Cobb

Death's Agenda 25 Ways to Iraq

Much controversy has transpired over what the actual death toll of the current war in Iraq might be. But that's not really much of a moral conversation. I mean either the people are dead or they're not. We can't really attach a number to it although it makes sense to try. What's more interesting than the 'how many' question is the 'who and whom' question. Geeks such as myself want to know how, and the ultimate questions must be 'why' and 'to what ends'? But the point of this post is the question of who and whom following up on something interesting over at Drezner:

UPDATE:  Tyler Cowen posts on The Lancet study as well -- and highlights another important fact that explains a large part of my disenchantment with the Bush administration: 

[T]he sheer number of deaths is being overdebated.  Steve Sailer notes: "The violent death toll in the third year of the war is more than triple what it was in the first year." That to me is the more telling estimate.

A very high deaths total, taken alone, suggests (but does not prove) that the Iraqis were ready to start killing each other in great numbers the minute Saddam went away. The stronger that propensity, the less contingent it was upon the U.S. invasion, and the more likely it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. In that scenario the war greatly accelerated deaths. But short of giving Iraq an eternal dictator, that genie was already in the bottle.

If the deaths are low at first but rising over time, it is more likely that a peaceful transition might have been possible, either through better postwar planning or by leaving Saddam in power and letting Iraqi events take some other course. That could make Bush policies look worse, not better. (emphasis added)

I'm not so sure about that and the thing that convinces me is that we know that slowly but surely the Iraqi Insurgency has been getting more organized and more lethal. A lot of opponents of the Bush policy have rightly said that shying away from the term 'civil war' is a mistake. Michael Yon independent of such partisan concerns has been suggesting that the term is more or less apt for a long time now. If we are to accept the arbitrary figure of 500,000 KIA, then we have some extraordinary explaining to do with regard to the direct or indirect culpability of American forces who have suffered roughly 2800 KIA to date. A simpler explanation is in order. Iraqis killed Iraqis.

Who And Whom?
According to Samir Haddad and Mazin Ghazi in 2004 there were a whole laundry list of militant insurgent groups ready to do battle, each for their own reasons.  I want to list those enumerated by Wikipedia. And I'm going to do it so it takes up a lot of space.

• Mujahideen Shura Council
• Mahdi Army (Jaish-i-Mahdi)
• Badr Organization
• Fedayeen Saddam
• Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Tantheem Al-Qaeda fi BiladirRafidain)
• Jaish Ansar al-Sunna
• Mohammad's Army (Jaish Mohammed)
• Islamic Army in Iraq (Al-Jaish Al-Islami fil-Iraq)
• Iraqi National Islamic Resistance (Moqawama al-Islamiya al-Wataniya, "1920 Revolution Brigades")
• Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat Al-Moqawama Al-Islamiya)
• Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance (al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Moqawama al-Iraqiya - JAMI)
• Jaish al-Mujahideen
• Jaish al-Rashideen
• Asaeb Ahl el-Iraq (Factions of the People of Iraq)
• Black Banner Organization (ar-Rayat as-Sawda)
• The Return (al-Awda)
• Nasserites
• Wakefulness and Holy War
• Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq
• Liberating Iraq's Army
• Abu Theeb's group
• Jaish Abi Baker's group
• Islamic Salafist Boy Scout Battalions (Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi)

That's a lot of arms, and it takes a whole lot of arms to kill a lot of people. Common sense would dictate, as well as the likely results of any accurate parsing of the various activities of all those groups, that it highly improbable that attacks carried out by those 23 odd group are coordinated in any substatial way. They are not a coalition, they are not a centrally directed command and control style army, they are insurgents each with their own agenda, each doing their killing and destruction in the wake of the destruction of the Baath Party.

But who are they killing?

They're obviously not killing US and Coalition forces. They're killing other Iraqis. I'm not going to brave a guess at the why question, that's outside of the scope of this one post. But as for culpability in a civil war, the first step is to identify the parties who are fighting. It seems to me that if we are to take the weight of the Lancet study seriously and say that half a million Iraqis have been killed, then it's time to ask the serious question of who did the killing and how. This seems to me to be the most serious import of such a high figure.

So let me be partisan for a moment. If these 23 groups are doing the bulk of the killing of Iraqi civilians, one has to wonder under what conditions their killing will end. The question begged by the presence of civil war is under what governmental organization will it be resolved. I find it very difficult to believe that some new constitution will be written and Sunni parties have not been able much to the surprise of many, to block the new Iraqi federalism. The point is that our policy has been to establish a constitutional democratic republic in Iraq and it is moving forward. The ire of the insurgency against the new Iraq is insufficient to stop the momentum of the majority, even as the majority is put in mortal danger by the killings throughout the country. The power of democracy is triumphing against the militancy of those trying kill Coalition and Government forces. And yet they continue to take it out against Iraqi civilians.

Unless you are willing to believe that it's just Americans that are doing all the killing.

UPDATE: McQ has some interesting developments. I am momentarily speechless. I don't trust the Wanker.

Footnote: Kathleen Harris

In the 'Hey I didn't realize that' department, I found a bit of old news.

Every once in a while, I get spew from people still mad at the Republicans for Bush v Gore. Even before I was a Republican, I pretty much blamed all of the fiasco-ness of the fiasco on then Sec'y of State Kathleen Harris. So here's a bit of spew to spew back.

The state Republican Party bluntly told Rep. Katherine Harris that she couldn't win this fall's Senate election and that the party wouldn't support her campaign, a letter obtained Monday by The Associated Press shows.

Party Chairman Carole Jean Jordan made a last-ditch attempt in the confidential May 7 letter to force Harris out of the race for the nomination to challenge Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson. But the next day, Harris turned in paperwork to get her name on the Sept. 5 Republican primary ballot.

The letter came as Gov. Jeb Bush was trying to get state House Speaker Allan Bense into the race. Bense announced later that week that he would not enter the race.

Harris rose to national prominence as Florida's secretary of state during the bitter presidential election recount in 2000 that gave the White House to George Bush. She was elected to the U.S. House in 2002.

The Harris campaign didn't return a phone message seeking comment Monday.

Tookie Redux

The Literary Thug shows once again why he is one of the best black critical writers online:

Personally, the night Williams was executed, I got blind drunk and cried my eyeballs out. I didn’t do it because Williams was going to die, nor did I do it in protest of the radical politics of Williams supporters. I did it because those supporters and those civil rights organizations that used so much emotion and exerted so much energy to defend Williams lifted nary a finger in protest of the hundred’s of thousands of black lives either ended or destroyed by Williams and the millions of black lives that his gang ended up tormenting. No drum circles have ever been played for the young men caught up in the death vise of Williams’s gang because of poor fathering, poor schooling and no culpable opportunities for them to have. No emotional, angst ridden poems were written and spoken for the single mothers trying to raise those young men, or the young women in these neighborhoods that aren’t getting any love and support from those young men, while being bombarded with vicious imagery from MTV and BET in the process. No tears were shed for the elderly black folks in countless neighborhoods in America who are imprisoned because of Crip activity; people scarred by both Jim crow and the project industrial complex, people who served as the backbone of working class black communities before crack hit those communities harder than a Joe Frazier left hook, and now people who cant go outside or do regular human activities on the fear that they might get robbed or shot. For god sake, just writing those sentences makes me want to take a drink.

This is such inspired writing, it makes me want to imitate. So I'm going to look and see what I was writing about a year ago to see if I made any sense whatsoever in retropsect.

Faith

"Your mind makes it real."
-- Morpheus

It was Karen Armstrong who spoke of the silence. The great silence of listening to God not answering prayers. The nuns, they took a vow of silence so as not to disturb and therefore better hear the silence of God.

God is a void, an infinite incomprehensible mystery. To have faith is to believe that matters. That somewhere in the vast emptiness of the Universe, that thing which is the unending creation, the mind and the being of God, that thing which answers not and yet contains our every atom, somewhere in all of that, we matter. In fact, we matter absolutely because we have Faith that God says so. The unity of God and man is found in the faith that we matter to God and that we understand good and evil with perfect unison.

It's difficult for a scientist to believe that faith and reason can be reconciled, but they must be, because both of them are instructional to us. Faith and reason motivate, they stimulate the proper neural patterns and cause us to know and believe and share and act.

Faith, like reason, requires discipline. We are predisposed to certain common sense notions about it, and sometimes it is counter-intuitively true. Faith is to be exercised, not with caution, but rigorously, and applied to life to have its due impact.

Equivocal Love for Hiphop

It's easy to hate what hiphop has become. It's difficult to hate hiphop music. For me, the question is whether or not what pumps out of trucks these days can be called music. It's as if the wheel has turned and now experienced blackfolks are saying the same things inexeperienced whitefolks were saying 20 years ago. That's not music!

It is music of course, and you can't even really say that it's bad music. There is so much hiphop out there today that even the garbage they play on the radio evidences talent of a recognizable sort. The product has been refined and purified. Commercial hiphop is musical crack. Producing it is not rocket science but it is chemistry.

But people with memories of the hiphop of the 80s and early 90s remember is when hiphop was social, political and musical manna. When Miles Davis made a hiphop album, it was a different world. This won't be the first, nor will it be the last time I comment on hiphop, but until it changes substantially, I think I know categorically what is wrong with it, and that wrongness is unlikely to change. It is the impoverished emotional range of hiphop today that makes it alien to those who once loved and lived it.

As usual at Cobb, I think of taxonomies. And because it was my generation that was responsible for investing so much into hiphop, these taxonomies are deeply intertwined with black identity. So I must speak of these in terms of black people and all of black music. Black music is Hiphop, Gospel, Blues, Funk, Reggae, Jazz and R&B. Seven nice round categories. Each of those expresses a different set of values best. The tragedy of hiphop is that while it has the potential to sample expressions of all because of its open structure, that it has been reduced to the narrow emotional spectrum of lust, greed, anger and frustration. Now one can split hairs and say that is really the fault of rap lyrics; that hiphop music can express a broad range of emotion instrumentally. My response is that jazz musicians and R&B artists have appropriated all that. I would allow one other exception to the completeness of this taxonomy and it is an important one, and that is the emotions of dance music. When Missy Elliot cranks out one of her jams, she has got the groove nailed and the infectious beat. I'm going to call that Funk, not Hiphop. And in that realm, I'll gladly admit things get complicated for me.

People like me who hate what hiphop has become, do so because of the cramp it has put on its dynamic emotional range. We invested so much of ourselves to it and in the end it grew into a monster, and so we had to let it go and disclaim it. Yet there stand many sentinels, diehard lovers of hiphop who with age have begun to equivocate their love for it. They speak of hiphop as a woman, a goddess, for whom they once gave their all, and she betrayed them and became a cheap, dirty whore. And now they long for the beauty of yesterday while she still enhances her attractiveness and flashes of her beauty remain as brilliant as ever. To have truly loved the art of hiphop is to have endured the worst sort of heartache, better to have loved and lost the hiphop struggle than to not have loved at all.

Lonnae Parker writes in today's Washington Post:

We felt ourselves united, with the power of a language we didn't begin to understand. "Rap at its best can refashion the world -- or at least the way we see it -- and shape it in our own image," said Adam Bradley, a literature professor at Claremont McKenna College who is working on a book about hip-hop poetics. It has the capacity "to give a voice that's distinctively our own and to do it with the kind of confidence and force we might not otherwise have."

I grew older, and my love affair with the music, swagger and semiotics of hip-hop continued. There was Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel and the seminal Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:

Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge
I'm tryin' not to lose my head.

I learned all the rhymes played on black radio, because do you remember when MTV wouldn't touch black music at all? I got to college and started getting my beats underground, which is where I stayed to find my hip-hop treasures. Public Enemy rapped "Fight the Power" and it could have been the soundtrack to CNN footage of Tiananmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Got to give us what we want
Gotta give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We got to fight the powers that be.

I was young and hungry and hip-hop was smart, and like Neneh Cherry said, we were raw like sushi back then, sensing we were onto something big, not realizing how easily it could get away from us.

Gospel remains the music of inspiration and devotion. But there are things that even young people's tastes make pefectly clear (if I'm a competent judge) and that is Old School romantic R&B still counts. Funk remains the basis of the hottest dance music, especially electric funk. And there are not enough days remaining in my life to adequately describe Jazz and the Blues. But I would stop to bow my head against the pinpricks of shame any growup blackfolks feel in regards to the most popular hiphopification of a blues song, Golddigger by Kanye West.

But there are times when I like hiphop for being exactly what it is, raw, stupid, loud, arrogant, angry rebellious noise. More often than not, I like that musically without listening to the words, which can be like a bad sermon in a beautiful church. There is something to say about music that conveys this belligerent spectrum of human emotion. I predict that one of these days, the most awesome and shocking martial music ever is going to be a hiphop anthem. If you listen to American military cadences you can hear African chants, and that call and response deep in black American music. We're only a step away from going way beyond what Country has done in righteous anger over attacks we've suffered and hiphop could be a transcendant vehicle, but..

But hiphop culture is a fragment of youth culture and America suffers from a youth culture that is dysfunctional in any nmber of directions. That is primarily because we have the nerve to call what youth do 'culture', but secondarily because the dumbing down of American culture that is youth culture has been commercialized successfully. What sells well is considered good. Sex and violence sells well. And part of the dysfunction that masquerades as blackness today manifests sex and violence in hiphop as lust and anger. Hiphop perverts any romantic or chivalrous code that might be vehicles for the full spectrum of emotions around sex and violence. They are common denominators, but hiphop brings them uncommonly low.

I don't feel compelled to denigrate hiphop. It does an excellent job of self-destruction. Nor do I feel any desire to reclaim it as I once did before I had a family. But it's clear that the genre could use a lot of work. There is no King of Hiphop who might direct it to a better place, as far as I know there are no critical awards other than Grammys. Hiphop improvisationally defies those definitions that might put it's tradition of sucka MC self-criticism on a philosophically consistent track. What was once 'dope' now must be 'crunktastic'. The opacity of hiphop crit is inside baseball to the nth degree. It's always crypto- something. Just try reading Byron Crawford (aka Bol Gueverra) sometime. You know something mysteriously wrong is going on when you have a category like 'Least Tragic Hip Hop Deaths'.

As a conservative, I'm more likely to find new undiscovered classics in other genres than wait for  a Hiphop renaissence. That's ok. It doesn't concern me as a black man because there are five other flavors of black music. Our generation was wrong in rebelling against Peaches and Herb, and expecting as much from Salt & Pepa. But now that we're older and wiser, we can look to all the other forms of black music and be reunited. And it feels so good.

David Brewer III: The Transformer

"To everybody in this community, you can expect one thing: I am not a reformer; I am a transformer. I am going to transform this district into — not a No Child Left Behind Act district. That is a low star. This is a global, global economy. This is a world in which our children have to compete globally. We're going to shoot for world-class."
-- David L. Brewer III

David Brewer has a distinguished military career, and now he's transforming into the latest hope for the public schools of Los Angeles. In a rather extraordinary political move, The LA Board of Ed has made their choice for the new Superintendant of the LA Unified School District and as the LA Times reports, they're very excited about him:

"Almost everything we threw at him, it seemed, he was able to relate to some experience he had had," said board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte. "He had a presence, a take-charge attitude…. He talked about potential solutions for many issues and was brutally honest about the few things he didn't know."

Hours later, a giddy board President Marlene Canter announced Brewer as the next superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District.

Brewer's surprise selection culminated a seven-month search that saw scores of candidates — many of them well-known educators considered at the outset to be likely choices — fade, flop or withdraw. Although he was an ostensibly unlikely choice, several board members and others said that by the end, Brewer showed leadership skills, intelligence and a commanding, infectious personality that made him what they considered the obvious choice to lead the nation's second-largest school district.

Everything I've seen about this guy so far, bristles of Old School, and I look forward to see a no-nonsense attitude from this man. He seems feerless and not so worried about politics as he is about results, and when the man says 'world-class' I think he means it.

He promises to go to the communities of sub-standard and dysfunctional and request increasing participation between parents and school. Brewer wants to know what goes on after 6pm. He's a fan of Kozol's book Shame of the Nation. He's also got a 'drop squad' mentality with regard to getting kids outside of their environment and letting them see everything out there so that they become familiar with the world of choices they will have.

On this last point, I agree with him 110%. In his interview he said 'field trips' and he gave some personal examples of experiences that bear him out. It is my experience as well, in doing community service that often the best thing you can do for folks in susbstandard communities is get them out of their comfort zone and show them that they will have to learn how to experience other parts of the world. Even if it scares them to death. My kids here in the Redondo School District all look forward to going to Camp Keep. In the South Pasadena elementary school the kids walked to the Post Office (incidentally in the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of questions about anthrax) But even trips much simpler can be life changing. I still remember field trips I took in elementary school, to a science lab and to a bakery.

You can listen to his interview with Patt Morrison here.

Brewer walks into a politcal poop storm with the usual suspects voicing usual complaints:

The top local teachers union official was in no mood to celebrate. "The idea that he has no grounding in K-12 is disturbing," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. "And the idea that UTLA and the broader community were not consulted. I don't want to hear that his wife and family were teachers. That doesn't do it."

"A classroom is different from a battlefield," he added. "The goals and objectives are completely different. And it's disconcerting to a certain portion of teachers who are fighting against military recruitment on campus."

Others took no issue with Brewer but faulted the process.

"What they did was just another mistake," said Luis Sanchez, executive director of InnerCity Struggle. Board members said they don't need legislation to collaborate, but "there's no collaboration that happened here. They basically told the mayor you have to agree with who we choose."

The Rev. Frederick O. Murph, an African American and a Villaraigosa ally, said that it was a "low blow" for the board to act while Villaraigosa was out of town. But he called Brewer "an excellent choice" and a man of integrity.

So, let us watch and see. This is going to be interesting.

Cobb Sez Vote This Way

Cobb's rule on voting for California initiatives. When faced with reasonable doubt, vote no. You save us all money, and you limit the ability of these airheads to believe they can solve all our problems for us. Let's see how we stare down this go-round's crop of wishful thoughts.

PROPOSITION 1A: TRANSPORTATION FUNDING PROTECTION. LEGISLATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
* Protects transportation funding for traffic congestion relief projects, safety improvements, and local streets and roads.
* Prohibits the state sales tax on motor vehicle fuels from being used for any purpose other than transportation improvements.
* Authorizes loans of these funds only in the case of severe state fiscal hardship. Requires loans of revenues from states sales tax on motor vehicle fuels to be fully repaid within the three years. Restricts loans to no more than twice in any 10-year period.

Cobb Sez: OK. Sure. Why not?

PROPOSITION 1B: HIGHWAY SAFETY, TRAFFIC REDUCTION, AIR QUALITY, AND PORT SECURITY BOND ACT OF 2006.
* Makes safety improvements and repairs to state highways; upgrades freeways to reduce congestion; repairs local streets and roads; upgrades highways along major transportation corridors.
* Improves seismic safety of local bridges.
* Expands public transit.
* Helps complete the state’s network of car pool lanes.
* Reduces air pollution.
* Improves anti-terrorism security at shipping ports.
* Provides for a bond issue not to exceed nineteen billion nine hundred twenty-five million dollars ($19,925,000,000).
* Appropriates money from the General Fund to pay off bonds.

Cobb Sez: 20 Billion? Ha! It won't stop the earthquakes nor the damage. I'd like to believe this could work, but I've seen CalTrans in [in]action. This looks way too broad and I don't trust it.

PROPOSITION 1C: HOUSING AND EMERGENCY SHELTER TRUST FUND ACT OF 2006.
* Funds may be used for the purpose of providing shelters for battered women and their children, clean and safe housing for low-income senior citizens; homeownership assistance for the disabled, military veterans, and working families; and repairs and accessibility improvements to apartment for families and disabled citizens.
* The state shall issue bonds totaling two billion eight hundred fifty million dollars ($2,850,000,000) paid from existing state funds at an average annual cost of two hundred and four million dollars ($204,000,000) per year over the 30 year life of the bonds.
* Requires reporting and publication of annual independent audited reports showing use of funds, and limits administration and overhead costs.
* Appropriates money from the General Fund to pay off bonds.

Cobb Sez:  No. No. No. This is one I simply don't trust. 2 Billion is not enough to solve any single problem and notice how it's being spread around six different ways. This is the incrementalism of indecision. I guarantee that it's ugly spaghetti law.

PROPOSITION 1D: KINDERGARTEN–UNIVERSITY PUBLIC EDUCATION FACILITIES BOND ACT OF 2006.
* This ten billion four hundred sixteen million dollar ($10,416,000,000) bond issue will provide needed funding to relieve public school overcrowding and to repair older schools.
* It will improve earthquake safety and fund vocational educational facilities in public schools. Bond funds must be spent according to strict accountability measures.
* Funds will also be used to repair and upgrade existing public college and university buildings and to build new classrooms to accommodate the growing student enrollment in the California Community Colleges, the University of California, and the California State University.
* Appropriates money from the General Fund to pay off bonds.

Cobb Sez: Here we go again with the earthquake safety. That's just another excuse to keep somebody's pocket lined. I wonder how one gets to be an earthquake certified construction firm... hmm.

PROPOSITION 1E:  DISASTER PREPAREDNESS AND FLOOD PREVENTION BOND ACT OF 2006.
* This act rebuilds and repairs California’s most vulnerable flood control structures to protect homes and prevent loss of life from flood-related disasters, including levee failures, flash floods, and mudslides.
* Protects California’s drinking water supply system by rebuilding delta levees that are vulnerable to earthquakes and storms.
* Authorizes a $4.09 billion dollar bond act.
* Appropriates money from the General Fund to pay off bonds.

Cobb Sez: Flood prevention? I wonder where that levee rhetoric came from. No thanks.

PROPOSITION 83: SEX OFFENDERS. SEXUALLY VIOLENT PREDATORS. PUNISHMENT, RESIDENCE RESTRICTIONS AND MONITORING. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
* Increases penalties for violent and habitual sex offenders and child molesters.
* Prohibits registered sex offenders from residing within 2,000 feet of any school or park.
* Requires lifetime Global Positioning System monitoring of felony registered sex offenders.
* Expands definition of a sexually violent predator.
* Changes current two-year involuntary civil commitment for a sexually violent predator to an indeterminate commitment, subject to annual review by the Director of Mental Health and subsequent ability of sexually violent predator to petition court for sexually violent predator’s conditional release or unconditional discharge.

Cobb Sez: Not on your life. GPS tracking for life? Where do these idiots get their ideas?

PROPOSITION 84: WATER QUALITY, SAFETY AND SUPPLY. FLOOD CONTROL. NATURAL RESOURCE PROTECTION. PARK IMPROVEMENTS. BONDS. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
* Funds projects relating to safe drinking water, water quality and supply, flood control, waterway and natural resource protection, water pollution and contamination control, state and local park improvements, public access to natural resources, and water conservation efforts.
* Provides funding for emergency drinking water, and exempts such expenditures from public contract and procurement requirements to ensure immediate action for public safety.
* Authorizes $5,388,000,000 in general obligation bonds to fund projects and expenditures, to be repaid from the state’s General Fund.

Cobb Sez: You know, I don't know where all these parks are that are supposedly getting improved. Do you?

PROPOSITION 85: WAITING PERIOD AND PARENTAL NOTIFICATION BEFORE TERMINATION OF MINOR’S PREGNANCY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
* Amends California Constitution to prohibit abortion for unemancipated minor until 48 hours after physician notifies minor’s parent or legal guardian, except in medical emergency or with parental waiver.
* Permits minor to obtain court order waiving notice based on clear and convincing evidence of minor’s maturity or best interests.
* Mandates various reporting requirements, including reports from physicians regarding abortions performed on minors.
* Authorizes monetary damages against physicians for violation.
* Requires minor’s consent to abortion, with certain exceptions.
* Permits judicial relief if minor’s consent coerced.

Cobb Sez: That sounds reasonable to me. Doesn't cost any money either.

PROPOSITION 86: TAX ON CIGARETTES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND STATUTE.
* Imposes additional 13 cent tax on each cigarette distributed ($2.60 per pack), and indirectly increases tax on other tobacco products.
* Provides funding to qualified hospitals for emergency services, nursing education and health insurance to eligible children.
* Revenue also allocated to specified purposes including tobacco-use-prevention programs, enforcement of tobacco-related laws, and research, prevention, treatment of various conditions including cancers (breast, cervical, prostate, colorectal), heart disease, stroke, asthma and obesity.
* Exempts recipient hospitals from antitrust laws in certain circumstances.
* Revenue excluded from appropriation limits and minimum education funding (Proposition 98) calculations.

Cobb Sez: Whatever. Half of a cigarette price is tax already. What has that done? Sin taxes are stupid. There I said it. But you know what? I'm going to back this one, because it looks like it will get the state in the habit of funding emergency health care services and maybe even building hospitals that work.

PROPOSITION 87: ALTERNATIVE ENERGY. RESEARCH, PRODUCTION, INCENTIVES. TAX ON CALIFORNIA OIL PRODUCERS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND STATUTE.
* Establishes $4 billion program with goal to reduce petroleum consumption by 25%, with research and production incentives for alternative energy, alternative energy vehicles, energy efficient technologies, and for education and training.
* Funded by tax of 1.5% to 6% (depending on oil price per barrel) on producers of oil extracted in California. Prohibits producers from passing tax to consumers.
* Program administered by new California Energy Alternatives Program Authority.
* Prohibits changing tax while indebtedness remains.
* Revenue excluded from appropriation limits and minimum education funding (Proposition 98) calculations.

Cobb Sez: Hell no. Once again with the sin taxes. Our gas is already a dollar more expensive than in Georgia. Forget about it.

PROPOSITION 88: EDUCATION FUNDING. REAL PROPERTY PARCEL TAX. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND STATUTE.
*  Provides additional public school funding for kindergarten through grade 12.
* Funded by $50 tax on each real property parcel.
* Exempts certain elderly and disabled homeowners.
* Funds must be used for class size reduction, textbooks, school safety, Academic Success facility grants, and data system to evaluate educational program effectiveness.
* Provides for reimbursement to General Fund to offset anticipated decrease in income tax revenues due to increased deductions attributable to new parcel tax.
* Requires school district audits, penalties for fund misuse.
* Revenue excluded from minimum education funding (Proposition 98) calculations.

Cobb Sez: Sounds reasonable to me.

PROPOSITION 89: POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS. PUBLIC FINANCING. CORPORATE TAX INCREASE. CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION AND EXPENDITURE LIMITS. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
* Provides that candidates for state elective office meeting certain eligibility requirements, including collection of a specified number of $5.00 contributions from voters, may voluntarily receive public campaign funding from Fair Political Practices Commission, in amounts varying by elective office and election type.
* Increases income tax rate on corporations and financial institutions by 0.2 percent to fund program.
* Imposes new limits on campaign contributions to state-office candidates and campaign committees, and new restrictions on contributions by lobbyists, state contractors.
* Limits certain contributions and expenditures by corporations.

Cobb Sez: This one sounds very strange. Rather like a rehash of stuff we voted on last time. Can't trust it.

PROPOSITION 90: GOVERNMENT ACQUISITION, REGULATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
*  Bars state and local governments from condemning or damaging private property to promote other private projects or uses.
* Limits government’s authority to adopt certain land use, housing, consumer, environmental and workplace laws and regulations, except when necessary to preserve public health or safety.
* Voids unpublished eminent domain court decisions.
* Defines “just compensation.”
* Government must occupy condemned property or lease property for public use.
* Condemned private property must be offered for resale to prior owner or owner’s heir at current fair market value if government abandons condemnation’s objective.
* Exempts certain governmental actions.

Cobb Sez: Ahh. Kelo backlash. About time.

So there it is. Now you don't have to think. I did all of your thinking for you. Ain't democracy grand?

Yahoo Time Capsule

I just found out..

"The Time Capsule (...) is organized around ten themes, chosen to illuminate different corners of the human experience. The ten themes are: Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You. Each theme harbors an open-ended question: What do you love? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you believe in? What’s beautiful? What’s fun? What do you remember? What is your wish? Describe your world. Who are you? People respond to these questions in five simple ways – with words, pictures, videos, sounds, and drawings."

Guess I've got some blogging to do.

Google Maps My Palm

Every month it seems, Google has come up with something for me to say 'Wow' about. I must confess that I love them more than I loved Microsoft in the days when IBM mainframes dominated the planet. The latest wow? Google Maps for the Treo. That's a true wireless client server application. Way to go Google.

BTW, Writely is dead. Long live Writely.

Triscadecaphobia Again

Today is Friday the 13th. Woo scary.

Is this the first year where there hasn't been another Jason, the hockey mask killer, in theatres? I can remember back in the day when I used to take underprivileged kids up to the mountains for hikes and whatnot. One time we were in Big Sur and one of the kids makes this noise: 'ch ch ch ch ch'. I pay no attention to it and the other kids start freaking out. They say 'Jason is going to get me', and I'm trying to figure out which of the kids is named Jason so I can slap him upside the head. One chubby girl is near to tears as she blubbers an explanation. I don't suppose my dismissive attitude worked at first, but we did get her down to see the seals.

So I'm in the eviable position of saying, now and forever, stop saying 'ch ch ch ch ch'!

Speaking of which, I've always been the dude who says why not have a guy with Encyclopedia Brittanica down at Venice Beach to counteract the noise of the prophets of doom. In that mode, figured out how to fight superstitious fire with fire. Basically this, if you walk under a ladder and get 7 years bad luck, planting a flower gives you 7 years good luck. If you break a mirror, find another mirror and spin around 7 times saying 'God is love' and then you undo the bad luck. I told my kids this and they don't believe me, so I just amended it to some sunk costs. I told them that every Sunday that they went to Church was 7 years good luck and so they're covered for life. That worked.

I can't think of any superstitions that I ever really worried about. I always hated cats, so the black cat thing had an inch of credibility - only because the first time I ever picked up a kitten when I was a kid, it scratched the hell out of me. And I was being nice. So I figured it's just the scratching thing.

This being October, there are all kinds of baseball superstitions out there. I forget, are you not supposed to say 'no hitter' until the 7th inning?

Art In America

For the past year or so, I have been completely turned off of the 'art' of Hollywood. More specifically, I have been perturbed by the kind of creativity produced by what I percieve to be a class of limousine liberals and it has brought me to a question about the state of art in America.

In writing about conservative and liberal principles, as part of disambiguating the Left from Liberalism, I pose the question of the purpose of art in society.  I am inclined to believe that Liberals believe in an absolutist defense of the individual, and that the ultimate expression of such an absolute individual would be someone cast out from society. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, for example.  The value of this individual is taken for granted by the Liberal in that his exclusion demonstrates the cruelty of society and it is this cruelty that Liberalism combats. With regards to the purposes of art, then, the lessons of this individual can show society the error of its ways. And because of these assumptions about isolation and exceptionalism, we associate creativity, the propensity to create art, with individuals who are somehow abnormal. Ideally, the abnormal outcast, by demonstrating his humanity artistically shows society how its intolerance is immoral, and this is a regulating force in society. The liberal view of progress then is by continually opening up society to those deemed outcasts we better understand ourselves as humans of unlimited potential and we strip away the injustice inherent in inequality.

Hollywood illustrates this principle by pushing the limits of civility in its creations. We have come to celebrate the anti-hero in productions like 'Oz' in which the lives of prisoners is the central drama - where all of the protagonists are convicts, and the viewer is forced to follow the ethics and morality of the murky world of the fraternity of thugs, thieves, murderers and rapists. Indeed, 'murky world' shows are all the rage. Andre Braugher's 'Theif', the HBO series 'The Sopranos' as well as 'Deadwood' and the British show 'Hustle' all take us to places where deception and moral equivocation (if not depravity) are the norm, and the hero is the person who can hold his own life together by being the most successful in those murky worlds.  Showtime and FX have their entrees as well, the new show 'Dexter' is about a serial killer who kills serial killers. 'The Shield' is about a cop who continually breaks the law in order to uphold the law.

This may be entertainment, but is it art? I'm not sure the difference makes a difference if the principle remains the same.

I have always been attracted to essays, novels and plays and the moral discourse therein. The writings of Voltaire, Moliere, Martin Amis, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka and Eugene O'Neill stand out for me in this regard. I also used to read John Updike and John Steinbeck in my youth in a similar vein.  In the 90s, I believed that multiculturalism would be led by artistic productions of that caliber but the thrust of the multicultural movement fell off of that track. So while it was useful and inspiring for me to read Borges, Vikram Seth and Carlos Fuentes, I think that the import of this literature has left little impact on most of America. This is obviously complicated by the fact that most Americans have shallow expectations of art but it doesn't change the fact that lighter entertainment can express the same principles as great art.

So we are left with a problem which is probably best expressed by the futility our creative producers have in addressing the moral implications of the difficulties Americans have with the great issues of our contemporary lives. And it is into this gap which more and more Americans find themselves turning to religion. But it is not, by and large, the religion of inspiration I see Americans finding, rather the religion of medication, literally the opiate of the masses. It is because of the default of American Art.

I am surely not the first to recognize this, but I must confess that my time to read contemporary accounts is limited. I'm late for work today as it is. I simply pose this question? Why has the artist been replaced by the commentator - those people Michael Savage rightly call 'hollow men'? If even Keith Olbermann finds himself compelled to enter said fray of punditry, are we not in the brink of some soul death?

It seems to me that artists in America have not exercised their craft in any influential way to meet the moral needs of a nation of millions. There is nothing spellbinding that arrests our imaginations and slices through the Gordian Knot of contemporary spin, PC ethics and disingenuous debate. A proper religion will certainly do so and should, but isn't it curious that our creatives have wandered so far from being useful?

It's Still Rocket Science

For some reason I fail to recall, I went on YouTube browsing spree this morning and made myself late for work. I happened upon some extraordinary video of jet plane crashes and rocket launches. That led to a rather circular route to the DPRK and their weekend fizzle.

It is extraordinarily comforting to me to know that such radical fools as those leading North Korea are incapable of achieving what free people in America did almost 70 years ago. But it is even more comforting that we have been able to sustain what we have. Noting in passing that we have had over 1000 nuclear tests, we also have ICBM technology, and the rocketry to lift satellites and scientific instruments into various orbits around the planet. It is commonplace to acknowledge such accomplishments and yet fairly rare to appreciate how difficult they actually are to accomplish.

Gladwell has nailed a very useful concept: Degree of Difficulty.

I remember once having a discussion with a guy who knew a lot about professional basketball. He said he had asked a big sample of NBA players who they felt would be the most formidable one-on-one opponent in the league. The answer was fairly unanimous: Vince Carter. Now that's surprising. Why Carter and not Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or any number of other, far more accomplished, offensive players? The answer, this guy told me, was the same in nearly every case: "you have no idea how hard it is to do the things that Carter does."

Makes me want to see who this Carter character is. Aside from all that and Gladwell's tangent into sporstwriting, we should keep in mind how difficult it is for pros to accomplish what they do. So while there is a great deal of rightly expressed pride in American accomplishements, we should not forget that those who blather on like Ahmadinejad also have within their nations some extraordinary talents as well. As much as we like to talk about 'backwards countries', states are still where all the money and all the talent lies.

Consider AQ Khan's involvement with North Korea:

AQ Khan and Pyongyang's possibly uranium bomb

The question of why North Korea would agree to give up its efforts to produce a plutonium bomb during Carter's visit is explained by one name. AQ Khan. Around the time of the Carter visit, Khan was touting his nuclear weapons design services to interested dictators. That fact prompted President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan today to deny that his country helped North Korea with its bomb by insisting it was a plutonium bomb despite a confession that one of its most prominent scientists had in fact assisted Pyongyang and despite the fact that UN knew North Korea was embarked on a uranium enrichment program. Reuters reports:

 

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf defended his country on Wednesday   against suspicions that illegal nuclear proliferation by a disgraced atomic   scientist had enabled North Korea to carry out a nuclear test. "This bomb   (North Korea's test) is a plutonium bomb. We don't have a plutonium bomb. We   are following a uranium route. That should answer your question,"   Musharraf told journalists at a news conference, following a dinner with the   media to break fast. Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan,   admitted selling nuclear parts and secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea in   early 2004, and has been under house arrest in Islamabad since.

The available facts suggest that AQ Khan may have made the plutonium route which Carter "succeeded" in stopping superfluous and provided an alternative and tested uranium path to bomb during the second Clinton term. Wikipedia traces Dr. Khan's career as the Johnny Appleseed of WMDs in the 1990s.

Virtually all of Khan's overseas travels, to Iran, Libya, North Korea,   Niger, Mali, and the Middle East, were on official Pakistan government   aircraft which he commandeered at will, given the status he enjoyed in   Pakistan. Typically, these were Pakistan Air Force (PAF) aircraft, including   VIP transport aircraft such as the Boeing 707 (of which the PAF has 3), and   C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft. (Within Pakistan, Khan typically used the PAF's   shorter-range CN-235 aircraft.) The high-capacity C-130 Hercules aircraft   made numerous round trips to Pyongyang in the 1990s, both with and without   Khan, presumably to deliver centrifuges and other nuclear parts. In each   case the planes flew through Chinese airspace over Xinjiang and   Chinese-controlled airspace in Tibet and Qinghai. Given the 2,000 mile range   of the C-130, refuelling would have been required, almost certainly at PLAAF   bases en-route.

These are serious actors working on difficult problems. So despite the flack that Richard Armitage got a few weeks ago over his comment about bombing Pakistan back to the Stone Age, the US was right to make it abundantly clear that we were not about to ignore the serious science of building WMDs for rogue states.

It's interesting to note the details of Operation Paperclip are not and probably will not be disclosed until nothing about WW2 is controversial any longer.

 

 

October Surprises

I think I just realized how annoying I am. Just as I was out the door, I got snagged into a conversation about geopolitics, and I ran down chapter and verse why Saudi Arabia is a source of conflict for Jihadis. Then I wound up telling my cowoker why, although you'll never hear about it in the news, George W. Bush has done more to combat AIDS in Africa than any other president. He appeared rather stunned at these revelations, and still wonders why we're not in Darfur.

Two things occurred to me. The first is a nice metaphor that you have permission to use. It's called 'asking for the unicycle'. My associate doesn't really care so much about the positive of Darfur as he does about the negative of Iraq. I didn't ask him if he thought we should overthrow the sitting government in Khartoum (actually I should snarkily ask him if he knows the capital of Sudan), but I guess his answer would be no. He's asking for the unicycle because he's mad we gave a bicycle to Iraq and he should get at least half of that for what he wants. Of course he doesn't know how to ride a unicycle, he's just trying to get satisfaction.

Yes we oughta be the world's policeman, but we have to choose our beat wisely.

So he asked where did I get all of this information. I'm thinking where did he not? And so it hits me that I pay about as much attention to baseball in every other month but October about as much as I'd guess the ordinary Joe pays to politics in every other month but October.

The latest surprise is Harry Reid's real-estate money. Then there's stories about family corruption surrounding Harold Ford Jr in Tennessee. There's some smudge against candidates in Montana over Jack Abramhoff, and people still can't get Foley out of their system. But this is all playoff hype. It means nothing during the regular season, and people coming in to ad campaigns as their entre to political races are poor pathetic excuses for political fans. They don't know the half.

It must show on my face when I listen to people who subscribe to fewer than 30 RSS feeds (I just cut my 70 down a bit) ramble on about North Korea or Iraq or damn near anything I obsess over here in the blogosphere. But that's just me. And you.

650K

Funny, I was just looking at mortality questions about Iraq. Now these cats at the Lancet have published numbers that put presumably war-related deaths somewhere between... well you read it.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.

Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.

That's a huge spread. Whatever happened to plus or minus 3% accuracy that surveys are supposed to have? Any number is better than no number, but not if the number is ridiculous. You've got to have a lot of nerve to suggest that your number could be off by almost 3x. I expect the 'sphere to take these guys to task, and I'm just rubbing my hands in anticipation of the delicious details.

Return of the Latin Mass

Yay!

THE Pope is taking steps to revive the ancient tradition of the Latin Tridentine Mass in Catholic churches worldwide, according to sources in Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a universal indult — or permission — for priests to celebrate again the Mass used throughout the Church for nearly 1,500 years. The indult could be published in the next few weeks, sources told The Times.

Chess

Jahiliyyah: Salafist Hell

Walid Phares underscores the concept of Salifists understanding of Jahiliyyah and Western political misunderstanding of that scope of Salifist enemies:

In an article titled "Al Qaeda finds new partner: Salafist group finds limited success in native Algeria" (The Washington Post, October 5, 2006) by Craig Whitlock, Western sources, including French and American, assert that the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (originally a local Algerian group) has become global by joining with al Qaeda. While the article is very interesting and informative, the analysis of the International Salafi movement by Western sources and expertise shows a continuous misunderstanding of Jihadism and its strategies. For in the essence of the article there is an assertion that the Algerian Salafists were restricted to fight their Government for "local" reasons, but it was U.S. intervention in the region that "compelled" the Combat Salafists to join al Qaeda worldwide. This assertion and other little informed debates taking place in the U.S. these days are committing an analytical sin: Projecting onto the Jihadists an alien thinking, most likely because of the pressures of American politics.

The academic, expert, and journalistic assertions that Jihadists in general and Salafists in particular, are initially local, then become international, is derived from how Western scholarship monitors the Islamists actions but in many cases fail to analyze the motives and thinking process of these Jihadists. The Salafists for example, do not consider their Jihad as solely confined to a particular country, even if their actions are restricted to the boundaries of a particular country. Salafists and other Jihadis are international by essence, by ideology, and by ultimate goal. It is not the foreign policies of Western powers that "open their eyes" on the necessity of initiating action internationally, but it is their analysis of the feasibility of such action, in conformity with their ideology.

A Salafist, briefly stated, is a rough equivalent of a fire and brimstone Christian pentacostal. Almost everybody but them is damned to Hell. Except for Salafists, Hell is now, and they are obliged to bring it. They believe that most people, including many Muslims are outside of the fold. That they live in Jahiliyyah - the world of essentially excommunicated infidels. My understanding is that they don't need an explicit fatwa to kill such infidels.

So the idea that any Salafist group is motivated by Western actions to declare violent action against infidels is misleading. By definition, Salafists are already there. Joining alQuaeda does not expand the scope of their terrorist activities, it would merely be a merger of convenience. We in Jahiliyyah were already doomed.

The clearest interpretation I can give of an objective qualification by which a Salafist or other follower of Qutb might judge one as being in Jahiliyyah would be secular rule. That is to say, if you obey the laws of men, as opposed to the laws of God - that of a proper Sharia - then you are in Jahiliyyah and therefore a target.

On Malkin v YouTube

My understanding of the situation is simple. YouTube is becoming a battleground and an inflection point over matters of free speech. But YouTube doesn't appear to be constititionally defensive of free speech. So it is and will continue to be  inconsistent in its policy towards banning. Not only that, there is the question of a million strings trying to pull copyright nickles and dimes.

So Malkin is in the stew for insulting the permanent outrage of radical Islam on YouTube and the head Tubers are complying with complaints by deactivating her account.

I'm not sure how this might be impacted by the new Google ownership, because you really have to wonder about the extent to which they will defend free speech. But chances are that since Google will have a smarter and surer team of attorneys there will be some better protections for uploaders, the rationale being their contractual prowess will shield users better than that of the YouTube startup folks.

I find myself giving Google the benefit of a lot of doubts because I like most of what they've done technology-wise and I really admire their boldness in offering a second life to the fractional publication value of a great deal of text. This has long been a dream of all of us ex-Xeroids, and the Googleplex can provide the appropriate economies of scale for the future (although I still see room for a half-dozen more players).

When this will really become interesting is when machine language translation becomes viable. It will enable global politics. Until then the viability of free speech online is subject to the bottlenecks of an immature multicultural punditry...

Yo Yo Yo

OK I'm speechless.

Nuclear Naming Conventions

Want to know a secret? I'm a sucker for naming conventions. So when I found this comprehensive list of all the nuclear tests published by FAS, my silly little heart jumped for joy.

What Happens In Google Stays In Google

Here's what I think about the Google purchase of YouTube. I think that as soon as Google hosts all the YouTube content, there will be no way of knowing the monetization potential of any piece of contested material without Google's participation. In otherwords, everybody who guesses how many hits, and therefore how valuable some piece of content is in terms of eyeballs will have to ask Google and Google would have to be compelled to divulge that information. Then what happens? Google can make a quick calculation of what it's worth, in terms of ad revenue, to deal or no deal. If it's no deal, Google cuts the piece of content loose and its value drops to zero.

The trick is having the entire infrastructure of the Googleplex which would host the valuable content. That makes them the equivalent of the broadcast TV networks, and if entertainment lawyers are dancing naked because they think that YouTube is a litigation free-for all just waiting to happen, they will quickly find out how difficult it is to sue the network.

All of that seems to be a big fuss over content that's primarily only valuable because Google broadcasts it, some very small fraction of which has any commercial value in any other form. Only Google has the free billions of equity required to do any of this so, it's essentially a win situation for them. It seems to me that this is something only Google could do because they're the ones investing in the Googleplex.

Trusting Japan

(I wrote this on October 6th while on vacation in anticipation of trouble from North Korea)

The Norks are going to piss off somebody, but it probably won't be the American Opposition. All they care is that they can snipe at the President's foreign policy. Apparently they are pissing off the Japanese. And why shouldn't they. Korea isn't far from Japan and a new nuclear neighbor is not needed when those nukes are in the hands of a government and people as desparate as the North Koreans.

I don't have nearly enough information to recommend with much gusto, the escalation of the military preparedness of Japan, but I trust them. What I trust about Japan is what I trust about what I've learned about their culture and for what business dealings I have had with Japanese corporations. In some important ways, it can be boiled down to the archtype of Japanese decision-making. Japanese come to consensus and agree upon a plan of action, it is dishonorable to stray from that consensus. and they will risk the sucess of a project in order to honor that consensus. Japanese decision making is risk-averse but their organizational discipline is admirable.

Norks Nukes

What I have been missing in my studies of the current global geopolitics is a detailed review of those things that led to the breaking up of the AQ Khan network. So now that the Norks have a nuke, it's difficult for me to know what level of concern is appropriate.

My gut reaction is that Japan out to be seething right about now. The NYT is leading with the idea that China is really losing face, and I agree with that assessment.

The nuke itself appears to be a max of 2 KT, which is about one fifth of Little Boy.

Rico of Starfish

Captain Yancy

Farewell Bahamas

Diversity and Conservatism

I am largely thinking of Conservatism these days as the possible saving grace of America and Western Civilization. What concerns me the most is how socially conservative our Conservatism will have to be in order to be that in the face of Jihadism and Relativism.

As The Looming Tower is making clearer for me, the Khomeinists are at war with modernity and secular rule. As the American Opposition is making clear to me there is no single unifying principle in the American ideosphere they believe is worth fighting for. And so it is likely that they will relent and face their own destruction rather than to stand for something. I make the case extreme for the purposes of illustration, but it isn't clear to me that the mainstream of Democrat politics is willing to create a defensible unity. You know, Eclexia.

Eclexia is characterized by a restless antipathy to the established and an overweening desire to get away from it. The eclexic is eclectic to a fault. Their fatal flaw is that once the novelty of the thing has worn off, once it becomes established, their interest and respect fades rapidly.

Eclexia is a sin because it is fundamentally disrespectful of the efforts made by people who bother to study something specific. It acts against collaboration in solving standing problems. It refuses to focus. Thus the eclexic requires some outre personality which allows him to eschew the 'mundane' tasks that are faced by all of us. In that regard, eclexics are dependent on an established alternative subculture - something that allows them to easily be understood as 'cutting edge' or 'radical' even if they are not talented or committed in any way.

So last night I complimented Los Angeles because of its ethnic and religious diversity. But as I did so, I realized I did so in the context of a balance which is not necessarily permanent. You see what America offers previously persecuted minorities and immigrants is the opportunity to move from the Third World to the Second and then possibly to the First. So long as that material opportunity survives, then participation in mainstreaming is a useful, even critical source of national unity.  I've always said that the act of raising the flag is patriotic and it is the struggle of snatching that honor from one generation, or one ethnicity to the next which insures the integrity of patriotism. The overkill of PC is a reasonable reaction to the oppression of ethnic minorities, but the eclexic aren't necessarily demanding that the ethnic be patriotic, and therein lies the problem. Inclusion for it's own sake is not good enough. It has to be inclusion into the nation which requires demonstrated affinity for national principles. But that is not how anti-conservatives see it. The very idea that 'Nobody is illegal', demonstrates this problem.

As I remarked in Derbyshire's Dilemma, what cuts us to the chase is the question of black progress. More generally, it is this same question of progress which should be the razor on any matter of diversity. It's not inclusion for its own eclexic radical chic sake of 'social change', but inclusion for the purposes of social progress, of real self-enabled elevation, of taking advantage of what the nation has to offer.

For Conservatism to be right and proper, it has to assure that inclusion is reflective of a diversity of sources and a unity of purpose, rather than a many-to-many relationship. That is because it is under attack from those who expect nothing less than conversion of the planet to Islam. And so Conservatism has to be defensive of liberty and religious freedom, but not absolute freedom to the point of eclexia and disposable consumerist culture. We must conserve Modernism, we must conserve Rationalism, we must preserve the road to social mobility and mainstreaming.

Mariah Cay

Today, the Spousal Unit and I got dropped off on Mariah Cay and left to our own designs. This deally was called the Castaway Adventure and basically we got our own private beach. We had a cooler full of beer and wine, plus a steak and lobster lunch plus some cheeses that I've actually never even seen before, much less tasted. It was about a 8.5 on the bomb scale. The weather was perfect, the food was great, but there were no fishies passing in front of our snorkeled faces. Nevertheless...

The Stashiu Chronicles

Patterico has published some of the finest information I've ever read about the business at Gitmo. If you haven't read or heard of his multipart series, I guarantee you that it will be the closest you'll get to the reality of the Camps. It's riveting stuff.

It comes in three parts so far. I excerpt the graf in each that I found world-rocking.

Part One

I know Zarqawi, the terrorist said to the American. I am going to have Zarqawi cut off your family’s head while you watch. Then he will cut off your head.

The terrorist said it all in a matter-of-fact way, looking the American straight in the eye.

The American was not frightened. There was little danger that the terrorist was going to carry out his threat . . . at least any time soon.

The terrorist was a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the American was an Army nurse who worked with Guantánamo detainees with psychological and/or behavioral problems. For six months, he spoke with detainees on a daily basis, and built a rapport of sorts with some of the most troublesome terrorists at Guantánamo.

He spoke with me recently, and I will be telling his story in several posts over the coming days.

Part Two

But, as someone who is familiar with the backgrounds of many of the detainees, does Stashiu think the majority are really terrorists, or just folks who have been scooped up by accident? He said:

I believe that the majority of the guys there are true terrorists, and they follow the Manchester Document to the letter.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Manchester Document, it is an official Al Qaeda training manual that was discovered by British police in Manchester, England while searching the computer of a known Al Qaeda terrorist. You can read it here.  An article posted on the Defense Department’s web site explains that, according to the manual:

If you’re a Muslim extremist captured while fighting your holy war against “infidels,” avoid revealing information at all costs, don’t give your real name and claim that you were mistreated or tortured during your detention.

As Stashiu explained it, the mission was: “deny, deny, deny.”  A recent article in the New York Times Magazine says of the Manchester Document:

Officials at the detention facility at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say they see clear evidence that detainees are well-versed in its contents.

Stashiu agrees with this wholeheartedly.

Part Three

As the article explains, there were competing objectives among the detainees. Simply, we were in a Catch-22. If concessions were made, one group would say that they could get even more by continuing to cause problems. If concessions weren’t made, the reasoning was that they just weren’t applying enough pressure. There is a hardcore group of AQ there that will try to turn everything they can to their advantage. They circulate untrue stories of torture, poisoned food, desecrated Korans, and many other things.  This keeps the tensions high and then they find a way to light the match.

Two Faced Blogroll

I told Deet that I read Iraq the Model and Allahpundit. This is not entirely correct. I read Malkin, TigerHawk and Belmont Club often enough so that I know them by referral. They are quoted often enough so that I recognize them, but of the 60 or so RSS feeds that I keep track of, they are not in them.

So it occurred to me after reading Raed that there might exist some Iraqi blogger that was once the darling of the Right or Milbloggers who has since been summarily dumped for being a political infidel. I wonder who that might be. Has it happened at all? It's an open question. Perhaps the Lefty or Pacifists have dumped an Iraqi blogger. Has there been a turn of events so mindblowing that this has happened on either side. I want to know.

Great Exuma

So far so good. We found the package store right across the tenth hole in front of the casino and bought a couple gallons of intoxicants. So right now I'm feeling a whole lot of Meyer's Rum. Is that how you spell it? I can't quite see straight. Anyway, I'm uploading selected shots into a group at Flickr starting with this one that actually looks like a postcard.

The Canvas

This is the view from the room. I'm just getting out of bed. What time is it? I don't know. I've got nothing to do and nowhere to go. I think I'll go get my feet wet.

The Right To Wear A T-Shirt

Out of curiousity's sake, I went looking for the number presumed to be that of Iraqi citizens killed during OIF. The number is somewhere around 43,000 but I don't know the scope of the time period or whether those are strictly those killed by American and Coalition forces. It's still a decent number to keep in mind.

As I followed some links to various sites, I found that of Raed. He writes extensively of an outrage at Jet Blue upon his return to the US from the Middle East. They wouldn't allow him to wear a T-shirt with Arabic writing which said 'We Will Not Be Silent'. Go ahead and read the whole thing. I really hope that you do.

The other night I was debating rather fiercely with Deet who surprised me with an 'it doesn't really matter' response to my question about whether women voting in Iraq is a change for the better. Later on in the same conversation, he complained about the NSA's domestic surveillance program and the discomfort it caused him in calling a friend in Iran just to say happy birthday.

I mention these two things because I think they are errors of the same type when it comes to questions of civil liberties and matters of free speech. I told Deet that his phone call is not worth spying on and he was foolish to think anybody at the NSA would spend two minutes looking at his case. They've got more important fish to fry. He wasn't consoled. In reading the blog post by Raed, one wonders if he understands the irony of his publication at all. A T-shirt is not an essay, it is a simplistic provocation designed to get a rise out of anybody who happens to stare at your chest. An essay, on the other hand, is much more substatial - given that you can write coherently which obviously Raed can. If there were really political repression going on in America, his essay, which is clearly more powerful than his dumbass T-shirt would be the thing that got him in trouble.

Deet cannot find any cases Americans have brought against the Patriot Act, and as I predicted, nobody in Congress has brought suit against the NSA program. Of course we might both be misinformed, but neither of us are materially affected. If the grounds for standing to bring suit against the NSA's domestic surveillance program has been mysteriously altered, chances are, somebody as well-informed as I try to be should have heard about it. But the more important questions are whether or not free speech is being protected or not.

It seems to me that if rude and fearful Americans react to my provocative T-shirt, it is reasonable, but rude for an airline to ask me to desist. What kind of public nuisance am I? Hard to say. But, as my mother would say, "don't make a Federal case out of it." But would we? Is this the kind of expression that thoughtful citizens are supposed to be defending?

The right to wear a T-shirt on a plane? The right to expect privacy on a phone call to say happy birthday? These seem to be more conveniences and indulgences to me, and I think we ought to have them and I think it's wrong to arbitrarily restrict them. But it is also wrong to pretend that any restrictions on such things represent abuses of power which are fundamentally eroding the material elements of a free society.

If you disagree, feel free to say so. But also make sure you read his blog before Halliburton buys Google and erases all cached versions of it.

I Actually Knew That

Here are 11 myths in the high tech geek business arena. I actually knew them all. Hmm. I must be on the right track.

• Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
• Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
• Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
• Myth #4: What you think matters.
• Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
• Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
• Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
• Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business
• Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
• Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
• Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I'll be happy.

Read the whole thing.

Jamaica Funk

I'm sitting here listening to one of my favorite funky songs of all time, and I realize that I have no iead what the people are saying. Sure there's something about Betty Boop and Alley Oop. And we all know that Tom Browne is 'one ordinary guy'. Does anybody know what's going on in that song?

Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?

Thom Bell outclasses Terri Gross in an NPR Interview. It's about time this man gets his props.

Producer, composer and arranger Thom Bell was one of the prime originators of the Sound of Philadelphia, creating hits with the Delfonics such as "La La La Means I Love You" and "Didn't I Blow Your Mind." Bell was born in Jamaica and moved to Philadelphia at age 5. He planned to become a classical conductor, but in his early 20s, he was signed by Cameo Records to create a Philadelphia version of Motown.

Bell is someone whose name I've seen all around the place back in the day spinning on records. With Gamble & Huff (whom he knew) and McFadden & Whitehead and Stevie Wonder there were few who could compete.   It's rather stunning to know he hung out with Andre Watts. He was the man behind the Spinners, The Stylistics and many others. Listen to the show and if you're like me, you'll recognize many of the songs that formed your attitudes about romance.

Obligatory Seriousness on Rep Foley

Heave Ho.

Laughing, Puking & Interrogating

I won't be the first nor the last to recognize the absurdity of American society. I've had a good taste of it this weekend already. But perhaps I'll be the first to consider the implications of Jackass 2 on American geopolitics.

Jackass 2 is the funniest film I've seen all year, without question. In fact it is the funniest film I've seen in several years. If I told you the other film that I'm thinking about from 2003 you'd probably dismiss me as a lowbrow crank. I might be, but I'll hold that  judgement in abeyance by keeping mum. Still I cannot watch a film like this without considering exactly how flexible the definition of torture must be. But let's forget about the popular definition of torture, lets look specifically at the extensions the President demanded. Essentially, if I read Balkin correct, it's the difference between suffering and damage.

The bill would define ˜serious mental pain or suffering" to be basically coterminous with the term ˜severe mental pain or suffering" under the torture act, except that as to conduct occurring after this law is enacted, the definition would cover conduct not only intended to result in "prolonged mental harm" (as is the case under the torture statute), but also conduct intended to result in "serious and non-transitory mental harm (which need not be prolonged)." What does it mean for "serious" mental harm to be non-transitory but also non-prolonged? The bill does not say. Between transitory and prolonged falls . . . the shadow.

More important is the bill's definition of ˜serious physical pain or suffering." One would think that, on any reasonable understanding of ordinary language, the "alternative" CIA techniques do, indeed, result in serious physical suffering, at the very least. Indeed, such serious suffering -- and the prospect of ending such suffering by telling one's interrogators what they wish to hear -- is the whole point of using such techniques in the first place.  But remarkably -- and not accidently -- the bill's definition would not cover all such actual "serious physical suffering." 

The definition would require, for one thing, a "bodily injury" -- something that would not necessarily result from use of the CIA techniques -- even though one can of course be subject to great physical suffering without any "physical injury."

What's worse, such physical injury would also have to "involve" at least one of the following:

(1) a substantial risk of death;

(2) extreme physical pain;

(3) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions, or bruises; or

(4) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.

As you can see, this definition simply does not cover many categories of actual serious physcial suffering, including, naturally, the physical suffering that ordinarily results from the CIA techniques that have been reported.

So now that you've got a snootful of legalese, you need to go see what the stuntmen of Jackass do in their movie, on film, for laughs. And you have to understand that it is very likely, although it would take some sort of lawyer and expert to say whether or not these things would be considered torture under the pre-Bush interpretation of Article 3. Somebody in the legal profession please do us all a favor so we can recognize, we being the American masses with appetites for fast cars, alcohol and violent movies.

This is the number one movie in America, and it is puke up your guts funny. I literally had a very difficult time and had to close my eyes during several scenes (when people on screen were puking) so that I wouldn't puke myself. It was a combination of hilarity and revulsion which was the virtual equivalent of waterboarding milk through your nose; most definitely a unique combination of emotions.

The premise of Jackass is fairly simple. Several overgrown adolescent pranksters come up with ideas for outrageous stunts and pranks. They connive each other into performing these pointless and painful stunts for the pure gag of it. But they also decieve each other into compromising humiliations. The final stunt of the film is probably one that should go down in history as the most politically resonant satire of a generation, and it definitely would be considered torture in the pre-Bush world. Nevertheless, I laughed. There are sometimes pranks within stunts which subject the performer to greater humiliation than they ever expect. An example.

Bam, a rather famous skateboarder, is a guest stuntee on the show. We are told that he is fearless with one exception, snakes. And so he signs up to perform 'The Wind Tunnel' in which he dresses in a tuxedo and holds on with both hands inside a horse trailer as the propeller from a swamp buggy is spun at full blast. As expected he holds on for a time and then is finally blown about twenty feet into the trailer. As he is about to take his bow, a gate within the trailer is closed and locked and a live cobra is tossed into the area where he is now imprisoned. Naturally he freaks out as the other pranksters taunt him. He slams his head into an iron bar as he frantically makes his escape and retreats mumbling as the camera follows him. "I don't trust anyone any more". He winds up on the top of another trailer trying to regain composure with a beer still cursing his tormentors who then  sneak up behind him and expertly throw a rubber hose around his neck. Bam takes this to be another snake and loses his beer. There's no way that writing this can express the humor in it which is hard to imagine, but easy to see on film.

According to the experts at Slate magazine:

Name: Exploiting individual phobias, e.g. use of dogs       

Source: DOD Working Group memo; Memorandum from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing interrogation practices for use in Iraq       

Description: When "fear up" doesn't work, interrogators may actively stimulate a detainee's fears. Pentagon lawyers described this tactic as "increasing anxiety by use of aversions." Photos from Abu Ghraib show a detainee seated before a large, snarling military police dog (a full-grown German shepherd, for example). This technique may be followed by a threat to repeat the scare session or to let the dog off the leash so it could tear into the detainee's flesh. The tactic can also be conducted in public areas to scare other detainees.

Physical, Psychological, or Other Effects: Severe emotional distress; paranoia; physical manifestations of the fear such as high heart rate, increased blood pressure, and uncontrolled urination and defecation.

Locations Used: Iraq, Guantanamo Bay       

Legal Opinion: Army intelligence doctrine does not directly speak to dog use because the dogs belong to military police units. Military police doctrine does not allow threatening use of dogs.       

The Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on physical and mental coercion also prohibit the use of dogs in this manner.

The Army lawyer who proposed the use of dogs at Guantanamo concluded that it was permissible if done for an important governmental objective, without intent to cause harm or prolonged mental suffering. This analysis reflects the U.S. reservations to signing the CAT and the ICCPR. But the lawyer's conclusion may be wrong because the U.S. reservation to the CAT defines impermissible psychological torture as "the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering." Army Field Manual 34-52 categorizes food deprivation as a form of "physical torture."

Obviously, a cobra is more dangerous than a dog, and yet we laugh. We live in a society in which we accept actions that are tortuous and humiliating and extremely painful, for the sake of comedy. I've talke about this before with regard to the gruesome gauntlets of Fear Factor. And yet when it comes to our true needs, for security, we balk at the prospect of being percieved as brutal by other nations around the world. Yes, it is absurd.

My heart isn't faint, and I don't think I could make it so.  I do know the difference between that which is done for entertainment purposes one off, and that which might go on indefinitely. I'd much rather be pranked by these guys than captured by some intelligence service. But Jackass does serve to remind us that there are plenty of people made of sterner stuff than the average Joe - that the word 'extreme' is relative, and that the human body is capable of enduring quite a lot of pain and suffering. I'm convinced that nobody, even at Abu Graihb, was branded during interrogation by US intelligence officers. But in this movie I saw a man branded.

Theere can be no doubt that watching Jackass and enjoying it deadens some sensibilities one might have. I've been one who has argued against the deadening tropes of extremism in TV. I tired of the fictions of HBOs Deadwood. I also think we should avoid the temptations of watching horrors.  For example, I refused to watch, host or link to the video of the beheading of Dave Berg. I cannot imagine that I could stand watching the film of Steve Irwin's death by stingray either. And while much of Jackass is grotesque and shocking, almost none of it is horrifying. While I'm not going to try and establish some scale of human revulsion, there are certainly shades and levels.

I find it difficult to believe that any of the drafters of the Geneva Conventions could have stomached the extremeties of Jackass nor can most Americans. But there are some of us who can, and professionals who see much much worse. I have every belief that those professionals deserve our confidence in their aims to up the ante to the level of physical suffering without physical injury, which is, short of the branding, the kind of outrage that is de rigueur for the Jackass crew. I know that makes a lot of Americans puke, but I think that beats the alternative.