Party People. When I think of upscale partying and the Party People, I think of the young adults of The Dons as the leaders of the pack. You see during the 80s, a revolution in paryting was going on. Prior to then, in the late 70s, it was all about house parties, and while house parties were still happening, the black club scene was exploding in neighborhoods that had never seen the like from El Segundo to Beverly Hills. So here is an intro to a book that needs to be written one of these days, which is a canonical rundown of the happening clubs of black LA in the Arsenio Hall / Cosby 80s.

Vivica vs Vanessa

Busting out laughing. It's Friday and time to. So I'm cruising around and I land on a cool spot which highlights the contrast between Vivica Fox and Vanessa Williams. When she first broke out, there was no bigger scandal (not since the crippling of Teddy Pendergrass) than Vanessa Williams' nasty pictures. But isn't it fascinating how the world has forgot it? Hmm.

You Know It

:: how jedi are you? ::

Ghettoisie

Iraq vs Vietnam

At Africana, Jelani Cobb suggests that we've got another Vietnam on our hands.

I would suggest a comparison of numbers. First of all, let's start with a math question. What is 22 x 254? That's the number of soldiers who died in Vietnam, just from California. If you care about the dead, perhaps you might check out their names. The answer is somewhere north of 5500, which is more than 8 times as many American soldiers as have died in Iraq. At the current rate of American casualties it will take 8 years of occupation in Iraq to match the number of Vietnam dead from California alone.

Look around you. Do you see any mass demonstrations in the streets of America? NO. It's because Americans can count. That's reason number one why this is not 'another Vietnam'.

Do you know what Congress was debating yesterday? They were debating whether or not National Guardsmen on active duty in Iraq will be penalized for early withdrawl of funds from their IRAs. If this were Vietnam, I daresay they'd be a lot more worried about whether they're ever going to see America again, much less the tax rates on their stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

Moral outrage is a good and fine tool in politics, but let's keep things in perspective. The occupation of Iraq is not another Vietnam, it's not even another Gulf War. It is what it is, so let's pay attention to that and leave historical comparisons to the time in the future when this occupation actually will be history.

The Conceit of Being Well-Read

I suspect that Hitchens is on a roll with his anti-religious rants in preparing himself to ramp up his rhetoric against the scourge of jihadism. It's almost enough to get me to put down Neal Stephenson in favor of Salman Rushdie. Not.

Last night he had a fair salvo of invective against Christianity's nut of forgiveness, but like most anti-theists his focus centers on the hole instead of the donut. All men are afraid of the dark, so what does it matter that one creates God and another creates Science if the purpose is obliviate fear? Well the conduct of those systems of belief does matter, and anyone is right to criticize a means that creates more fear than it settles. There is plenty of evidence that religion bears a great responsibility for that. Amis said that the purpose of philosophy is to show the proper way to prepare for death, and admirable goal. And so it works equally in that the age of Maoism and Stalinism and other like political philosophies a great deal of preparation was made of an ungodly amount of death.

It is only being well read that diffuses the conceit of any monotheism or single political ideology. But being well-read is a conceit as well, especially in that it arms one with a kind of grip which allows one to swing a more or less straight path through any jungle of diverse trees without getting bogged down in the fruits of just one. Such swingers as Hitchens, and Amis to a lesser extent, can quickly find the nut of contradiction in any single system given the broad understanding a life of sampling gives one. And yet it is only conceit that could justify ignoring the fruits of systems of belief entirely.

Goedel famously suggested, (and if your belief in math is total, you could say he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt) that it is impossible for any single system of proofs to be both complete and consistent. I generally take the example of Judaism to be exemplary of this. There are a huge number of rules which must be scrupulously followed by the faithful, and yet in the holy of holies, in the temple where G*d, who must not be named, there is only one human who can go to the single place. And yet what he sees must be nothing at all. Judaism, like every other monotheism is a faith around a void, and that non-existence is the article of faith which legitimize everything around it in perfect harmony with Goede's Incompleteness Theorem.

That such religions have a singular proveable flaw make them more consistent than the forest of trees the well-read swing through on their random paths toward enlightenment. For all such swingers must examine & abandon, revise & review their world view. This is called being progressive, and although it should be incredibly tiresome, men such as Hitchens remain faithful to its discipline. They cannot stop reading. They cannot stop writing. Their task is never complete for there are few settled truths.

Those that are, must then be observed religiously, and one is apparently the rejection of theism. This principle may often be practically correct, although I've yet to hear any anti-theist reject the principles of Buddhism. It is a conceit nonetheless, so let's not forget that.

I am not here to suggest that all things are relative. It is only that I am convinced all things are not which makes me conservative. I know of what it is I conserve and so I am not so likely to be swinging through forests of logic. I honestly believe I can be honest without knowing who Leni Reifenstahl was. (Although Google helps)

And that's all I have to say about that.

Kicking Crabs to the Curb

Don't ask me in any detail because I haven't seen a minute of it. If one of them passed me on the street I'd have no idea. But from what I've been able to glean from second hand sources, Kwame should have fired Omarosa.

How can I presume the dynamic going on between these to blackfolks? As much as anyone, I suppose. But I suspect that Kwame must have felt at some point that he would take extra heat for 'dissing the sister'. It would only make my case stronger were I able to percieve a bit of bourgie reluctance in K's regard of O's ghetto monopoly, and anyone capable of confirming that meta-bservation would be sufficient for me to suggest that K thusly didn't deserve to win, for what it's worth.

O was corrosive to the spirit of teamwork. I'd have put her in the basement and given enough static, kicked her to the curb. But not knowing the necessity for that in the context of the work to be done, maybe she could and should have been retained. On the other hand, how seriously can we possibly take this crap?

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World

Whatever you might have said about Kill Bill v1, you cannot say it again about Kill Bill v2 unless it's simply 'Wow!'.

The difference between Beatrix Kiddo and every Clint Eastwood there ever was is that all the male killers ran out of moral ammo before they ran out of bullets. So they always lived with some regret about killing too much. Kiddo has no such problem, she doesn't ride off sad into the sunset. Instead she has a fit of teary laughter and then cuddles up with her young daughter and watches an old movie. Everybody she killed deserved to die because finally she proves that there is honor among theives. Or at the very least, thieves and killers with young children.

Like any superhero, Kiddo has reserves that require a backstory to explain. Kiddo finally rescues herself from the pit of doom which seems to put Tarantino's film on the verge of folding in on itself and backing out of a narrative sideways. When she finally does, you realize that she is truly indestructable. What the hell are we going to do with an indestructable woman? We're going to let her live happily ever after but not before wrecking every convention of the action hero genre in the process.

Tarantino has created a masterpiece in this duo of films that will have feminists and others banging their heads against walls for the next decade. He has illustrated another pure kind of power, that of feminine revenge that we will all be so glad for as we proceed into the future. In fact, I will go as far as to say that this is the movie among all movies America has ever made, that will be considered by far the most pornographic and blasphemous in repressive Islamicist regimes around the world. Uma Thurman is now the devil incarnate to a world of men who suffer the the greatest indignity when they are told they 'cry like a woman'.

If you haven't read Spiders, do so. This too is the stuff of the future.

Is Gitmo the U.S.?

Even a daunting question for the legal scholars, this is a perplexing one for the rest of us. Some legal fiction has been created which says that a US Embassy in a foreign country is as if it was not, which is to say on US soil and thus subject only to the laws of the United States. Somehow this kind of applies to US military bases, and presumeably the brigs within. Gitmo seems to be to me exactly the case of a brig within a US military base, subject to the laws of the US.

But these days NAFTA tribunals have established that even Supreme Court decisions may be subject to further review. I think the American people ultimately will not have it, and I imagine many judges flipping their wigs at the thought of a reversal of their decisions by some extra-territorial court.

Yet these days, we face disintermediation of national boundaries via technology and other modern developments. What exactly is an armed subcontractor of a multinational corporation in an occupied territory? Other than the obvious, that he is a goner in the hands of radical jihadists, what are his rights to trial? This is the sort of question we are faced with as we try to accomodate our legal system to the kind of ventures into imperialism which we find ourselves.

Allow me to remind you that I am an imperialist and that America should endeavor mightily to be the proper kind of empire. Consequently we should employ the right kind of imperial tribunal in this context lest we become the Pontius Pilates of the future. How is unclear but why is not. We simply cannot extend the rights of citizens to those murky persons. The context and circumstances of their arrest is more important than than the legal fictions of our patches of sovereignty on foreign soil.

I hope that we come to some better understanding that the forces of international law come from the power of nations and not the conveniences of legalese. International courts have quite a long evolution ahead of them and we should not be so quick to defer to their short list of precedences. Treaties are more durable and have a longer history. So let us not be so quick to push everything into the purview of domestic courts, the laws of war are sufficient.

Hitchens and I

According to the personal answer I got last evening from Christopher Hitchens, I've been right all along to suggest exactly what I've been moaning about. Americans who have abandoned the cause of the Kurds and others who have rebelled against Saddam Hussein are our greatest source of national shame.

I found out just this afternoon, and it infuriates me to know I must be that far out of the loop, that Hitchens and Martin Amis would be at Royce Hall this evening. The hall didn't sell out, and I managed to deal with a kind bloke a Jackson for a seat in the fourth row. It was from that fourth row that I stood as the second person selected from the audience to speak.

The first, some woman from Seattle, had managed to get the pair reduced to telling dick jokes, if you can believe that. The theme was exchanging the word 'dick' for 'heart' in the titles of popular songs. I hated to embarrass them at their own game and added at the end of that session 'Owner of a Lonely Heart' in back reference to Hitch's excellent dis of al Sadr as a true wanker. Had I decided to also mention the other classic they forgot 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around' it would have inappropriately continued a sort of levity that needed to cease considering the gravity of my real question. I asked if in our pursuit of ridding the world of Jihadists whether or not we had punished Socialists quite enough. With a brief reference to my incurable sobbing over Koba the Dread, I further asked if we should be concerned with some resurgence of that particular kind of terror. The short answer was no, but that is not what one pays such literary folks to say, and thankfully so because their responses illuminated much.

Amis piped up to say that in his reading of history the death of God was indeed final and into that void filled the cults of ideology. Devotion to Maoism, Stalinism and several other isms I forget replaced devotion to God in the modern world, and the overproduction of these (misplaced is not what he said) loyalties produced catastrophes of historical magnitude. On the whole I found Amis to be rather subdued the entire evening but his was a fine answer. It indicates, as does his respect for the power of the myth of Christ (even via Gibson), that his respect for religion is somewhat similar to mine. But more on that later. Hitchens' angle on this was curiouser still, since he was indeed once a Socialist. It was through his response that we turned to the Kurdish rebel soldiers. There used to be a cool name for them that we have forgotten.

Hitchens had, in response to Brian Lamb some time ago answered three questions of himself with regard the current and future status of a secular, internationalist socialist program and came resolutely to the conclusion that there was no future in it. The best work of Socialism is behind us and it will not at any time in the future provide a mandate returning to power. Certainly many millions have been improved by the work of socialism. Certainly the Marxist critique of capitalism and of history in fact, cannot be outdone according to Hitchens, but there is nobody on the planet with a better idea than global capitalism. So we are in 100% agreement. Fabulous. This was all good, but his next step blew me away. Hitch thus doesn't disown the analytical tools of Marxist theory and he gives credit where credit is due internationalist, secular socialists. Then specifically he talked about his association with precisely those parties in Iraq, Kurds and Shia among them, as they battled against the tyranny that was Saddam Hussein.

Hussein literally tortured his foreign ministers. He would torture them for days before he sent them on UN missions. These men lived in such fear of Husseins's wrath that they would say exactly what he wished in contradiction to any and all logic and reason. No amount of time spent with Kofi Annan would make an ounce of difference. But what really got Hitchens' shorts hitched up was the suggestion that the militant jagoffs under head Wanker al Sadr would merit the honorific of 'insurgent'. These weren't insurgents, and the internationalist secular left of America, following the airheaded lead of the likes of Michael Moore, in order to score points against GWBush, ought to be lashed for this unforgivable abandonment of the true insurgents of Iraq, those Kurds and Shia who were left dangling after the first Gulf War.

It was, for me, a resounding endorsement of what I've been saying for over a year and I am satisfied to have this confirmed in such a dramatic fashion by none other than Hitch himself.

UPDATE: Background on CH mindstate.

Three Questions

Go ahead. Ask me three questions. Any three you like. I'll answer.

(Yeah this was Baldilocks copy of DC's idea, but I like it.)

Bourgetto

The Big C

Today is the big meeting with the oncologist out in Santa Monica. Moms, of course, is brave and confident in the way that women of faith are. Although it sometimes feels like diffidence to me, the bottom line is that her head is straight and she's ready to go under the knife.

We've gone through the legalese of Advance Directives and decided who is going to decide what. There are significant details with regard to the timing and milestones in the grey areas and percentages of recovery progress on the respirator. It comes as a small surprise that there was nothing at all in the California form which suggested that same sex couples could not designate their partners as having medical power of attorney. This may be new, at may be not, but I've seen it and I know. It's an admittedly odd way to come to a political discovery, but there is always something to learn when you walk through life with your eyes open. Ours are open and watery, but the vision isn't blurry. Our mother is 67 and about to lose a kidney.

Everyone's best guess through the lenses of the MRI scans that the cancer has originated in the right kidney and is pressing up against the liver. So while the kidney has got to go, there will be a good deal of residual cancerous growth on the liver itself which the surgeons will have to scrape like so much carbon on toast. Liver tissue regenerates rather quickly, so we are hopeful that as the surgeons do their scraping they don't get too happy about it. So we have requested that RFA be available during the surgery to zap any spots of cancerous tissue that appears to be left.

The complication in all of this is a recently discovered spot of something ugly in the vena cava, the main vein to the heart. Nobody knows exactly what it is. I suspect that it might be part of the missing yellowcake from Niger, but I could be wrong. The smart money is it being some bit of cancer which broke loose from the homeland and established a colony in the new world, in which case the news is not so good. But there is a significant minority report which indicates it might be a simple blood clot, which can be deftly handled in a 15 minute procedure. The difficulty in this is you can't know until you've cracked the ribcage and opened the damned thing up. I'm sure we all look very forward to nanotechnology. Until then we do it the old fashioned way. At worse they will have to bypass and pull some veins out of her leg and make a graft of some sort. I will ask specific questions about the diameter of these pipes today.

As you might imagine, such thought takes a bit out of one. I hope at my turn to be a lucid subject.

It reminds me of my late uncle Salif, who remained a man of mystery until his bitter end. His decision, that old African, was to keep quiet about the reality of his cancer. He became a consumate asshole to the people who loved him most. He drove them away in a calculation of love, selfish to be sure, but effective. By the time he died, his wife and kids were practically to the point at which they were wishing him dead. That may be the way they do it in Mali, but things are different here. And yet it makes us think about our willingness to submit to death and in what ways we prepare ourselves and others for it.

I'll have time to be philosophical beyond that point another day. This day, it's down to Santa Monica for the Big Meeting.

Why WMD

The way I see things, the extraordinary blame Bush gets for the war against The Baath party owes much to the politics of Ritter, Blix and Fisk.

These days, few people are likely to consider the broad level of support our military action had, not only abroad but domestically. Congress gets almost no blame. There are no state governors who will say publically that they are against the war and that troops should come home immediately. Unless the anti-war sentiment can be spun into an indictment of Bush and an endorsement of Kerry, most political voices and elected officials are silent.

I say that the geopolitical conflict with Iraq was inevitable. The accumulation of damnation of Saddam Hussein grew greater as time went by. But that WMDs became the single most imporant issue of the domestic political legitimacy of the war owes primarily to the agendas of Blix, Ritter and Fisk.

I understand and respect any pacifist objection to this conflict, and I expect of that pacifist the acknowledgement that Hussein's murders would go unavenged. But the WMD argument is becoming ossified in opposition to the war, and I find it embarassing for my opponents to argue this point.

Blix represents the deliberation of the UN. His inability to find WMDs, in my opinion, was only exacerbated by the fact that the UN is incapable, on the ground, to be an effective fighting force. I don't think anyone doubts his eyesight, but his ability to get where he needs to see is entirely hobbled by the tactical incompetence of the organization he represents. Blaming Bush via Blix means you believe the UN is better at finding out secrets than our forces. He wouldn't even be as sure as he is today were it not for our thousands of troops pacifying large areas of Iraq. I would suggest that there was no other timely way of coming to the level of certainty we have today. The UN inspection regime has, ultimately lasted since the first war. It has failed for 12 years and not come up with a better raison d'etre than WMD, Bush's term.

Fisk embarassed all the journalists in the world by giving them a firehose of information they couldn't contextualize. He proved that few were doing their homework. In the end, about all the media could do was attempt to digest and regurgitate his politics, which were essentially that Bush was both stupid and conspiratorial. And yet our journalistic ethics blind us to advance the kind of thinking that could actually help Americans understand the situation on the ground. Were it not for the ready-made gripe that pool reporters and embedded reporters could only see a limited amount, media organizations might have an answer to Fisk. But like the CIA itself, media organizations have not been willing to invest in people with human intelligence on the ground. Between editorial and live footage of heads rolling, speculation ruled. Default to WMDs. Yeah that and a fair but self-serving documentary about a journalist's fate in Bagdhad the first time around.

Finally, and I believe most importantly, Ritter's decision to agitate against the war became a rallying point for the opposition. Yet Ritter made it entirely clear that he was not going to speak about humanitarian concerns, because if he were to detail what Saddam Hussein actually did, it would rally Americans to the cause of war. What Ritter knew and knows today is that Americans could be made to feel about Iraqis what it feels about Rwandans. Instead he chose to pursue a course which highlighted what he felt were abuses of our own democratic system. I think it is entirely reasonable for him to have done so from the point of view of a patriot willing to be isolationist in this matter. Yet the inevitable results of this is that it too combines to undermine the pacifist responsibility for averting their gaze from damage done by Saddam Hussein with or without WMDs.

The WMD argument is null and void. There are none, and perhaps there never were and those who needed to know, actually knew. As Woodward's book suggests, Bush and company had other significant geopolitical reasons to do battle with Saddam Hussein WMD or no. But in order to paint Bush in the colors of war, many Americans have undermined their own credibility as humanitarians with their suggestions that our deposing of Saddam has done more damage to Iraq than Hussein himself did.

Insatiable

Make Me Laugh, Dammit!

I watched most of, and will see the rest of Chris Rock's new HBO special. Tonight I know to have a couple drinks first.

It's official. Chris Rock has lost his timing. I've been watching more comedy these days to compensate for the fucking death and disease in my family. That was rather frank, wasn't it? At any rate, I figure a good laugh during vegetative television time is better than watching 24 or Alias or the Sopranos or Law & Order which is my usual fare of dramatic misery. These entertainments are very practically useful for us affluent suburbanites in reminding us how wonderful our boring lives are, and we are thankful for their existence. Other people's problems are fun to watch. It makes paying the $200 cable and high speed internet bill go down easier. But then again, sometimes it doesn't and that is where comedy comes in.

Chris Rock.. what can I say. I remember Chris when he only owned one leather jacket. Back in the excellent old days of the Comedy Act Theatre, Los Angeles 1988, Chris broke onto the scene with fresh material and an ironic delivery that was truly remarkable. Then, he started in with the repetitive preaching style. It worked once. This time it did not.

What's happened? Has he been in too many movies? Yeah, I think that's it. But worse off, his racial material stinks. It was rambling from Affirmative Action to Slavery and he milked 5 jokes too damn long. Who taught that nigga 'octagon'? Ho boy! He needed to stop, instead he made a wreck. Then he starts talking about Rich vs Wealthy. Stop preaching, it ain't funny. What Rock needed in that whole section was hyperbole, instead he tried to be the insightful critic. I got news for you Rock, you aint that smart. Stick with the comic genius because your depth perception needs adjustment. Chris Rock needs to realize that it's not gutsy for him to handle this kind of material, so nobody is going to be impressed or put on edge. Those barriers have long been broken. You've got to say something new. Jerry Buss signs Shaq's check? That's deep?

And even when he did something pretty damned good with the 'Alright because it's all white' piece... well. You see Reverend Rock and see what I mean. I think I've become immune to his charm. He doesn't look like a funny comedian any longer. He looks like a bank teller in a pimpsuit with $50,000 worth of cosmetic dentistry. Actually, that should be funny, but Chris Rock already did that.

I didn't see the opening 20 minutes, but I can tell he made no references back to it. But the closing part of the act was the best. On marriage, Chris rocks. But if this is his best material, clearly there isn't much left for him to talk about. He's not saying anything new about it, but at least he performed reasonably well. If anything, this turn proves how much time Rock must spend doing boring family things. Hey, dumbass, that's our job.

Rock reminds me how correct many of his earlier critics were. If you took out the profanity, you'd be left with a man of few words and an occasional funny face. His white people black people stuff is tired, his Bush bashing was completely predictable, he didn't do one impression in the whole final hour, and the whole special was edited by a pro. When a comedian is funny, you don't need to see the audience laughing because you're too busy laughing. His laughs weren't that long so that he was standing idly waiting for it to subside, so why show the audience.

As I said, I'm in a clustermunch situation so I'm willing to laugh at anything that can do it, and quite frankly, The Fairly Oddparents does a better job. Advice to Chris Rock, shave your head, gain 30 pounds, go to Africa, learn yoga. Do something. But change your life somehow; all your schitck is predictable and your timing is off. Chris Rock has already done Chris Rock. So Chris Rock has to change. Can he do it? He better get back on the road.

Where is Patton Oswalt when you need him? (I'll be damned.. on the Fairly Oddparents!)

Fractions

Threat Logic

Was Saddam Hussein a threat to the United States? I believe so. As I've said before, I believe strongly in Powell's argument about the necessary complicity of nations in providing aid and comfort to terrorist organizations & leaders. Without the Taliban, bin Laden would have had no army. The threat of Saddam was certainly qualified, but it was certainly real.

For folks who have a difficult time understanding the level of threat of Saddam Hussein or of Iraq, perhaps you should consider the extent to which you believe America is mired and bogged down. It seems to me that you can't have it both ways. What we are going through is the inevitable cost of tyranny unchecked.

Looking back at my post of Little White Lies shows a bit of past persuasion. It's clear now, with the kidnappings and atrocious acts initiated by radical militants in the Sunni Triangle, that even helicopter gunships are necessary for the kind of destruction that 'bogs us down'.

As Blair said this week, his visits to other capitals in the Middle East, leaders are all breathing easier now that Saddam is gone, especially those (I bet) in Saudi Arabia. Remember, this is the man who liked burning down oil wells. This is the man who went after the oil in Kuwait. He had regional designs which were contrary to the regional designs of the United States. Whose do you prefer?

Walls

Bombing for Gay Marriage

My good friend Jim has updated his blog and is now running Trigger Fish. Do check him out. He's only just begun and he's on a roll.

It would be ironic if the end result of al Qaida's war upon the West and its values ultimately drove the West further into putting the liberal in liberal democracy. Blowback works both ways.

These days, I wonder if Spain's economy is so cushy that they can make such pronouncements, or on the other hand, is their newly elected leader really straight out of moonbat central?

Either way, Jim is a great tickler for the strategic.

Isolationism

Tony Blair, Once Again

This morning's press briefing with the President and the Prime Minister was a study in contrasts and symmetry. All told, I think it went quite well. Geopolitically, I don't think there is much more to be said which doesn't capture the proper intent and spirit of our intervention in Iraq.

Loophole

Illegal Militias

Muqtada Al Sadr is 'evil'. Now you know.

Why? Because he has an illegal militia. What precisely is illegal about the militia is unclear since there are more pro-American clerics and others, including Chalabi, who have militias. Maybe it's because of some illegal acts done by the militia. Either way, here is another snarl in the smooth rhetoric of good vs evil.

Still, I don't understand why some folks (I've been overusing this kind of logic) can't seem to figure out that whether or not Al Sadr is 'evil', that he's no more predisposed to agreeing with UN or 'international' rules than he is to kissing the ass of the IGC.

For some inexplicable reason, we are negotiating with and militarily surrounding Al Sadr. Clearly the IGC isn't powerful enough to arrest him, so he's only 'illegal' to coalition forces. One wonders exactly how much such loose cannons will be allowed to get away with as the transitional government takes control. Moreover, how many American journalists are going to stick around to see how much more of Al Sadr's kind of behavior will be tolerated as US troops stand down? Few, I'd bet.

So Al Sadr, the gangsta cleric, will run around unleashed for an intederminate period. He will continue to recruit militiamen... What really kills me is the logic of this. Here you have Iraqis who have clearly not all been regular army joining up into religious militias complaining that the Americans are shooting them down, and so they fight the coalition troops. They really have no legitimate reason to be combattants. What do they do when the government is theirs? They shut up and obey? No, they'll find another reason to try to get the American Army to leave Iraq. But until the new Iraqi army is built, under the auspices of the same damned IGC and its elected successors, they'll have to remain in the militias.

So the way I see it is that the post IGC government is either going to beat these guys down, with coaltion help, or they're going to give some kind of amnesty to militias currently in conflict with the occupation forces. Impossible.

What's even more incredible is the domestic opposition which says Bush is in a quagmire and more troops are required. Yet at the same time they say this is a battle for hearts and minds. It's a battle for reason and competence, I say, and with the likes of Al Sadr rising to national prominence, the likelihood of that battle going the right way is dubious. But it's not for a lack of trying. The Iraqi people simply refuse to be pacified. So it's attrition all the way forward.

We couldn't just crush them. That wouldn't be nice.

UPDATE: Sadr backs down.

Ashcroft's Walls

It's clear, given the 15 minutes I was able to listen to him, that John Ashcroft is hell bent on catching the bad guys. He appropriates the rhetoric of war when he talks about what he wants to do with identified international bad guys. I must say that I am a bit more favorable to him based upon what I heard yesterday, but I absolutely want civil libertarians to be a half-inch behind him at every step.

Coming up to speed on FASI searches and warrants and what not is an interesting curve. It once again points to the abject failure of big media to point out, with any specificity, anything much beyond the gripe of partisans. It seems to me that there has been entirely too much to learn via these broadcast hearings that we have not been hearing. I mean we in the blogosphere count ourselves as fairly well-informed if not news junkies, but when have we been given such a clear understanding of the frustrations of the good guys before?

At any rate, it is clear that Ashcroft wants to charge through these walls although it is not clear what has been done since his bull has been unleashed. There's a bit more to know.

Let me also say at this point that the woman who gave the FBI accounting of their tracking of the two AQ operatives was brilliant. I've started to collect those staff statements and I'll have them here soon.