Is so-called "mega-church Christianity" actually to blame for the recent economic problems, or is it the harbinger of a new, working faith?

So, the question before us is, did Christianity actually cause the recent market crash? Despite the deliciously incindiary title, what we find inside is instead another tired retread of "Blame the Bourgies".

That's right, folks, it's not *necessarily* Christians in general who are at fault. Rather, it is instead the particular type of uneducated Christian who has held on to hope, worked hard, took risks, and refused to believe that faith and success cannot go hand-in-hand who are ultimately to blame. It's a lament as old as Robespierre, for the same reasons, if not (for now) the same consequences.

The author's relief that the brilliant success stories so thick on the ground were currently quite a bit less-than-successful is almost palpable. After all, the one thing a good secular humanist, quite firmly holding Marx's left hand, cannot abide is working class success, with, of all things, faith at its heart. So we are treated, at the end, with the ill-disguised confusion of a person quite firmly convinced these are people being exploited while not quite being able to put a finger on exactly why they seem so enthusiastic about it.

What I think is far more interesting, and completely unremarked at any point in the article, is what a real departure this is for Christian doctrine. Jesus's core message is, at heart, one of radical egalatarianism. You don't give what you can, he says many times, you give everything you've got, and then some, and then ask if there's anything more you can give while you're at it. It worked in that time, and for most of the rest of history, because the world was so steeped in death, injustice, and misery for such a very long time. It was only through the radical repudiation of such unending horror, literally turning one's back on the world and trusting everything to God, that one could find hope in the middle of such despair.

The truly strange part is so many people did. Then again, what other choice did they have?

The modern way of life, with its wealth, safety, and plenty, is so utterly different most people literally cannot imagine it. Those who do not have to imagine it because they're sitting in it are legendary in the lengths to which they will go to escape the old world to enter ours.

The world changed, and, to an organization with an institutional memory measured in millenia, with breathtaking suddenness. Christianity's legendary adaptability, which had served it so well when its adherents were being used to light Nero's garden or feed the occasional Norse tree, had grown brittle. It could not cope with such a fundamental transformation, one that not only refused to stop but sped up seemingly out of spite. Its failure led to the rise of endless doctrines shriekingly cold yet strikingly seductive, covered in the blood of billions.

But, while down, it would seem Christianity isn't actually out. It may very well be that these oft-derided mega-churches, with their treacly tales of independence and hope, are in fact the wave of the future. If the are, it will be because THEY WORK.

In the market of ideas only ivory tower academics and their well off minions have the luxury of sneering at the masses while simultaneously refusing to DIS-believe in doctrines that at best consign those masses to beggary at the hands of the state, and at worse all too frequently to a mass grave at the hands of that state's police. The rest of us are too busy making our own way, and too practical to really trust someone who WANTS to sell his house for a Jackson Pollock original.

Instead it would seem a very large number of Americans, and most importantly of all those who are quite new at BEING Americans, have decided on a third way, one which combines enough of the faith of their fathers to be recognizable, yet which openly acknowledges and embraces those aspects of the modern world which have proven to work over the centuries: faith in yourself, in your ability to relieve your own suffering, in the desirability of this goal and its comforts, while still grounding you in the humble humility of a peasant's love.

It can, will, and does work. But only if we let it.

Lest you think your friendly neighborhood crank has finally fallen off the right side of the world, I feel it important to point out I'm not only not a Christian, I'm a card-carrying secular Buddhist who occasionally gets yelled at for teaching my heathen faith to my daughter. I just think these people deserve more, and better, than they've gotten from main stream media.

Headline says it all: Abbas wants US to push out Netanyahu. This being the Jerusalem Post, the headline is the result of a moderately negative spin in the article, but only a moderate one. The full text reveals the characteristically juvenile attitude that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular have had about Israel is alive and well. Unfortunately the administration currently in the White House shows every sign of being arrogant enough and dumb enough to actually try this strategy.

The thing is, it won't work. Netanyahu has a broad coalition and, from what I've read, is quite popular in Israel at the moment. If I could pick one political personality in Israel least likely to respond to a Rahm Emanuel - style political dogfight, I couldn't do any better than ol' Bibi. The result will needlessly strain our relationship with the only functioning democracy in the region whilst encouraging bad behavior and unrealistic expectations in yet another generation of Palestinians.

The right of return has been a dead issue for almost as long as it has been an issue. Israelis know exactly what will happen to their country if hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were suddenly given the "right" to reclaim land and property lost some six decades ago. They simply won't do it. Any plan which insists on it is taken seriously only by people with no real interest in peace, and others so naive as to almost seem from a different planet.

Which is not going to stop them from trying, of course, especially with the reception they seem to have received from the current administration.

More's the pity.

It's been awhile since I've seen as sly a leftist attack on free markets and liberty as this one. I doubt the author really means it that explicitly, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em, and ridiculing hyper-expensive one-offs as bourgeois excess has been a staple of the left for more than a century.

Let's put it another way. Far from showcasing things "you shouldn't buy," I think this site shows just how industrious entrepreneurs can be in their efforts to separate the rich from their money. When I see things like this I don't view it from the consumer's perspective, a place I'm not likely to ever see, but instead from the producer's, which is a place I most definitely could be, some day. The reason most such things are expensive is because it takes a lot of talented people a long time to produce them, and each time someone very very rich buys one they become less rich while everyone involved in their production becomes more wealthy.

It's also important to understand that the producers of such amazingly expensive baubles live an extremely precarious life. The audience for such items can be counted in the low dozens, world-wide, and what appeals to, say, a hip-hop artist looking to cash their first royalty check today may not appeal to them tomorrow. It may be very glamorous to cater to such people, but it's not very smart.

In a market economy with a thriving middle class, the smart producer seeks to maximize the appeal of his or her product by making it affordable to as many people as possible. People like you and me. There are just so many more of us. An entrepreneur who caters to the Paris Hiltons of the world will never ever be richer than one who caters to the Joe and Jane Sixpacks of it. And so they do, and so we are the ones who benefit.

The hyper-rich have had their needs met since the beginning of time, and they always will. Attempts to "rectify" this "injustice" only serve to make the rich more clever about how they hide their money, and unlike you and me the rich can hire smart people to do this for them. The end result only makes it harder for smart entrepreneurs to reach the rest of us.

The danger is that, if we allow our governments to make it hard enough in a misguided attempt at "justice", smart entrepreneurs will stop trying.

The good news: The Obama administration is acting exactly as they said they would, and as the majority of the American people want them to act.

The bad news: The Obama administration is acting exactly as they said they would, and as the majority of the American people want them to act.

Populism is all well and good, until it's realized the corporations being attacked are the ones that employ you, and the rich people being soaked are the ones who's bank accounts provide your loans. What I see, and what almost none of the rest of you seem to understand, is that rich people are the only sort of people who absolutely can, and therefore will, take their money to a place it won't be sucked away to finance "economic justice." Big corporations are the only ones who can, and therefore will, close up and move shop to do the same. Then it'll be the rest of us who'll be left holding the bag.

If the past is any guide, it'll take three to five years for the destruction these policies will wreak to become impossible to ignore. And no, I don't think it'll be the end of the world, or the end of the nation, or even the end of Our Way of Life. Watergate was a much bigger disaster than the Bush administration, and Republicans managed to recover from that to rescue us from the last Democratic super-majority, back in 1980. I'm sure they'll be able to swoop in again to save us from this one. Eventually.

Which will, of course, simply re-set the alarm. Whenever there are enough voters with no memory of what happens when progressives are given power, who forget economic justice is incompatible with personal liberty, and who actually listen to people who've never done a real day's work in their life, it's just about inevitable the Democrats will be there to ride their naivete back to power. Which merely serves to give the wheel another turn.

It's all about keeping the bicycle balanced, I suppose.

Rush Limbaugh makes one impassioned gloves-off speech and the entire media circus seems to have suddenly swirled around him. What the main stream media has forgotten is what we all, me included, have forgotten... conservatism in general and Republicans in particular surged back to power precisely because pundits like Limbaugh said what we wanted to say, to people we wanted to say it to, in a way we've always wanted to say it. The frothing, rabid response just made it that much more entertaining.

Why did we forget it? Because for the past fourteen years, and especially for the past eight, our conservative op-ed writers have held themselves back. They knew that no matter how rotten the Republicans got, it was nothing compared to what the Democrats could pull. If they were quiet enough, circumspect enough, played ball just enough, maybe people like Limbaugh could slowly guide the party back to core principles without letting the teenagers and their college professors a shot at the wheel.

Well, that didn't work, but in failure were sowed the seeds of success. Because now there's nothing holding them back. It took a few months to get started, but an engine has come roaring back to life. Unfettered by the worry that noting the emperor had no clothes might lead the masses to put beggar in rags in charge, the entire arsenal is now being unleashed. It's now easy for Limbaugh and those like him to be both funny, right, and consistent, and they seem to be setting to it with gusto.

A certain admiral once quipped if given the opportunity he could run rampant for six months, but after that defeat was inevitable. It would appear this time around a different admiral only had three.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

To paraphrase a favorite movie line, Recycling: I don't think that word means what you think it means. The comments, in my opinion at least, reveal quite starkly the main problems I have with "green" ideas: to wit, the common assumption that human labor is free, and that recycling resources is always "better" than simply expending them.

It's all well and good for you to spend all your free time in a victory garden, mulching your family's waste with the kitchen trash, but quite frankly I really would rather pay someone to take it all away. Likewise, it may make a person feel quite at one with the environment to spend all that time sorting paper, plastic, and metal, but when it all ends up costing significantly more than it would otherwise I'm sorry but I will have to question its utility. And opt out, where I can.

It's not that I'm opposed to green initiatives, it's that so very often their costs are never considered, or actively hidden in all the feel-good propaganda, and then forced on me via government regulation or tax policy. Recycle? Sure... form a company that makes a profit doing it, and make it worth my while, and I'll be happy to sign up. Can't do that? State the price and let me decide if I want to support your green charity. It's when both of those fail, and the advocates in their failure try to turn the barrel of government's gun on me that I start to have a problem.

"Ah," says they, "you'll be happy to fiddle while Rome burns then, will you?" Show me the smoke. Show me the fire. Then, once more, ask me to support your cause.

"But you're unreasonable! The evidence won't convince you! There's an emergency and we must do something about it! Now!" Well, I'm terribly sorry about that then. Would you like me to line up against the wall now, or would you rather me wait until you've collected a few more of my friends?

Want your environmental initiatives to last? Turn them into markets. Let someone make a buck off it. Let someone make as many bucks as they can from it, and ten years from now the efficiencies will astound you. Let the price of scarce commodities drive solutions to their access, and ten years from now they'll all be cheaper than they are now.

But that's not good enough, now is it? That's not what we really want! It won't happen fast enough! It relies on commoners, and they're too stupid to do the right thing! It won't let the people who really know what they're doing to impose the policies we know are required to resolve the crisis!

Yeah, that's what I thought you'd say. Ah, well. Do they still hand out blindfolds and cigarettes for these things?

Congratulations to Barack Obama and the Democratic party on their convincing victory in this election. Here's to hoping you do a much, much better job than I expect you to.

My prediction? It all hangs on the Senate now. 41 seats means the more radical stuff... his tax plan, his health care plan, his environmental plan, and his foreign policy agenda, must be modified or they're dead on arrival. 40 seats? Then it'll be down to the media and the Democrats' own incompetence. Not a pretty picture.

I expect in the next few months a gush of hope and happiness not seen probably since Kennedy took office in 1960. It'll be one treacly special after another right up to the inauguration and just a little beyond. And hey, I'm more a student of history than I am a partisan, and because of that I will actually be quite proud that black children now have the South Lawn as their back yard. Dr. King's dream has come true.

But I'm also a realist, and I've watched this particular game played since the mid-70s. The media will turn on him first, because a happy and harmonious government doesn't sell, but a $500 haircut on the tarmac of LAX certainly does.

Then his own party will turn on him. Obama himself may be centrist, but his party absolutely is not. Their ecstasy will be their undoing, and they will immediately try to enact a whole raft of radical legislation the country quite plainly will not want.

And that's when the people will turn on him. Just as in '94, idealistic Americans who simply wanted change will suddenly realize these people really did mean what they said. They will realize the Democrats really are going to raise taxes, are going to go soft on defense, and are going to try socialized medicine and an expansion of the welfare state.

And that's where my side comes in. As it has in the past, this time in the wilderness will serve to strengthen and focus the Republican party. The party holding the White House always loses seats in off-year elections, so the Democrats' ability to genuinely screw things up will be curtailed in 2010, by how much will be largely determined by how badly they screw up in the two years previous. In the Clinton years, the Democrats were such utter f-ups they went from holding all the cards to being completely out of power at the next election, and this bunch promises to be much better at dropping it all in the pot than that bunch was.

Will it be that fast? If we can't hold them back in the Senate, it's a dead certainty, but the mess will be a lot bigger when we get there. If we are able to protect them from their worst excesses even a gradual erosion will be fine, because that'll mean a Republican president in 2012 will have a small, resentful, but not utterly intractable Democratic majority in Congress to deal with, and, if we must wait until 2016 that same Republican president will have a small, organized, and energized Republican majority with which to govern. Not too shabby, eh?

In a funny sort of way, I'm actually rather glad Obama made it. Had McCain won, the Democrats would've fallen much deeper into the radical left's grasp, and would most likely have paralyzed the country at precisely the time reasoned action is required. The desire for revenge would've simply overridden any real attempt to govern. 1948 - 1952 all over again, the Democrats only needing to find a single issue and their own McCarthy to run with it to truly unleash chaos.

Instead we'll get 6 months of obnoxious leftist gloating, perhaps two years of truly odious attempts to turn the US into New France, followed by our regular (and seemingly preferred) two-party gridlock to take us into the next Presidential cycle. Balancing this will be the fun we'll have watching patently naive people with a penchant for petulant chaos come to realize that it really is a lot more complicated than it looked from the outside, the country really wasn't held hostage by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and we all by and large don't want what they think we do.

The wailing at this "betrayal" will be sweet, sweet music indeed.

Your Democratic presidential ticket at work:

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that paying more in taxes is the patriotic thing to do for wealthier Americans.

The fact that nobody else thinks paying taxes is patriotic, and the increase will happen to the people who are both more likely and more able to move all their money to places that won't be taxed at all seems quite lost on Mr. Biden. Come to think of it, the fact that most of you probably nodded your head and thought, "what's so unfair?" while you read the article means the point is probably lost on you too.

Taxes are a strange sort of product, one which we are forced to purchase or face being thrown in jail. If given the chance, people who do not feel they are getting their money's worth on a purchase will not purchase it. Since that's not possible in this case, those people, being able to afford things like tax lawyers and accountants familiar with, say, Swiss banking law, will instead hide their money so it can't be taxed at all. The end result? Raising taxes on wealthy people causes them to pay less than they would otherwise.

It. Doesn't. Work. It never has, and it never will. All the soft-headed wishing, pleading, wheedling, and whining in the world will never get around the simple fact that people are only willing to pay what they themselves consider their fair share. Forcing them to pay more does not in fact result in them paying more. It simply raises the incentive for them to hide what they do not wish to pay.

It doesn't work for us. We can't afford the attorneys and accountants necessary to build a neat little hidey-hole in some exotic tropical location for us. They can. They will. Only the hopelessly naive or recklessly ignorant would think otherwise.

In other words, progressives and Democrats.

See you in November!

As predicted, Mugabe's sale-prices-on-command approach to countering inflation is a shattering failure. Constraining prices by legislative fiat always fails, no matter what. Any time you hear about a politician proposing a price control to "help" someone run, do not walk, to the nearest available voting booth and toss him or her out as quickly as possible. Were it to happen at the national level, it would have the nice indirect effect of tossing out all of the more egregious members of the Democratic party, perhaps the thin wedge needed to get me to consider voting for one of them.

The regime is now Stalinist in everything but name, so the next step will be for them to start shooting people. It took, what, a few weeks for the economy to shrivel and die? I'd give them another week, a month at the most, before we start reading stories about executions for the treasonous sabotage of the enlightened leader's economic plan. And those will be the lucky ones. The way regimes like this treat the children of their "enemies" is simply too horrible to detail.

Will that be what finally causes the people to bring down the government? No, probably not. Sadly, history shows the only way regimes like these fall is if their leader starts screwing around with his neighboring countries, or he dies. The army will be far too busy murdering the country's middle class and business sectors to cause its neighbors any grief, and, like Castro, Mugabe shows no signs of having the decency to just hurry up and die already.

Oh don't worry, it can't happen here. The progressives did their almighty best to take US apart in the 70s and (thanks to the timely intervention of Mr. Reagan) failed. They're nowhere near as powerful now as they were then. But those of you who support things like higher corporate taxes or more regulation to achieve economic "fairness" should take a long, hard look at Zimbabwe. What Venus is to global warming, Zimbabwe is to economic policy.

Via Instapundit.

Witness Marxist deterministic theory at its finest, at work in paleoanthropology. The idea that agriculture was a devastating discovery for humanity's overall well-being was most definitely the popular line of thinking twenty years ago. It was constantly harped on when I was getting my degree in college (at exactly the same time the article was written.)

Being a dumb, idealistic teenager, I simply accepted this as fact. We were happy hunter-gatherers in the past, and through some unclear chain of events all got trapped into this nasty, brutish, and short lifestyle known as agriculture. Yet even then I had the inklings of doubt... if agriculture was such an obviously awful way of life, why did people choose to live that way instead of the, according to my professors at any rate, obviously better hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

In truth, I still don't know the answer, but the searching for it is most likely one of the earliest events that lead me away from the milquetoast progressive beliefs I once held to the somewhat crunchier small-L libertarian ones I hold today. Agriculture may have caused very visible health problems for its adherents, but it most definitely provided some advantages, and very real ones at that. If it didn't, do you really think the hunter-gatherer lifestyle would've been shoved to the margins more than ten thousand years ago?

Nowadays, being better versed in Marxism than I once was, it's pretty obvious to me why the thought that agriculture was worse than hunting and gathering was so popular at that place and that time. Marxist theories of anthropology were still dominant theoretical forces, given less-red names like "cultural materialism." With the Berlin Wall still sturdy and strong, it was much easier to practice the time-honored academic tradition of holding a belief contradicted by everything around you.

Twenty years later, with Communism completely discredited, markets and freedom ascending, and the West's (in particular the United States's) utterly unreasonable inability to collapse and die on schedule still an embarrassing problem, I wonder if anything's changed over in theory-land? Certainly in Diamond's own later works one must scratch much deeper to get at the Red underneath.

Then again, considering how popular Communism's masonic children Environmentalism and Anti-globalization are, I can't help but think that the bloody, murderous bitch is still with us. There are no fools quite like old fools, and as long as they have people very young, stupid, or ignorant to talk to they will still get a hearing.

It's times like these I think, should immortality ever become reality, the one non-negotiable disqualification for treatment should be whether or not the candidate holds tenure.

Scientists keep finding more and more proof that we are hard-wired for egalitarianism. I sometimes wonder if the acceptance of market economics has been such an incredibly slow, painful, and always belittled process precisely because it cuts against this deeply rooted need we all seem to have to make sure everyone gets a share.

Like our hard-wired dietary preferences, these seemingly hard-wired social preferences simply don't "scale up" very well. While they obviously work when they involve very small groups, egalitarianism sets up precisely the wrong set of incentives required to make large, complex societies grow and prosper over time. For that growth to arrive, and stay, history has proven quite conclusively you need free markets, private property, and a strong rule of law.

Unfortunately the successful application of these conditions inevitably results in income disparity, often very large income disparity, which as noted above rattles the cage of our inner chimp something fierce. To me, this neatly explains humanity's constant, tragic, and utterly intransigent fascination with experiments in large-scale egalitarianism such as Christianity, Islam, and Communism. Even when each of these systems has proven completely (and, in the case of Communism, murderously) incapable of bringing real wealth to the masses, large swathes of us simply refuse to admit their failure.

We create societies so wealthy our poor drive to demonstrations because they're eating themselves to death, and people support them. Mass graves yawn open at the foot of every communist government ever created, and people still wave red flags. Fanatics state flatly their purpose is to dismantle and destroy the economic systems that have put the stars within our reach, and people promptly give them the money to do so.

It's almost enough to make one despair. But, as with our predilection for booze and donuts, many, perhaps even most, of us are now able to resist. It's taken some fifteen thousand years for us to create stable complex societies, but we seem now to have done so. There have been mighty setbacks, but the keys uncovered by Adam Smith and John Locke seem to have finally freed us of the chains we wrapped ourselves in for so long.

Was it fair? Of course it wasn't fair, that's the point. Harnessing greed and balancing ambition is how this game is played. Oppress these natural urges, and nothing moves. Let them run wild, and murderous totalitarianism always emerges. Deny they exist at all and the entire race ends up buried in a mass grave with a red flag fluttering atop it.

We are busy creatures, with large hearts and quick minds. Give us a lever, and a reason to try, and we will by God move the world. Take away that reason, and then try to guilt or force or frighten us into action, and we won't even bother picking the thing up. It really is that simple.

Which is not to say it's obvious, as anyone attending an anti-globalization rally, environmental protest, or Democratic fundraiser will plainly see. We must be careful to make sure our brethren drunk on the milk of their Utopian dreams aren't allowed to borrow or steal the keys to our free-market systems, but it is a care we seem able to take.

It won't stop them from trying, of course. After all, it's an urge we're hard-wired to feel. But as long as we pay attention, they'll fail.

You awake yet?

Mike J. gets a perceptive no-prize for bringing us this comparatively even-handed look at all the other problems Iran is facing. The payoff for me (emphasis added):

To curb demand, which has been driven in part by subsidies that keep the domestic pump price at a mere 35 cents a gallon, the government plans to begin rationing gasoline in March, a measure so unpopular, and potentially explosive, that rationing plans have been put off several times in the past.

This single paragraph tells me volumes about what is going on in Iran, and consulting everyone's favorite on-line encyclopedia confirms it: Iran runs on a socialist-style command economy. As with all such social redistribution systems, the regime traded long-term growth and stability for short-term gains in "equality and fairness*," with the predictable result of an unresponsive, inefficient economy incapable of real long-term growth.

In other words, they made sure a peasant's lot was immediately improved by the revolution by taking shortcuts that would completely sabotage the pathways that would let that peasant's children progress and prosper. Like all progressive/liberal economic policy makers, they never thought past stage one and are now paying the price.

Unfortunately, history only provides one way out that actually works... implementation of broad and pervasive free-market reforms. I say unfortunately because, to date anyway, such implementations have always brought about chaos and instability in the short term. In all but one case (China, and only so far, and only because they were willing to crack some heads), this has ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the implementing regime. Not a nice thing to mull over if you're in charge of a population quite famous for its propensity to riot when things don't break their way.

So, will the imams do what needs to be done, with the understanding that history treats even the most egregious implementers quite well once they've gone? It's impossible to say. However, it does, to me, indicate that sanctions have a lot of traction left in them. Over time, economies based on state controls rot like a termite-infested house, and once they become sufficiently rotten it doesn't take a lot of knocking to bring them down.

Sanctions have historically proven to knock rather softly, but if the underlying wood is rotten enough, a tap may be all it takes.

~ If he hears, he'll knock all day ~

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* Take from the rich, give to the poor, soak whoever makes more than a hardscrabble farmer with taxes and make sure no business is allowed to function without massive government oversight. In short, "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us."

Problem: What was once considered prime real estate has lately proven to be nothing more than a giant hurricane magnet.

Obvious solution: Don't live there, move away, build somewhere else.

Actual solution: Piss and moan until one level of government or another can make everyone else pay for your fancy condo or beach-front business:

In recent months, Florida's insurance crisis has mushroomed, spreading quickly from homeowners unable to cope with soaring rates to businesses facing policy cancellations, dwindling coverage and out-of-this-world costs if they can find insurance at all.
...
We brought together a group of lawmakers, a regulator, insurance agents and business and consumer leaders, including Marks, for a roundtable discussion on the crisis, its impact and possible solutions.

Florida already regulates what insurance companies can charge for a particular policy. You know, Florida, the place that's been hit by, what, five major hurricanes in the past three years? The result was typical, shortages. The surprised reaction was also unsurprising, "You're a a bunch of greedy awful corporations taking advantage of us little guys! We won't let you charge what you think it'll take to cover your costs and make a profit. This is what you can charge! Ha! Take that! Wait! Wait! Come back! Hey, Mr. Congressman, pass a tax or something so we can have our condo/beach business back!"

People will only live where it's affordable. But they want to live wherever they please. When markets are allowed to work, the cost of building or living in a hurricane zone, flood plain, fault line, or tornado alley rapidly exceeds what most people can afford, and so the population in those areas falls all by itself. Unfortunately, human nature means people do whatever they can to distort and control those markets so they can build expensive things in the paths of forces which will readily destroy them. They'll then use the levers of government to make us pay to rebuild it all again. And again. And again.

And that's when we all lose.

Profits are not greed. They're a measure of how efficient it is to do something. The prices they generate provide a powerful and effective method of modifying human behavior so it becomes less wasteful over time. Mistaking profits for greed and then trying to legislate your way out of a problem allows people to ignore the obvious and continue their wasteful ways.

The popular response is not to trust the market, it's to legislate some more. After all, it's working so well right now. That it doesn't work, never has worked, and never will work is immaterial. It's not our approach that's the problem, it's that we haven't found the right set of rules, or the people are too stupid to follow them. Pass some more laws! Put the kulaks against the wall! It'll eventually get better! Keep trying!

It's not greed. It's a direct and extremely effective measure of the price of doing business somewhere. The kind of people who ignore this are the kind of people who'll live in a hurricane zone.

Sometimes I think they get what they deserve.

While this article on "what went wrong?" last year is about Bush vs. the Congress, it really could be about any president since Watergate. The gridlock we've all come to know and loathe is of course far from new, but its origins are more recent, and more reasonable, than you'd probably first imagine.

Before Watergate, probably to combat the very things this article talks about, Congress had gradually structured itself so that most of its power was concentrated in the hands of just a few committee chairs. Presidents who really wanted something done met with perhaps 15 or so men (they were always men) and if he could get them to agree to it, it got done.

The zenith of this arrangement was during the Johnson administration. Between 1964 and 1968 perhaps the most powerful congressman (and senator) of the modern era was placed in charge of the presidency with a then-unprecedented electoral majority. Lyndon Johnson knew how the institution worked, knew the men who worked it, and knew exactly what was needed to get something, anything, done. The result was an era of Democratic power and unity not seen before or since.

Largely because of the disastrous excesses this concentration of power created in the Johnson and later Nixon administrations, Congress reformed itself in 1974 (the so-called "Watergate baby" era). The intent was to shatter the control of the comittee chairs and de-centralize decision making in the hopes of making the institution more representative of and compliant to the people. As with most attempts to change powerful structures, they succeeded, but at a cost they didn't foresee.

Instead of de-centralizing the power of committees, the reforms instead created dozens of sub-committees with weaker but still powerful chairmen. The "surface area" of power increased, allowing many more places for lobbyists and special interests groups to corrode the ability of the institution to act in a sensible and consistent manner. That is, when it could act at all, since much of the traditional gridlock of what we now experience as the federal government is traced directly to these reforms.

This is not to say the reforms were bad. After all, they were put in place to stop debacles on the scale of Vietnam, Watergate, and the "stagflation" of the early 70s from ever happening again, and at this they have succeeded reasonably well*. It does, however, mean that people have far less to fear from one party holding "all the cards", and far less to hope for splitting that power between the two parties.

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* Those who equate the experiences of 2001-2005 to 1968-1974 either have an axe to grind or aren't paying attention.

Earlier this year much was made of pharmacists who refused, on moral grounds, to dispense various sorts of birth control. While the vast majority of commentators were wailing and rending their shirts over this "unfair and worrying" development, I decided to sit by and wait for the other shoe to drop.

Thud:

Walgreen Co. said it has put four Illinois pharmacists in the St. Louis area on unpaid leave for refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception in violation of a state rule.

The four cited religious or moral objections to filling prescriptions for the morning-after pill and "have said they would like to maintain their right to refuse to dispense, and in Illinois that is not an option," Walgreen spokeswoman Tiffani Bruce said.

Illinois must not be an "employ at will" state, or Walgreens must not have its policies in order. In both Virginia and Arkansas, these people would've been shown the door simply because they weren't doing the described job, that of filling prescriptions. Why they weren't doing it would be immaterial. Yes, there most definitely would've been lawsuits (perhaps another reason for the legislation), but they would be unwinnable.

This is why it's so important to let market forces do their work whenever possible. This is why people who think businessmen and their profit are evil are simply out of their minds. Customers want safe forms of contraception, and are willing to pay much more than it costs to produce them. Pharmacists who let their politics get in the way of someone else's business cut into those profits, providing strong, efficient, and effective incentives for said pharmacists to either change their ways or stop being pharmacists, voluntarily or otherwise.

Europe is praised for its worker-friendly environment, but in, say, France, pharmacists who refuse to do their job are effectively immune to the consequences, protected by thick layers of government regulation and ubiquitous unions. Labor unions in our own country are often praised for sticking up for the "little guy", but in a case like this the pharmacists would again be protected by labor contracts and arbitration. Meanwhile, someone who doesn't want to become a parent waits, held hostage by forces beyond their control.

Standing up for your principles is commendable. A pharmacist can decide on religious grounds that all medicine is bad and refuse to hand out anything but sugar pills, and that's fine by me. Fine by me, that is, as long as the market that wants these medicines is allowed to thunder past or even over them to get what it wants.

A final note: Standing up for your principles also means being prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Doing so with dignity and honor is what heroes are all about. Suing someone because you don't like the aftermath doesn't make you a hero, it makes you a whiney bitch.

Sparked by the comment:

You know, the more I've learned about Adolf Hitler, the less he resembles any sort of conservative, and the more he resembles the far left. He was a vegitarian, an atheist, an intellectual, an artist, a revolutionary, and dreamed of a return to a past utopia when people (or Arayans, at any rate) were truly free. The classification of him, and other reactionaries, as conservative smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

He wasn't far left, he was most definitely far right. What he has in common with your list of "hard lefties" is he was a socialist. Before WWII, there were two kinds of socialism... right and left. The right-wing socialists wanted power to coalesce into the hands of a strong central state, controlled by a select and elite group of people who would keep the common folk's (technically, the proletariat's) best interests in mind while governing without their input.

Left-wing socialists see the state as an oppressive construct foisted on the proletariat, and wish to destroy it thereby allowing power to be wielded by the people themselves as expressed through various theoretically self-forming collectives.

The right wing of socialism is commonly considered to have been destroyed by WWII. Left-wing socialists were conceded the field and have run amok and essentially unopposed since then. Never the brightest bulbs in the bunch, these utopians, when given access to the levers of power, were directly responsible for the abattoirs of the late 20th century.

In my own opinion, right-wing socialism was not destroyed but was instead forced underground. To me, the various governments of continental Europe and Japan, most especially those of Germany, France, and Japan, very strongly represent models of right-wing socialism. True, they have been softened a bit with a veneer of democracy, but close observers of these societies will always comment that power is wielded most often by unelected bureaucrats with only a vague understanding of what the people of their countries really want.

The reason why we do not clearly understand this distinction is to me obvious. Now utterly dominated by nihilistic left-wing socialists, the "soft sciences" of western academia have renamed right-wing socialism "fascism" because it is a) a poorly defined term into which everything bad about the right can be dumped and b) it removes a real and to them dangerous stigma to their hallowed and cherished leftist brand of socialism.

If the 20th century has proven anything it is that socialism of any sort, be it right, left, or the newly minted Islamic kind, is easily the greatest danger to humanity that has ever existed. Hyperbole? Hardly. Societies ruled by the various forms of socialism have probably killed more people in the past century than were killed at the hands of Christians in the previous two thousand. A papal legate may have consigned thousands of innocents to the flames with his comment, "let God sort them out", but this is nothing compared to the millions who have been starved, gassed, beaten, shot or simply worked to death by the likes of those who have substituted the state or some vague secular ideal in His place.

This all has a great deal to do with why I fear our current crop of religious "righties" far less than I do our current crop of secular "lefties." A right-winger may secretly want to force you into a church and consign the most unreasonable of your friends to the flames because they can’t keep their mouths shut and their pants zipped, but it takes a left-winger to starve your entire town to death in a camp for thinking the wrong thing.

Hanging onto a set of discredited beliefs like socialism is one thing. Humanity’s capability for delusion in the quest for radical egalitarianism long predates the plea of, “can’t we just all get along?” It’s something different altogether to be so myopic as to cover up the tendency of those beliefs toward genocide just to give them “one more try.” That those on the left continue to do so, and in such a garishly naïve fashion, is why I fear them.

We'll be taking a photo-blog break so I can make two predictions in this post-Katrina world:

Death toll: less than 1200. If I were to put an exact number on it, 853. That's for everywhere, not just NO.

New Orleans dry again: less than 2 weeks from today.

Political histrionics, duly regurgitated by our credulous "the Democrats deserve another break today" MSM, always add at least two zeros to any disaster number. Likewise, initial estimates are exciting but always wrong (remember five years to put out the Gulf War fires? 35,000 dead at the WTC?). It may have taken them a day to fix the first pump, but the lessons learned usually mean it'll only take three hours to fix the next, and half that for the one after it, and so on.

The hysterical tantrums thrown (and still being thrown) by the New Orleans and Louisiana administrations had to me just a whiff of ass-covering even before the storm completely blew through. Once the truth about city and state ineptitude began to be made fully clear, that whiff turned into a rancid reek. Democratic spinmeisters and their MSM lackeys are going through heroic efforts to pin the blame on the federal government (which, we should all remember, can't even move letters from one place to another in less than three days), if they try hard enough, they may even obscure the truth, at least for awhile.

Unfortunately Katrina came at the wrong time in the election cycle for this strategy to work well as a road back to power. Had a category-4 hurricane drowned hundreds of Democratic constituents on national TV in the September before a national election the entire liberal-left establishment would (rightly) need to wear underwear protection to keep their ecstasy from becoming a wardrobe problem. As it stands now there will be plenty of time for ponderous federal machinery to slowly and for the most part effectively clank into place to provide relief. There will also be plenty of time for even the most gung-ho Democratic apologists in the media to get bored and start asking what really happened to all those buses.

Anyone actually paying attention can already tell they won't like the answer one bit.

This was something even I had completely missed in all the hyperventilated coverage over New Orleans. Why haven't we heard similar histrionic coverage about Mississippi? They were the ones who got bullseyed by the hurricane, not Louisiana. Why aren't we hearing about even more disastrous incompetence there?:

The buildings in New Orleans are still standing; the Gulf Coast of Mississippi basically has been scrubbed, like God took out a pencil eraser and just erased it.
...
I really don't like to find fault at times like this, but one thing that was missing was a quick recognition that in such a situation the potential for civil collapse is nearly 100%. Once the weather settles, you need to immediately declare marshal law and send in the MPs. That's basically what Haley Barbour did in Mississippi - there were a few early problems but very quickly the MPs were patrolling what was left of Biloxi and Gulfport and keeping a lid on things. Back on Tuesday when I put on the news and we all saw Kathleen Blanco bursting into tears, I knew that was the wrong message and would bring trouble. Louisiana and New Orleans basically have those touchy-feely, "I'm okay, you're okay" soft-leftie types in charge. Their education took a few days and has been expensive.

Actually, I don't chalk up this blind spot in the MSM's coverage to any sort of political bias. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been and always will be a bulwark of popular media. Devastated but otherwise quiet streets patrolled by competently-lead troops just don't have the same sass as corpses floating down Borboun street and boat-borne shootouts below the Pontchartrain levee, don't ya know?

There's also the "hammer" problem*. Since the national media have taken over the story, they see it as a national problem which needs a national solution. I really believe it has simply never ocurred to them to ask why state and local authorities, the people who must be on the ball in the first three days of any crisis of this magnitude, have so publicly dropped it in such a spectacularly disastrous fashion. We hear constantly about Bush administration failures without anyone even once asking why, for example, a city with a comprehensive and well-regarded public transportation system (as New Orleans has had for decades) had apparently no plan whatever to use it as an evacuation tool. Or why the governor, who is explicitly responsible for commanding national guard troops within state borders, was quite patently unable to do so effectively within any sort of reasonable timeframe.

Disasters aren't just federal problems. As much as the "controls everything, must control everything, proper to control everything" popular center-left perception of the federal government is, there are normally at least three other types of government authority out there to assist: state, county/parish, and municipal. When properly run, they will be both faster and more effective than anything a ponderous national entity can manage, especially in the short term. When they're mismanaged and poorly run? Well, the other thing I continue to find amazing is how the MSM seems to have turned a blind eye to Louisiana's and New Orleans's well known and deserved reputations as the most corrupt and poorly managed governments in the country.

I think the contrast with Mississippi is indeed quite instructive, and the comment "So I hope you're Watching Mississippi. Highly recommended - we may have found our next President out of this (you heard it here first)" quite intriguing indeed. Nice to see a state better known for keeping Arkansas off the bottom of most lists getting things right when it really counted.

Via Jason, who also has several good articles you should check out before you ask the "obvious" questions here.

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* "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Often mis-interpreted by those who have never held one.

Actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long for a politician to decide he's an expert in market economics:

Citing credible evidence of price gouging, Governor Sonny Perdue Wednesday afternoon signed an executive order authorizing state sanctions against gas retailers who gouge consumers.

Perdue said he does not believe there is an energy emergency and that the state will not tolerate citizens being fooled by exorbitant gas prices.

"Does not believe", in spite of widespread credible reports of, you know, a giant hurricane ripping through a central refinery location. So now instead of people who really must have fuel to function, folks who drive ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, public-transport busses, and the like being able to get gas while those who don't require it do without for awhile, we get hoarders and shortages.

The press are already reporting huge lines at gas stations in that area, all the while never making the connection that, due to the artificially lowered price and a market panic, everyone in the metro Atlanta area has decided to fill up every single car, motorcycle, lawnmower, and gas-guzzling SUV they own along with every can, jar, and bucket they stuff inside them with gasoline. Regular supplies couldn't keep up with such a sudden spike in demand, let alone those strained by destruction and panic, so shortages are inevitable. In cases like this price spikes are the only way to bring sense to the masses in a way that still ensures a supply is there for those who really need it.

Some price spikes does not equate to an entire city's worth of gas stations setting their prices that high all at once. In a competitive market, if the price is too high at one station you go to one with a lower price. If there really isn't a drop in supplies, if the guy down the street really is just profiteering, then your cheap station won't run out. If it does, you go find the next-less-expensive station, and then the next, and then the next, until it's just too expensive and you walk, buy a bike, take a bus, carpool with the guy who owns a hybrid, or just stay at home and fix dinner instead of going out tonight. What happens then? Why, due to high prices reducing demand, supplies catch up, prices go down, and everything goes back to normal. This is how it's supposed to work. This is the only way it ever works.

But since nobody in America really likes walking or biking or riding a bus or carpooling, they find the nearest reporter and start raising hell about how they "must drive" and "can't survive" and "won't get paid" if they can't fill up their car. Reporters, being the "critical thinking is hard" types they are, will then dutifully report this to the politicians, who, being the "like my job" sorts they are, will obligingly jigger up some laws that hold the price down. Which causes hoarding. Which creates shortages. And around the wheel goes again.

Well, that is unless you're an ambulance driver, or a cop, or a bus getting ready to carry a hundred people who can't pay what gas already costs. Instead of doing their job they'll be sitting in a line with the rest of the grumbling masses, waiting on the next gas shipment to arrive.

"Hell with you! Do you have any idea how fat the profits everyone is making on this are? The oil companies are swimming in cash!"

Do you think they're sticking that money under a matress somewhere? Digging a hole in their back yard and burying it? Hiding it under rocks? Listen up sparky. Yes they're making huge profits, and then they're taking those huge profits and dumping them in banks. Our banks. Money follows supply-and-demand curves just like gasoline, and when there's lots of it the cost of lending it out to other people, people who need it to do things that make even more money, goes way down. They in turn can build more things cheaper, or build fewer things with more risk, creating jobs and opportunities and even more cash, which goes right back into the banks, who then lend it out again. And around that wheel goes.

Let's put it another way. Do you think the ability to get a great mortgage or a near-zero interest car loan or a zero interest credit card is an accident?

Fark (of all places) linked up this detailed look at recent developments surrounding the Alberta oil sands. Now that oil prices have gone far beyond the $40 per barrel price generally seen as required to make the sands profitable, the region is experiencing a gigantic development boom. The potential windfall of billions of dollars in profits are creating fault lines throughout Canadian politics, and could change any number of international axes of power.

In other words, the system is working... higher prices are causing alternative sources of energy to be exploited. This will (eventually) increase supplies, causing prices to decline. That is, if the markets are allowed to work. As mentioned in the article, Canada's eastern liberal elite have once before instituted controls on the development of oil resources for their own purposes, and they're already making noises they will have no problems doing so again. Such bureaucratic meddling is perhaps the only thing gauranteed to prevent the efficient utilization of any resource, and with the mountains of cash this resource can bring in, meddling attempts are pretty much inevitable.

Will exploitation of the oil sands mean the return of cheap oil? Well, it'll certainly mean the return of cheaper oil, which may be enough to bail China out of the jam in which its energy subsidies have placed it. This is probably the most desirable result, since it will allow India's, China's, and the US's economies to continue expanding without a major financial disruption. Canada will become the surprise superpower of the 21st century, with stunned canuks in an enviable position of being able to dictate terms at will to both OPEC and the industrialized world.

But if it doesn't, the subsequent economic collapse will certainly send oil prices crashing well below the $40 per barrel price Canada needs to keep the oil sands profitable, causing an entire industry there to implode. Seething resentment over meddlesome government bungling could finally trigger a rupture that splits the country apart. Governments of oil-rich states, grown fat on monstrous profits, will suddenly be saddled with expensive, inefficient welfare states and constituents unwilling to accept any deprivation. The Middle East will almost certainly wither on the vine, and Hugo Chavez will be lucky to make it to Cuba before a mob hangs his body by its ankles in the capital's square.

It is a very fine line indeed that the various players are walking on right now, and anyone who thinks they know where it'll all end isn't paying attention. Welcome to interesting times!

While it may seem that the great dragon of China is able to shrug off the super-high oil prices that are percieved to be strangling everyone else, the truth is actually quite different:

The chaos created by sudden fuel shortages in Guangdong Province continues ... The official reason for the shortages proffered by the central government, laughably, concerned last week’s typhoon that hit the province. Additional speculation for the shortages blamed market distortions due to price controls, alas this was only partly correct. Finally, the Hong Kong media got it right yesterday, the real reasons for the shortages have been common knowledge in Guangzhou for several weeks...

While the author cites warring oil companies turning off the taps in a conspiracy to corner China's burgeoning petroleum market, the actual reason is right there... price controls. This explains a lot about what's going on in the oil markets right now. When prices go up, what's supposed to happen is that demand goes down. In the market-driven economies of the west, that's exactly what's happening. This then results in a stabilization of prices, eventually leading to a reduction of price as things regain equilibrium.

But China's throwing a wrench into the works. By instituting price controls, China has allowed demand to grow at a rate completely disconnected from the reality of oil supplies. High prices should cause factories, farm equipment, cars, and power plants to become more efficient just to stay in business, causing them to use less oil, stopping and then eventually reversing price hikes. But since the Chinese government is shielding its industries from this effect there is no incentive to improve, no reason to become more efficient. Wasteful tractors, inefficient power plants, and gas-guzzling cars are allowed to continue operating, even faster, because there's no reason for them not to.

However, the "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" principle is finally starting to take hold. Someone's been left holding the bag on this, eating this price difference, and it would appear to be the oil companies. The inevitable result of any attempt to artificially control prices is a shortage, and now that these oil companies have cut off the taps all sorts of hell may start breaking loose. Because you see most people don't understand why market forces, even ones that seem to hurt people, are a long-term good. They instead focus on the short-term evil of shortages, long lines at gas stations, brown-outs at home, and crops left to rot in fields because there's no fuel for the tractor.

These are the times when democracy shines, and therein lies a deep and perhaps insoluble problem for the current Chinese government. When western nations tried to have it both ways by controlling oil prices in the face of real scarcity back in the 1970s, the resulting economic chaos simply caused voters to boot out the engineers of the disaster and bring in others who could fix it. In some places these fixers were then booted out in turn*, but there was no social revolution, no dismantling of an entire country, no civil wars.

China doesn't have this safety valve. Worse still, the communist party leadership has made the common error of assuming it is the country, and therefore its leaders cannot get their heads around China existing without them. If they can't get ahead of this oil crisis, and quickly, Very Bad Things will start to happen. If they can't get the oil companies to play ball, economic collapse is right around the corner. If they can't get the populace to accept higher prices, social revolution is right behind it.

And therein lies the rub... it seems clear the populace won't accept higher prices, and China's Byzantine bureaucracy and endemic corruption mean their oil companies may not have to play ball. And even if they do, oil prices aren't going to drop just because the Chinese government wants them to, so getting the oil companies to come around will merely delay the crisis, not avert it. When irresistible forces start flitting around immovable objects, reality has a way of clubbing those who refuse to see. If the Chinese government doesn't do something to reign in demand, I'm expecting that club to hit them right between the eyes.

I've often said we're sitting on an oil price bubble that merely needs a pinprick to burst. China's economy collapsing into a heap would fit the bill nicely. Unfortunately their governmental structures are so rigid and inflexible, social revolution would almost inevitably follow. Considering China holds an enormous amount of the US's debt, this would definitely cause "interesting times" for just about everyone.

But that's another story...

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* Westerners are no better at seeing long-term good versus short-term evil, and I can vividly remember the anger most people felt as jobs were lost, farms were foreclosed, and businesses went under during the early 80s. Reagan lost most of his congressional power base in the 1982 elections because of this, and I'm still amazed Margaret Thatcher stayed in power at roughly the same time.

Welcome, one and all, to the Land of Fuzzy Thinking and Emotional Do-Goodism. This lovely land looks very much like our own, except shortages are not expected to cause price increases:

Hundreds of commuters spent Thursday night stranded in London and some have accused hoteliers of cashing in on the crisis in the capital.

Prices at a number of London's hotels increased by more than double on Thursday night, the BBC has learned.

They most definitely should have doubled, and for very good reasons. Every hotel in the district experienced an unexpected, and unbudgeted, business surge. All existing staff had to stay on and work double shifts (with overtime bonuses). Extra staff had to be called in on top of them to maintain service. Restaurants had to order "rush" supplies to ensure meals could be served. Utility consumption, from electricity to water to even internet access, spiked upward in a completely unpredictable way. Simple custodial and maid services had to have been strained, requiring yet more extra people to contain the rush.

But even if none of that happened and this was a simple price spike, that's the way it's supposed to work. When demand increases and supply remains the same, in a free market the price goes up. People are simply willing to pay more for something that's scarce.

The alternative? Well, in the Land of Fuzzy Thinking, extra hotel rooms certainly would have been whirled out of thin air in an instant, to be given away to maintain our Emotional Do-Goodism image. In the real world, simple human nature pokes a stick in the eye of this lovely leftist liberal ideal, because when the price of something is low, people consume more of it. People who could have made alternative arrangements (no matter how inconvenient) to get home would have checked into a room instead. Those who may have been willing to add some room mates to split the costs would have instead taken a single room. Some may even have declared a holiday for themselves and stayed much longer than they needed to.

The result? Those who couldn't make alternative arrangements no matter what, who would've been quite willing to more efficiently use the space by adding more people, or who just needed a place to sleep for a few hours would simply have had no place to go.

Because, unlike the Land of Fuzzy Thinking, there is no magic hotel fairy around to wave a wand and create rooms out of thin air. No matter how cruel it may sound to the Emotional Do-Gooders who only visit our cold real world on occasion, the simple fact is there is supply, and there is demand. To the crushing and continual disappointment of leftists and liberals around the world no amount of control, regulation, command, or even wishful thinking will change this. Trying anyway (as the good citizens of tLoFT always do) doesn't magically make the situation better, it makes it worse.

Not that this will change anything. When confronted with the simple reality of, well, reality, when their fuzzy yellow nerf-like naivete is squashed flat under the steam roller of human nature, the citizens of the Land of Fuzzy Thinking, as all good leftists and liberals tend to do, will simply simper and cry. "Oh waily waily waily!!!" they'll say, "the evil capitalists and conservatives are having their way with us!!! Exploitation! Profiteering! Such is what happens when greed overtakes compassion! Shame on them! Waily waily waily!!!"

They disappoint me, but they do not surprise me. Just as increased consumption in the face of lower prices is a fact of human nature, so is whining about something we want but can't get. I can only hope common sense takes over and the people bitching about paying double for their hotel room realize that there are others who paid a far higher price that day.

Go home. Get some rest. Hug the ones you love, and keep in mind that if money is your problem, that's no real problem at all.

So, what did we learn this afternoon?

• As much as it'll roll the eyes of many of those closest to me... as with OJ, we learned that America has most definitely progressed. The money of a rich (well, formerly at any rate) black man now buys the same amount of innocence as that of a rich white man*.
• Regardless of the media circus, regardless of common sense, "Joe and Jane Sixpack" really do take "beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously.
• Those on the left who think "trust the people" is eye-roll-worthy hyperbole should drop to their knees now and thank whatever it is they worship that they live in this country. You know, in case they ever get accused of something they didn't actually do. Or at least, didn't hurt anyone in the doing.
• The people of California, after a decade, still have not realized they must Clean House. Start from the lowliest elected official they can get their hands on and boot them over the horizon, then work their way up. Make sure whomever is put in their place knows the reason they have their job is to boot those the people couldn't directly affect over the horizon. Maybe, maybe then The People's Republic of California will stop being a law enforcement laughing stock.

Do I think Jackson did it? Like OJ, the answer is simple... oh hell yes. I read The Smoking Gun. Fourteen-year-olds don't come up with that kind of detail.

Do I think they proved it beyond a reasonable doubt? Again, as with OJ, oh hell no. California prosecutors, per historical precedent, chose to worship the cult of wealth and personality in their own special way and in the process allowed who knows how many real bad guys to walk. California citizens, swirled into the same narcissistic maelstrom, seem to keep re-electing these incompetents just to make sure their state's name stays in the papers. Of course, they then wonder cow-eyed at their monstrous state deficits.

The rest of us simply shake our heads and ponder how we can feel both sickened and heartened at the same time. Micheal Jackson is quite obviously someone who, were it not for obscene wealth, would have been given over to "Bubba the Love Machine" behind bars years ago. And yet he walks free, because in spite of the power and wealth of a state twelve people could not be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt he did what he almost certainly did.

Remeber folks, we're not looking for a perfect system. The world is infested with humanity, and anyone who even dreams of "perfect" justice is either hopelesly naive, an unapologetic card-carrying member of the liberal left (redundant I know), or selling something.

The rest of us, well... on a viceral level and in spite of the fact that I know it's irrational, it sometimes becomes difficult trusting family with my child. I think it takes a suspiciously naive person to allow their near-terminally-ill child to sleep alone in the bed of a man who spends millions of dollars every year to convince himself he's still eleven years old.

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* As destructive as that sentiment may seem, this is why they cheered ten years ago. If you don't think it matters, you're either white or not paying attention.

It's actually quite a bit more complicated than "China is stealing American jobs":

China is not the only trading partner of the United States and Europe, but, listening to politicians in the past few weeks, you could be forgiven for thinking it was. In reality, China supplies about one-seventh of American imports and a tenth of European ones.
...
Moreover, those shares are increasing because Americans and Europeans want them to.
...
Now, the United States and EU want to turn the clock back by imposing new restrictions on Chinese textiles. In general, the World Trade Organization has been sympathetic to such measures when they were strictly temporary and used to protect industries in transition. There is no such excuse this time; the United States and EU had a decade to prepare, and anyone could have predicted China's actions when the agreement expired.
...
China keeps the yuan trading within an extremely narrow range by buying billions of dollars worth of American securities. It supplies financing for businesses and the government, making up for the low saving rate in the United States. Again, consumers in the United States benefit - they can keep spending.

In spite of this, as the article notes, protectionism does seem to be on the march, and I agree it bodes well for no one.

"But they're taking our jobs! My friends just lost theirs to foreign competition!"

Quite so, but this is happening because we are making it happen. American regulations and unionized labor have artificially inflated labor costs and made it impossible for our native textile industry, to take one example, to produce clothing and make a profit.

"That's because the other places cheat! Look how they live! These Americans have families! Mortgages! Bills to pay! It's not fair!"

Again, good points. However, there are many definitions of "fair". True, it certainly doesn't seem "fair" for a forty-year-old textile worker to lose their high-paying job because their company can't compete with cheap imports. But it also doesn't seem very "fair" that an entire nation of 280 million people should be forced to pay billions of dollars more for clothing every year just so a few thousand of their fellows can keep their jobs.

What should happen is consumers are given a choice... cheap, reasonably well-made clothing from China (or India, or Vietnam, or wherever), or more expensive, reasonably well-made clothing from the US. The chips (or dollars, if you will) then will fall where they may... if you want to save US jobs, you buy US clothing. If you want to save money, you buy the cheapest thing you can find.

What is going to happen (if Western regulators get their way) is we will be forced to pay more for our clothing than we otherwise would to ensure inefficient factories, poor management, and overpriced unionized labor are able to seem to be competitive. But at least they'll get to keep their jobs, no?

Notice too this burden of higher prices will inevitably fall disproportionately on the poor. I can now in fact afford to pay an extra $5 for a shirt, and probably not even notice it. But there was a time not too long ago when $5 was to me the difference between making my rent or bouncing a check, and I know there are tens of thousands of people across the country to whom $5 is still "real money". The simple fact is that opposition to free trade and globalism, the two great lietmotifs of the left, does not protect the poor, it merely redirects cash from one set of rich people to another.

"Oh, I see it now. What you're saying is we should just toss all these people to the curb simply because they can't compete! How typically neocon of you!"

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that protectionism as a response to competition does not work, is in fact counter-productive, and hurts far more people than it would ever help. This does not mean we should simply "toss people to the curb", rather we should re-define our strategies for helping them. Make it easier and cheaper to get a good education. Reform regulations and business law to make it simpler and cheaper for anyone to start and run their own business. Keep taxes low so people can keep more of what they make. Ensure capital markets are strong, rich, and healthy so that the very rich (all over the world) deposit their money in our banks, allowing them in turn to lend it out to anyone with a dream and a willingness to work for it. Provide opportunities, don't guarantee results.

Does this mean people will fail? Of course it will. One of the defining features of capitalism is that there are winners and losers. But by ensuring such loss does not automatically exclude future opportunity, we give everyone the chance to keep trying until they finally get it right.

Protectionism is the bastion of utopian idealists, ivory-tower socialists, and cynical special interests. It always creates far more problems than it ever solves. Far better to give people the tools to succeed and the opportunity to use them. Only by allowing them to fail can we ever hope to see them succeed.

Nope, we're still not over it:

An apparent airspace violation over Washington on Wednesday prompted evacuations of the White House and the U.S. Capitol as military fighter jets scrambled to intercept an unidentified aircraft.
...
Former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw said he heard two F-16 jets and saw them circle a single-engine airplane and fire warning flares. The jets then seemed to direct the small aircraft away from the downtown Washington area, Shaw said.

Yup, they rushed people out of the Capitol because of a Cessna. It's been nearly five years, and we're still on a hair trigger.

Those of you outside the US who wait for the time we'll "get over it" have got a lot to learn. I can still remember as a child how obsessed this country was over the likelihood of a sneak attack on a harbor or town, and at that point Pearl Harbor was more than three decades in the past. Other countries may be used to people blowing them up for no clear reason, but we're not, and that will never change.

Does that make us better than anyone else? No. We should get over it. It's been nearly four years, al Quaeda is smashed, Saddam is sitting in a prison, Syria is afraid of sneezing too loudly, and Iran is building nukes because they think they're the only thing left proven to make the US behave itself. With democracy dawning and fascism finally setting over the horizon, we should be well and truly done with jumping at shadows.

Will we get over it? Nope. We're Americans. Most of us really do believe we're the inheritors of the power and glory of republican Rome coupled with the temperance and tenacity of imperial Britain. In a very real sense they are our parents, and reinforced from both sides is the subconscious but no less real belief that We Cannot Fail. As a nation we are simply unable to accept it. Not unwilling, unable. Such cultures do not react well when defeat comes calling.

Rome was shamed and humiliated by Carthage and the Romans did not rest until salt had been sewn into the earth of that city's foundations. Britain threw away a century of careful balancing and precipitated apocalypse over her fear of a Germanic Napoleon. Japan paid the price of nuclear eschaton for her successful humiliation of the most powerful Western culture in history.

In a world where entire cities can be incinerated at the touch of a button, such a brittle pride can be a risky asset. But, in spite of the contrary wailing of soft-headed twenty-somethings and their "old hippies never die they just smoke away" socialist mentors, we are not republican Rome. In spite of the fevered delusions of exploitation and socialist utopia the Democratic Underground hold so dear, we are not imperial Britain. The world may fear our power and detest our wealth, to be honest sometimes we do as well, but its people do themselves a disservice if they think we can be deconstructed as someone else's dim reflection. We will not be seen through a glass, and darkly.

We are instead Americans, as unique and unprecedented as any other people in the world. At our best, we cherish success, reward nobility, protect helplessness, and destroy evil. Since we are still human, at our worst we are quite capable of envying success, undercutting nobility, exploiting helplessness, and encouraging evil. If you were to pick any one thing out that makes Americans different, it is perhaps that, for the most part, we do not cede credit to or place blame on anyone else for our extremes, even when perhaps we should.

We will not "get over it" any time soon, not at all. A nation rich, powerful, and almost gloriously naive about the existence of evil in this world experienced the largest single-day loss of life in an attack since Antietam. Not simply killed, and not soldiers at all, but instead regular citizens murdered in spectacular fashion on national television using the very tools and monuments of our power to do the deed.

The rest of the world treated this country very much as a pretty girl who'd been raped, "Yes, it was a terrible thing, and yes, they were evil men, but really dear, look at the way you dress, the way you act. Don't you think you deserved it, just a little bit?" Even worse was the significant number of our own citizens who snuffled a bit, winced at the pain of still-bleeding wounds, and then slowly nodded in agreement.

But most of us, most of us knew the truth. We knew the world should be safe enough that anyone, no matter how beautiful or flamboyant, should be able to walk down a street stark naked and not worry about being raped. The world miscalculated when it thought America would simply walk away from such an egregious wound. That the barbaric perpetrators, fiery old men who have forever attempted to crush liberty and freedom, should do so is unsurprising. That the rest of the world should do so, merely disappointing. This didn't happen to you. It happened to us. What differentiates us from you is we have the power and the will to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else. If that means we jump every time a Cessna gets lost or reach for a gun whenever some tinpot loon starts blowing off steam, so be it.

Because we will not fail.

Poor textbooks are nothing new, not exclusive to the United States, and are actually the symptom of a much bigger problem than bad science.

While this article on just how dumb American school textbooks are makes a lot of noise about how awful things are now, I can state quite categorically this is nothing new. People were making the same "horrible discovery" of politically correct groupthink about the textbooks we used in High School 20 years ago, and they were actually much better than drivel used in the late '60s and early '70s. To this day I'm mildly surprised to read a history book that says something good about Western civilization without immediately qualifying it with something horrible.

But it's not just the US. Japan's version of PC-as-education (the whole "Pearl Harbor was a strike against Western imperialism that resulted in Japan's vicitmization with atomic weaponry" theme) regularly gets it into hot water with its neighbors. We won't even start about what a classroom in Egypt, India, or Russia is stocked with.

The bottom line is when you politicize something it will be politics, not rationality or scientific veracity or even basic common sense, that will rule the day. Government is run by whatever set of busybodies happen to be ascendent in any particular region at any particular time, and those busybodies will be the ones who set the agendas for the schools. And don't get all huffy about fundamentalist wackos teaching kids about Noah and the ark. For every loon you show me trying to wedge Genesis into a science text book I will quite easily show you a loon trying to wedge Paul Erlich into the same space.

Is there a solution? It's hard to say. There have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of experiments in "good" public schooling in the roughly century-and-a-half it has existed. Unfortunately, such experiments are far more contingent on how effective they are as a lever to drive a wedge of political belief around than they are on how well they teach Alan and Betty to read. Hence the ones that actually get a shot nearly always fail, sometimes disastrously, while others that make immenent sense but are essentially a-political are never tried at all.

Higher education is even worse, since tenure has largely sheltered dinosaurs whose political beliefs (socialism, post-modernism, environmentalism, nihilism, fundamentalism, etc.) have elsewhere succumbed to the gigantic asteroid impact of the 20th century. Keep in mind we actually pay extra to allow these fossils-in-the-making to "educate" our children.

In the end I think, as with anything government touches, the best we can hope for is not "best-practice", but rather "least-worst", and even that will come only through constant struggle. This is not as depressing as it may at first sound. America has been muddling through with a least-worst school system for the past 150 years, and we've done pretty well over the long haul.

But it doesn't mean we should stop trying. The loons may twirl to the right or to the left as they bark madly in the night, but make no mistake, they are out there.

And they'll take our children if we let them.

Ward Churchill and his ilk would simply ignore such savagery in their quest to pillory their own "tiny Eichmanns", but we won't:

Suddenly, the woman in the backseat of the Buick opened the door and stepped out. Her abbaya was unfastened. Her scarf and veil were gone. She had long, thick, black hair. She was a young Saudi woman, maybe seventeen or eighteen. She reached up to the sky and she cried, "Momma! Momma!" Blue nylon cord dangled from her wrists. The white-haired driver got out again and scrambled back around the front of the car. In a futile effort to resist, the young woman sprawled out on the road, stretching her arms out in front of her on the baking summer asphalt. The man pulled her arms behind her back and deftly tied them to her ankles. Then he opened the trunk of the Buick, lifted her up, and dropped her in. He closed the trunk, made a U-turn at the intersection, and disappeared into the sunlit afternoon. It was over in the time it takes a traffic light to change from red to green.

Oh it gets worse, it gets much worse.

There are those on the left who would say, "that's right, that's what it's like, and the Bush administration is beavering away as hard as they can to bring it here." The sentiment would be funny if it weren't so delusional; the utter lack of historical perspective it demonstrates is as breathtaking as it is depressingly common.

Honor killing on this scale and with this much acceptance simply never existed in the west. Yes, the Julian marriage laws of the early Roman empire legalized almost exactly this, but those were considered radical even in their day. Augustus did not have his daughter's throat cut when Julia was found in a brothel, he banished her instead.

Christianity itself abolished the legal framework that allowed such things to take place in the setting sun of the empire's power. The conquering tsunami of Germanic tribes, for whom women were comparatively powerful partners, swept away the widespread cultural acceptance of such practices just a few centuries later.

In the patrilineal agrarian societies of medieval and early modern Europe, adultery was treated as a deadly serious crime because it threatened the power and stability of society, not the ephemeral honor of a single family. Even in the heart of puritan America death for infidelity was a penalty meted by a judge and jury, not the whims or delusions of a single man. And this was only after marriage. One of the hallmarks of peasant life in the pre-industrial west, from Charlemagne to Thomas Jefferson, was the freewheeling permissiveness allowed to young people of both sexes. Virginity itself was important only to heads of state who relied on blood for power. Unintended pregnancies resulted in a quick marriage, not a quick death.

The rise of the machine age simply accelerated the trends. By eliminating physical strength and endurance as a requirement for productive labor, industrial societies willing to forego "traditional" women's roles suddenly found their pool of labor doubled, essentially for free. As their importance to the economic well-being of society increased, women successfully demanded more of the benefits, now "rights", of what they were helping to create.

This is not to say it was easy. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Fredrick Douglas's words are as relevant for women as they are for blacks. They may not have everything they want, but women in the west have indeed come a long way.

So to even imply a conservative western government has any relation at all to a pre-modern pastoral culture is ludicrous. Our society cannot be pulled back into a Dark Age of disposable women because such a dark age never existed. The requirements of industrialization alone guarantees any attempt to destroy half a country's labor force will remain the dark fantasies of cranks who scream at children on their lawn. Conservatives are famous for their love of business, and making women unhappy in the modern world is very, very bad for business.

Which is, of course, cold comfort to those unfortunate enough to be born in one of the last remaining honor cultures in the world. Christianity's radical challenge to the Mediterranean honor system succeeded, but at the cost of an apocalypse that lasted a thousand years, an eschaton in slow motion that got far, far worse before it ever got better. Islam's radical challenge to its own cultural systems failed from the start, its seeds of egalitarianism and equality never allowed to fully blossom in the sandy soil of its birthplace.

It's not clear if secular modernity will destroy the Christian culture which birthed it as totally as Christianity did to its own ancient pagan roots. What is clear is that this new leviathan can no longer ignore the mewling, half-born thing that once overmatched it, even threatened its existence so long ago. Letting them sort it out themselves is an option that died in the rubble of tall towers and low-slung offices. Yet those who dispair of the comparatively secular Iraq ever getting it right should gasp in horror at the magnitude of the job that would be required for Saudi Arabia. Those who believe the Saudis should have come first should join Socrates in admitting the only thing they know well is that they know nothing at all.

Regardless, this particular die has been cast, this particular Rubicon crossed and far behind us. What lies ahead is anyone's guess, and a guess is all it would be. But as someone who now literally cannot imagine the horrific ignorance and hatred required to draw a knife across the throat of his own daughter over honor, I can say I am grateful that we are at least trying to stop it, and not just with words but with our own blood, tears, and treasure. It took nearly two thousand years for westerners to stop leaving little baby girls to wail their life away in remote fields. It will take more than our own generation to get a different culture to stop.

But every journey, however difficult, begins with a first step. I, for one, am glad we have finally started walking.

"Which is all well and good, but you aren't asking the real question, you arrogant hypocrite. What happened to "not with my daughter?" Really, would you send her to die for this?"

"You ask the wrong question my friend. Olivia will be a grown woman and will make the decision to serve her country on her own. Children should never die before their parents, but death comes for us all. If hers should come fighting to stop old men from stuffing helpless girls into trunks, to stop the unmarked graves from piling up in the desert, to stop fathers from teaching daughters the noise their sister's throat makes when it's cut, I would call that sacrifice meaningful.

The real question should be, why don't you?"

Original article via Silflay.

The inevitable authoritarian backlash is happening:

Take Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum, the organization for editors within the World Association of Newspapers, please. Mourning Jordan's decision to step down, Pecquerie likened bloggers to the "sons of Senator McCarthy" and "scalps' hunters."

Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review Daily Web site, blasted Jordan's Internet critics in an e-mail to New York University professor Jay Rosen's blog PressThink... : "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

The article goes on at length about the mainstream media's reaction, as does this Jeff Jarvis piece and this Instapundit article. What I find most remarkable is how similar this reaction to an empowered public is to the reaction of another set of American elites to a similarly empowered public more than two centuries before.

In The People Themselves, Larry D. Kramer explores how early generations of Americans viewed their constitution and the government it created. It was the founding fathers's intent and expectation that the people, given the ability to elect their own representatives, would do so and then quietly allow their (presumably) enlightened government to go about its business governing in peace. The people would later assemble in an orderly fashion at regular intervals to express their approval or disapproval of that government in, and only in, the ballot box.

That was the ideal. The reality was, as usual, quite different. The people were patently not content to allow their "enlightened rulers" (who far too often made thieves and vagabonds look good) to go about the business of governing undisturbed. To the American elite's growing horror, it became apparent the people expected a direct and constant voice in the way their country was run. To the Virginia gentleman-farmer or the Boston lawyer, such an expectation was akin to letting the lunatics run the asylum, but by then it was too late. Whether intentional or not, the people of America were given the tools to run their own country, and they proceeded to do so with great gusto.

Then, rich businessmen and powerful planters were horrified that the people thought they could run their own country. Now, rich media moguls and powerful editors are horrified that the people think they can run their own news services.

By reducing the cost of regime change from violent rebellion to voting, the founding fathers made a marketplace for ideas possible. The chaotic mess that followed could only be loved by bomb-throwers like Thomas Jefferson (and even his affection for change lasted only so long as he was not its target). However the result would become, all too often in spite of itself, the most powerful nation the world has ever known.

By reducing the cost of publishing and distribution to nearly nil, blogs have unleashed many of the same forces on our new monolithic elite, the mainstream media. Document forgeries and public cases of foot-in-mouth disease that once were treated with a wink and a nod by those "on the inside" are now treated with deadly seriousness by those who are not. Asking whether or not these outsiders should, or could, or are even remotely qualified to do so misses the point. The people themselves are again empowered to choose what they do or do not believe is important on their own, without a patronizing filter that all too often blindly serves its own naked self-interest.

The result will be, as always, a chaotic mess that is a horror to anyone who actually knows, or rather thinks they know, how the system is supposed to work. As such once-empowered voices sink screaming into the seething ocean of the people, their ideas will have to compete on their merits instead of their laurels. Apocalypse and eschaton will be their final cries, to no avail, because once given a power the people seldom return it.

If history is any guide, the people will eventually use it well. And those who try to cross them will do so at their peril.

Optimistic news from Iraq in the Washington Post this morning:

With a hero who gave his life for the elections, a revived national anthem blaring from car stereos and a greater willingness to help police, the public mood appears to be moving more clearly against the insurgency in Iraq, political and security officials said.

In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country.

One of the biggest mistakes we made in Vietnam was not allowing elections to take place in 1954 after the fall of Dien Bien Fu. Yes, it would have meant the entire country becoming communist and yes, Ho Chi Minh would have been elected president. However, hindsight being what it is, it seems extremely likely Vietnam would have become a freer, more open society (as it is today) perhaps thirty years earlier. The difference would have been 65,000 Americans and at least five times that many Vietnamese would still be around.

Of course, we didn't know then what we know now, so while it's easy to point out our forefather's mistakes, we should be careful not to blame them for being unable to predict the future. They paid a terrible price in blood, tears, and treasure for their pride and ignorance. Some of those bills are still being paid off to this day.

But, far more important, it seems there really were positive lessons that came out of Vietnam, not the least of which seems to be let the people decide, and sooner rather than later. Trust them. Give them a chance. They may take that chance and waste it, but they may also grab it with both hands and use it to run down the sun. You'll only learn if you let them.

As with any human endeavor that really matters, there's no guarantee either way. But, should they succeed (and I think they will, eventually), not only will it pay profound tribute to the lives lost in the current conflict, I think it will also honor a different set, once thought wasted for naught in distant jungles so long ago.

Or, perhaps not...

"You've done a man's job, sir. I guess you're through, huh?"
"Finished."
"It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?"

Been meaning to link this soldier's critique of war coverage in Iraq, not just because it gets the message out about what's going on over there, but also because with its very existence it tells us even more about what is going on.

The first indications that something was going seriously wrong in Vietnam started to be noticed about two years into our "advisory" role in that conflict. Around 1963 young reporters like Niel Sheehan and David Halberstam started getting interviews from battlefield commanders like then-Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann that directly contradicted the far rosier accounts coming from Saigon and being reported without question in the mainstream media. In the days before e-mail, blogs, and other "alternative" news sources, it was comparatively easy to mute these dissonant voices, and so poor leadership, poor tactics, and misguided policies were allow to continue for years.

Fast forward four decades. Technology has made it possible for even the lowliest grunt to "get the word out" about what is going on literally minutes after it happens. Like printing presses in centuries past, this technology means higher authorities aren't able to shut down these alternative views. They come too fast, and from too many places.

So, with this technology, what are we hearing two years into this conflict? From reporters trapped in the green zone, trying not to repeat the mistakes of their all-too-approving editorial ancestors and unable to see the manipulation they're being subjected to, we get utter and complete negativity. From soldiers on the front lines, who actually see what's going on, who fight, bleed, and die for this cause, we get... cautious optimism. Profound disappointment that their own message doesn't seem to be "getting out". Even approval of how the leadership is carrying on the broader strategies of the war.

The polar opposites of then and now are striking. Before, mainstream media blared nothing but over-positive and under-critical reports; soldiers unable to be heard any other way leaked stories of what was actually happening that when reported threatened the careers of everyone involved, and were simply not believed. Today, that same media provides an uncritical megaphone to any voice that says we are failing, while success is relegated to obscure journals and small websites, barely to be heard at all.

It is conventional wisdom amongst those "in the know" that after Tet in 1968 the only thing standing in the way of US victory in Vietnam was the (now completely converted) mainstream media. Were it not for their now unrelenting negativity, the thinking goes, Vietnam would be a free-market democracy. Yet many of the same people who "know" about Vietnam, because of what that very same media is telling them now, also "know" we are failing in Iraq, and any story or opinion to the contrary is treated with suspicion if not outright contempt.

I have no certainty about what's going on over there. I've read a dozen books about the middle east, perhaps half again that many about Vietnam, the accounts in my local papers and the stories of soldiers and Iraqis on their blogs, and I have no certainty. I do, however, have hope for success.

I find it curious but not particularly surprising that those who have done none of these things are certain only of failure.

1. If you think America is becoming a fascist state you don't know a damned thing about either one.
2. If you think the government can legislate away our constitutional rights you don't know a damned thing about how this country was created.
3. The Americans who told the rest of us to "f--- off" when they didn't get what they wanted would've been in charge if they had.
4. "MoveOn" is not a name, it's an action.
5. The people who claim they're moving to Canada because of the election are the same people who were too lazy to vote.
6. Faith is not fanaticism.
7. Many people can't tell the difference.
8. The rest of us are glad they lost.
9. The ultimate beneficiary of legalized gay marriage will be divorce lawyers.
10. Should abortion be legal? Should it be used as birth control?
11. A comfortable majority of us say "yes" to the first and "no" to the second.
12. Most women reading this have known someone who's said "yes" to both.
13. The correct question is, "are the lives of thousands of American children worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children?"
14. Anyone who is certain about the answer is insane.
15. Anyone scandalized by a war based on lies doesn't know a lot about the American Revolution.
16. Or the Civil War.
17. Or World War One.
18. Or World War Two.
19. Or any damned war for that matter.
20. After 228 years of continuous existence, it's hard to argue that America's system isn't the best in the world.
21. Just ask the homeless guy on the Metro grate beside the White House.
22. A European berating an American for their country's imperialism is like Joan Rivers flipping out over someone else's nose job.
23. An Arab blaming colonialism for their problems is like a farmer trying to claim hail damage for a rusted-out pickup truck.
24. Anyone who thinks that Jews are ultimately to blame should be taken for a long walk off a short pier.
25. If that were to actually happen continental Europe would suddenly wonder where all their politicians had gone.
26. And Israel's settler problem would consist of finding enough of them.
27. Thinking this election's outcome was determined by morality only proves it really is possible to forget the unforgettable.
28. If you're not made uncomfortable by at least one item on this list you're not paying attention.

Next...

Pat gets a discount no-prize for bringing us this NYT piece about what might be the final decline of the US textile industry:

For many years, textile and clothing factories in the mill towns of the Carolinas - originally drawn from New York and New England decades ago by the prospect of inexpensive nonunion workers - have been closing one after another as the industry migrated abroad in search of ever-cheaper labor. Now, this gradual loss may be about to turn into a rout.

On Jan. 1, the global system of country-by-country quotas regulating the $495 billion international trade in textiles and apparel is scheduled to be eliminated.

The article goes into great, predictable, detail about how a small innocent Southern town is being decimated by foreign competition and government neglect. Which is, on the face of it, sincerely tragic and rather difficult for a free marketeer to argue against. Until you re-phrase the question:

Should we all be forced to pay six billion dollars more for our clothes to ensure a few thousand people get to keep their jobs?

There are some of you out there who will respond with a raucous "yes!" Who would be quite willing to pay a premium for a "made in USA" tag. To which I say "more power to you!" It's your money, it should be your choice, and if you decide to help these people with your dollars then great, that's the way it's supposed to work.

But the cold hard truth is we're not doing it. To this day I can sing "Look for the Union Label", a jingle to a commercial run thirty years ago in an attempt to get people to "buy American" textiles. It didn't work then, and it's not working now. No matter what smoke and mirrors main stream media and union organizers try to distract us with, the bottom line is it's not the government's fault the textile industry is in free fall. It's ours.

Our penance? Being forced to do our patriotic duty. That's right folks, they're not asking you to "buy American", they're telling you. That is, ultimately, what quotas and trade barriers are all about. Taking choice out of our hands and putting it in the hands of those who think (sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not) they know better than we do. Technocratic stasis at its purest.

Noble as saving jobs for rural, poorly educated citizens is, where does it stop? If we save the textile industry, why can't we save the auto industry? The dairy farmers? The steel mills? The bell hops? The travel agents? And who decides which industries get protection, and which ones don't? I may personally be able to afford an extra $4 per shirt, but for a lot of people $4 can make the difference between being clothed and going naked.

To which, of course, technocrats intone the world over "We are the Ones Who will Decide Who Should Pay More and Who Should Pay Less." The truly sad thing is many of you actually believe them. So instead of a free market in which we get to decide who stays and who goes, we end up with a cabal of elite who do whatever they please while ensuring the "rabble" (i.e. you and me) bear the brunt of their decisions about what is fair and what is not.

America has one of the most efficient, mobile, and educated workforces in the world. We work more hours and produce more per hour than any other country on the planet. Sophisticated companies producing sophisticated products are constantly building factories in this country because increasingly wealthy consumers around the world are demanding sophisticated products with phenomenal quality and unsurpassed capabilities that can only be built here. As the world gets wealthier, our supernaturally capable mousetraps are causing them to pave a path to our door.

"Well, that's all well and good Scott", I can hear you say, "but that doesn't hide the fact that textile jobs are still moving overseas. You're just blowing smoke, because obviously we can't compete there, and perhaps anywhere else."

To which I say, to be blunt, bullshit. There's no reason our textile industry can't leverage our superior infrastructure, work ethic, technology, and educated workforce to carve giant chunks out of the hides of anyone who tries to take us on.

Well, no reason except one:

Current trade adjustment assistance, largely aimed at training workers for new jobs, was denounced by factory owners and union officials in this region as too little and too difficult. (emphasis added)

Anyone outside a union who's ever had to deal with one will be the first to tell you about the insanity organized labor imposes on a business. My dad to this day can regale you with tales of bolts on spacecraft that went untightened because union regulations specified only a certain person could turn the wrench. No matter what their (admittedly powerful) emotional appeal, modern labor unions wrap a noose around the neck of any industry that touches them. They may protect, for a time, but when the trap door of competition is opened instead of bouncing on the ground below, coming up bruised but otherwise fine, all a hapless worker will hear is a sickening "snap".

To be honest, I don't think it's fair that someone who's dedicated their lives to a company should suddenly be facing destitution just because the company bosses made stupid decisions. That's why I support easier access to higher education, tort reform and lower taxes to make selling houses more profitable, even loopy things like moving subsidies to make it cheaper to go from one end of this country to the other in search of a job. But I do not think we should all be punished with higher prices just because factory managers and the leadership of the unionized workers refuse to face reality.

I don't say these things as some sort of pseudo-academic who's never had to face these decisions myself. I would still be in Arkansas in a radically different situation if, fifteen years ago, I had been able to find work there. The sad truth is nothing I could do was of value in Arkansas, so after wrenching and horribly disruptive events in my life I ended up (ultimately) in Northern Virginia, where I could send out twenty resumes and get five replies back per week.

If I'd had the opportunity to avoid it all, would I? Without knowing what I do now, facing those risks with no guarantee, absolutely, I would have done anything to avoid it. Am I, my family, my city, my state, my country better off because I couldn't?

The work I do now, that I never dreamed of doing fifteen years ago, helps other people. Helps them keep their family members from killing themselves. Helps others stop the demons from talking them into slashing themselves with razors. Helps them eat a pill instead of a bullet. Helps me raise a family, and buy a house, and pay my taxes.

Yes, it was terrible. Yes, there was pain. No, it wasn't fair. But am I now better off?

What do you think?

Beldar articulates a series of questions I've been struggling to convey for months now to my peanut gallery friends, not the least of which is:

Are you being realistic when you think that President Kerry is going to defeat the terrorists and the peace-at-any-price wing of the Democratic Party?

(Emphasis original)

The impression I get from most of my friends (from either side) is that they seem to see the presidency as a sort of disguised dictatorship. Sure, there's this congress over there causing trouble and there's these supreme court people dressing funny and making weird decisions, but the man sitting in the Oval Office is where the real action is. Right?

Wrong. The structure of our government makes our president one of the weakest heads of state of any modern country. He can't do anything, anything, without the approval of someone else. He can't introduce legislation without someone else's help. He can't make treaties without someone else's OK. He can't even hire his own staff without a green light from other people. It's the ultimate "mother may I?" position.

Even aside from that structural weakness, the job itself has been utterly impossible for one person to manage, even from the very beginning. From Washington to Jackson to Grant to Johnson to Bush the ultimate success or failure of a presidency lies not in the man, but in the people around him.

Let's take another tack for a second. We are a nation of 280 million people, and, as the old commercial jingle goes, "no two are quite the same". A large number of us are completely unreasonable when it comes to things we care about. You literally can't talk us out of certain things, and sometimes one set will completely conflict with the other. It's a country of titanic complexity, with trillions of data points making it up. If a president really were the ultimate "person in charge" in the manner most of my friends seem to think, he'd have to hold all that in his head and balance it all against itself and then come out with an answer.

It can't be done, which is why people who excoriate candidates based on their perceived intelligence are missing the point. You can't know everything about this job, it's utterly useless to even try. It would be worse than trying to drink from a fire hose. It would be like trying to drink from a fire hose that's connected to a pump at the bottom of the ocean.

Which is why a president has a "cabinet". It's these people, who advise the president and carry out his instructions, who are critically important. Even they are not where the real power resides. That lies several layers deeper, in the inscrutable beuracracies that fill the nooks and crannies of the government itself. But the secretaries are in control, however nominally, and it is they who set the tone, they who hire and fire, and they who control what the president even sees, let alone decides on.

When it all works properly, when the people the president surrounds himself with can get questions answered correctly, the presidency can indeed be a powerful force, and the country can succeed because of it. But when it doesn't, that power curdles and curls in on itself, and dangerous forces are unleashed that can, and have, threatened to pull the entire place down.

This is why it's more important for a president to be decisive than it is for him to be knowledgeable. This is why ideology matters. This is why parties count. Because a candidate can be as neutral as he or she wants, but a president must pick from the faithful for his advisors.

With one notable exception, I happen to agree with all of Bush's picks. I think the people around him have done a bang-up job, all things considered. This is one of the reasons I support him for re-election. I appose Kerry because I think he'll surround himself with the wrong people with the wrong ideas, and that this will be bad for the country. You can (usually do) disagree. But in the disagreeing, you don't seem to be paying attention to what your candidate really stands for. You're not missing the forest because of all the trees, you're deciding a single tree is the forest.

And, to be blunt, I think far too many of you have decided you're standing in a hardwood forest because of a single oak tree some enterprising farmers have planted in their piney woods.

Original essay via On the Third Hand.

I've always thought music was too expensive at $12.99, and utterly outrageous at $18.99 (where most of the weird stuff I buy is). Which is why I have a killer stereo system but haven't bought new music for it in, what, something like 15 years now. $10.00 is more my speed, $8.00 would be even better. Well, guess what, I have a powerful friend on my side now:

Along with other giant retailers such as Best Buy and Target, Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 (they buy most hit CDs from distributors for around $12) ... Wal-Mart is tired of losing money on cheap CDs. It wants to keep selling them for less than $10 -- $9.72, to be exact -- but it wants the record industry to lower the prices at which it purchases them ... According to music-industry sources, Wal-Mart executives hinted that they could reduce Wal-Mart's CD stock and replace it with more lucrative DVDs and video games [if the labels did not comply].

The article's full of a lot of whining and crying about how terrible it is to do business with Wal Mart, that they're mean and don't care about profit margins and will squeeze you for every half cent you have. Which is all completely true, but there's a reason:

"The labels price things based on what they believe they can get -- a pricing philosophy a lot of industries have," [Gary Severson, Wal-Mart's senior vice president and general merchandise manager in charge of the chain's entertainment section] says. "But we like to price things as cheaply as we possibly can, rather than charge as much as we can get. It's a big difference in philosophy, and we try to help other people see that."

Essentially, Wal Mart has figured out there's a price point out there when it comes to music. Large numbers of people (like me) will not pay even $13 for a CD, but will have no problem paying $9.72. Wal Mart wants to sell music to these people, and make money doing it. Record execs could care less. They’re already making all the money they want. Well, as long as nobody challenges the RIAA lawsuits and the DMCA is never repealed, that is.

Unfortunately, what Wal Mart wants, Wal Mart gets, and so I expect to be visiting our local one soon. What keeps the label execs up nights is that once one retailer gets what they want, the others will demand it too. It's a slippery slope, and they're grabbing grass right now.

Oh there will definitely be a down side to it. Once Wal Mart and the rest force the industry into a $10 per disc model, all those tiny little bands so cherished on the edges of the market will disappear with a "pop". The music industry's business model is coming apart at the seams, and instead of innovating and finding a new one, the people at the top are using lawsuits to try and hold the line. It's not working, and when the shakeout comes, and as long as the markets are free it will come, it will be very, very ugly.

But only for a short while. People make music by and large because they love to make music. People listen to it because they love listening to it. The market's not going away, it's just changing. In spite of apocalyptic predictions, the demise of the current music market will not represent the destruction of western civilization as we know it. Yes, a lot of people will lose (are losing) their jobs, good people who just picked the wrong industry at the wrong time. But, contrary to industry propaganda, it won't result in "McMusic" (bland, boring, and bad for you).

Technology is making it possible for anyone to build a fantastic recording studio in their basement. With a little technical skill and a credit card or two, it's now possible for any artist to be their own record label. The Internet destroys distribution and advertising costs, and the rise of iMusic and its competitors drives down the cost (and therefore risk) to any new act that just wants to be heard. If someone ever figures out how to burn CDs on demand for $1 a disc, Wal Mart won't be carrying 5,000 titles, they'll be carrying 5 million.

To these people, these artists, these innovators, the labels are all roaring dinosaurs, dangerous, heavy, stupid, and vicious, serving only to impede and stymie them. Wal Mart's insistence on a profit-making $9.77 CD may in fact be the asteroid that finally smashes their dominance, heralding apocalypse and ruin. But when the smoke finally clears, we will not be left with sterile wilderness, we will instead be confronted by an explosion of creativity, a jungle of variety, with a diversity literally unthinkable to us today. It will be painful, but in the end it will be very, very good.

And we'll be paying less than $9.72 a disc for it.

Offshoring. The very name strikes fear into the tech community. We have to protect those jobs! Keep them from going overseas! Taxes! Tariffs! Quotas! Whatever it takes, do something to stop it!

The emotional response, yes, but unfortunately the wrong one. because if you do that, then this becomes impossible:

Kathy Brittain White has a dream. She figures if U.S. CIOs will ship programming jobs to India to save money, maybe they'll ship them to rural Arkansas instead. So White's company, Rural Sourcing, is setting up outsourcing centers in places in the U.S. where the cost of living is low -- not as low as in Bangalore, but low enough to compete with the total cost of offshoring.

Because that's the other side of the offshoring equation, the one big media ignores and big labor tries to hide. While third world labor is cheaper than US labor, often by orders of magnitude, it's nowhere near as efficient as US labor. The United States has one of (I'm pretty sure it's the) most efficient labor forces in the world. We're expensive, but we get the job done right, the first time, and almost faster than you can complete the specification. It doesn't much matter if you only pay Haji $3 a day to make your widgets when it takes him two days to make one that's any good. Far better to pay Jane $18 an hour and have her turn out fifty perfect ones in a day.

Companies are often wooed by the siren song of cheap labor only to find their ship foundering on the rocks of terrible quality control, uneven and unreliable infrastructure, rapacious government officials, unstable regimes, horrible customer service, and endless export and treaty problems. These are the hidden costs of outsourcing, and they can be huge, even ruinous. We don't hear about them much because "new widget factory opens in Pacoima" is nowhere near as sexy a headline as "little brown people steal jobs from the US." Even worse, the fact that the new widget factory probably won't be a union shop means a tightly organized force will be actively working against anyone ever hearing about the possibility.

In this particular case, not only do I think it will work, I think it will work well. Tech sector jobs in places like Virginia, California, and Washington state are located in places with spectacular costs of living. I can buy a house twice as big as mine for half the price in Arkansas, and that's only the beginning. From cars to crackers and asparagus to zucchini, nearly everything is cheaper in the South.

It won't just be people moving there either. A strong work ethic and a deep suspicion of organized labor equal a work force that will be and stay at the top of the heap in productivity and efficiency. And these aren't McJobs either... they're good, well-paying, solid work for anyone with the brains and the will to learn them.

I always wondered what, if anything, would become of the sad little shuttered factories that dot my old home town of Dumas, Arkansas (pop. 5800) like dried tree stumps in an empty field. I couldn't be more thrilled if, fifteen years from now, they were replaced by clean, efficient tech centers.

None of this would be possible without free markets and free trade. The rich upper-middle-class "haves" would ensure no government program would ever threaten their cushy jobs, no matter how many "have-not" lower-class single mothers would be helped out of trailer parks half way across the country. Companies having no incentive to take the risk or pay the expense of training a new work force would never even dream of moving anywhere else. Without the ability to charge a price she considered fair Ms. White would have no reason to even think of a program like this, and no government official in Washington DC could ever hope to determine that price for her.

No, markets are not pretty. They're not always fair. But they work. People will lose, but people will also win. Rigging the game with technocratic barriers, doing things like "putting the environment and labor first", or raising taxes on people who know how to make money to give it to people who don't, just keep folks from even trying.

I want to try. I'm just glad that, for now at least, I live in a country that wants to let me.

Tim Worstall linked up this most excellent article by Brad DeLong that very nicely explains why free trade is the real solution to global poverty, and how the left's quest for "fairness" and distaste for "exploitation" merely propagate what they want to stop:

Seth Stevenson thinks that those who do not buy the coir mats are morally superior to Debbie and the rest of us: they are not complicit in the exploitation of Third World labor. But there is another way of looking at it ... Suppose that Seth Stevenson, on his bicycle ride, were to stop by a couple of empty huts, run into them, steal the looms, and then smash their looms to pieces on the beach and dance in front of the resulting bonfire. Then the villagers could no longer make coir mats. They would have to find something else to do--something else that is worse than making mats. Such a theft-and-bonfire would have the same effect on the people of Desperately Poor Village as... as... drying up demand for their products by urging First World consumers to adopt a higher standard of morality and eschew the products of Third World labor, no?

One of the biggest problems I have with the traditional liberal agenda regarding economics is their quixotic quest for that ever-elusive "fairness". It's not "fair" a peasant in India makes less than an autoworker in Detroit. It's not "fair" Bill Gates is worth billions of dollars while a mother of four with an eighth grade education can't find a job. It's not "fair" someone gets paid $3 a week to make doormats that I pay $26.99 for.

To which I can only reply, "what is fair?" How can someone, anyone sitting in their own air-conditioned home instant messaging their friend in California on their own computer while watching their brand-new plasma TV determine what is or is not fair for an Indian peasant in Kerala? How can any politician sitting in his office on Capitol Hill surrounded by pretty, well-scrubbed staffers hope to untangle the forces and incentives that created a single mother of four with no education? How can anyone so utterly ignorant of the spectacularly different conditions of each single person living in poverty think they can help create legislation to fix all of them?

They can't. I can't. You can't. The only people who can are the people themselves. The worker knows how much their labor is worth to them, and the employer knows how much they will be able to pay for that labor. Both base their calculations on hundreds of variables, and in a competitive market most of those (on both sides) will be secret. Do-gooder outsiders with little or no understanding of basic economics, let alone the unique stories behind each and every person in a village, can't even be trusted not to offend anyone, let alone offer any real help.

It's so baldly obvious it's no wonder technocrats and stasists do their best to ignore it: In a country with free markets, stable governments, evenly enforced rules of law, in which information is allowed to flow freely, exploitation is impossible.

A peasant works for 50 cents a day because he knows it only costs 25 cents a day for him to live. An educated peasant also knows to save that extra 25 cents a day, and will do so because his stable government won't take it away or murder him to get it. That same peasant can then one day use his savings to open a store selling mats, secure in the knowledge his landlord will be prevented from arbitrarily raising his rent because of his secure contract. This now successful businessman then learns through his newspaper that there is high demand for mats in the next province, and opens another store there, and then another, and then another. The peasant is now a wealthy man, even though at one point he was being "exploited" making a mere 50 cents a day.

Once we accept this axiom for the truth that it is, our policies change. Create incentives for people to use their own knowledge to succeed. Work for consistent and understandable laws, and try to make sure they're enforced evenly so that people aren't holding the hand of someone who's holding them down. Allow the free flow of information, capital, people, and ideas so that they can learn about opportunities and move wherever they may be. Educate them well so that they'll recognize those opportunities when they come.

All of which is, of course, anathema to the technocratic left. People are poor because they are exploited, and only by taking money from those who have made it and giving it to those who didn't can we right the situation. Jobs are lost because greedy corporations wish only to maximize their profits, and only by protecting these businesses from even greedier foreign competitors can the situation be salvaged. Laws are used to oppress the common man, and only by disrupting them through "empowerment" and endless lawsuits can wrongs be righted.

Common sense, of course. Unfortunately utterly wrong as well. Like energy maneuvers in air combat, to really succeed in providing prosperity we must sometimes do things that point the nose away from the target. Trust people, give them the tools to figure it out amongst themselves, and provide the opportunity for them to do so, and prosperity will happen faster than you can possibly imagine. Try to control them, to force them to fit into your idea of fairness, and you will create people who depend on your fairness just to survive. Prosperity becomes something that must be taken, not shared.

Which is, I suppose, what most political leaders want... an appreciating constituency completely dependent on the largess of their leader. It even works, as long as the leader is wise, never makes a mistake, and never dies. For myself, I don't want to be dependent on anyone. I should be allowed to succeed or fail by my own devices, and reap the rewards of my success without them being taken from me, and deal with the consequences of my failure without them being "cushioned" for me at someone else's expense.

I don’t want to rely on anyone but myself. Why does anyone want anything else?

Slashdot linked up this summary of recent developments in space elevator technology. It's still just a lot of talk, but it's a lot of talk coming from many more people and it's a whole lot more serious than it used to be.

It's also nice to see people actually debating private sector funding. In the past, a project of this scope would have only been an occasion for a bunch of lobbyists to huddle and try to find a way of prying the money out of the government. NASA stands out as a shining example of the limitations and inefficiencies of that method.

It would seem now is the first time in history we are wealthy enough to buy (if nothing else as part of a company) our own spacecraft. Risky? Absolutely. But the first group to field a system for lofting things into orbit at $1 per pound will effectively have a license to print money, and the efficiencies provided to all will literally transform the way we live. NASA couldn't be replaced in 1982 because nobody knew how to make money in space. Today, that is no longer a problem, and so privatization is much more than just a buzzword.

Stasists and technocrats around the country will be saying things like "this is too important to let the markets handle", which is of course merely an elitist shorthand for "this is too important to me to let the markets handle." Only the power of government can simply take money away from people and spend it on a project someone else thinks is a good cause. "It's my dream, and the only reason you don't see it is you're stupid, greedy, or ignorant. Give me your money anyway." The whole point of representational government is to give the people who have money a voice in the way it is spent. But the mechanisms aren't pretty, and even when they work they do so only poorly.

Far better to have people willingly come together and spend their own money reaching for the stars. Only then can the people providing the money be sure the people spending it are doing so wisely, and remove them easily if they are not. Only then can setbacks be seen as mere obstacles to be overcome, and not opportunities to prove the entire effort folly. Only then can we be certain what is finally accomplished can stand on its own, last beyond our years, and not simply be seen as a pinnacle, one small step, on a path never to be walked again.

Nearly everyone who says "health care needs to be reformed" usually follows it up with "we should have a system more like Canada's." This is, as usual, simply because most people really don't know much about Canada's system:

Canada often boasts its universal health care program shows it is more caring than the United States, but the system is creaking alarmingly, with long wait lists for treatment, and shortages of cash and doctors.

Ok, once more, and slowly... this is not unique. All forms of socialized or government-controlled medicine inevitably experience shortages and poor service. All of them. Without exception.

The reason is simple, yet vast numbers of people (including many who read this site) don't seem to understand it... of all the different methods of allocating scarce resources with alternative uses, government has been proven time and again, for thousands of years, to be the worst agent available. Not just a bad agent, the worst.

There are a huge number of "things" that make up the ultimate cost of, say, a medication, or a doctor's time and expertise, or a hospital stay. Because of this, it's effectively impossible for any third party to accurately "set" or "control" the price of (or access to) any one of them, let alone all of them.

Of course, this doesn't stop technocrats from trying, or from discontented citizens from trying to make them. The results are as inevitable as they are depressingly predictable. People consume more when the price is low, so setting an artificial ceiling on how much can be charged for something results in greater consumption of that something than would otherwise be the case. Conversely, people do not produce as much (or at all) when the price they receive for something is below what it costs them to make it, and so production drops. This leads to a simple and incontrovertible axiom:

When price controls are instituted on a good or service, shortages will always follow.

What's worse are the incentives price controls set up. Since profits on goods and services are typically fixed in most price control schemes (when they're allowed at all), there is no incentive to reduce costs. Why improve a dilapidated hospital when you're guaranteed a profit running it as it is now? Innovation is at least stifled, if not halted outright. Why attempt creating a daring new drug when you can't recoup your costs? Quality of service falls, sometimes dangerously. Why should anyone go to the considerable effort of becoming a doctor when your fixed compensation comes nowhere close to the cost?

The ugly truth is that, as perhaps the only free market medical system remaining on the planet, the United States is effectively subsidizing the rest of the world's medicine. Canada's system (and everywhere else governments set the price of things medical) functions as well as it does only because international companies are able to transfer the costs of their artificial and inefficient systems to our free markets, making health care more expensive for us than it otherwise would be. They have access to new and innovative drugs, machines, and procedures only because the United States allows companies and doctors to cover their risk in whatever manner they see fit. The prices of all forms of medical care fall only because the United States provides choice and competition, which pressures providers to become more efficient lest they fail completely.

Is our system perfect? Hardly. If you can't afford a car you can walk or ride a bicycle. If you can't afford a specific cancer drug you die. The simple and inhuman finality of this equation puts a unique spin on markets dealing in human medicine, and creates different pressures and incentives, ones that even cold-hearted economists can't deal with comfortably. Markets in general are always messy, sometimes dangerous, and never a good place for the sick, unlucky, or stupid. As with democracies, they are not the best solution to the problem, they are simply the least worst solution that humanity has found. And as with any human construction, there is always room for improvement.

But anyone who thinks government is the solution simply because Canadians pay less for Viagra than we do is not paying attention.

Power outages are so much fun. Our network has had essentially nothing invested in it for the past three years, in spite of near continuous growth in the overall organization. Well, essentially nothing, except for the quarter-million dollar website that the previous Executive Director thought was far more important than, like, ensuring everyone got paid. Which is why he isn't by us anymore.

At any rate, by now the network compares favorably to Enterprise at the beginning of ST III... it can fake being a real network, as long as you don't bang on it too hard. Even then, as long as I'm in engineering, you can still bang on it a bit, as long as you ignore the screams coming from my office.

But when the extra-helpful folks from Virginia Power & Light dropped a large branch on some power lines while trying to clear them, the network got far more than just a solid thump. With a loud "BANG!!!", power dropped to the entire building, and most of the rest of the block. Four days from our annual convention. In an office full of excitable social-work majors. It was such a lovely evening.

The next morning was spent re-lighting various electronic pilot lights. Even then, the shambling mound of bailing wire and ductape that is my network had nooks and crannies of darkness that required someone else stumbling over the furniture to find. So the rest of the day was spent finding these poor lost souls, throwing the breakers required, and leading them to safety.

Which brings us to the point of the post. My organization serves people who, on the best of days, can be rather fragile of mood and quirky of personality. Having a severe illness can turn you into an object of compassion, but it can also turn you into a gold-plated pain in the ass.

So I definitely rolled my eyes a bit when the operator told me QLZ was on the phone. Nice guy, as long as you were willing to follow the lines of his hypercubed personality:

Me: "Hello, QLZ"

QLZ: "Hello, Scott, how are you?"

Me: "Oh, fine, just fine... how are you?"

QLZ: "Well, turns out I have cancer."

For once, someone else got to listen to my train of thought derail and skid into a nearby oil refinery.

QLZ: "Yeah, kidney cancer. But that's not why I'm calling. I can't get [a trivial section of an infrequently used website] to work... what's up with that?"

It's times like that I realize why I'm there. Most of these folks are even less clueful than a Kerry campaign staffer confronted by a Swift boat veteran. One of them left a brand new computer in its box because he literally couldn't figure out how to get it out.

But dammit, it isn't their fault. Their brains went south on them, usually just as they were beginning "real" life. Their heads get caught in Doom3 sometimes, but they can't hit save, can't just push away from it when it gets too much. The pills that pop them out of that horror don't fix it, they just tone it down enough for them to hear over hell and rejoin the human race. But even then, some of them can't escape.

Which is why, pain in the ass or no, I did what I was supposed to. I fixed his dinky little problem, and wished him a nice day.

I made a goddamned difference.

How many of you have today?

A woman walks into the shop area of the dealership. "My car is broken, it won't start, it doesn't run right, and it never has."

"Did it make any specific noises? Smell funny? Have any vibrations?" the tech asked.

After a long, blank look, the woman says, "I don't know. I don't remember. All I know is it's broken and it's been that way a long time."

The tech calls up her record, which has entries like, "no gas in tank", "oil not changed for 12,000 miles", and "no air in tires." So the tech asked, "Well, was it working right after we fixed it the last three times?"

Another long, blank look. "I don't remember. But it is definitely broken now and has been for awhile."

The tech glances over the woman's shoulder and sees the car sitting quietly in the parking lot, with nothing obvious wrong with it. "It'll probably take a day to diagnose it. I'll let you know how much it will be when we find out what's wrong."

An aggrieved look comes over the woman's face. In a tone that strongly suggests the tech should not speak this way to people obviously injured by the incompetence of the tech and his staff, she says "I just don't understand why my car causes me such trouble." Then, switching subtly to an "I-know-damned-well-you're-screwing-with-me" tone, she says "My husband's an executive at an airline and he says cars shouldn't act this way."

Idea shamelessly stolen from IFOC.

You'd think with this kind of intro, this New York Times bit (free reg, blah blah) would've gotten more attention:

The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II.

I mean, of course that happened. Everyone knows the economy went into the tank as soon as Bush showed up. So why isn't this story getting more play? Maybe because:

new information shows that [the recession's] effect on Americans' incomes, particularly those at the upper end of the spectrum, was much more severe. (emphasis added)

Well, that's well and good, but Bush's tax cuts are really to blame, right? Wrong:

To some extent, taxes fell more than incomes because of tax cuts championed by President Bush and approved by Congress in 2001. But ... the major tax rate reductions for highly paid Americans did not take effect until 2003
...
At the same time many of those whose incomes fell the most - those reporting $200,000 to $10 million in income - paid at the highest rates, which meant that the drain on revenues was even greater when their incomes shrank.

This isn't Fox News people, it's the Great Gray Lady herself reporting it. Maybe now some of you will actually believe the people who own most of the wealth really are paying most of the taxes? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?

Didn't think so.

And, really, have any of you thought about what will actually happen if all those tax cuts get rolled back? Sure, revenue will increase, substantially even, at first. But what happens after that?

Wealthy people, people who are already paying most of the tax burden, will suddenly have strong incentives to move their money elsewhere. And, unlike you and me, rich people have the knowledge and ability to do so. Over time, tax revenues will begin to drop. Fine, at least some of you will say, we'll make it illegal for them to move their money out, change the laws and get rid of all those tax loopholes and shelters.

Here we delve into the world of science fiction, because (thank God) it's not 1967 (or 1993), and the Democrats do not have control of Congress. But let's just indulge ourselves and say that, in a fit of moonbat madness, laws really are passed preventing people from moving their wealth out of the country. Tax revenues will stop falling, at least at first. But what happens after that?

Such laws simply move the problem one step back. Instead of moving their wealth out of the country, rich people will start moving themselves out of the country. Tax revenues will continue to fall, and the deficit will baloon again, and there won't be any rich people to raise taxes on this time, because they'll have all moved to Barbados. All because nobody thought past stage one of their best and brightest plan.

This is all so intensely obvious and well-attributed I am completely flummoxed when people refuse to believe it. Well educated people who I otherwise deeply respect will take a scientist at their word when they say, "evolution is fact" but will refuse to believe an economist when they say, "taking less profit on more items will always earn more money than when you take more profit on fewer items."

Far too often we focus on the desired goals and deplorable results of a program instead of the incentives they create. We celebrate the creation of a "great society", and fifteen years later deplore the welfare state. We cheer the concept of "equal opportunity", and twenty years later decry quotas. Others crow about universal health care, and then ignore the people who die of cancer because they were forced to wait fifteen months for chemotherapy.

Unlike the other side's opinion of my own beliefs, I really do think liberals and lefties have the best of intentions. Free health care, free education, free access, all and more are wonderful concepts, beautiful ideas, that speak well of their humanity.

Unfortunately we don't live in a world that allows any of those things to succeed. Your ideas may be noble, but they will fail. There's a reason the further to the political left you go, the higher the contempt for the "common man" becomes. When an idea, program, or policy requires going against human nature, failure is inevitable. When that happens it's far easier to blame the mass's intransigence instead of one's own cherished beliefs.

Markets are messy, but they work, because they compliment human nature. Democracies are messy, but they work, for the same reason. Science, the cherished last fallback of the stasist technocrat, works only because it weds the human desire to learn and explore with the equally human desire to doubt and discredit.

I don't hate the left or their beliefs, even though most of them certainly seem to hate me and mine. Instead, I feel compassion, because they're simply good people who, even with overwhelming evidence, categorically refuse to recognize simple facts. They don't believe it.

And that is why they fail.

WaPo today carried yet another billboard in the "we know better than you do" saga of interventionist America:

Safety advocates say the government has failed to keep up with the trend [of car makers emphasizing performance over safety]. The Governors Highway Safety Association, an alliance of state officials, says federal regulators ignore speed safety in favor of promoting seat belts and discouraging drunken driving.

But the section continues with an absolutely classic case of an exclusion fallacy:

"We're at an all-time high for seat belt use, and fatalities continue to increase," association spokesman Jonathan Adkins said.

To his credit, even the reporter didn't let this one go completely without note:

There were 43,220 fatalities on U.S. roads last year, the highest number since 1990 and the second straight year of increasing deaths ... The rate of deaths per miles traveled stayed unchanged, because people also drove more than ever. [emphasis added]

The counterpoint is almost uselessly vague. Which "last" year was it (turns out "Last year" was probably 2002, since the 2003 information hasn't been published yet)? Over how long a period have the rate of deaths per mile (DPM) been unchanged? Did the fatality rate drop at all during the 90s? By how much? How does that compare with the DPM rate?

You'll never get a straight answer to these questions out of "safety advocate" organizations because to do so would be to completely undercut their entire reason for existing. The DPM rate is a far more useful statistic in judging highway danger. Overall fatality spikes can always be correlated with improvements in economic conditions, lowering gas prices, cheaper cars, and whatever else causes more people to drive more often. Yet the DPM rate has always gone down because cars, roads, and drivers are all improving.

When causes are looked at objectively, two statistics will immediately jump out... alcohol and inattentiveness. To this day, drunks account for nearly half of all traffic fatalities. Drivers not paying attention or falling asleep account for nearly a quarter of the remainder. Neither would be affected by a "slow the f--- down" campaign, yet addressing them would drop the highway fatality rate by nearly 75%.

But you won't hear these people talking about that, because it denies them the ability to disapprove of everyone else and try to get government to "do something about it". Third parties who think they "know better" than everyone else have been trying to steer our government around for as long as its existed. They actually managed to do it from 1933-1980, with predictably disastrous results*. Now, thankfully, they're mostly reduced to whining and bloviating about whatever toothpick they've chosen to stick in their own ear.

Speed may kill, but only if you get in an accident. Which one would you rather prevent?

------------
* Yeah, I know, "we seem to have done all right from 1941-1945". Hell, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

As I'm listening to the current schlock on the radio, I'm thinking back to the late 80's and early 90's. At that point, we'd gone from good rock-n-roll music and had started to get into the power ballads from the hair metal bands. Then, rock died, we got a plethora of boy bands, and grunge hit. In thinking about this, I came up with a theory - as soon as a genre of music gets to be uber-cool, it gets invaded by wussies who write power ballads. Then, that type gets a huge boost in the ratings and dies off a few years later.

To illustrate, here's a progression of bands that I want you to consider: Jethro Tull, Foghat, AC-DC, and the like give way to Journey and their cohorts. What happens? Hard rock basically dies off (in an interesting subnote - this does give rise to millions of mullets...)

Then, after a bit of weak music hangs around for a bit, we start to get the harder bands of the 80's - Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Anthrax, and the like. The kids in shop class rejoice as they have hard anti-social music that they can annoy old folks with. Then what happens? Hair metal - Ratt, Poison, Dokken, and others. While they were mostly hard music (sex, drugs and rock-n-roll), they started down the path of wussie music. Remember 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn'? Probably Poison's biggest hit. That opened Pandora's box. Then you got Warrant, Nelson, and Richard Marx. Need I remind you that this was one of the darkest moments in musical history?!? Coinciding with this was the explosion of the boy band.

Relief soon followed. Nirvana exploded on the scene along with Pearl Jam, STP (who desperately wanted to be Pearl Jam), Alice in Chains, the Breeders, and a plethora of bands that rocked. Some had social songs, others had dark emotional tracks, and no one over 25 could understand a damn thing they said. Life was good. The buzz on grunge continued unmolested for years.

Then came the slow change. The constipated bands (think Creed and their clones) showed up. Now, we've got the power ballads coming out again. Would Nirvana have done a ballad? Could you imagine Pearl Jam doing one (ignore the Last Kiss cover - that's a tribute to the past)? STP singing about anything other than drugs? No - but now you have Hoobastank and others pushing their schlock. It's the death of grunge, I tell you.

Do I know what's going to replace it? No - but please, by the Goddess, let it ROCK!

LaShawn Barber linked up this important decision in a Virginia suit that claimed illegal aliens' constitutional rights were being violated because state colleges were refusing to enroll them:

A federal judge has dismissed charges by a group of illegal aliens who claimed that state-sponsored colleges in Virginia were violating the Constitution by refusing to enroll them.

As a conservative, it probably won't surprise you that I applaud this decision and think illegal aliens should be denied access to any tax-supported services. What may surprise you though is that I think the problem can only be solved by liberalizing our immigration laws to make it easier for people to achieve legal status.

Personally, I find it outrageous that people who are not paying taxes are getting access to things like free education, legal representation, and medical care. These are benefits of citizens, people who through birth or effort belong in a very real sense to the United States. They are extended to legal aliens because those legals are paying at least some taxes, and are therefore entitled to the same access. I also think it's a good idea, because it makes it more likely that people who work hard and are productive will become citizens of this country, making it a better place for us all.

But again, in no uncertain terms, I do not think illegal immigrants should have access to any of these services. In fact, I think these services should be actively denied to them.

However, as a dynamic progressive, I think it's current immigration and minimum-wage law that are in fact creating the problem of illegal immigration. I strongly believe we need to liberalize current laws and make it easier for people to legally immigrate to this country. For related reasons, I support initiatives to roll back minimum wage laws.

As any illegal (or employer thereof) will tell you, this would simply legitimize what's already a fact on the ground. If federal officials found every single illegal immigrant in this country and deported them tomorrow, the results would be disastrous. Entire chunks of our economy would simply evaporate, or slowly grind to a halt. We're talking a full-blown collapse here. Anyone who believes otherwise doesn't live in even a medium-sized city or major agricultural area.

Illegals are in such high demand because our minimum wage laws set an artificial lower boundary on labor costs, making it too expensive to hire citizens or legal immigrants for most, if not all, entry-level and/or low-skill jobs. Not just because they don't want to do the work, but because employing them at an illegal, albeit realistic, wage would be an unacceptable risk to the employer. An illegal's status also creates incentives for them to under value the cost of their labor, because the threat of deportation is so high, making them even cheaper to employ (and, by definition, exploit).

Common citizens oppose the liberalization of immigration law because they think "they'll take our jobs", not understanding that the jobs illegals "take" are nearly always those that nobody else wants. Organized labor opposes it because it represents the last bastion of their anti-market, protectionist power. Powerful business interests oppose it because it would in fact increase their costs, since now-legal immigrants could demand a market-set price for their labor, as well as humane working conditions that the threat of deportation keeps them from demanding.

Unfortunately, just reforming immigration law won't be enough. Even if we were to suddenly grant everyone who stepped into the country legal status, the results would still be a disaster. At the very best, prices would spike upward on pretty much everything as now-legal immigrants could demand unrealistically high wages for their unskilled, entry-level labor. At worst the immigration problem would continue unchanged, as legal status would rightly be seen as only useful for the very skilled (as it pretty much is today). Ending our immigration problem will require not only liberalization of immigration law, it will require the repeal (either dejure or defacto) of the minimum wage laws that make hiring any unskilled or entry-level labor unrealistically expensive.

Note I do not say "repeal immigration laws"... I still think the ability to deport those who cause trouble or try to find some sort of free ride is important. But by making it easier for immigrants who come to this country to work to achieve legal status, we'll gain far more than we'll lose:

• The tax base will increase as now-legal aliens by the tens of thousands start paying income taxes.
• Services such as free education will grow as new revenue allows for their expansion.
• Exploitation will decrease because legal aliens will have open access to laws that protect everyone in the workplace.
• Unemployment will plummet for all workers (both citizens and non-citizens) especially on the lower end of the scale, as the cost and risk of employing low-skilled and entry-level workers is allowed to settle at a market-driven price point.
• Thousands of people will have the opportunity to learn the skills required for higher income jobs because it will now be cheap enough to teach them when they start out.
• Crime rates, dependency, and poverty will all decrease markedly as more and more able-bodied people are gainfully employed.
• "Offshoring" and other "outsourcing" pressures will ease because the US labor market's traditionally unmatched efficiency will suddenly be paired with much lower labor costs.
• Thousands, if not millions, of new people will place their foot on the bottom rung of the only ladder proven to yield success in America: time, jobs, education, and a stake in the system.

The Bush administration's relatively enlightened policies on immigration are one of the reasons I support his re-election. Inflation is slowly repealing the now set-in-stone minimum wage laws, and I support a Republican congress in part because they have an "over my dead body" stamp to use every time a Democrat tries to push legislation through that attempts to raise it.

Providing tax-supported services to illegal immigrants who pay nothing into the system is not only unfair, it creates the counter-productive pressures of dependency and exploitation. Only by reforming and liberalizing immigration and wage laws will we break this vicious cycle. By doing so, we will not only be recognizing the facts on the ground, we will be setting the stage for millions of people to become productive members of our society. In a nation in which every single member is an immigrant of some sort (even if they were just hunting mammoth, they moved from somewhere else), how can we do otherwise?

Slashdot linked up this extra-snarky NYT Magazine article describing the rise of the graphic novel as a form of "serious" literature. Contains wonderful bon-mots like this:

Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.

Which, along with the rest, is among the better examples of affirming the consequent I've seen in a long time.

The rise of the graphic novel is not some sort of dystopian signpost of the crumbling of western civilization, it is instead yet another indicator of the rising wealth of people under 35, in all industrial cultures.

The left may believe it's axiomatic that "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer", but this is only because they choose to see what they want to see. Wealth is not a zero-sum game, it is created. The pizza of wealth is not cut into different sized slices, it grows larger, and the slices grow with it.

One of those slices belongs to people under 35, who are in real terms far wealthier than their parents were at the same age, let alone their grandparents or great grandparents. In a free market, goods and services follow the preferences of whomever happens to have enough dollars to spend, and the youth of today have a great deal to spend indeed.

Comics and graphic novels are being taken seriously not because they're "suddenly" a lot better. As anyone who grew up in the 70s can attest, comics were exploring sophisticated narratives with adult "situations" long before publishers like Dark Horse ever opened their doors. The Watchmen was a culmination, not an innovation. Comics and graphic novels are today being taken seriously because for the first time serious money is being made off of them.

The rise in quality is also no accident. For perhaps the first time, a market that has always appreciated quality and sophistication now has enough money to spend to attract it. Furthermore, a growing market will always provide far more opportunity than a static one, and comics and graphic novels are growing very fast indeed.

This is a culture that is quite patently not "dumbing down", but is instead exploring new themes and new ideas using a medium older than both film and television in which to do it. The perceived “dumbness” so often decried from the tops of various chattering ivory towers is far more about what a very small group of people think we all should listen to, read, or watch, instead of what we simply want to listen to, read, or watch. What they are incapable of understanding is this is a culture and a generation that simply has better things to do than reading very long stories about very small changes in very small people just because their elders tell them they should.

For the past eighteen months every time a group of pissed-off Iraqis gets together and decides to blow themselves up some Americans every talking head around the world will say the same word at once: Tet. This is Tet, that is Tet, here comes the Tet again, over and over again, culminating in the greatest Tet revival of them all, the Fallujah offensive in April. At that point, you couldn't swing a baseball bat without cracking open the skull of some commentator saying "Tet".

All it really showed was how poorly understood Tet is among journalistic circles. This is not surprising, since the Tet offensive is probably the most poorly understood event in a very poorly understood war. Worse still, by calling the game too soon the media are now incapable of admitting that the recent country-wide bombings and insurgencies in Iraq are at least as "Tet-like" as anything they reported in Fallujah. The media are therefore ignoring valuable parallels and insights between Tet and current events, ones that could provide perspective, and help avoid repeating profoundly damaging mistakes.

It is, of course, useful to understand what, exactly, happened at Tet before moving forward. After some fifteen years of more or less continuous conflict and three years of direct American involvement, the North Vietnamese leadership decided only a bold move could quickly end the civil war in Vietnam. To that end, a surprise offensive was planned for the 1968 Tet holiday (January 31st), Vietnam's New Year celebration and up to that time traditionally a period of truce.

The plan was for the North Vietnamese army to stage a diversionary attack on a remote US base in Khe Sahn near the North-South border. While US forces were thus distracted, southern guerrilla Viet Cong (VC) cadres along with smuggled-in North Vietnamese regular army soldiers would attack most major cities in the South simultaneously. The people of the South, it was assumed, would see how the corrupt Southern regime was incapable of defending them, rise up, and join the insurrection, quickly ending the entire conflict with a single stroke.

At first the plan worked brilliantly. US leadership, which had always been looking for the "one big fight" required to smash the North, went after the bait of Khe Sahn like a starving marlin. The VC uprisings caught all remaining US and Southern forces completely by surprise, allowing the VC to rapidly gain control of several cities, even allowing them to blow a hole in the wall of the US embassy in Saigon during a direct assault.

Unfortunately the offensive began to unravel nearly as quickly as it had started. The key failure was the South's inability to see "the light of truth and liberation" their Northern brethren offered and their consequent refusal to join in the revolt. Through a bit of luck and a bit of skill, a lower-ranking US Army general had held back a few battalions of US forces for protection in Saigon, and these, combined with the Southern Vietnamese army (ARVN), were then able to annihilate the VC forces after a few weeks of admittedly bitter fighting. The Viet Cong would never again be a real factor in the Vietnamese conflict.

Someone completely unfamiliar with the story of Vietnam might be surprised to find out that not only was Tet a disaster for the Viet Cong, it was also a disaster for the United States military. Tet marked the point where public opinion started its decisive swing from supporting an eventual victory to wishing simply to get out. The US's military presence ceased growing and started shrinking almost overnight. Protests of the war would grow larger and increasingly violent. It is no exaggeration to say the chain of events that directly led to the fall of Saigon had its first link forged at Tet.

Conventional wisdom among many military history buffs is this is the direct result of the negative media portrayals both during and after the event. Certainly at the time the events of Tet were portrayed in a negative light and the general perception for perhaps the next fifteen years would be that Tet was a resounding defeat for Southern and US forces.

However, while this is now demonstrably untrue, to lay the blame for the loss of Vietnam on the media's portrayal of a single event is to completely ignore the greater context of the war itself. Vietnam was a debacle from end to end not because of the top brass's inability to control a hostile media, but because of its complete and utter incompetence in the handling of the conflict itself.

Equipped and trained to fight a gigantic force-on-force conventional war with the Soviet Union, like a toddler with a hammer the upper echelons of military leadership kept trying to bang the square peg of Vietnam into the round hole of mechanized warfare. Lower echelon officers who could see what was wrong and attempted to make a difference were prevented from and sometimes even punished for developing new tactics and strategies to fight and win. The dissonance between an army that knew how to win (or at least how not to lose) and a leadership that refused to let them slowly began to tear the military apart from within.

Uncomfortable media reports, worrisome losses, and incessant protests could be dismissed as long as our leaders assured America they were winning. As hard as it is to imagine now, the government's say-so was all that most of the "greatest generation" ever needed to feel confident. But Tet ripped away the curtain of deception the military and political leadership had drawn over the truth. Contrary to what they had been told by their leaders, at times almost daily, the enemy was not growing weaker, was not demoralized or bankrupt, and was not going anywhere any time soon. That Tet itself ultimately ended in victory was of little import. The evidence of their strength, their resolve, and their skill was as bright and clear as the TV screens that transmitted it. It was a fundamental breach of trust between the American people and its political and military leadership that ultimately doomed the effort in Vietnam. The ultimate significance of Tet is that it was here the breach first fissured open.

The parallels between Tet and the three guerrilla insurrections in Iraq (Ba'athist, al-Sadrist, and the current Zarqawist) are many, but they are subtle and too often incorrectly drawn by the media. Then, as now, Guerrilla forces are fighting a US-run occupation to discredit and destroy a US-backed regime. Then, as now, the battle is timed to maximize its effect on an upcoming presidential election. Then, as now, victory will be measured more by a swing in opinion polls than any loss of blood, land, or treasure.

The differences between Tet and the various insurrections are at least as important, and almost never discussed in the media. Iraq is not split in two, with large numbers of its citizens fighting each other. There is no huge regular army standing behind the guerrillas, waiting to pounce. There are no superpowers writing blank checks to the opposition. The government of Iraq is not a military junta of Christian outsiders, emplaced by a violent coup and empowered by US force. Most importantly, America today blindly trusts no one with the lives of its children. We are quite ready, perhaps at times too ready, to believe reports that our political and military leaders are dropping the ball, and are quick to call them on it.

While the political lessons of Tet, that no one with a huge amount of power should ever be trusted blindly, and (much later) that journalists can be trusted to report what they see, but not what they think it means, can be said to have been well and truly learned by modern America. However, the military lesson of Tet seems to have been learned by hardly anyone at all.

When reduced to a narrow military lesson, Tet teaches us that it is profoundly dangerous for an irregular guerrilla force, no matter how well organized or equipped, to take on a more powerful conventional military force in any sort of sustained offensive. Such offensives frequently start out with the advantage of surprise and spectacular success, but with time, especially without the support of the people, merely serve to expend carefully hoarded materiel and expose carefully trained cadre and commanders to the overwhelming firepower of a superior force.

In 1968, with a force trained in the wrong tactics using the wrong gear supported by locals who clearly wished to be somewhere else, the US military utterly destroyed a guerrilla force that had defeated a previous Western foe (the French) fifteen years earlier and seemed undefeatable just weeks before. Thirty-five years of technology, training, strategy, and tactics have made our military orders of magnitude more effective at fighting insurgents dumb enough to try and take them on.

Tet should not teach us an organized uprising is a sign of immenent defeat, but instead is an opportunity. Like a column of enemy tanks moving without air cover, we should see these guerrillas for what they really are.

Targets.

There are people in this world who:

• think permissiveness and personal freedom are what make America great, while also strongly supporting smoking bans and crushing cigarette taxes.
• think evolution is just a theory, and a wrong one at that, while at the same time taking a rainbow of pills to keep themselves alive.
• will passionately declare, in no uncertain terms, that America has become a Fascist-like police state. In public. At a rally. In a park. Owned by the government.
• believe those with strong religious convictions are dangerous and should not be allowed positions in government, who also think Paul Ehrlich, Stephen Schneider, and others like them are above reproach.
• think abortion should be made illegal, while at the same time opposing all forms of social welfare.
• participate in pro choice rallies one day and visit a friend who had to go to China to adopt a child the next.
• worry about air quality for their child while driving them to daycare in an automobile.
• oppose any sort of amnesty for illegal aliens, while at the same time being careful to step aside as the brown guy with the leaf blower on his back walks by.
• think the federal government should do more to help people, just before they go spend their latest tax refund check.
• believe Michael Moore is a crusader, and Ann Coulter is a maniac.
• believe Ann Coulter is a crusader, and Michael Moore is a maniac.
• think our government is dangerously interventionist, while at the same time decrying free trade and job outsourcing.
• think first amendment rights are the most important rights we have, while at the same keeping their name on the federal "do-not-call" list.
• think the failure of biblical prophecies of apocalypse prove that book completely invalid, but the failure of environmental predictions of the same is simply due to a lack of data.
• believe at least one of the items on this list is not a contradiction at all.

Four out of five Iraqis report holding a negative view of the U.S. occupation authority and of coalition forces. -- (Washington Post, May 13, 2004).

Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm. (USA Today, April 28, 2004)

Few Iraqis mourn the fall of Saddam but there is a growing, at times almost visceral, hatred of the occupation. (Independent/UK, June 22, 2003)

The signs seem to be everywhere... we're failing to rebuild Iraq, we're screwing up the occupation, the Iraqis hate us and want us gone gone gone. It would seem that saying the occupation is not working out is like saying George Bush tends to stumble over words or Michael Moore looks a little chunky. The whole thing feels like it's coming apart faster than an zombie extra in "The Dawn of the Dead."

What I find surprising is that everyone thinks this is a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, the absolute worst thing that could have happened would have been for us to have gone in with a marvelous master plan that quickly and efficiently rebuilt Iraq into a gleaming, well-scrubbed nation, sorta like those IKEA commercials, only with tanks. You see, nation building is simply not something I think we should be all that good at.

"You two want to go outside? You better clean up this goddamned room first, because if I come back and this place still looks like a train wreck, I'm going to clean it up for you."

"I'm going to clean it up for you." No eight words were heard with more dread in our house, especially coming from my dad. The first time he gave us an "or else", we didn't take him all that seriously. When we came home our room was spotless... pristine, like something you'd see in a Home and Garden magazine. It was fantastic, until we realized it got that way because dad had been the one deciding what was junk and what was important. For a brief time we thought he'd even thrown out the dog. It was, in essence, an apocalypse for two boys who thought putting stuff up was what a maid (or mom) did.

From that point on we took our dad's warnings with deathly seriousness. "Clean up your goddamned room!" motivated us with the same alacrity as Greek peasants hearing Zeus's own voice from on high.

This makes us sound like two selfish spoiled brats, which we were, but really we were just being human. Throughout time and space, giving something valuable to a human being in the hope they'll start working to get more is disastrous. Eventually, and with surprising swiftness, they start expecting that something. Taking it away results not in a buckling down to get it themselves, but instead brings tantrums wailing for a replacement or outright rebellion in order to take it.

Only providing humans with the opportunity to get it themselves, and then having the patience and discipline to let them, will lead to long term success. Oh, there will still be wailing and rebellion aplenty, with maddening attempts to cheat, lie, or steal their way to success, but it will be the background noise of a system building itself up instead of the chaotic roar of a system crashing down.

In this, nations are not much different from the people who make them up. South Vietnam had billions of dollars poured into it, and the protection of the most powerful military machine in the world to protect it, and the result was not a vibrant society of capitalists but instead a sad, sick, twisted culture of dependants and sycophants who simultaneously loathed the presence of the rich Yankee and bewailed any mention of his imminent departure. The Yankee would never depart, so why should they even try to figure it out themselves? The resulting collapse when we did leave may have been demoralizing for Americans, but it was Armageddon for the South Vietnamese, who endured nearly two decades of violent "re-education" at that hands of their northern brethren.

That today we are disheartened or surprised at the chaos and confusion, inefficiencies and graft, abuses and even death in Iraq merely shows the world is right in one respect... most Americans are hopelessly naive about the world around them. What other country would be disappointed that a people ground under the boot heel of a madman for the past thirty five years, with not one year of self-rule in the past five thousand, were unable to "see the light" and form their own working democracy in less than eighteen months? What other country in the world would contain a significant number of people who think this failure could have been avoided with better planning?

Fixing a broken nation isn't like fixing a broken car. This is not "Pimp My Ride" with a guy named Achmed and a really sad truck. A nation is an organic thing, capable of healing itself if given the time and space to do so. A surgeon who cuts and sews on a patient and then does it some more when they don't leap out of bed the next day isn't a healer, they're a butcher. So it is with a beuracracy, polity, or chattering elite who search for program after program to "fix" a nation's problems and then blame the first white face they see when it all fails, all the while ignoring and even impeding the progress of the people on the ground, who are after all the only ones with any real hope of solving it at all.

So pardon me if I'm not disappointed when an Iraqi says we're screwing it all up, or when a reporter breathlessly announces "they hate us", or that they'll be happy to see us all go. I don't want them to be happy with us. I don't want them to think they owe it all to us. I don't want them to think they owe any of it to us. Arab cultures are the last great honor-driven societies in the world. Can you imagine the guilt trip an entire nation of them would undergo if they thought they owed it all to a bunch of clumsy grinning Yankees who just walked up and handed it to them? Do you really think they would be grateful? Do you really think they'd keep it running after we left?

I want the rest of the world to know we're serious when we say "clean it up or we'll clean it up for you", and that the consequences of ignoring this warning will not be a non-stop jet ride to modernity. I want the mice to understand that roaring will like as not get them stepped on before they're handed any cheese. But I don't want us as a nation to think we're good at it, or that it's a simple way to solve a problem. It's said that when you hold a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and I would fear for a world containing a nation that thought such carpentry was cheap or quick or easy.

But I would equally fear for a world that contained no nation, no society, no people, willing and able to stand up and take down fascists and fanatics when they see the need. I'm proud to be a citizen of a nation that's willing to sacrifice its own grown children to ensure at least the hope of freedom for those only now being born in a place almost as far away and alien as a crater on Mars. I want desperately for them to succeed, and to believe they succeeded not because but in spite of our help.

I can think of no greater tribute to the sacrifice of our soldiers and citizens than a free, prosperous, safe, argumentative, unreasonable, and ungrateful Iraq. If the price we must pay for the first three is putting up with the last three, so be it. After all, rebuilding something in your own image means always having to look at yourself in the mirror.

In just a few short weeks our very own Nina, sister-in-law extraordinaire, will graduate High School. While my first memory of her is a three-and-half-foot-tall ten-year-old punk rushing down the stairs, shouting as she went by, "you're the one dating my sister?!?" [fingers in an L shape slapped to her forehead] "LOSER!!!", I must say that, first impressions notwithstanding, she's turned out pretty decent after all.

However, she, like thousands of other 17 and 18-year-olds, is now staring over the precipice of adolescence and into the chasm of adulthood. If my experience is any indication, lots and lots of people are now emphasizing to all these kids how important it is to move on to college and graduate, but not a one is providing them with any real practical advice as to how to go about it. Which is where we come in...

AMCGLTD's Guide to Getting out of College with a Degree

• First and foremost, understand one thing: this is the way you're going to live the rest of your life. Once you walk out that door, you will not be coming back. If this doesn't make you feel a little queasy (hell it's nearly 20 years later and it still makes me queasy), you're not paying attention. Get used to it now while you still can.
• Choose a major, any major, and stick with it. As Joseph Campbell once said, "follow your bliss", parents and peers bedamned. College teaches you how to learn, not get a job. Learn about something that interests you now, and the tools you gain in the doing will help you get whatever job you want.
• Go to class. No, really, just go. This sounds stupid and easy... after all, that's what you do now, right? Wrong. Nobody makes you go to class in college, and dragging your ass out of bed for classes you don't understand and professors you hate will be the hardest thing you've ever done. But there are real advantages.

  Showing up every damned day will get your face noticed by the professor, who might actually start to care a little (see below) and bail your butt out of a jam if you need it. Showing up every damned day will mean you can get by without some of the massive amounts of homework college buries you under. Showing up every damned day for four years in a row, and paying at least a little bit of attention, doing a little bit of homework, taking just a few notes, will almost guarantee your graduation.

• Stay the hell away from credit cards. This will start out being easy, but will end up being the second hardest thing you do (aside from graduating itself). Entering college will mean most all of you will have jumped from luxurious independence to indentured servitude in a matter of months. It's happened so fast that none of you will even notice it for at least another year. You'll be dealing with it for probably the next fifteen.

  "Independence?!?" I can hear you all cry out, "this is not independence! Independence is what I'm going to, not coming from."

  Wrong-o. You're confusing social independence with economic independence. This will be the very first time in your life where the economic decisions you make will be the difference between having what you want and getting what you need. There really will come a time when it's down to getting Manson's (or Korn's, or BEP's, or Jay-Z's, or whoever it is you damned kids listen to nowadays) new CD or getting groceries. When (not if) this happens, the siren song of easy credit will be deafening. Most of your friends will succumb, which will make your ragged sweatshirt, torn jeans, and Ramen noodles even harder to bear.

  As someone who only just now, after more than a decade of trying, got himself out from under the debt hole he'd dug himself in his college years, I won't preach to you how credit cards are wrong or evil, or that you should throw them all away. I'll just say they're stupid, and they'll make you do stupid things if you're not damned careful with them. Become a mean cheap bastard, and if you ever catch yourself seeing credit cards as an opportunity, cut them up now.

• If you go to orientation or some big introduction assembly, look to your left, then look to your right. Those people aren't going to graduate. College is that brutal. Now sigh and feel sorry for them, because you're the one getting out with the prize.
• Never take a class before 9:00 am or after 2:00 pm if you can possibly avoid it. The people around you saying, "how hard can it be? High school classes start at 7:30!" are idiots, and will not graduate. 9:00-ish classes don't condone laziness, they give you invaluable cram time to bone up on exams and finish papers. If a class you must take is only available at 7:30, take an elective now and take the required class next semester. I'm serious, it's really that important.

  Late classes are different, in that they cut into your study/leisure/work time, and make job scheduling more complex than it has to be. Avoid them when possible.

• "Gappy" schedules can work to your advantage, as long as the gap isn't too long. You'll get an hour or two of free time to study, work on projects, or read without the discipline pressure you'll face back at the dorm or the apartment.
• Don't be afraid to drop a class, especially if the problems you're having are caused by the instructor. Nobody pays attention to "incomplete" marks on your transcript, but everyone pays attention to your GPA. Only a moron tries to "tough it out" with an instructor who can't teach them.
• Understand that college instructors do not care about you. You'll be dealing either with grad students who have problems of their own or tenured professors who could screw the Dean's daughter in the main square and not get fired for it. Mommy and daddy have no leverage with these people, and neither will you. Students who go to class thinking the instructors will catch them if they fall are going to end up as colorful splats on the pavement below.
• You are not the smartest person in this school. You will not be able to bullshit your way out of an answer you don't know, or to an A you don't deserve. Try it at your peril.
• Don't envy athletes, pity them. In sane colleges they're working their butts off pleasing two masters, the coach and the teacher. In an NCAA division 1 school, they're probably recruited, on a scholarship, have no idea what they're doing, and are essentially doomed from the start. They'll live high on the hog for awhile, but ten years from now they'll be asking, "you want fries with that?"
• Learn how to use a washer and dryer. Nothing screams "stupid freshman" like a pretty well-scrubbed face staring cow-eyed at a washing machine. Except maybe for the ones who go to class with pink socks.
• Cherish your weekends. You can completely cut loose between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning with essentially no consequences (well, as long as you stay out of jail). Under no circumstances hang out with people who want to party on any other day (or night). They will not graduate.
• Always keep in mind the weekend ends on Sunday morning, not Monday morning. Be wary of attempts to squeeze one more night of partying out of the weekend, and don't hang out with people who make a habit of it. They will not graduate.
• Travel. This is the only time in your life when you're supposed to be able to stuff everything important to you in the back of a car. Learn how to read a map, and take "we've never been there before!" as a challenge instead of a roadblock. If you have a reliable car, make sure you use it at least once a month to go somewhere (parent's houses don't count!)
• Give your roommate a chance, but don't stick with a psycho. They're not worth it, because they're not going to graduate. If you try to stay with them, they'll make sure you don't either. Get out quickly.
• Expect drama, ridiculous drama. The vast majority of college students will be living away from home for the first time, and far too many will be making some of the dumbest decisions of their lives. Don't let the personal politics of your new peers take your eyes off the prize.
• Expect romance, grownup romance. The kind that can and often does lead to marriage. This is not high school, where you were surrounded by layers of safety nets keeping your hormones from ruining your life. Don't get me wrong... casual is now very casual; you can boink everyone within reach if you like without garnering a "reputation". But keep in mind serious is also now very serious. Romantic entanglements will be the last, greatest risk to your chances at graduation. Tread carefully.
• Don't feel like you must pledge a fraternity or sorority for the "complete" college experience. Especially in the South, Greek life is all too often merely a continuation of the petty peer pressures of high school, only with alcohol and party dresses. Try it out on your own for awhile first.
• College is the first place you will be valued for what you know, not who you know. Cherish this, and find a group of people who share every weird or bizarre interest you may have. You'll find them if you're patient. It may be the last time.
• College is the first place you can ignore the pretty people and get away with it. Pity them too, because now they just don't matter. Some of them never get over it.
• Never walk home at night without a can of pepper spray in your hand. Girls and guys.
• Always keep a small box of condoms in your nightstand. Guys and girls.

If nothing else, your roommate will thank you for it.

Welcome to The Peak Oil Theory, the latest in a very, very long line of predictions that the world is in imminent danger of running out of oil. It all reads as very rational and very, very worrying:

Peak Oil marks the transition to the downward curve, where oil and gas become much more expensive to produce and demand hugely outstrips production. When energy supply falls beneath demand in around 2006 we will encounter an unavoidable crisis [...] The result? The economy will collapse.

Of course, the only real problem with this theory is that it's crap. Complete and utter crap. It's not that oil isn't abundant, it's just easier to get at it in some places compared to others. They're mistaking a momentary and artificial market spike for Ragnarok. When the oil finally does run out, it won't rush out in a whoosh that sucks the world down with it. It'll instead simper out in a trickle we'll barely notice at all.

First, regarding supply, let's take a moment to examine the Canadian oil sands:

Estimates of Canada’s oil reserves jumped from 4.9 billion barrels to 180 billion [in 2003], making the country the second-largest oil reserve in the world, according to an annual survey conducted by the Oil and Gas Journal.

Furthermore, pumping oil isn't like draining a bathtub. The taps won't all suddenly go dry, and certainly not all at once all over the world. Instead, world supplies will gradually decrease, gradually increasing prices. While there will certainly be some wailing and gnashing of teeth, in free market societies there will also be a great deal of innovation taking place.

There's no impetus to get serious about alternative fuels right now because there's no money in it; petroleum-based fuels are simply too good and too cheap. But when oil prices hit $55 a barrel, it'll send the alternative fuel industry into a growth spurt that'll make the tech boom of the 90s look like a baby fart in a bathtub.

And then something amazing will happen. Once things like this start attracting real money and real innovation, economies of scale will start to kick in. It will get cheaper, and then cheaper still. And it won't be an economic disaster, because the high price of oil will have finally made exploring alternative energy sources profitable. People will be making money off this new stuff, eventually more than was ever made from oil.

Except for the oil producing states, of course. For them very high oil prices are a short term boon that courts long term apocalypse.

This has already happened once to OPEC, in the 1970s. Then, an artificial shortage was created by Arabs who were pissed off because they thought it was the West that was keeping them from squishing Israel like a bug in a yarmulke*. Oil prices skyrocketed, and there were even outright shortages. Arabs got rich, and economies went into a tailspin. Pseudo-academics made millions on the talking-head-circuit telling us all now the taps will run dry.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon. Oil got really expensive, so consumers stopped using it. The money you'd save buying a little fuel-efficient Japanese car was suddenly large enough (in a short enough time) to make up for the difference in comfort you got from a big hulking American sedan. High utility costs meant you made up the difference between an expensive efficient air conditioner and a cheap wasteful one in a matter of months instead of years. Recycling became a profitable practice because it was a lot cheaper to wash a bottle and reuse it than to throw it away and buy a new one. In short, people just sorted it out and got used to it.

This was a complete disaster for OPEC. Demand started to fall, and so the price of oil did as well. Further cuts just made it worse. In 1979 oil prices were so high (the real record, once adjusted for inflation) that oil wells in Arkansas started making money again. Plucky Scandinavians finally had a reason to brave the shittiest weather in the world and started tapping gigantic oil deposits of their own. Not only was the West not using oil like it did before, it was buying it from the wrong people.

OPEC imploded, collapsing in a crisis of leadership that took twenty years to sort out. The taps gushed oil into a market that simply didn't need all that much anymore, and prices went into free fall. The pundits who predicted we'd never ever ever see gasoline prices under $1.00 per gallon in the US were suddenly filling their tanks up with stuff costing .69 cents per gallon.

Of course, the pendulum then began to swing in the other direction, but it took two decades to even come close to equilibrium. In the meantime oil-producing countries suffered an entire generation of instability and revolution, and the West, now with booming, efficient, cheaply-fueled economies, decided to let them.

Finally they got it all back under control, around 1999. This time there would be no politics. Prices would be set at $28 per barrel come hell or high water. Western governments would squeak as prices increased 30% or so, but at that point OPEC countries were desperate and didn't really care.

The problem, of course, was there really was no way to completely exclude politics. Western countries, the US in particular, are insufferably arrogant (being rich, powerful, and right most of the time will do that to you), and there's nothing quite like the thrill of jiggering with their economies by twiddling with the taps.

The first real bumps in the road came from South America, when Venezuela's attempts to sustain old-fashioned cronyism while simultaneously trying to build a free market economy came unglued in 2000. Nothing will win you elections faster than slapping around the gringos from "el Norte", and sometimes if you don't do it your unions will do it for you. Up went the prices.

But the wheels didn't really fall off until 2003. At that point the Saudis, who'd had enough of being called the Wal Mart Supercenter of terrorism (the truth hurts when you don't want to hear it) decided taking the US down a peg or two might be good for it. Don't want them thinking they can build a liberal democracy on our doorstep without consequences, you see. So they allowed OPEC to close the taps just a bit, right when demand would be at its highest.

What everyone seems to have ignored is that the US isn't the only 800-pound oil swilling gorilla in the world anymore. China and India have gigantic oil requirements of their own, and their consumption is going up, not down. Mix in Osama and his Merry Band of Detonating Dervishes and suddenly it's 1979 all over again.

OPEC seems to understand they've badly miscalculated, and are taking steps to correct the problem. Who knows, if they do it fast enough it might actually work. They better hope it does, because the sad truth is OPEC needs the West a lot more than the West needs OPEC.

But to use short-term market miscalculations to support a theory predicting economic Armageddon is like using a burned out light bulb as evidence that you're going blind. Thinking we're all going to drive our SUVs until the taps run flat dry ignores the fact that people will change if they have the proper motivation.

Of course, tenured professors the world over have been trying to reason away human nature for five thousand years. Why should they stop now?

---------
* Because you know it simply could not be that a free and democratic society full of Jews could defeat the flower of Islamic military culture. The horror!

Ok, look, I know there are mac users out in the world that aren't complete incompetents. I happen to be good friends with two. Out of the two mac users in the office, one seems very solid. But I swear to God, as someone who's worked with PCs of all sorts all his professional life, the ratio of morons to competents is noticeably higher in the mac world than in that of the PC. Case in point:

The Scenario: A "corporate" sexual harassment seminar (Evil Scott: "what? Are they gonna teach us how?" Good Scott: "Shaddup you").

The instructor has one of those nifty new Mac laptops (silver, looks like it could stop a bullet). I'd been told about this, and said, "no problem! Our LCD projector will work with it." Which, a few years ago, was true. Back then Macs used the universal DIN-9 VGA connector that everyone else in the civilized world uses. Every projector or monitor in the world can connect to that. So the next day she shows up, I get out the projector, and pull everything out in the conference room.

Me: "Great, we'll hook you right up."

Instructor: [proudly shows off shiny, sleek, connector-less Mac laptop]

Me: "umm... does it have ports?" Far as I could tell it didn't even have a damned power cord.

Instructor: [PAUSE] (I swear I could hear the claxons this time... *graunk* *graunk* *graunk* "All hamsters to battle stations! Prepare for maximum wheel RPM!" *graunk* *graunK* *graunk*)

Me: "Ports? ... Connectors?"

Instructor: [audible CRUNCH as the wheels engage the gears] "Oh! Sure!" and down flips an even sleeker cover to open the "port bay". I'll give them this, Apple laptops are to PC laptops what Queen Noor is to Margaret Thatcher.

Of course, what I'd forgotten was that Mr. Jobs, in his infinite "do-you-want-to-sell-sugar-water-or-change-the-world" design wisdom, decided to equip all the new macs with very avant-guard (and I'm sure quite superior) digital connectors. Which of course nobody else uses on their display hardware.

The mac people in the audience will be nodding their heads and thinking, "yeah, so what? That's what the adapter is for." Well dealing with a genuine Mac on my network for the past year has taught me a few things. I knew all about that adapter.

But I also knew all about typical social-work-major computer skills.

Me: "Ah! You have one of the new ones. We'll need your adapter." Watch this... 3... 2... 1...

Instructor: [spoken with the same "had-a-rock-shoved-in-their-mouth" way that, say, a Trobriand Islander would trying to pronounce "Inglebert Humperdink"] "Ah-dap-ter?"

Me: [inside my head, Evil Scott looks over at Good Scott and says, "told ya. Pay up asshole."] "Yeah, there was an adapter that came with your computer."

Instructor: [*blink* *blink*]

Me: [inside my head, Evil Scott looks over at Good Scott and says, "HA! I love double or nothing. Pay me."] "Small thing, white, connectors on both ends, thin wire between them?"

Instructor: "Oh yeah! I remember that!"

Me: [waiting expectantly]

Instructor: "Yeah, no, I don't have that with me."

Me: [inside my head, Good Scott looks over at Evil Scott and says, "what? Did you think I was going to fall for it twice?"]

Now, let's savor this one for a bit. A laptop is meant to be carried all over the place. That's the point. Without this adapter, 75%, hell probably 90% of the world's displays are not going to work. Why would you need to carry around something that important? Damn thing'll probably just get lost.

Me: [inside my head, a wrestling match ensues as Good Scott struggles to keep Evil Scott from pushing the "SPEAK: 'such a shame when cousins marry'" button] "Be right back."

So off on a quest I go. First stop, the actual Mac in the office. This has an adapter. Unfortunately it also has an employee sitting in front of it. Next stop, the guy who has our "loaner" laptop. "Him? He's gone for a presentation." So now we're down to the parts bin.

After some rummaging I managed to dredge up an old Toshiba laptop. I'm greeted with a "Windows 95" screen, the first one I've seen in perhaps six years (probably the last time this was turned on). But by God it has power point on it. Surprising how little laptops have changed, this one has the big green eraser in the center of the keyboard for a mouse, just like the ones today.

Instructor: "What, exactly, should I use for a mouse on this thing?"

[inside my head, Evil Scott says to Good Scott, "This is just too easy..."]

Fark (of all places) linked up this business report on how speculative money has entered the oil market, driving up prices perhaps as much as $10 per barrel more than demand would otherwise cause. Some analysts are thinking $50 per barrel is not out of the question this year. Right now it's very, very good to be an oil producer. What I think everyone has forgotten is that when this bubble bursts, it's going to be very bad to be an oil producer.

The whole reason OPEC got its act together in the late 90s was because uncontrolled production had glutted the market and nearly gutted the economies of oil producing states. The idea was to keep oil prices in a "sustainable" $25-$28 per barrel range, enough to make money but not enough to force corpulent westerners to sell their gas-guzzling SUVs.

Well, something certainly went wrong. People involved in oil production, which includes the governments in states like Texas and Alaska, are making money hand-over-fist at the moment, but nobody expects these prices to last forever. Collapsing oil prices forcing sheiks into the street may sound appealing, but it's more complicated than that. When it snaps, and it will, it won't just blanch the Saudi economy, it'll probably pop the wheels off Russia's as well. The difference is, of course, the Russians still have nukes.

OPEC seems to have forgotten the lesson it was taught in the late 70s and early 80s: the US may piss and moan about high oil prices, but if they stay high enough long enough we will change our consumption habits, and that will have a profound, very long term effect on oil prices. Western economies can survive high, even very high, oil prices because they're rich and very diversified. It's a lot harder for oil producing nations to survive low, especially very low, oil prices, because that's all they've got.

You see, with this much money sloshing (as it were) around, there are very heavy pressures for increasing production capacity at any cost. Oil companies and oil producers have for the past ten years been pretty good at balancing production and refinery increases with price goals, but with prices this high it'll be very hard not to let it all get out of control. Building "pipeline-and-truck" capacity is slower and less flexible than the lunatic swings a commodity market can take. Like office space, there's a very real risk of a production glut as capacity oversteps demand.

The last long-term sag in prices nearly skewered the entire Middle East and a big chunk of South America. The prices are much higher, and have been that way much longer, this time around. If the oil market crashes to scale, it will be very, very bad for our "friends" with the turbans. The only real problem is it'll be very bad for a whole bunch of other people we don't necessarily want to be put out on the streets.

A lot of politicians will get blamed for the bad stuff that happens, and a lot of other ones (perhaps the same ones, depending on who wins the next election) will take credit for all the good stuff that happens, but the bottom line is oil is a market-driven commodity. Conventional wisdom and foil-hat conspiracies notwithstanding, governments have very little control over the market price of oil*. You can throw rocks at Bush now and then flowers at him (or Kerry) later, but as with Clinton a decade ago they'll just happen to be the ones standing at the station as the train goes by. The engine is bigger than any of them and is driven by forces nobody completely understands, let alone controls.

Buckle your seatbelts folks... it's going to get a lot bumpier soon.

----
* That's market price of crude oil, not the pump price of fuel. Pump prices are quite heavily influenced by governments, because fuel is one of the most productive commodities to tax. In the US, something like 40% of what you ultimately pay for fuel ends up in some beauracrat's coffer. In Europe it's much worse. But governments all over the world went on spending binges in the '90s, and nobody's going to cut those taxes just to help something as abstract as a taxpayer.

Vietnam did many things to this country. Some good, some bad, all painful. Most of all, it destroyed respect for soldiering as a profession. Conventional wisdom now says you join the military for an exciting job, for an easier way into college, for direction and discipline in your life. Today we never seem to even consider people would join because they want to be a soldier. A warrior. Someone who wants to be on the front line, who wants to serve their country by dancing on the knife edge of history.

Are all soldiers like that? Hardly. But there are many more than you'd think. It makes far too many effete intellectuals uncomfortable to think that there are people who would enjoy soldiering for its own sake. That's why Nightline made heroic national headlines with its Vietnam-retread "roll call of the dead", but accounts of living soldier's heroic deeds must languish in obscurity.

Maybe it's better this way. Maybe we should follow the liberal idea of war as nothing more than institutional, legalized murder. Maybe we should puzzle over, discount, fear (and fear for) those who would want to participate. Certainly, glorification has gotten far more nations in trouble. But I think perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, when the only real way a soldier can become famous is as a flag-draped box, a single forlorn picture in a paper, a name read off by a sobbing commentator. Why not read off a list of soldiers who did their duty with honor, who survived amazing acts of bravery?

Why must we only feel comfortable honoring soldiers when they're dead?

Humanity's love for social stability is matched only by the capacity for self-delusion that is required to perceive it. Worse still, like infants who think the pain never ends we wail and cry of apocalypse and collapse whenever some event tears through our colorful curtain of lies. Naked prisoners, unemployed workers, corrupt politicians, scandalous corporations, all and more are too often seen as the buboes of a diseased culture, the stench of a body politic struck dead on the highway of history.

The truth, as with most axioms of "conventional wisdom", is quite the opposite. These are not symptoms of corruption and decay heralding end times. They are instead indications of a living, breathing, healthy culture. But why does it so often seem the opposite?

Corruption, graft, thievery, rape, murder, and mayhem are not exceptions in our societies. They are the rule in the ever-more-complex cultures humanity has created for itself. Throughout history, one after another would stumble upon some new improvement in warfare, production, or organization, set up a society of plenty and prosperity, only to have it crumble from within due to the rot nobody wanted to talk about. Time and again glittering monuments to humanity's progress would become vine-choked dragon's teeth rotting in the noonday sun. This tragic cycle would repeat over and again for perhaps fifteen thousand years.

The first innovation that helped break the cycle was English... a rule of laws to which even kings of divine right must pay heed. A century later a group of English colonists took the next logical step, one that had been advocated for centuries but which no one ever had the nerve to implement. Essentially, with their written "Constitution" they institutionalized free inquiry, making it possible for any unreasonable crank who didn't care about the stability of a society to turn it all upside down, or at least try to, any time they pleased.

What resulted was not an elegant powerhouse that smoothly exploited its way to world dominance. Instead, a bickering, poorly educated, surly mob was handed the reigns of power, and the resulting chaotic mess became a scandal of the civilized world. "Old" Europe quietly laughed into its collective handkerchiefs as a group of trailer trash, slaves, untouchables, and lunatics lurched from one ridiculous crisis to the next.

There were, of course, just as many hoodlums, thieves, cranks, and lunatics in the world as there were in the United States. The difference was we kept ours where we could see them, and by exposing them were able to stop them before they could do too much damage.

The rest of the world continued to yearn for quiet and stability at the expense of all else, with utterly predictable results. Europe unleashed apocalypse, surviving only to suddenly find itself prostrate before, and then rebuilt by, the rabble from across the sea they made such sport of a century before. Asia fossilized under the weight of its own narcissism, ultimately to be consumed by Western barbarians, then destroyed by wars of its own making. Today Arabia toys with its own annihilation by playing spectacular stunts on the only culture capable of wiping it from the planet with the press of a button.

All in the name of stability, of a smooth culture, of something clean and quiet, something that's admired, something that doesn't make noise. I learn about Enron and Tycho and feel depressed, but I also take heart because, in the name of quiet, the next logical steps result in apparatchiks, plush dachas for a few, and empty shelves for the rest. I read about Watergate and Iran-Contra and what the definition of "Is" is and I'm disgusted, but I'm also pleased, because, in the name of stability, to ignore them would slide us down a slippery slope that ends in red armbands and thunderous, mindless chants. I look at the pictures of naked prisoners and I'm repulsed, but I'm also relieved because without them, in the name of quiet, mothers crawl in a pit on knees cut by bone looking for the doll their child was carrying when they disappeared one night.

In spite of what we'd like to believe, the United States is not composed of saints, is not without bandits, is not free of people who enjoy base violence and humiliation. We are not immune to failure. The difference is we have mechanisms to stop these people, expose them, and remove them from the commanding heights that they have so woefully abused. We are able to correct our failures. It's not quick, it's not clean, it's not always even very fair, but it does work. It fails safe.

Personally, overall, I'm quite happy with my ugly, messy, noisy, inefficient, and embarrassing country. Anyone who isn't simply hasn't considered the real alternatives.

Everyone hears it today... politics is more and more partisan, far worse than anyone has ever seen it before. Viciousness and libel, petty bickering and political meltdowns, backstabbing and throat-slashing, all and more seem to be bubbling up faster and faster, like a fetid scum-covered gyser getting ready to erupt. But is it really that bad? Is it really that different? Has it in fact gotten worse over time?

Hardly. In the very first contested election in the United States, that of 1796, Thomas Jefferson was portrayed as a bloodthirsty atheist and a puppet of the French, who represented only "cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin." John Adams was referred to as, at best, "His Rotundity", was accused publicly of planning to cancel the Constitution and have himself crowned king, and of having two English mistresses secretly imported to keep him comfortable on the campaign trail.

Twenty years later, newspapers supporting Andrew Jackson referred to his incumbent opponent John Quincy Adams as "The Pimp" because he introduced the Tsar of Russia to a young woman whom the Tsar later had an affair with. Dark insinuations of "gambling furniture" being installed in the White House turned out to be a pool table purchase. Not to be outdone, newspapers in support of Adams ran this piquant rejoinder:

"General Jackson's mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers! She afterward married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which number General Jackson IS ONE!!"

By the time Abraham Lincoln was running for president, things had not gotten much better. Democratic newspapers referred to him as "Honest Ape" and ran cartoons of him so racist they would get a modern newspaper shut down and its editors lynched. In 1876 the choices, according to the newspapers of the time, were between an alcoholic syphilitic grifter (Samuel Tilden) and a battlefield corpse robber who once shot at his own mother (Rutherford B. Hayes).

More modern presidential elections were no better. Republican "hatchet men" attacked Democrats as corrupt, incompetent, and even Communist in the 1952 presidential campaign. In 1960 candidate Kennedy accused his opponent of being "experienced in the policies of retreat, defeat, and weakness." In 1964 LBJ, with the willing assistance of a sympathetic media, portrayed his opponent Barry Goldwater as a reckless warmonger who would press "the button" on a whim.

This all culminated of course with the Nixon administration, whose paranoia and willingness to use any lever of power institutionalized the "dirty trick" machine and gave us The Plumbers and Watergate. But even that spectacular debacle failed to drive the nastiness underground. Carter was a religious wacko, Reagan both criminally stupid and criminally diabolic, Bush a liar, Clinton a spineless philanderer, and GW Bush a criminally stupid and criminally diabolic thief.

It has always been nasty, it always will be nasty, and in fact if anything has gotten less nasty over time. As children we don't pay attention to how nasty it is, and look up from our Big Wheels to a man who is an institutional father figure. Teenagers and twenty-somethings, facing the blow-torch intensity of a professional candidate's charisma for the first time, see "their" candidate as the good guy being attacked in shocking and deeply unfair ways by "the bad guys" on the other side. We don't do that, no sir. Well, we wouldn't have to if they didn't make us.

It doesn't help that the media, who's gnat-like attention span is matched only by their utter lack of historic perspective, wail and rend their shirts at the first sign a campaign is "going negative." In the worrisome event a candidate obstinately refuses to actually "betray" the issues and go "on the attack", reporters are of course not opposed to giving the campaign a shove or two by dredging up a bimbo, drug deal, or service gap on their own. After all, we don't want the campaign to be boring, do we?

It's ok to wish it weren't so, but in the wishing we are simply pulling the covers over our heads hoping the monsters stay hidden in the dark. It's also ok to revel in the chaos of it all, sitting in the bleachers roaring with the rest of the plebes as one erstwhile gladiator guts his opponent in our own queer Coliseum. More importantly, we should all learn to look past it, see it for the contrived irrelevance that it truly is, and hold all of their feet to the fire until they start producing facts and positions instead of hyperbole and distraction.

But don't forget to bring the popcorn. I hear Kerry's latest attack ad is really something to see!

Lots of vignettes today:

U1, a famously frantic staffer, strides into my office brandishing a piece of paper and without any preamble or introduction asks, "is this what I need to give you?"

Me: "To...?" (Light a fire? Scribble an autograph? Choke you until the vacuous excuse for a brain you use suffers a seizure?)

U1: "Purchase [software I frantically need yet somehow only asked for once, a month ago]"

Me: "Ah yes! Thank you!" I need to get my money back from the psychic friends network.

U2, in an email on Thursday: "I need this printing in color. Could you get this converted to PDF or directly print to color. [U1] has start working [sic] on this project ASAP so I would really appreciate if this is printed tomorrow."

Me, in email reply, that day: "I cannot work with [toy desktop publishing documents]. I've found a spare Acrobat license. Let me know when you have 30 minutes and I'll install it. You'll be able to print it yourself then."

U2, in reply: "That's great! Can you do it Monday afternoon?"

At 3:30 p.m. sharp I was not surprised to discover it was already installed on their system.

U3, fabulous and fabulously charming, streams fashionable scarves into my office. "Scott," flashing a "sex-in-the-city" spectacular smile, "the screen on my laptop is broken and I desperately need to fix it," runway-worthy turn on some imaginary catwalk that seems to end at my doorstep, "when can you replace it?"

Me: "Not sure, I'll have to see what is free."

U3, in a gracefully executed cross-pose (the word VOGUE briefly flashes over her head), "well I have to get it soon, it's just unusable like this." Exit in a sashay that makes Cindy Crawford weep.

So I scrounge a very nice reasonably new laptop from a recently departed employee (I'm known as the Angel of Computer Death around here because I "harvest" the computers of the dearly departed), and notify U3 by email that I'll need her system for 1 hour to transfer all files and settings.

Six weeks pass. Weeks.

This morning, U3, in a ravishing ensemble, gracefully strides down that weird runway I just can't see: "I hear you have a system for me?"

Me: "Yup, need an hour."

U3: "Let me get a few things done and I can give it to you this morning."

Six hours later, no laptop.

u4, our resident short fuse: "I need another mouse for my system."

Me: "Isn't this your third one?"

U4's spring obviously clicks two notches tighter: "Well, yes, I guess it is."

Me: "That normally means it's the computer, not the mouse."

*CLICK* goes the spring one notch tighter, U4: "Well, if we can find another one..."

Me: "Let's go look and see what's wrong."

Yes, they did have a real problem. Which I eventually fixed, and then went to lunch, with a closed door.

*KNOCK KNOCK* Great. What now? [Open], and there's U4 half way to my boss's door.

Me: "Did everything wor--"

U4, spring wound so tight I'm expecting a sprocket to fly out of his ear and take out a passing staffer, "my password changed again."

Me: "Well, I didn't change it." *CLICK* *CLICK* "Let's go check."

Walk down to U4's office, where they sit and furiously begin typing. Me: "Slowly now, let's try it again."

The password, of course, worked fine.

This afternoon, a remote user sent a desparate (they're all desparate... email is like oxygen to these people) note to me regarding how one specific organization was unable to send mail to her.

Examination of the error messages revealed what is probably a buggy e-mail firewall on their end. This has happened oh, say three times in the past six or seven years. The cheaper firewall companies only test against the Borg, and as we all know Microsoft is not all that interested in interconnectivity. Since, what, half the internet still uses Sendmail, they end up posting corrective patches pretty quickly. It's getting them installed that's the trick.

At any rate, I gave this theory to the sysadmin on the other end, only to get the following reply (which I swear I am not making up):

Moron Admin: "Well, yes, now that you mention it we did upgrade our systems a few weeks ago. And actually, I have had a few domains mention they were having trouble connecting to our systems. But I know it's not on our end. Would you please check your systems out again?"

Why no, actually, I don't think I will.

Myth: The deficit is ballooning out of control, and will undermine the economy.

Fact: The current deficit is equal to or smaller than those recorded in previous recession years, as a percentage of the gross domestic product (citation).

Myth: The current deficit is a gigantic weight on the country's economy.

Fact: The current deficit is impressively large at 521 billion dollars, but this represents just 5% of the gross domestic product of the United States economy (citation).

Myth: The national debt is titanic, growing larger, and will eventually crush our children.

Fact: The national debt currently stands at an admittedly staggering 7.1 trillion dollars. However, this represents just 16% of the currently estimated total household wealth in the United States (citation). Further, more than half this debt is owned by US citizens in the form of various kinds of government bonds (citation).

Myth: Millions of US citizens have no access to health care.

Fact: Federal law requires any person, regardless of insurance, citizenship, or even legal resident status be treated regardless of insurance status if they present themselves to an emergency room (citation).

Myth: Tax burdens fall mostly on middle and lower income families, while the wealthy pay little to nothing at all.

Fact:: Families in the top 5% income bracket pay 50% of all personal income tax the federal government receives. The bottom 60% is responsible for exactly 6%. The bottom 5% receive a 2% credit, regardless of income (citation).

Myth: The war in Iraq will crush the US economy.

Fact:: At the requested funding level of 87 billion dollars, the cost of the war in Iraq represents not quite 4% of the current government budget for the next fiscal year (citation).

Myth: Unemployment is unreasonably high in the United States.

Fact: 94.5% of all eligible workers in the US are in fact employed (citation).

Of course, you know the country's on an express elevator to hell, going down. Just be sure to cite your sources when you prove it.

By now most people in the West know that while Europeans were sleeping with their own oxen and unscrewing each other's heads with abandon, Arabs were inventing algebra, trading with China, and building structures whose beauty staggers us to this day. Yet in less than three centuries their glittering culture would be crushed and humiliated by barbarians they had once bettered in every way. How could this be?

The roots of failure in the cultures ascribed to Islam are the same that lead to their success, and therein lies the great Sophoclean tragedy of it all. Because the ground in which these roots, of both triumph and oblivion, rest was created by the Koran.

Ironically, it's the history of Christianity that best illustrates this argument. Jesus preached his ministry in the center of a prosperous, and oppressive, empire arguably the most powerful the world had seen. His crucifixion occurred perhaps only five years after the beginning of his movement, introducing an element of instability Christianity lives with to this day. Because the movement was both escatalogical (the end of the world is nigh) and subversive (we're the only ones with a ticket out), a natural fault line developed dividing the spiritual power of Christianity (do as I say because you'll go to Hell if you don't) from the temporal power of the Empire (do as I say or I'll run you through with this sword).

While the rise of Christianity to official status largely filled this chasm in the Eastern half of the empire, historical happenstance (in the form of various flea-bitten but no less ferocious barbarian hordes) maintained it in the West. Over the next thousand years an uncomfortable and unstable status-quo set itself up between a Church that could command hearts and kings who could command steel. Europe suffered four centuries of darkness while it all got sorted out.

All of these things, doctrinaire instability, subversive revolution, the very concept of a separate "church" and "state", were completely alien to a follower of Islam. Unlike Jesus, Mohamed had an extremely long, productive ministry, in which all of the core documents of the movement were written by the founder himself (or by God through him, if you like)*. This made for a comparatively stable religious foundation, which to date has experienced only one significant doctrinal dispute. Islam was created in an area with no government institution larger than what was needed to manage a city. Therefore when the Bedouin exploded out of the desert they were able to grasp both secular and religious power simultaneously.

Herein lay the roots of Islam's success. As a merchant, Mohamed knew almost instinctively that the key to the success of a society was consistent laws enforced consistently. If there was any question of this he had the abject lesson of the Christians of the Eastern empire, who at that point were damning and killing each other over paintings and the precise date of Easter, to instruct him. His long ministry allowed the final and absolute resolution of the thousands of petty arguments that arise with any complex movement. Finally, Islam was able to stab upward into the underbelly of the two richest and paradoxically weakest empires in existence at that time.

This all combined to create a very rich and culturally complex environment almost purpose-built for stability, safety, and free movement. Without the albatrosses of oppression and suspicion around their necks, Muslims were able to look at the enormous libraries of Greek knowledge in their conquered Eastern territories with fresh eyes and open minds. They took this and literally ran with it, extending and expanding beyond even their own expectations. The torch of learning was not extinguished when Odacer deposed Romulus Augustus in 476. It was instead set aside, only to quickly be picked up by Arab hands who, for a very long time, carried it well indeed.

So what went wrong? Again, it's more instructive to first look at Christianity before examining Islam.

It took nearly a thousand years, but eventually the Medieval west settled into a sort of equilibrium uncomfortably managed by bishops and feudal warrior-kings. They grew strong enough that by the end of the eleventh century they were able to carve a chunk out of the Islamic empire and maintain it more or less intact for nearly three hundred years. Far more important, although less glamorous, was the Reconquista, the crusade to reclaim the Iberian peninsula for Christianity. By conquering but not destroying the great Moorish cities a sort of "back door" was created, allowing the re-introduction not only of the old Greek learning once lost, but of all the Muslim developments as well.

However, even this wasn't enough to start what would come to be known as the European Renaissance. It would take the scythe of the Black Death hacking away perhaps as much as a third of the population of Europe to light the fuse on that powder keg.

Labor, once nearly free, became fantastically expensive. Empires in the past were able to respond to this through conquest and importation of slaves, but Europe was too politically fragmented for any one state to command that much power. People were able to demand rights and privileges from their rulers in return for their labor, and the rulers had to give it to them or risk those same people offering their services to someone else who would.

But not everyone had this option. Enormous tracts of land, complete with villages and their resident peasants, had been ceded to monasteries over the previous centuries. At first, this was actually one hell (as it were) of a move up for said peasants. No armies to feed, no randy knights hacking and burning houses when they got bored, and no Droit de seigneur. What wasn't to love?

This rosy arrangement started to unravel shortly after the plague, and it only went downhill from there. The duke, bergher, or king may have been an unpredictable bastard, but you could at least bargain with him. The abbot had God on his side. Negotiating a reduction in the harvest tithe was not an option, since the percentage was decided by the Lord himself and who were you to question that? Demanding a change in the tax rate to make your business more competitive with the Venetians merely resulted in blank looks. Push harder and you risked a Crusade being called down on your head.

Of course, in the long run it couldn't last. The monasteries were rich enough to hire a few dozen armored goons to keep the peasants in line, but they were no match for the burgeoning power of the kings and merchant empires. Eventually the peasants either ran off to the nearest free city or took shelter with a prince only too happy to double the wages made miniscule by four centuries of inflation. Over time, one by one and all across Europe, the monasteries were cracked open like oysters on the belly of a sea otter, slowly removing the last vestiges of the medieval and clearing the way for our own modern world.

By all accounts the Arab empires suffered at least as much, if not more, from plague. They had the additional burden of being in the way of the most effective light horse army the world has ever seen (Mongols). And yet with similar pressures came very different results. Christian Europe exploded, first consuming itself in successive paroxysms of religious, trade, and revolutionary wars, then when that became too expensive hacking empires out of everything around them. Muslims, in contrast, coalesced into a single monolithic empire that, once established, essentially coasted unchanged for the next three hundred fifty years. At its end this Ottoman Empire, so powerful that at one point it literally threatened Christianity's existence, was itself allowed to exist at the whim of these "barbaric" Europeans, to be ignominiously dismantled by them when it was finally no longer useful.

The comparison with the medieval monasteries of Europe is striking. True, Islam shuns monasticism in all forms, but by melding religious and secular power into the sharia, they inadvertently made the entire culture beholden to what was in effect a highly organized and indeed quite powerful religious order. The innate conservatism inherent in all organized religion meant that any cultural or economic innovation that the mullahs could not understand would be crushed before it had a chance to break anything.

The burgeoning Ottoman empire, then at the hight of its power, absorbed the impact of the Black Death not through innovation but through the forced migration of perhaps millions of slaves. What commerce existed did so at the whim of the Sultan, and the Sultan never took risks. The culture of empire meant there would be no escape for the common people, no rival petty kings to check the power of the mullahs, no chance for a Renaissance of clever, questioning men to take hold. The empire, as all empires do, slowly ossified, trapping what was once a vibrant and brilliant culture in a pretty, frozen drop of amber.

Islam, once so fortunate in history's eye, chose precisely the wrong moment to crystallize into a monolithic empire. Europe had stumbled onto a combination of culture and technology that, however horrifically violent in its infancy, gradually allowed fantastic gains in productivity. The cold truth is that even without Napoleon, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe had become so incredibly rich it could have hastened the end of the last great Islamic empires through the simple expedient of purchasing them.

Islam tried to catch up, but by the time it figured out it was even in a race it was too late. A set of cultures raised on a thousand years of divinely decreed, indeed self-evident, dominance was suddenly confronted with the shattering realization that they were not, in fact, the alpha and omega of creation; that it would be a different set of people, ascribing to a religion they had supposedly discredited ten centuries ago, who would in fact rule the world. They have quite simply never recovered.

For a time it looked as if the old salves of retrenchment and revival, a "returning to the old ways", would bring holy wrath down upon the infidel's head and restore the faded glory of mullah and mosque. Certainly the spectacular collapse of the two most prominent landmarks on the infidel's horizon at the hands of these fundamentalists signaled the dawn of a new age, when divinely inspired martyrs would rain death down on the heads of these prurient, effete infidels and show that the power of Islam had not in fact faded into history.

Of course, as with all escatological fantasies, the world obstinately refused to end. It took five hard and difficult years of planning to kill three thousand infidels in a single day. Yet less than two years after this triumph the only countries in Islam to ever successfully take on the West lay in ruins, their leaders dead, imprisoned, or running too hard to even show their faces. Even worse, the people of these countries are showing signs of adapting to the infidel, of turning their backs on the men of God who should be leading them, riding down the seductive road of perdition called "self government."

In fact, their predicament is no different from that experienced by their Christian brethren six centuries ago. Because to them the world did end, for the one when the last tower of Cluny was pulled down by French peasants so enraged they used their bare hands, for the other when the bronze statue of a madman was yanked off its pedestal while infidel tanks rolled unopposed through the city that once formed the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

It remains to be seen whether the hold of the mad mullahs can be broken, whether, given the chance, great men will arise from all walks of life and lead the peoples of Islam in adapting to modernity instead of being martyred by it. Because without a doubt the peoples of the old Islamic empires must come to terms with the world around them.

It is up to them to choose whether they do so united under a flag of liberty, or the tombstone of a mass grave.

The Howard Stern radio show has been taken off half a dozen channels for obscenity. The hosts of the similar Don and Mike radio show in Washington D.C. were placed on administrative leave for two weeks because a technical glitch allowed an obscenity to be heard on the air. "Bubba the Love Sponge" in Florida was fired outright. A cold wind indeed seems to be blowing through broadcasting, and you can't turn on a radio show today without hearing about it.

The thing is, for the most part I agree with what's happening right now. I reserve the right to change my mind or protest if I think it's goes too far, but at the moment to be honest I'm ever-so-slightly pleased at what's going on.

Nobody is as shocked as I am at that admission. For the longest time I was at the absolute tip of the anti-censorship crusade. "If you don't like it, change the damned channel" was the "phrase that pays" as far as I was concerned. Just a bunch of damned busy-bodies poking their noses into my entertainment, trying to tell me what I could and could not watch.

But you know what? As I've grown older, and more importantly had my own child, I'm beginning to realize just how much of this is crap for crap's sake. Shocking images, shocking sounds, shocking words that illuminate absolutely nothing, reveal only that we can be shocked, are simply a waste of everyone's time. Yes, I can (will) change the channel, but I'm growing increasingly tired of being required to every time I turn around.

So pardon me if I'm not particularly concerned that Howard won't be able to smear a woman's butt with cream cheese and throw bagels at it. Excuse me if I'm just a little relieved I won't hear even a bit of what Don or Mike saw in their toilet bowl this morning. And please forgive me if I think it's a good thing Arty Lang will have to be clever to get laughs instead of simply being good at "anal ring toss".

I've lived through all this before, and so have they. Reagan's Meese commission was far more effective at "suppressing smut" than the current FCC will ever dream of being. The country survived that, it'll survive this too. Slippery slopes? Please. I find irony deeper than an ocean trench every time some mindless twenty-something holds a "Bush = Censorship" sign up to a camera, or yet another drippy hippy writes a screed on their website proclaiming the police state has arrived. Got news for you sparky... people who have really lost their freedom of speech don't get the chance to complain about it.

I think everything, even pornography, has its place. I still believe changing the channel is the first, best choice for someone who doesn't like what they’re hearing or seeing. But I also believe people have an obligation to be decent to each other, that shocking people just to shock them is artistic masturbation, and that it's better to do good work than indulge in bad behavior. I don't think preventing Howard from broadcasting the description of a man's toe being inserted into a woman's vagina will result in the destruction of our free society.

I'm amazed anyone (except maybe Howard) does.

While I have already stated my overall reasons for supporting the war in Iraq, the questions "why now? Why the rush? Why not more time for inspections? Why not more time for negotiation?" are legitimate ones. A few more months, even a year, would have made little difference. Why not wait?

In all this debate, not once have I seen simple logistics mentioned. As the aphorism goes, "amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics." In my opinion, looking at the logistics and circumstances of the lead-up to this conflict provides the ultimate answer not to "why?" (which we addressed in part 1), but rather, "why now?"

It was widely speculated in the media that one of the strategic purposes of the governments who apposed the war was to delay action long enough for summer to start. This is a very valid point. If the jump-off point was pushed from March to, perhaps, July, the average high temperature would've spiked from 66F to 108F (citation), making the weather at least as dangerous as the Iraqis themselves. Had the international community gotten its wish and been given an extra three months, they would have effectively been given an additional four months as the brain-frying summer heat passed by.

This additional four months would have, of course, been spent with troops gathered inside countries who held no particular love for them. The opportunities for terrorism would have been many. Armies are similar in some respects to athletic teams... motivation over long periods of inactivity is challenging to say the least. The sword that was sharp in March might have been far duller in November. The political cost of having reserves and national guard units sitting thousands of miles from families and jobs while doing literally nothing goes without saying. The fiscal and logistical price of moving them home then moving them back would have been prohibitive.

Well, if a few months were impractical, why not a whole year? The problem then is not logistical, but political. Waiting until March 2004 would have put the operation in the heart of the election season, providing the opposition a titanic stick with which to beat the current administration. Most everyone should remember the "wag the dog" debacle Clinton went through when he attacked Baghdad in '98 (on the eve of his impeachment vote), and those were just cruise missiles (citation). Our government moves slowly in the best of times. In an election year it moves not at all.

So delaying the war even three months would have effectively delayed it at least two full years while the national elections passed and the dust settled. Two years of international pressure to not only delay a war, but remove sanctions completely. Two years of costly, dangerous enforcement of no-fly zones at the full expense of US taxpayers. Two years with an election in the middle that may have installed a different administration, one that would perhaps have allowed the sanctions to lapse or be removed. Two years of potential gestation before the real nightmare began.

Had Osama's operation gone off a year earlier, I do not doubt we would have given the international community their year. Whichever president ended up in the White House would've been able to do that. Unfortunately it didn’t. In my opinion once Afghanistan was targeted first and Iraq second, the only way the timetable could work was for an invasion to be started in March of 2003 at the latest. It wasn't a comfortable clock, and its gears may have been made of knives, but our discomfort with it did not stop its ticking.

In my opinion, this is the reason the governments of France, Germany, and Russia decided to risk outright rupture with the United States and pushed so hard to delay the campaign. A delay of only three months, a reasonable request among gentlemen concerning such a barbaric but effectively de-fanged little brown man, had the very real potential of scuttling the entire project, perhaps forever. The oil money promised to them in construction contracts, defense purchases, and outright graft would've flowed freely, and it would've been a fine party indeed. Right up to the point of apocalypse.

It's quite true that our forces probably could've gone in the height of summer and won anyway. An inverted Odessa campaign wouldn't have resulted in a blast-furnace Stalingrad. Certainly the Iraqis would have been fighting under the same, if not worse, conditions. But I wonder how the fierce detractors of the conflict would have reacted had even a single US or UK soldier died of heat stroke simply because they wanted the international community to like us.

The sad thing is, I doubt they would have reacted at all.

I supported our decision to depose Saddam Hussein through military action. But the anti-war protesters were right; there were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11, and Iraq presented no clear and present danger to the United States. His economy was being strangled by sanctions, and almost daily air strikes ensured his military could not even build basic defenses. This was naked aggression, a war of conquest at the whim of a single madman, a 21st century Hitler goose-stepping across the world. How could anyone with an IQ greater than a hamster's support such a thing?

I cannot speak for the administration's actual motives. However, being without an "inside track" does not prevent informed speculation, as just about every pundit on the planet proves daily. What follows is, as with theirs, my own opinion and worth about as much.

We never really stopped being "at war" with Saddam Hussein's regime. For more than a decade after the end of general hostilities in 1991 Iraq was the subject of almost daily bombing raids to enforce the northern and southern "no-fly" zones. Attacks on the heartland were periodic but frequent. This was not done for free, nor was it being paid for by any international coalition. The US and UK were spending approximately a billion dollars a year simply to maintain a dangerous status-quo (citation).

The escalating level of violence required to enforce these no-fly zones was resulting in increasingly vocal humanitarian opposition. The very legality of the zones was open to contentious debate (citation). The loss of even a single aircrew would have inevitably brought about tough, perhaps even unanswerable, questions about our involvement and the zones's effectiveness. Having a captive or dead American soldier or two paraded in front of television cameras would have almost certainly triggered an end to the only military involvement actively preventing the Ba'athist regime's undisguised efforts at rearmament.

The vaunted sanctions supposedly strangling the regime into submission were widely accepted as not working (citation), and the outcry at the humanitarian cost was growing increasingly difficult to counter. The international (and indeed domestic) business community, quite rightly seeing Iraq as a titanic works project waiting to happen, was also bringing increased pressure on the various governments involved to end the sanctions. Many prominent countries were simply ignoring them and signing billion-dollar investment deals with the Ba'athist regime, presenting the United States and Britain with a gradual but no less de facto international repeal.

It was only a matter of time before the outcry grew so great and the suffering of the Iraqi people so obvious that future US and UK governments, with no particular attachment to policies of previous administrations, sought some method of quietly ending sanctions altogether. Re-armament would not then simply be expected, but facilitated by international arms dealers competing for a piece of the last big arms market in the world. But this re-armament would only concern Iraq's immediate neighbors. The unprecedented events of September 11th showed in spectacular fashion how to carry war to the west's own cities, their own peoples, in ways that could paralyze them with comparatively minimal expense.

Ideological differences have caused Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to be anathema each other. However, the Middle East has a long, rich history of demagogues holding their noses and associating themselves with turgidly corrupt secular leaders... as long as the price was right. With its own funding sources pinched if not cut off entirely, it would be difficult indeed to resist the sound of gold shaking on the belt pouch of the man sitting between the Tigris and Euphrates.

Even if bin Laden still snubbed the now freed Hussein regime, it's not particularly difficult to field one's own set of insurgents. Certainly the Palestinians, who remained faithful allies, would've been quite willing and able to provide both training and recruits. The dormant quest for nuclear weapons, either purchased or manufactured, would certainly be renewed. Even at the height of sanctions feelers were being cast about to acquire such weapons and the technologies required to deliver them (citation).

In my own view, it's quite true that Iraq in 2003 posed no real and present danger to the west, the United States in particular. Unfortunately, the efforts required to maintain this situation were on-going, expensive, dangerous, sometimes deadly to innocents, and showed literally no signs of ever ending. A war without end made real. Worse still, powerful political and economic forces were aligning to free Hussein's regime of these restrictions, allowing Iraq to eventually become a very real, indeed inevitable, future danger to our country, and the world.

This is why, in my opinion, Saddam had to go, and sooner rather than later. Not for any present need, not for any pressing requirement, but rather to avert an obvious political, humanitarian, and military disaster that was quite patently going to happen before it actually did so. Certainly if Saddam's reconstruction were to succeed beyond his wildest dreams we would still be able to defeat him. But at what additional cost?

History is littered with wars that could have been stopped, holocausts that could have been interrupted, millions dead in combat who simply did not need to die, had someone acted decisively at an early enough juncture to force real change. In my opinion, that is exactly what has happened here. You can disagree. You can claim my scenarios are unlikely to ever have happened. You may even be right.

But know I sleep better at night because now I'm certain they can never happen at all.

It is axiomatic in the third world that the best, indeed only, way to defeat the United States in battle is to inflict the maximum possible casualties at all times. Eventually, the reasoning goes, the weak and vacillating commoner leading them will pull the troops out in order to win the next election. Failing that, the people will rise up and install a leader that will do it for them. Either way, the result will be the same, because Americans have no stomach for battle.

The thing is, they're right. History has proven time and again that the United States has a very low "pain threshold" for it's own casualties. However, to paraphrase a line in a movie I once saw, "that does not mean what they think it means."

"You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it." -- Ho Chi Minh

Part of the problem is the definition of what, exactly, constitutes a casualty. To most of the rest of the world, a nation's existence is defined not by the survival and prosperity of its people, but of its elite. For nations (and supra-national paramilitary organizations) such as these, the success of one man's (or a small group of men's) will defines the success of that nation (or group). A failure of will naturally means apocalypse.

In a situation like this, the life of one soldier is meaningless. The lives of battalions of them are meaningless. They can, indeed should, be sacrificed to ensure the will of the nation (i.e. the exclusive will of its leadership) is expressed in victory.

The United States simply isn't like this. In fact, we are so different it's often difficult for us to comprehend this sort of mindset. Regardless of chicken-little airheads' and washed up radicals' accusations of "fascism", the United States has been, is, and always will be the expression of a collective, not individual, will. The survival of the nation is not bound up in a single man, but is instead defined by the combined wishes of a majority of its inhabitants*.

In a situation like this, the life of every soldier has value. The loss of battalions of them simply unspeakable. They are us, and because we have no particular wish to die we do not wish our soldiers to die either, sometimes regardless of the cause. When our nation's forces leave a war zone it is never a defeat because that departure represents the will of the nation as a whole. We leave not because we must, we leave because we want to.

This has important implications for all sides. A totalitarian ruler would be well advised to stop wasting money on fancy weapons his indoctrinated troops could barely use anyway and spend the money on Madison Avenue and the New York Times's advertising department instead. A few clever Super Bowl ads here, a few full-page print sections there, and pretty soon it won't matter what the President thinks, because the people will be planning vacations and the editors will spin negative stories like tops just to keep the business.

This is not to say we're stupid. Far from it. It's just that, if it doesn't intrude directly on our lives, most of us don't care what the rest of the world does. In this we are no different from the rest of humanity. A Briton, Indian, or Chinese may protest their civility versus our barbarity, but when was the last time you saw a campaign to relieve the poor on Manhattan's streets?

An aside, for a moment, on the myth of the vaunted Western concern for civilian casualties. Significantly vocal but most definitely small minorities will violently disagree, but for the most part if it's someone else that's getting blown up, we're no more concerned about it than a Guyanan, Congolese, or Trobriand Islander would be. Oh, we'll feel bad about it, sometimes to the point of actually doing something to stop it. But if it comes down to a choice of protecting our troops or their civilians, well that's no choice at all. History has shown time and again most people (not just Americans) are quite willing to believe the most outrageous lies about battlefield victims as long as victory is swift and their own are not the ones filling the bags**.

For Americans, it's important to admit that it is in fact possible for an enemy to win (by their definition) simply by killing enough of our soldiers†. However, it's also important to understand that the values which make this possible: rule of law, citizen soldiers, universal education, and free inquiry, are at the same time what makes our military the most effective and powerful fighting force in history.

By emphasizing the value of each soldier while instilling in him or her pride in both their service and their country, we do not create soft cowards, we create mean clever bastards who fight harder and smarter than any opponent who may face them. They'll evaluate, innovate, and implement whatever works wherever possible, faster than any tinpot dictator or religious wack could ever hope to match.

Because, as citizens of the United States of America, they simply have better things to do.

"What makes me so mad", a friend once said to me during an instant message conversation, "is that people accuse us of being anti-American because we protest the war."

To which I replied, "that's because they're stupid. Protesting wars is one of the things that makes us Americans. We shoot each other over sneakers. Of course we're going to argue about war. Besides, you still love the country, right?"

After a long, thoughtful pause, the words came up, "well, that's a complex issue. We'll have to talk it over some time."

An artful dodge, but one I actually understood. How could any educated person actually "love" this country? How could we, when we knew this country had oppressed so many peoples in its making, sucked up environmental resources in gargantuan quantities and spewed them out the tops of smoke stacks to ruinous end, coddled the rich and buried the poor, and destabilized entire regions settling old family scores? Who could love such a thing?

Well, I can. I do. And for better reasons than any of my "educated citizens" might have for disliking it.

I love America because it's got an insanely complex government. Tens of thousands of people at all levels get to decide almost everything about the country, from the position of garbage cans outside my house to the position of a space station orbiting the earth. The only thing special about these people is they simply wanted to do it. Even better, we regularly get a chance to replace all of them, sometimes simply because we don't like their beady little stare. Every bit of regulation and law, right up to the founding documents of the country itself, can be changed or discarded if enough of us feel like it.

I love America because large numbers of its citizens are so naive they actually expect this government to function. They rally, they chant, they write, they march, they call, they vote, they care, all in the sincere belief that if the right combination of politicians ended up in office, we could actually get this government to work for us. For this they are, of course, doomed to eternal disappointment, but their Charlie-Brown-like ability to get up, dust themselves off, and grumble down the field for another kick at congress's football makes us all better in the long run.

I love America because far larger numbers of its citizens want to work for themselves and keep the government out of their way. They know that people who gain power through public office need to be carefully watched, and that crusaders are usually only leading their followers into the sea. They strongly believe as long as the playing field is level and the rules are followed, anyone... anyone can succeed. For this they too are doomed to disappointment, not just because the field can be mined and the rules hidden, but because too many players think they're "owed" a starting position.

I love America because it's as much an idea as a nation, one that lets anyone participate. It may not be easy, it's usually not fair, but it's too often far more than 85% of the world gets on their first birthday. Today we are not the only place in the world that provides this opportunity, but we were the first, and we stand with a depressingly small group of equals.

I love America because as a nation we're always thinking up something new. People are smarter than their governments, a lot smarter, and by enabling more people than anywhere else on the planet, America has become a gyser of ideas, a fountainhead of innovation unequaled in time or place. Not all of them are good ideas, and some work only badly, but for every Zima, Chia Pet, and Clinton Administration there are a dozen TiVOs, Saturn Vs, and Wright Brothers. More importantly, we get to decided what succeeds and fails, not some dusty bureaucrat or son of a dictator.

I love America most of all because we never stop trying. We screw it up just as much as anyone else, sometimes with horrible, tragic results. When we see that happen, we work to fix it, nearly always faster than anyone else would or could. We refuse to be the whipping boy of the rest of the world, refuse to be an excuse distracting from bankrupt economies, crumbling infrastructures, and ruptured ideas. This means we get blamed for screwing up a lot more than we've ever been responsible for. But when we accept a screwup, we do what we can to fix it, from giving a farmer cash for a stray bomb to crushing an entire administration for blowing up a country and then lying about it.

We're not perfect. We're not even close. If you were to hack this country out and put it under a dome on Mars, we'd still be robbing liquor stores and trying to elect Hillary Clinton. We probably wouldn't even notice the sky'd gone a funny color and the French had finally shut up. But to the great disappointment of Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Jacques Chirac, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden (aka "next"), and many others, we're not going anywhere. Instead we're going to stand out here, holding our torch as high as we can. Because no matter how rusted it may be, no matter how many times we're ungainly in its holding, we know the gold of it will always shine bright.

And for that, my friends, I am a patriot.

This is a letter to the editors of E-Pregnancy Magazine. In their current issue, they have yet another tiresome, repetitive, and most of all utterly wrong article titled, "Keeping Kitty in Her Place." You can check out E-Pregnancy here.

Scott says this lacks my normal "ranty freshness", but I think it still gets the point across. Mama Smurf will be very happy it doesn't contain f-word, not even once.

I am a Licensed Veterinary Technician of 10 years and had my first baby 5 months ago. I am also the owner of 5 cats. I practice at an exclusive cat practice in Arlington, Va. I am also an active member in the VALVT (Virginia Association for Licensed Veterinary Technicians.) I am writing to educate the authors of the article, "Keep Kitty in Her Place" that appeared in your January 2004 issue, who are ignorant in this field and have chosen to only listen to their medical practitioners, other magazines and superstitious friends and family. When one is pregnant and owns a pet, your veterinarian can become an invaluable source of information and advice.

To this day, I am still appalled by what is written in pregnancy magazines about cats. Not only how to keep pets away from your children, but a 'How To' guide on how to toss a pet aside when one is pregnant and make it a "Me" situation. How utterly selfish. Pets are a responsibility. If you plan to become pregnant and just can't seem to fit a pet in your life, don't get one. Learn to adjust your life and your pet's life to a new addition and make it a positive experience for everyone. I cannot tell you how many clients I have had come in to our clinic and test and retest their cats on Toxoplasmosis only because they keep receiving false information. I practiced feline medicine till the day I went into labor at work, ( and returned 6 weeks later).

I have spent ten years in the field of professional animal medicine, being exposed to cats for forty hours a week, six days per week on average. This is far, far, beyond anything an average pet owner will ever experience. Like all other pregnant women, I was tested for toxoplasmosis in my first trimester.

I tested negative. I had never, not once, been infected with the disease.

You are more likely to contract Toxoplasmosis by raw meat and gardening. Hence, wash your hands.

Now, to the specifics of the article:

Many cats are NOT deterred by tinfoil. Cats WILL cross that line. You might as well draw a circle of salt and hope for the best. Cats are not stupid, they are curious by nature. Cats like to play with tinfoil, especially in ball form. So why would you want to deter them with a toy?

Keeping a spray bottle around and spritzing the cat every time it nears the baby is also a poor idea. This only lets the cats know the baby and that area of the house is "off limits" permanently and because of this the cats will generally cause trouble elsewhere or become depressed. What you are telling the cat with this action is that: "I don't want you around." It amazes me to this day how a couple will come in with a new kitten, ooh and ahh over it, 6 months or later down the line, become pregnant and that poor cat is tossed aside like some dirty laundry. A pet is a companion, it is a privilege to enjoy its company.

Cats like to be where people are, and this naturally includes the baby. Cats won't suck their breath away or sleep on their heads because of warmth. Most cats will leave a baby alone for quite a while and will introduce themselves to the baby when they feel it's time. I have a cat in my household that is well known for being "nasty" to company, and was not amused when the baby arrived. This cat has now taken to the baby and likes to sit by her and share her space watching her with curiosity. Never has this cat uttered a growl or hiss. The cat comes running to her when she is upset.

Cats WILL find a cozy place of their own. It may not be the baby crib, but it may just be that play mat, or Boppy or blanket that you left on the floor.

It is recommend that you not only discuss your options with your doctor, but with your VETERINARIAN or Veterinary Staff- especially those who have had children.

One thing that you failed to mention in the article, KEEP THE DOOR CLOSED! This is the EASIEST way to keep kitty away from baby.

I hope in the future you contact a veterinarian that is CURRENT on feline medicine for consultations on advice in this matter. You can find the information you are looking for at www.aafponline.org (The American Association for Feline Practitioners) for further information on feline medicine and advice.

Sincerely,

Ellen Carozza LVT, VDT
Vice President of The Virginia Association of Licensed Veterinary Technicians.
Mom of 1 human and to 5 cats.

Safety is as safety does...

In Part I we discussed the various things you need to have fun working on a car, well, other than Pam Anderson (or, if you prefer, Jonny Depp) in a coverall. These were a) a safe place to work, preferably a garage, and b) quality tools to get the job done. Now, we'll talk a little about working on a car safely.

An automobile is nearly always at least a full ton of steel, mounted on wheels, filled with enough gasoline to blow up a house and an electrical supply that can weld metal. Screw around with your girlfriend (or boyfriend) and they'll leave you. Screw around with your car and it'll kill you faster than a Palestinian "fashion belt."

So, there are a certain set of tools and procedures you must follow if you want to work on your car safely. These are basically non-negotiable if you don't want to be buried with it. If someone tries to get you to work on a car without this stuff, know you are doing so at your own, mortal, risk.

The first thing you need is actually part of your safe place to work: a hard, flat, level surface. An automobile is one of the first, best examples of mass versus weight. When your car is sitting on a level surface, all you're dealing with is its mass¹, which neatly obeys Newton's laws of motion. In other words, if it's sitting still it'll tend to stay still, moving only when something acts on it. You'll be the only thing acting on it, so you'll be able to control it.

When you put a car on an incline, you're working with its mass and its weight. Weight is the force of gravity on an object², and a car on an incline is basically a whole bunch of mass fighting to break free. This means that, instead of tinkering with a neutral lump, you're working around something that wants to move. Which means you have to sit there and figure out which ways it wants to move, and brace against them. Not impossible, but the consequences of screwing up can be, well, unpleasant.

The next things you'll need are a floor jack and a pair of jackstands. You may wonder, since cars come with jacks already, why you'd need a special one just to work on the car. Well, spare tire jacks are emergency-use devices, meant to help you impress chicks (or rescue helpless guys) and scrape knuckles. They're not designed to push cars into the air time and again, and don't lift the car very high into the air. As a car is lifted on a jack, it shifts around a bit. Spare tire jacks aren't designed to compensate for this, and so they'll lean over alarmingly as the car goes higher in the air. Floor jacks have none of these limitations. If you get one nice enough, it'll also lift the car a lot faster than any spare tire jack could.

Jackstands are simple (and therefore cheap), but one of the most critical "first-buys" you'll make. All they do is hold a car in the air. They are designed to never move, lean, crack, crumble, bend, or splinter. Rocks, cinder blocks, bricks, boards, and blocks have been used to hold a car in the air, sometimes even successfully, but only by stupid or very desperate people. At a typical cost of $50 for a pair of really nice ones (and half that for cheap ones), there's no reason not to have them.

These two items, jacks and stands, go together because they perform related, but distinct, jobs. The jack lifts the car into the air, and the stands hold it there. As you will find often in your adventures in automotive maintenance, these tools are very good at what they're designed to do, and they suck ass at anything else. If you use a screwdriver as a prybar and it snaps in two, you've usually just ruined a tool. If a car falls off a jack because you were too cheap to buy stands or too lazy to use them, at best you'll simply damage your vehicle. At worst you'll be dinner table conversation at the next coroner's convention.

This is important enough to deserve repeating: Never, ever, ever work under a car that isn't properly supported. A jack of any sort is not proper support. One of the saddest things I ever saw was an episode of "California Coroner"³ I caught on Discovery a few years back. Someone had called the police complaining of a stench coming from their neighbor's back yard. The police arrived to discover a very (as in 4-day) dead person half-squashed underneath a car. The moron had only used a bumper jack, and apparently he got a little careless and bumped it. The horrifying thing was it took a little while before he died. They could tell because he'd broken his fingernails off, desperately trying to lift a two ton Chrysler Imperial off his chest with his bare hands.

The third thing you should buy, or first if the stuff you need to do doesn't involve putting the car in the air, is a large fire extinguisher. The larger the better. Cars are filled with all sorts of nifty petroleum products, ironically the largest quantity of which is also the most flammable. None can be put out with a garden hose or a bucket of water. Once ignited, a car will quite merrily burn with a heat that can melt cast iron and definitely destroy an entire house. A fire extinguisher will ensure a random flame is a fun excuse to coat your garage with white powder, not a reason to call 911.

Stay alert when working on a car that's running. There are a lot of spinning parts in there, any one of which can lop off a careless finger or crush a misplaced hand. Assume that unless you're watching it, the hand you're moving is being placed straight into the path of the fan blades. This will ensure it always stays attached to your wrist. Put away the damned jewelry, which will get caught and torn up, probably cutting you up in the process. Make damned sure all long hair is kept under control, because getting that caught in a fan belt will tear your head off, which makes for a very messy cleanup.

The rest of it is just common sense. Stay calm, take your time, think about what you're doing. The really dangerous stuff usually has warning labels attached to it ("do not open when hot", "can explode if not properly ventilated", "keep hands and feet in ride at all times", etc.) Follow them religiously. Read the manual to learn the proper places to put a jack and stands, because you'll damage the car if you don't. If you don't have the manual ask someone, don't just take a guess.

Your car, your body, your friends and your family will thank you.

To be continued...

While the press is, rather predictably, playing up the "worrisome escalation" angle of yesterday's big ambush attacks, there are several things they're missing:

• The regular army isn't very big on subtlety or subterfuge. In other words, when it comes to ops planning they have the reputation of being as imaginative and subtle as a cast iron skillet. So, let's for the moment posit that this whole thing wasn't some massive, extremely clever setup. This means the CPA has been penetrated, and probably pretty deeply. Convoys filled with currency don't have swinging yellow "Billions On Board" signs attached to them. Someone dropped a dime on this one.

  The co-ordination was just too good. Sure, a convoy filled with APCs and M-1s guarding a few 5-tons fairly screams "ambush me!" But you can't co-ordinate three different nearly simultaneous attacks with a cell-style guerilla unit structure. It takes time, and quite a bit of it, to get everyone in position, trained and tasked. They've got leaks, serious ones, and need to find them.

• They almost certainly didn't bag 50-plus insurgents. On average, for every dead combatant there will be two wounded (in other words, usually 1/3rd of all combat casualties are deaths, the rest are wounded), and it's very unlikely the good guys managed to wound everyone, which is what would be required for the numbers to add up. Expect a lot of Monday-morning-quarterbacking by the press monkeys brave enough to actually leave the Palestine hotel for a few hours.
• They did kill some of them, and almost certainly wounded many more. At the cost of zero dead and eight wounded. This is about as one-sided as it can get.We won this one.
• In spite of the trumpeted co-ordination, there was a remarkable lack of heavy weapons. Shooting AK-47s and RPGs at an M-1 Abrams, even the ass of an M-1 Abrams, is like lobbing spitballs at Steve Austin. You need recoilless rifles, big mortars, and wire-guided missiles before these things even start paying attention to you. They had what must have been at least a week of preparation, and still couldn't field these critical items.
• Even without them, the insurgents stood up and fought. Every guerilla doctrine from the Wascones to chairman Mao states you sneak up on the enemy, hit him on the back of the head as hard as you can, and then run like hell if he turns around. We turned around, but they didn't run. We had tanks and they didn't run.

  This means they were stupid, arrogant, or very, very desperate. You just don't attack prepared regular army units with partisans, not if you want keep them from being noisily turned into worm food. Trained officers, even ones as badly trained as those who riddled Saddam's army, know this. These men were sacrificed in a gamble that didn't pay off. They bluffed us with aces and eights when we were showing four cards of a straight flush.

• They took the chance anyway because we are winning. The "old" Iraqi Dinars, which it would be fair to assume the guerrillas have aplenty, expire this month (according to NBC news at least). Always remember guerrillas operate on the fringes... they beg, borrow, steal, or buy what they need or they (literally) starve and die. If the CPA really were running around with their thumbs stuffed so far up their asses they could pick boogers then the "new" Dinars would be taken about as seriously as Michael Jackson's claims of "innocent" sleepovers.

  Instead, the new money is being taken so seriously the opposition was willing to show just how co-ordinated it could get just to knock over a few trucks full of it. This is the kind of co-ordination you use only when you have the chance to shove a bullet in Bremer's ear. If it were a simple feint they would never have come near this convoy. Instead they threw everything they had at it, and had their heads handed to them.

We're not perfect over there. I think we're still probably screwing up at least as often as we're getting it right. But this was not a screwup, at least not on our part. The good guys won this one.

And if you don't think we're the good guys, please don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Nearly all of you, at one point or another in your life, will get stranded somewhere because of a car breakdown. Nearly all of you at one point or another will shell out more than a thousand dollars for an unexpected car repair. Nearly all of you will pay someone else to solve these problems.

Some of you, though, will think, "maybe I can do this". Of course, you'll be wrong. Just thinking you can do it is quite a bit different from actually gathering up everything you need to do it. The only time someone fixes a car simply by lifting the hood and twiddling with something unseen is in a movie.

Real car work, even simple real car work, requires an amazing amount of stuff to get done right. But don't worry, that's where AMCGLTD comes in. No, you can't have my tools, sod off! But you can have the knowledge I've gained from 20 years of working on various cars, which (as any professional mechanic will tell you after reading this) will be worth exactly what you paid for. What we're going to explore here are the things I've discovered that will a) allow you to fix cars and b) have at least some fun doing it.

Which reminds me... there are about as many different ways to work on a car as there are cars to work on. Automotive Maintenance is as much about philosophy as it is technique. This is my philosophy, my technique. You can (many will) disagree with it. That doesn't make you any less wrong¹ , but hey, if you've been working on your own car long enough to disagree with me, then what are you doing here? The following is what I have found I needed to fix a car and have fun doing it.

To start, you must find a safe place to work. Parking lots are not safe places to work. Not only do you risk getting run over by Buffy the SUV slayer as your legs stick out from under your car, you also risk the wrath of the Condo (or Apartment) Nazis. These jackbooted thugs² will not understand your quest for automotive enlightenment, instead persuing their own obsession with weird abstracts like "property value" and what a 96 Toyota on blocks leaking hydraulic fluid is doing to it. Avoid their attention at all costs.

Beginners will try abandoned parking lots or even back or (if you're desperate, isolated, and/or unmarried) front yards. The first time a 4mm screw slips from your fingers and into the tall grass, or a C-clip departs the engine bay at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light, you'll understand there are exactly two safe places to work... a garage and a driveway. Of the two, a garage is far superior, because there's nothing more effective at getting you to snap a bolt off than lightning hitting a tree a hundred yards away.

As with just about anything else involved in working on cars, you can borrow adequate working space. However, this will generally limit your projects to things that can be done quickly, usually less than a day. Worse still, it sometimes limits you to projects other people think you're capable of completing3. Finally, unless you're fortunate enough to borrow the space of someone who already does car work, you have to bring all your own tools. Having to make long round trips to your house (or a parts store) just to pick up a pair of pliers or a wrench, four or five times a day, is not conducive to an enjoyable repair experience.

Which brings us to tools. Ah... lovely, sweet, shiny tools. In auto maintenance, having the right tool is literally half the battle. The basics, sockets, ratchets and wrenches⁴ are only the beginning. There's also screwdrivers, pliers, cutters, punches, chisels, hammers, crimpers, and a whole host of specialized tools you probably won't even know to ask about when you start. The first time you do any new project, you'll end up buying a whole host of tools. The good news is, generally you'll only have to make big purchases at first. The bad news is, good tools aren't cheap.

And you want good tools. Sure, they all have lifetime warranties, which in theory makes them all equal. However, as with Mr. Orwell's barn, some are more equal than others. In America, there are three tool brands professional mechanics use in preference to all others... Snap-On, Mac, and Matco. Of the three, Snap-On is considered the best, with good reason. Unfortunately, Snap-On knows this, and charges accordingly. A small Snap-On metric socket set can easily set you back $300. No, that's not a misprint. On my patented "scale of beers"⁵, Snap-On is equivalent to Guinness poured from a tap in Dublin. It may take awhile to appreciate, but there just isn't anything better.

Mac and Matco seem to be roughly co-equal with each other, their reputation setting them below Snap-On but far above anything you'll find in a department store⁶. Their pricing is substantially less than Snap-On as well, usually by almost half. Still, $170 for a set of ten sockets and a ratchet will shock the hell out of anyone used to shopping at Wal Mart. On the scale of beers, they both rate in the "Sam Adams/Pete's Wicked/[Your Favorite Microbrew]" league. Definitely premium, but there are (a few) better things, if you can afford them.

Which leads us to the department-store stuff. While few can question the quality of the "big three", there's a lot of variation in the "amateur" ranks. Without exception, "real" mechanics will call most of it junk. Pure junk, if they're in an ugly mood that day. For the most part, they're not far from wrong. Because I wanted to actually eat, there have been times when I've been forced to buy the cheapest tool I could find. Some of them are so poorly made they won't even fit what they're supposed to. Worse still, many will damage nuts and bolts that need some grunt to loosen. On the beer scale, anything with made in "Taiwan", "India" or "China" is equivalent to the plain white can in your grocery store labeled in large block letters with the word "BEER". You can buy them, but you're not working on my car with them!

Of all the tool makes "mere mortals" can buy, the only two I personally would recommend are Craftsman and Husky. Craftsman makes decent quality tools and sells them for (comparatively) bargain-basement prices. I've found their sockets very high quality, their wrenches somewhat crude but effective, and their ratchets sub-par but workable. There's also the legendary Craftsman guarantee on hand tools:if it breaks, no matter how old, worn, or nasty it is, take it in to any Sears anywhere in the world and you'll get a new one, no questions asked. Husky, a brand found mostly in Home Depots in the south, is supposedly made by the same company, but regardless the quality is roughly equivalent. On the beer scale, they're in the Yuengling/Michelobe range. Certainly not the best you can do, but definitely acceptable considering the price.

And then there's e-bay. Because all of these tools have lifetime warranties, it really doesn't matter how used they are. If they break, you get new ones. So, e-bay is an extremely useful place to find discount tools. Probably half the hand tools I now have I got from e-bay. Snap-on is, ironically, the most common professional grade tool you'll find, but absolutely everyone knows how much they're worth. You won't have to pay $320 for a set of 10 wrenches, but you'll usually have to pay at least $120.

Mac and Matco are also out there, but much rarer. The sets tend to go for only a little less than the Snap-on stuff, but because they're not as well known it's possible to "snipe" an occasional auction and get a really great deal. It's still better than what you'd pay buying them off the truck.

The real bargains are Craftsman. Those are the tools you'll get literally for pennies on the dollar. Not only that, a lot of the stuff is new, usually still shrinkwrapped. Be careful though! As with any e-bay item, make sure you know how much any of it costs new. Include the shipping! Craftsman is available at any Sears in the country, and there are very few things in the world that'll make you feel more foolish than buying used tools for more than you'd pay for new.

So, now you've got your tools, you've got your car, and you've got a place to do some work. Now what? Well, you could just start loosening and unscrewing until stuff starts to fall off. And if I want to get rich I can just go to Vegas and start playing slot machines. Both have a roughly equal chance of success. But, as with blackjack, there are systems you can use, strategies and techniques that, while they can't guarantee success, can at least minimize the pain.

For those, you'll have to wait for part 2.

The second in a series of occasional essays on various aspects of warfare.

Preface

One of the problems with being a lifelong student of military history is you start assuming everyone knows things that very few people actually do. There have been many times in the past few weeks where I've shouted "DUR!!!" at the TV only to be confronted with a quizzical look from my wife. So, apologies if this all seems a bit too obvious to you, or a gross oversimplification. I'm just trying to make sure we're all working from the same page.

Guerrilla warfare is one of the most complex, and yet paradoxically one of the most simple, forms of warfare man has created. Like chess, the pieces are straightforward, their paths well-known, but in combination give rise to a nearly infinite number of combinations and strategies. Because of this, guerrilla warfare is usually considered one of the more difficult fields of fighting to study, and often seems barely understood by the popular media. We're going to try, in 1500 words or less, to take at least a baby step in rectifying this situation.

First off, it's important to emphasize that because of their very nature guerrilla conflicts are always unique. Generalizations are very difficult, and dangerous besides. It's very tempting to think just because you understand one guerrilla conflict very well, you understand them all. Gigantic volumes have been written simply detailing the differences between the various conflicts. Trying to inflexibly apply rules that worked in one to another can get you killed.That said, comparing all the various conflicts and the writings of the people who fought them does reveal some commonality.

The basic units, the guerrillas themselves, are nearly always taken from the poorest sections of a society. They are usually young men, poorly educated but not stupid, drawn directly from the local population. As such, they come with a built-in knowledge of local language, custom, and geography, items invaluable to a guerrilla's survival.

The leadership of these bands are oftentimes not drawn from the same "local boys" as the rank-and-file. Instead, leaders tend to come from groups of the better educated middle- and upper-class sections of a society. University students and recent graduates are common choices, as their youth and uncritical idealism make them prime candidates for indoctrination, while their education allows them to see alternatives to the injustice the current society is inflicting.

Because guerrillas are at heart a grass-roots movement, they are always chronically short of supplies. Since they have no factories, no foundries, no depots to call on, they must beg, borrow, or steal essentially everything they need to do their job. Simply acquiring and maintaining the advanced weaponry needed to make the entire project work is a major and difficult undertaking.

Because of this utter reliance on the world around them for supply, the guerrilla must have the support of the common people. As Mao Tse-Tung once said, "the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea." The common people provide the guerrilla with food, shelter, and places to train, as well as accurate and timely information about the enemy. Without the people the guerrilla is simply a starving target hiding in the wilderness. This single factor is central to a guerrilla's existence. Without the people, guerrilla movements wither and die.

The support of an outside "great power" providing weaponry, pots of money, and/or logistical support is nice, but not required for the success of guerrilla operations. If an outsider isn't around to just hand you things like SAMs, recoilless rifles, howitzers, and mortars, then a guerrilla unit will simply attempt buy, borrow, or steal them from the enemy. Don't laugh... the Viet Cong were for a very long time equipped with some of the finest weaponry the US government could provide.

Indoctrination and ideology are also essential to a guerrilla movement's success. You'll always have a certain number of individuals who'll fight just for the sake of fighting, but to really build numbers you must give people something worth fighting for.

It's important to also understand how limited guerrillas really are. While easily able to harass and hinder, they are not capable of occupation in the face of determined, well-organized resistance. They can run amok when all they're facing is infantry, even regular infantry, but when the tanks and planes show up they run or they die. Guerrilla movements can drive "regular" generals insane and hamper their ability to operate, but it takes a regular "real" army to make the final moves in a revolution.This does not mean the guerrilla leaders need to build their own army from scratch, although some have done so. At least as common is co-opting existing generals by indoctrination, blackmail, or kidnapping.

This is why guerrillas need safe places, far away from enemy interference. Without a haven, regulars cannot be trained, supplies cannot be built up, training cannot take place. This is where the dumb luck of geography comes in... some places have terrain almost purpose-built to hide huge numbers of people doing really noisy things, while others make it impossible for three guys to stand together without being noticed.

While it is very difficult for a guerrilla force to win, it's equally (and more famously) difficult for them to lose. Because a guerrilla is as much about mindset as equipment or training, they can fade back into the peasantry as quickly as they sprang up, only to return again when the conditions are right. When lead well, guerrillas never even attempt to confront their enemies under anything other than ideal conditions. Again, Mao: "When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue." If the enemy won't stand and fight, and looks exactly like a peasant once he's ditched his rifle, it's just about impossible to win a battle with him.

This does not mean guerrilla forces are invincible, far from it. Guerrilla movements are created by external conditions, and it is only by controlling and removing these external conditions that they can be reliably defeated. Sometimes this is simply not possible... a brutal, corrupt dictatorship is not going to introduce land reform or give away its power, no matter how many soldiers die in ambushes. In such places the best that can be hoped for is a bloody stalemate, with both sides grinding away at each other, sometimes for decades at a time.

When the conditions can be alleviated, guerrilla movements evaporate like puddles on a hot street. However, these conditions are by no means obvious, and their solutions not simple at all. Roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals can be built by the dozen, but if half the project is sucked up in graft and the other half is spent meeting the requirements on the cheap, nothing will be gained. Children can be sent to schools and protected on safe streets but if it requires the locals to be uprooted from the land of their ancestors they'll simply move right back where they started, and send their sons to fight the infidel. Fences can be constructed and leaders assassinated, but as long as settlements are built in the heart of an erstwhile homeland while bags of money are being handed over the border by cynical fools, nothing will change.

So when you hear the report of a bombing, consider the targets. Were they soldiers, or their supporters? Were they instead common people, or those known to help them? Are soldiers working with the locals, or are they trying to sweep the opposition aside so that a "new order" can take hold? Are the guerrillas drawn from the local population, or are they filled with ranks of "foreigners" from other places? Do the guerrillas have a safe haven to operate from, or terrain to use as cover for their operations, or are they stuck with flat, exposed country in which even dead dogs can be spotted a half mile away?

Ironically, as far as Iraq goes the conclusion to my first "101" essay is essentially the same as this:

What you watch for then is how patient our guys are. The Iraqis have no love for us, because we have invaded their country. Never lose sight of this fact. It doesn't matter if we're there to "liberate" them... we're big, scary, weird looking, and in their front yard. Only by being patient, by removing the bastards with the sniper rifles and the mortars, without killing anyone else, will they decide we are the lesser of two evils. When that happens they'll do our work for us, because unlike us they know Achmed's kid Achmad is no damned good and has been playing with some awfully smelly stuff in his basement lately. It is only with the villagers' help that we'll transform a successful suicide bombing into a dumb kid sitting in a cell.

One of the more challenging parts of growing up, for me at least, was learning about sportsmanship. Oh, we'd be told about "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game", but the way adults acted when a team played well but lost versus when a team played poorly but won was not ignored by the children involved. As I grew up, hard lessons taught me the only time people play for the sake of playing is when they have nothing to lose. People who win, and do it consistently, have always understood rules are flexible things, rewarding most only when bent just to the point of breaking, but no further.

It's everywhere. Pro ball players, business owners, real estate developers, labor union leaders, senior citizen groups, gun nuts, peacenicks, hookers and homeless are all looking for an edge, an advantage that will give them exactly what they want, and at the top will do absolutely anything to get. Every one of them always keeping in mind the old axiom "it's not breaking the rules as long as you don't get caught."

What I find surprising about such things is that other people find them so surprising. In business and sports it's amusing, but in politics it's simply staggering. Thankfully, our founding fathers were nowhere near as naive about human nature as the current generation seems to be. They knew far too many of us prefer to bend our knees than use our heads, and that people who seek governmental power are always smart, charming, perceptive, funny, and at heart the absolute last people you would actually want to give that sort of power to. So they designed from the outset a system of government so Byzantine in its complexity we still haven't completely figured out all its subtleties more than two centuries later. Even then it was nearly torn apart by the efforts of the rapidly industrializing North to defang the power of the old-money South. Only the truly credulous think the Civil War was just about slavery, or state's rights.

I'm not so cynical as to say everyone is like this. Far from it. Our country is fantastically successful not just because it puts ruthless, vicious people in a precarious balance against themselves, but because it also makes them directly accountable to the vast majority of decent, law-abiding folks who make up the rest of it, folks who really do think good works, a pious soul, and living a clean life are signposts along the only real road to happiness. But to deny the monsters exist, or to claim they infest one side only, or that they are not in charge and have always been in charge (no matter which label happens to hang on them) is to at best show a fawning ignorance in the way the world works, at worst a denial so complete as to be called cynical itself.

It's very important to remember this... the US is not successful because of any innate virtue bestowed on us, but rather because the dark, powerful people who run our society are kept in balance with each other, while being held in check by and accountable to the rest of us. Even more importantly, the rest of the world is not as successful as we are not because we've lied or stolen or killed our way to the top. They fail instead because for the most part their countries do not have such checks and balances, and therefore are always at risk from the predations of evil and the miscalculations of good intent. History has proven time and again that such nations all too easily succumb to the abyss of totalitarianism, no matter what its disguise may be.

It is to our discredit that we fail to recognize this, and instead blame ourselves, and allow ourselves to be blamed, for all the evil that is in this world.

"We love the people, we just hate their government" is a phrase nearly everyone, everywhere, has heard, and yet no single phrase is more often misunderstood by its speakers.

Westerners living in democracies say this out of their utter naivete about how the world works. Deep down, most of us actually think there are no real differences between the governing class and the governed in a society. In our wide-eyed ignorance, we really do see one group as interchangeable with the other.

It simply doesn't work this way. No matter how egalitarian, no matter how totalitarian, societies are ruled by the social elite of their culture. What's important to understand about more "traditional" (i.e. theocratic, Marxist, and/or autocratic) cultures is their social elite is small, fixed, and essentially unchangeable. It is made up of at best a few dozen families who jealously and brutally guard their privilege. We are puzzled when a dictator or oligarchy runs their country into the ground because we do not understand that, to them, they are the country, and only their prosperity matters.

This deserves repeating: In most of the rest of the world, if you are not born with the right last name, go to the right school, marry the right person, and live in the right neighborhood, you do not count as a member of that society. A cynic may sneer it's no different here than there, but that only proves their ignorance. In a traditional society there is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to change these facts to your advantage.

Power changes hands only with violence. Without exception, throughout history, real transfers of power are marked by seas of blood sloshed out of losers at the hands of winners. Dynasty is exterminated by dynasty, empires change hands with a sword through the neck, and heretics create orthodoxy with a torch and kindling.

The theory that modern democracies are miraculous because they avoid this mayhem through law is a myth. As is so often bemoaned by Marxists and Greens in the west, the change is only one of degree, not kind. Al Gore went to Harvard, George Bush to Yale, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to Oxford. These are most definitely not men of common stock.

Instead, the power of capitalism and democracy are that they spread out the definition of elite, make larger and far more mobile the pool of aristocracy. Faith can be twisted, naivete manipulated, but the money enshrined in capitalism has a cold, hard logic that defies long-term political or religious manipulation. Academics and liberals bleat about the failure of this country because of rights denied, opportunities stolen, all the while willfully ignoring an ugly truth: the only things really inalienable in this world are naked power and grim death. Constitutions are designed to protect, and only enable by accident. Whatever failings this country may have, its democratic constitution has over time protected it very, very well.

We succeed where all others fail not out of fairness, or the empowerment of a mythical "common man", but because our society gives anyone smart enough, mean enough, and determined enough the opportunity to become elite. Power is therefore never wrested from the smoking pyres of coincidental birth, but is instead bequeathed by one recognizable old fart to another. By breaking the chains of simple inheritance, our society reaches liberty not by allowing the plebe to influence the senator, but by allowing the plebe to become the senator.

And therein, as they say, lies the rub. Anti-war protesters in our country march in the streets against our violent involvement in the affairs of another country. In part, they do this because they assume that by attacking the ruling government we are attacking the people, because in their countries the government is the people. Never once do they seem to realize this is simply not the case. Never once do they seem to realize that violence is required to remove an entrenched elite, an elite so small and removed from the "commoners" as to be almost from another planet. Never once do they seem to realize that without such intervention, they doom the other society to a bleak existence of poverty, secret police, and wood chippers.

The reverse mistake is almost as common. The surest way to power, or the elimination of a rival power, in a traditional setting is to exterminate a small, readily identifiable minority. Simply destroying glorious landmarks in a timely way will ensure the collapse of an entire country because that's exactly what would happen in their country, if a bomb was smuggled into the right palace. Never once do they realize the ignorant masses that to them moo and baa at the master's command actually are the government they seek to destroy, and the only way to truly eliminate the threat is to kill them all.

It should therefore not be surprising that such elite labor so mightily to acquire weapons that can kill millions at the touch of a button. Nor should it be surprising (to anyone that's actually paying attention) that our government is willing to shed blood to deny them that privilege. We fear them because we think they have the support of millions. They attack us under the assumption that the death of mere thousands will give them hegemony.

Of the two, the latter is the more delusional. True, it's been proven time and again that a small, mobile, determined foe can succeed as long as their larger, more resourceful opponent screws it up. As long as they're lucky each time, they will prevail.

The problem they refuse to see is the big guy only has to be lucky once.

Bin Laden accuses us of being soft. Have we no stomach for violence? In the long run, will it make a difference?

We've all seen it at one time or another... the hero, after witnessing the deaths of his loved ones sets out to avenge these misdeeds. After questing long and hard, he finally confronts the evildoer and after an epic battle disarms him. Just as he's about to send this murderer to his maker, some supporting actor always runs up, grabs the hero's arm, and shouts, "No! You can't do this! If you kill him you'll be no better than he is!" After a few moments of dramatic music, the hero takes a deep breath, puts away his weapon, and the credits roll.

This tableaux, acted out so often in our media we can almost recite the dialog word for word, represents a fundamental contradiction in our modern society. The elitist, the academic, the intellectual, both self-styled and actual, is bemused by simple, outdated concepts like "good" and "evil". After some sixty years of post-war cultural relativism, they fully believe in the utopian delusion that misunderstanding and miscommunication are the root of all evil and only by refusing to "talk it out" do we descend into madness.

The "common" people, however, hold no such delusions. In a world of strong versus weak, where success is too many times defined by how hungry you are when you go to bed, where prosperity is always bestowed to the mean and the clever instead of the virtuous and responsible, they know without a doubt that good and evil are both concrete and easy to spot. They do not look to the latest vogue social theories to guide them, they look instead to the books of their ancestors, whose admonitions will be with them long after the latest behavioral theory has been discredited.

And so, since Hollywood is filled with the former while the rest of America is filled with the latter, our heroes seem to always be forced through this existential angst at doing what is, after all, the hero's job. As with all modern streams of liberal thought, Hollywood has forgotten what middle America has not. There are always differences between the hero and the villain, deeply rooted ones that could never be undone with a single act of violence.

It wasn't always like this. The foundations of our culture, the quasi-mythological histories of Greece, Rome, and Judea, are filled with vengeful characters carrying out their missions with, as the modern saying goes, "extreme prejudice." Ancient criminal justice systems could be sophisticated in the extreme in the procedures used to find guilt, yet had exactly three sorts of penalties: fines, mutilations, and death. Such sentences were always carried out publicly, and at the ancient high point of our cultural tradition were turned into macabre sport. In warfare, extermination of an entire people was the understood, and desired, goal, so obvious it was never even articulated.

What changed? The answer lies at the feet of the industrial revolution. The upward mobility and burgeoning middle class created by industrialization redefined what was a threat to society. Because agrarian cultures (and, before about 1760, all advanced cultures were agrarian) are always ruled by an extremely small, extremely rich elite surrounded by masses of very poor, very desperate people, the slightest transgression was always seen as a direct threat to society^*, and was treated accordingly. Defeated cultures could be annihilated simply by lopping off a few thousand heads and enslaving the rest.

Industrialization's emphasis of wealth over birth as the arbiter of power shattered this construct. For the first time in the history of civilization, being born poor did not automatically doom someone to a life of poverty. Unprecedented numbers of people suddenly had the wealth and time required to be creative, and therefore define the culture. The weapons of these societies were so powerful they doomed any army that didn't have them, and so such creativity could not be snuffed at the will of a thug who happened to be good with a horse.

With so many people having a "buy" into a society, and industrial technology arming them with weapons of such unprecedented lethality, cultural extinction simply fell off the radar screen. Since birth no longer solely determined a person's value to a society, the concept of "rehabilitation" became possible, even desirable in an age of freewheeling opportunism. It took a lot longer for massacring an opponent's army to go out of fashion, but eventually even that was seen as denying one's own producers a set of future consumers.

Modern societies are now ever further removed from violence of any sort. A person nauseated by the thought of killing a chicken, cow, or pig would've starved 150 years ago yet today can prosper without eating meat at all. The effectiveness of modern police forces have made private gun ownership an at times dangerous luxury instead of an obvious necessity. We have become so insulated even obviously fictional violence upsets us, and viewing real, albeit televised, death is perceived as a shattering experience.

What's important to understand, and far too often ignored by insular academics, elitist diplomats, and policy wonks, is that the rest of the world still works the old way. A "traditional" society is almost by definition agrarian in nature. This is far too often romanticized into bucolic visions of peaceful farmers riding carts pulled by braying donkeys, but such is not the case.

Instead, these are societies ruled by very small classes of elites, defined more by blood than by talent. Social mobility, especially by women, is seen as (and in fact is) an immediate and direct threat to the very foundations of these cultures, and because of this is dealt with in the most harsh and brutal ways imaginable. "The people" simply don't exist in the western conception of that term, instead being composed of masses of very poor, very ignorant people with no conception of or concern for the policies, practices, or preachings of their rulers so long as it does not affect their fields.

The events of September 11th represented a literal clash of these two cultural conceptions. To the traditional culture, this was a logical attempt to exterminate at least some** of the ruling elite that threatened their utter destruction. In their mind, such destruction would perforce result in the implosion and extinction of that society, since the elite were the only ones actually responsible for it. Victory would be, therefore, inevitable.

To the most culturally advanced (i.e. liberal) members of the industrial society, it was the violent "acting out" of a people who had simply "missed out" on the benefits of modernity. Cultural extinction, on either side, simply never occurred to them because their society was made up of all the people, not just a small subset, and it would be assumed the other side was likewise composed. Negotiations should be the rule of the day, not primitive vengeance.

Of course, of the two miscalculations, the former is much more dangerous to the traditional society than the latter is to the industrial. Modernity is an uncomfortable suit of clothes for many, perhaps even most, of its inhabitants. Even two centuries is not enough time for such people to forget apocalypse. To them, the attacks represented a clear and present danger not just to their country, but to their way of life, even their very existence. It doesn't help much that they're right. And it's those millions of people who understood on that terrible day one simple truth the liberals, elites, and academics had long forgotten.

The good guy can never turn into the bad guy simply by killing him, because the bad guy is now dead.

U1: "Scott! Help! I sent a message to a few people and it ended up going to the whole staff! What's wrong?!?"

Just what I need on a Friday. An e-mail mystery.

U2: "Scott! Oh my god! I sent a message to someone and it went to the whole staff!"

Well, ok, one person having a problem is, well, one person having a problem. Every network admin worth his/her salt knows the biggest source of bugs and errors comes from the device sitting between the chair and the keyboard. More than one person having a problem, well, that's a network issue, and that's my job.

U3: "Scott! What's going on?!? I sent..."

Me, in unison: "a message to someone and it went to the whole staff?"

U3, disappointed (spoiled it for her): "well, yes."

Me: "No idea what's causing this. I'll get on it."

U3: "Well, great, because ... " [insert user dialog #6: "something weird happened and now people are calling me and I just wanted you to know because it's completely your responsibility at least a little and I know you're interested anyway"]

While trying to tease out what the hell might be going on with these messages (I got them too), a miracle occurred. Not just a "wow-look-a-20-dollar-bill-on-the-sidewalk" miracle, but a genuine gold-plated divine intervention, complete with clouds parting, sunbeams descending, and a chorus of angels singing hosannas on high.

One of my users figured out what was going wrong. All by themselves. And they actually came by to tell me about it.

U2: "I've got it! The messages I sent to [Known Clueless User^tm, aka KCU^tm] got sent to all the staff. Just those, nothing else."

Cue wavy-screen flashback effect and music as Scott looks skyward. Voiceover of Scott: "Hmmm... [KCU^tm]"

Flashback: Yesterday, 3 pm, phone rings

Me: "This is Scott"

KCU^tm: "Hi Scott! This is [KCU^tm]!"

Me: *GROAN* (on the inside)

KCU^tm: "What was that? Is my cell phone acting up again?"

Note to self: must keep inside thoughts inside

Me: "I guess... what's up?"

KCU^tm: "Well, umm... I was... umm... wondering. How do I set it so that it sends out umm... you know... whenever I log in?"

How to get tech support to help your clueless ass [page 28]: Be as vague as possible. Tech support people enjoy trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about. Words like "computer" and "email" are too specific and disappoint your tech support person. Instead, use pronouns that could refer to six or seven different things on your computer. Finally, make sure to refer to something that's just impossible, like sending everyone on the staff a message when you log into your computer. Support people live to help you specify your problems before they can solve them.

Me: (Hooray! Another dart throwing contest! Let's see... what does KCU^tm always want to do yet never remembers how... ah! I remember, the thing KCU^tm called about the past three times in a row) "You mean you want to set a vacation autoreply on your e-mail account so when people send you mail they get a reply that you're out of the office?" (Swear to god, Jane Goodall got nothing on me when it comes to translating the intentions of the primitives)

KCU^tm: "Yes! That's it!"

Me: "Ok, go to [intranet website] and visit [clearly labeled e-mail section], then click [clearly labeled account management section, even says "autoreply" on it], then follow the directions."

KCU^tm (long pause ... I can almost hear claxons sounding in her brain and the announcement "DANGER! DANGER! SELF-RELIANCE REQUIRED! SYSTEMS OVERLOADING! STAND CLEAR! SYSTEMS OVERLOADING!"): "The directions?"

Me [oh no you don't, not this time]: "Yup, the directions are right there. Just follow them."

KCU^tm: "And they'll tell me what to do?"

Me: No, they'll tell you how to make chicken and dumplings in a spare tire. "Yup."

KCU^tm [in doubtful singsong tones suggesting "You'll be sorr-rey"]: "Umm... Okay..."

Cue wavy-screen flashback effect and music as Scott nods his head

Me: "Thanks [U2], I think I already know where the problem is."

Let's see... nope, don't know her password, not on file (things like this are why I keep them in a file, not because I like spying on them. Well, much.) Too bad, so sad, going to have to call me to find out what it is now. A quick password re-set and I'm in. Sure enough, there it was.

You see, right below the part where you set your vacation reply is another section marked AUTO FORWARD. Let's repeat that... another section. That being something marked clearly and separately from the correct section. And right there, in the auto forward section, was the all-staff e-mail address. Now, this isn't some sort of button you just click and suddenly mail is going somewhere else. Nope, you have to click two boxes and type some text in to get forwarding to work. You have to want it to work.

Yup, this person had, for reasons I at first refused to even attempt understanding, set it up so anyone sending her e-mail would automatically have that e-mail forwarded to the entire staff of this organization.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence -- Napoleon Bonaparte

I should have that carved into my door. No, I don't think she did it on purpose. Wait, what am I saying, of course she did it on purpose... it's the only way something like that can be done. What I mean is I don't think she did it out of a sense of malice.

Putting on my "moron goggles" I had to admit that, in spite of the fact these were two separate sections with two obviously different functions, there were no explicit instructions saying "use this for that, and this other thing for that other thing." In my own defense, nobody in the past five years this system had been in use had managed a stunt like this. However, by crossing my eyes and focusing on exactly and only what was in front of me and ignoring everything else, I could almost see what happened...

KCU^tm [in voiceover]: Let's see... here's the autoreply stuff... well, this is easy... who needs those squiggly "instruction" things anyway. Now, type up the reply, and, oh! Look! It's even got this blank at the bottom for me to tell it who to send the reply to! Wow, it's got more squiggles around it... "A-U-T-O F-O-R-W--" oh god, this is so confusing... Well, it's obvious what it's for anyway. Let's send it to everyone on the staff, that's so great!"

So now there are big red warnings on the page, a-la "DO NOT USE HAIR DRYER WHILE IN BATHTUB" and "WARNING: INSERTING HEAD INTO BAG AND CLOSING MAY RESULT IN SUFFOCATION".

Now if I can just get out of here before she calls wondering what happened with her password...

How to spot a:

Liberal

1. Thinks Al Franken is funny
2. Isn't sure what's causing all this bad weather, but knows George W. Bush is behind it somehow
3. Sincerely believes this would be a better place if government got more involved
4. Thinks world opinion is more important than actually getting something done
5. Is actually surprised when politicians lie. Well, Democratic politicians that is.

Conservative

1. Thinks Rush Limbaugh is funny.
2. Isn't sure what's causing the economy to flop around like a trout in the bottom of a boat, but knows Hillary Clinton is behind it somehow.
3. Believes big business has only the best interests of this country at heart.
4. Thinks the US would be much better off if we'd just put all these funny looking people back on the boats they came in on.
5. Believes Christianity automatically makes someone moral.

European

1. Thinks the UN is an honest, efficient agent for world peace.
2. Isn't sure what caused that huge heat wave, but knows the US was behind it somehow.
3. Believes Israel would be much better off without so many damned Jews.
4. Wishes they could stick all the funny looking people on boats and ship them to the US.
5. Thinks the safe-house of radical Islam is in the Middle East.

Iraqi

1. Thinks the occupation is the root cause of all suffering
2. Wonders why soldiers are so mean to them when "someone else" lobs an RPG through a Humvee.
3. Doesn't know what the answer is, but knows the US, the OA, the Imams, the tribes, their elders, the Ba'ath, their mom, and their cousin aren't it.
4. Wonders why 200,000 soldiers can't find 20 million people jobs.
5. Believes a working air conditioner is a bigger worry than their kid ending up in a wood chipper.

Palestinian

1. It's all the Jews' fault
2. It's all the Jews' fault
3. It's all the Jews' fault
4. It's all the Jews' fault
5. It's all the Jews' fault

Journalist

1. Doesn't care who's fault it is as long as they get a byline.
2. Thinks research is reading the New York Times and the Washington Post.
3. Sincerely believes liberals are under-represented in the mainstream media.
4. Thinks a microphone in their hand automatically means they have something interesting to say.
5. Knows that they are the only thing standing between the mooing masses and a Republican-led dictatorship.

Hollywood Actor

1. Thinks having a microphone stuck in their face automatically means they have something meaningful to say.
2. Believes money is a good substitute for education
3. Wishes all these plebian, ignorant "fans" would just leave them alone so they can go about practicing their "craft". At least until their next movie comes out.
4. Thinks playing make-believe turns them into a political analyst and foreign policy expert.
5. Sincerely believes things like "good" and "evil" are antiquated notions unsuited to this "post-modern" age.

That should piss pretty much everyone off. My day is complete. :)

The casualties along the airport road have occurred during a string of attacks that have killed 34 U.S. soldiers in Iraq since May 1. A soldier was killed today when his convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenades on a highway just west of here.

--Washington Post, July 17, 2003

At least 79 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since Bush announced an end to major fighting May 1. Of those, 32 have been killed by hostile fire and 47 were victims of non-hostile fire or accidents.

--CNN.com, July 11, 2003

The solider was at least the 34th killed since major combat operation ended May 1, and the 149th to die in combat since the war began. Counting accidents, 226 Americans have died in the war, which began a day shy of four months ago.

--CBSnews.com, July 18, 2003

Dreaded calls continue to arrive in the still of night.

This week alone, nine soldiers died and another dozen were wounded. Among the dead were Sgt. Michael B. Quinn, 37, who went to high school, married and lived in the Tampa area before reenlisting in November 1994, and Sgt. Thomas F. Broomhead, 34, who was raised in Fort Myers.

--WMBBTV.com (a local news station in Panama City, FL), May 30, 2003

Two months after President Bush declared major combat over in Iraq, stealthy enemies are still killing and wounding American and allied soldiers - five killed and 22 wounded in May, 20 killed and 39 wounded in June.

--Knight Ridder News Service, June 30, 2003

It's depressing, isn't it? We went to all that effort, spent all that money, lost all those men and women, and now we're losing the peace. Every time you pick up a newspaper, turn on a TV, or listen to a radio, you hear it over and over and over again... US troops are getting killed constantly, nothing's going right in Iraq, and no real progress is being made. We might as well pack up and head out before we're inflicted with another Mogadishu or, even worse, Vietnam.

It's crap. Crap perpetrated by a press corps far more interested in a career-enhancing story than in providing an even balance of reporting. Pictures of blood splattered humvees and tear-stained parents sell. Stories of bomb-throwing taxi drivers and clerics preaching Jihad against the infidel sell. The consequences these stories have on the moral of a nation doesn't sell. The implications these stories have on perceptions of progress don't sell. What these stories do to the overall effort of rebuilding a nation we spent the blood of our own on don't sell.

And of course, if it doesn't sell, the media doesn't care about it.

Let's do a little fact checking on our own, shall we? The media love to intone the statistics of dead soldiers in the occupation of Iraq, ticking off the numbers with deep sincerity every single chance they get. But listen carefully. For the longest time the statistic was combat and accidents. In other words, to the press corps a kid getting killed by an Iraqi with an RPG is comparable to a different kid getting killed by a crate of tank treads falling on him. This is a distinction important enough it deserves repeating: to the press, accident and combat fatalities are the same thing.

What we're not getting, unsurprisingly, is any sort of perspective about these numbers. The Army is a dangerous place in the best of times. Working with stuff designed to blow up on purpose usually is. To demonstrate this, let's take a look at just how dangerous it is to work in the army on, as they say, "any given Sunday" by checking out the fatality rate for the past nine years (source):

Please note that, like the media, I'm lumping all army fatalities in here. So let's compare it with the last "real" war the media seems to take seriously, Vietnam (source):

Again, lumping both combat and "non-combat" casualties.

For comparison, the total number of fatalities for the army in FY 02-03, including combat and accidents, stands at approximately 344. That's 151 fatalities during the war (source), and 193 accidental deaths since October of 2002 (source).

So, what does it all mean? Well, depends on how you look at it. If we look only at accidents, the current fatality rate is high, but not extraordinarily so. If we look only at combat fatalities, the current rate is almost unbelievably low, especially when compared to the last occupation-style operation in which a comparable number of troops were involved.

Most importantly it means the press is focusing on the wrong thing. The media has an incredibly important role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq. Vietnam turned into a debacle in no small part because nobody was watching the people in charge to make sure they were doing a good job. We need the press to keep us informed, to act as a watchdog against bureaucratic excess and failure when it happens, and act as a promoter of ideas that work and people who come up with them if they remain in obscurity. They are simply not doing this.

Each fatality is a terrible tragedy, yes, but we're in the process of rebuilding an entire nation. Where are the stories about fixing infrastructure? Where are the stories about attempts at government? Where are the stories about reconstructing the economy? While careerist pop-star wannabes are out chasing ambulances we're stuck here with no idea what's really going on.

It's not at all uncommon for our media to self-indulgently focus on the dramatic death of a single person in order to further a career. The orgy is distasteful, but in the context of, say, a natural disaster or a lurid murder the results are basically harmless.

The rules are different now. The fate of someone else's country is at stake. Like it or not, the media sets the tone for our national debates. By focusing on demoralizing tales of death and failure on the scale of a single soldier, they are actively undermining political support for a national cause which we have already paid for in blood.

It's not just the prestige of a politician, the success of a party, or the re-election of a president that's on the line here. The ultimate fate of more than 22 million people and countless future generations is now our responsibility. Of course, this is simply too big for most of our press corps to get their head around, so let's ratchet the focus down a bit. If we suffer a failure of nerve over a perceived lack of success, if we cut and run because of a seemingly endless stream of bad news, if our representatives squander their opportunities and destroy our chances with programs that just don't work, then our media will have ensured only one thing.

They will have ensured the sacrifices of all the Americans they take such ill-disguised glee in reporting, every single one of them, will have been a complete and utter waste. And if we all don't wise up to them, it might actually happen.

Ok, let's face it, I'm not exactly what you'd call a socializer. I'm just not real good at it. I guess I don't feel I have all that much in common with, well, almost anyone. In the great high school we call adult life, I am most definitely one of the weird kids in the corner reading a science fiction book. I'm actually used to it, so what has happened in the last nine months has caught me completely by surprise. In that short period of time I went from the guy people scheduled around to someone every person wanted to talk to.

Oh, I've found friends, good people who do in fact share the same interests as me, but most of the time my conversations with other people tended to go like this:

P: "Wow, that's an interesting picture on your calendar there."

Me: "Yeah, that's an He-111 bomber. In fact, it's the one that flew Franco around after World War II. The Confederate Air Force picked it up in the sixties and fly it around to this day. It's one of the only warbirds I haven't seen in person. If you'll notice the engine nacelles look funny. That's because they used Merlin engines with that model. Makes them look really different." (Ok, look, I didn't say being treated like I still had zit cream on my chin wasn't justified.)

P: [blank stare, bit of a pause] "Umm... yeah... wow... gee, look at the time, gotta go!"

Me: "Sure! No problem! You sure you don't want to see next month's--"

At which point they've usually escaped.

Worse still are lunchtime conversations. Those long, awkward silences while you're munching a sandwich with someone sitting next to you, even if it's someone you don't know very well, get under my skin in a hurry. This usually triggers a pitiful exchange like:

Me: "Wow, some weather we're having, huh?"

R: "Yeah. Rains a lot now. My geraniums have really started to wilt. Do you garden?"

Me: "Well, no, not really."

R: "And my husband hasn't been able to attend any baseball games either. Who's your favorite team?"

Me: "Ah. Well, don't really follow baseball that closely either."

[long pause.]

R: "Wow, some weather we're having, huh?"

It gets so bad I sometimes think people move their lunch hours around just to avoid me.

At parties I try to stay quiet, which works just long enough for me to find the beer, which gives me "can't-shut-up disease." This inevitably leads to fixed stares of slowly congealing horror on the faces of those around me as I barrel across the conversational savanna like a rhino charging a tour bus.

Ellen's not a whole lot better. I know it will be nearly impossible for regular readers of this site to believe, but in a party situation Ellen is usually a complete wallflower. A field mouse under a leaf pile hiding in mortal fear of a hawk is more conspicuous than my wife at an office party. Alcohol will loosen her up, yes, but when that happens at the end of the night I can find where she is by listening for the word "cat" interspersed with "and then I said what the fuck are you talking about?!?" Not hard to do, since her voice travels quite well enough to reach the host. And the people in the next county.

Yeah, party invitations were few and far between. Repeats less so. Well, at least until we found friends as weird as we were anyway (TCM! TCM! WE'RE A FAN! IF GOTHS CAN'T DO IT NO ONE CAN!)

Pregnancy changes all of this, and not just for the mother. A lifetime membership in the pocket protectorate is suddenly turned on its head. Not only do you have something to say to someone, anyone, they're actually interested in hearing it! Even stranger, they'll actually ask you questions, and listen to the answers!

Z, in gleeful tone: "Scott honey, just how is that wife of yours doing?"

Me: [Long pause. Turn around. Twice. Did they hire another Scott? Has someone replaced the woman who said "I'm sick of you talking to me like that, and I'm going to see it stops" with some alien clone? Is this in fact the fourth sign of the apocalypse? Is my fly undone?] "Oh, uh... she's fine, ready for it to end, but fine."

Z, so cheerful you expect the top of her head to blow off from the pressure of all that pure sunshine: "Well that's just great. Just great. Be sure to give her my regards and tell her to hang in there!"

Lunchroom conversations are an absolute breeze now:

D: "How's Ellen? When is her due date again?"

Me: "June 27th."

D: "Wow. Are you guys ready?"

Me: "Well, for the most part, but..."

The eyes don't glaze over, furtive looks of "oh my god make it stop make it stop!!!" are not exchanged with better-adjusted companions, they're not even curling in on themselves like someone opened a carton of six-week-old milk under their noses. Let's try an experiment...

Me: "... and it was a great excuse to pick up the latest Stephen Hawking book, and man let me tell you--"

D: "Umm... yeah... wow... gee, look at the time, gotta go!"

Ah well. At least lunchtime won't be so damned awkward anymore. Now if I can just figure out how to convince one of them Olivia could really use a 24 piece metric wrench set...

I stand with Israel. In the endless finger-pointing game of "who shot first? Who stops shooting first?" I point my finger squarely at the Arab world, and wait with Israel for them to make the first real move. I admire Israel, because it is a ridiculously small country with ridiculously brave people.

At this point most other authors would say, "if you don't agree with me you'd better just skip the rest of this." I almost did just that. But I changed my mind. If you don't agree with the sentiments above I want you to read the rest of this very slowly. I want you to understand how stupid and ignorant you are. I want you to understand that being "for Jews but against Israel" is a contradiction that reeks of anti-Semitism. I want you to get so angry your blood fizzes. Because you see that's how angry I am right now, and I feel like sharing.

I'm sure anti-Semitism did exist in the little southern town I grew up in. The real problem with it was a lack of targets. There were two, count them two, Jewish families in Dumas Arkansas (population: 6400). Since everyone was busy discriminating against people who looked different (I mean, really, what good is bigotry if you have to ask before you discriminate against someone?) these two families had simply become part of the quirky background noise that flavors any small town, like candy flowers on a particularly tacky birthday cake.

One family had a wife who was a flat-out kleptomaniac. Her husband would keep an inventory of whatever she happened to shake out of her hand bag every night and come around to each store once a week to pay for the items. My mom cared for the matriarch of the other family to help pay for nursing school. Stories of a very tiny, very old, very crazy Jewish lady who insisted on putting up a Christmas tree every year regaled our household for that brief period.

When I was a kid, I learned about the Holocaust, and I learned about Israel. To me, the two became inextricably linked... very bad people had gathered up a bunch of other people and shot them and hung them and gassed them and burned them by the millions simply because they didn't like them very much. A country got set up by the people who survived to ensure it never, ever happened again. These people were still surrounded by other people who would shoot them and hang them and gas them and burn them if they were given the chance.

The difference this time around was the Jews had guns. Big ones, and lots of them. I was told these Jews, these Israelis, got most of their guns from us. Unlike their Soviet-sponsored neighbors they didn't use them as fancy parade pieces, and didn't use them as an efficient way to blow up their own people. They used them, very well, to protect themselves from everyone else. As I watched the television images of living naked people being rushed to the edges of trenches filled with dead naked people and shot over and over and over until it seemed the whole world would be mired in tears and blood I was proud to know my country was helping to keep this from ever happening again.

I still am.

I learned later there was more to it than that. Actually a lot more. I learned that Palestine didn't even exist for two thousand years, it was merely the southern part of Syria. I learned how groups of Jews started simply buying land there from whomever would sell it to them. Turned out that at the end of the nineteenth century there were a lot of sellers. A lot. After all, it was mostly desert. So many sold that by 1917 an appreciable amount of what had then become Palestine was under Jewish ownership through the simple expedient of purchasing it.

I learned of the deeply cynical deals England and France made to everyone and anyone whom they thought would help them defeat Germany in the First World War. Southern Syria was sold not once but twice to two different peoples in secret agreements hardly anyone really knew the details to. When it was over England was given the whole thing in spite of all the agreements.

I learned that the Jews of Europe knew the rules of this system and how to make it work for them. While the Arabs squabbled amongst themselves as to how to deal with this new Crusade from the primitive infidels, the Jews continued to quietly buy land and bring in families. They built farms and houses and canals and universities. It became such a scandal among Arabs they started shooting each other to prevent the legal sale of land to Jews.

I learned that in order to quell Arab unrest in Palestine Britain closed it off to Jewish immigration at precisely the time Hitler came to power, and that thousands, perhaps millions, died because of this. When the war was over Britain turned the whole mess over to the UN, which, in typical UN fashion, came up with a plan that tried to please everyone and ended up satisfying no one.

I learned that in order to support their "Palestinian" brothers the rest of the Arab world decided to crush the nascent Israeli state instead of deal with it. When the Israelis handed them their heads the Arabs annexed whatever bits of land they could grab for their own countries, said to hell with whoever happened to be living there, and rooted out and booted out every Jew they could find inside their borders. Israel took every single one of them with open arms.

I learned the United States was officially no great friend to Israel in the beginning. It was the French who supplied arms and armor to the Israelis for the first fifteen years of their existence. The IAF flew Mirages, not Starfighters. Israel was denied direct help by one US administration after another because providing it would annoy the Soviets, who had the place surrounded with their client states.

I learned it was only when those client states attacked and threatened to annihilate Israel not once but twice did the US come around and realize the country they were ignoring as inconvenient was the only working democracy in the region. A democracy that would be unable to continue its existence without our help.

But most of all, I learned the United States did not create the "problem" of Israel. Israel created itself, by legal means where it could and by force where it had to. It won its existence the same way our country did, through blood and toil and tears, promising nothing and apologizing to no one.

I learned that even secular Jews consider Israel important. I learned that every time a restaurant or bus gets blown up they feel it like it happened on their street. I learned that even today it is ridiculously easy to get Arab leaders to admit the only logical path they can see toward peace is the utter destruction of Israel.

I say these things to Americans in the hope they will understand. Understand that even today when Israelis say they're fighting for their existence they aren't kidding. Understand that the Palestinians are not the helpless victims they so often claim to be. Understand that it's not radical Jewish terrorists who blow themselves up in the name of Jaweh. Understand that someone saying they're not against Jews, they're against Zionists is like someone saying they're not against Americans, they're against the United States.

I say these things to Israelis in the hope they, too, will understand. Understand that we realize one culture in the Middle East helped found ours, while the other wants to destroy it. Understand that we know we only got a taste of what it's like to live in your shoes. Understand that because of this the most powerful country the world has ever seen is working with all its might to ensure your nightmares, now ours, remain nothing more than dark wisps left behind on children's pillows.

I say these things to Israel's enemies even though I know they will never understand. Never understand that by destroying two buildings they succeeded only in transforming an ambiguous friend into a staunch ally. Never understand that by singing the praises of human detonators they merely dig a deeper hole in which to bury their own culture. Never understand their religion is no longer a force to be reckoned with, ceased being one six centuries ago, and their traditions are what got them in this mess in the first place.

I say these things to everyone so they may all understand. I am just one man among an ocean of men, a sea of women, living in a country of our own making with our own blood and treasure. I look across half the world and find in a region as old as time itself only one small nation that looks like mine. Unique in that region, its government is of its people, by its people, and for its people, and I am willing to do whatever I can to ensure it does not perish from this earth. True, I am just one man, standing up for what I believe in.

But I do not stand alone.

Ok, sometimes when work is slow Damion and I get to talking about souping up cars. Today's topic, how to soup up a Honda Civic so as to enable it to beat an 01 Pontiac Trans Am (why so specific? No reason...)

I do this to prove that I am not the motor wacko in this group. To wit:

S: beat him in it once, then sell it so he can't go build something else to beat it
D: right
S: oh no... D has a mission... what have I done....
D: we would have to get a standard tranny, but that shouldn't be too expensive
D: (borrow kris's)
S: heh
S: remember, we hafta do it cheap
S: cheap cheap cheap... want to build TA killer for, like, 1/5th cost of TA
S: "We can whup your ass *AND* carry more groceries!!!"
D: or we could add turbines to the back of the CRX as well
S: JATO rockets here we come
D: and a big fat spoiler on the roof
S: must APPEAR stock
D: we can do "appear"
D: Auction example of potential "victim"
D: now we're getting somewhere
S: I'd forgotten how frumpy those things looked
S: heh... jeff is on phone now
D: HAHAHA!!!
S: should I narc you to him?
D: oh, if you want, hahha
D: see if he laughs at us.
S: heh... indignity!!!
S: he doesn't think we can find a tranny that will hold all that horsepower
D: heh, with rocket power, we'll just drop it into neutral once we get up to a certian speed.
S: he sez "will still be a civic"
D: yeah, but a civic w/ a quarter mile time of like 6 seconds
D: if not less
S: he sez, "TA = chick magnet, Civic=gonzo nutball what-the-hell-izzit"
D: heh, he's just making excuses now.
S: no, final word was "well, yeah, there are 9 sec civics out there, but that's a total race car"
D: well, what about the stock engine w/ the solid state rocket in the back?
D: that's stock with (1) performance mod
S: I gotta write this up... just to prove to ppl I'm not the gearhead crazy in this group
S: well, the thing is, model rocket body = 6 oz.
S: civic crx = 25,600 oz.
S: um... think you might run into scaling problems eventually
D: wonder if my little igniter would work, or if you would have to hold a blowtorch to it...
S: *I* will not be holding blowtorch!
D: well, the like 50 of them, the size of of a 2 liter soda bottle
S: JATO rockets... if 8 of them can push a C-130 into the air in ~ 800 ft, I think we'll only need 2 of them to push a nutball D in a civic 1400 ft
D: well, better play it safe than sorry, get 5 of'm
D: wonder how much those rockets go for...
D: Hmm, actually, my mom is an ex-chemist.
D: I bet she could brew me up some.
S: lissen you hotroddin goth garb wearin skateboard moddin WACK
S: I AINT GOIN NEAR NO RICE ROCKET!!!
D: can I put Type R (for rocket) stickers on it?
D: sure ya don't wanna ride shotgun?
S: positive
S: more likely we'd light the fuse, there'd be this huge WOOSH, and when the smoke cleared the civic would be sitting there w/ no roof
S: and you'd have no eyebrows
D: no, cause it would go in the hatch
D: not on the roof
D: bolt it down to the floor
S: you crazy nutball... you actually want this thing BESIDE you?!?
D: weld a hell of a cage to hold it in place
D: well, technically behind me, a few feet hanging out the back ain't nothin
D: as long as you tie a red flag onto it so no one drives into the rear of your car
S: har
D: sure you don't wanna go for the test drive???
S: most definitely

One of the funniest things I've noticed about having a child is not how it has affected us, but how it has affected our parents. We seem to have ceased being their children and instead have become grandchild delivery systems.

Phone conversations are completely different. "How are you?" "What's new in your life?" "How are things going?" have been replaced with "How's my grandbaby?" "How's the baby doing?" "Are you sure the baby's OK?" Mysterious boxes arrive from points unknown with fuzzy pink things inside so cute they'll turn your teeth into sugar. Visits from parents turn into home improvement projects, even gardening expeditions, and you'd be glad for the help except for this scary gleam in their eye. Looking there, you know they're not seeing you, but rather they're seeing the people who'll be raising their grandchild.

I guess part of the reason is grandchildren are the ultimate "other people's kid." They are yours in a very real way, yet if you get tired of them you can (usually) give them back. What's more, unlike other people's kids, you can give advice on how these are raised and the other party has to listen.

It's especially funny to see how nice they are to the kids. Things my nephew does that would've gotten my brother in trouble are just cooed over, "isn't that cute?" I get this terrible feeling that if my daughter poured a bottle of chocolate syrup on our couch my mother-in-law would smile and hand her a spoon. Bill Cosby was definitely on the money when he said, "These are not the same people I grew up with! These are old people, trying to get into heaven!"

And you don't dare actually give them your children unsupervised. Not because they'd do anything wrong, far from it. I only too well remember, after upending yet another bottle of model paint on my new school pants, my mother saying, "one day you're going to have kids. And one day I'm going to get to keep them, and on that day I will spoil them absolutely, completely rotten, give them everything and anything they want, and then give them back to you." I know this will work, I know it will, because, looking back, I realize that is exactly what my grandmother did to me.

Of course, there's also the parent's curse... everyone say it with me now, "one day I hope you have kids, and I hope they act just like you." At the time you thought it was a silly threat, and pitched a fit anyway. Decades later, you can see the holy terror that was you at that age, and you fear.

Don't think that your parents won't be that way just because they claim not to want grandchildren. Trust me, they're lying. My step mom, my mom, and my mother-in-law all actively discouraged their kids from having their first grandkid. Tell them the news though, and it's like someone set a happy-bomb off inside their head. And God help you if your brother or sister has a grandkid and you don't. Babies are like crack to old people, and it doesn't take long before they start jonesing for another one. From there it's just a short hop to, "you know, it's so sad, seeing as how I'm going to die soon and all, that I won't ever get to see your child."

You shouldn't really worry too much though. Having someone around who's already been through it all can be a godsend. Especially since they've been through it all with someone who's going to act just like you.

35 is a funny age. With, God willing, roughly as much life ahead of me as behind me, I'm starting to get a perspective on just how much the world has changed. Oh there are myriad little things we've added... antilock brakes, glow-in-the-dark condoms, DVD collections and CD box sets, wine in big boxes and juice in small ones, telephones that fit in your pocket and televisions that hang from the roof of your car. All of these are things my daughter will take for granted that I simply can't stop marveling at. But there's one thing that is gone from our lives, that I, and perhaps everyone over the age of, say, 33, remember. One thing that is never commented on by "pundits" but is no less remarkable for its absence.

My daughter will not know fear of the apocalypse.

The dream was always the same. We would all be playing with our Star Wars toys out in a harvested bean field, wearing ripstop nylon windbreakers to protect us from the cold bed sheet breezes of autumn. Luke (Jeff) and Wedge (Me) would be running down the Death Star trench described by a stubbly dirt row, valiantly dodging Darth Vader (Jimmy) and his evil henchmen (Stewart). Just as we were making our "final run" (when everyone got to change sides), the sky would be split by a ripping sound, like someone tearing apart a thousand sheets of steel. The gray clouded sky would show a spark arcing across it like a struck match head, quite clearly a missile inbound. I knew what it was, we all knew what it was, and we would start running for home.

Running for home as time slowed and sliced into heartbeats, as the beautiful, awful thing fell over the horizon. A single pause, a silence between breaths, a last look at everything I ever knew frozen in a moment, and then the dome of cloud above us would burst with a blinding flame and a skull-cracking roar. Only then would I jerk awake, realizing it was in fact just a dream, all the same still feeling the heat on my cheek, sunburn hot and as real as the bed I was sleeping in.

I can't think of anyone I knew who didn't have these kinds of nightmares at least once in awhile. And not just kids either... I would hear grownups talk in quiet voices about each international crisis, not in terms of how it would affect them or the country, but how it might bring about the end of the world. It didn't help that every Christian fundamentalist preacher, in a town full of Christian fundamentalist preachers, could barely disguise their glee convincing everyone that now was the rapture, today would be the kingdom, coming at us on the point of a missile.

"And we'll be glad too," the 'guest speaker' at our boy scout meeting said to us, standing on the pulpit of our local church. Normally I wouldn't set foot in the place, but as an awkward 14 year old I was trying to walk in the footsteps of my old man and become a scout like him. The meeting started out in the basement, but we were brought to the main hall, ostensibly to hear how important scouting was.

Instead we got an earful. "You boys need to learn how to survive, because the Bible tells us that everything around us is doomed to destruction. Doomed, by the godless communists who as prophesied in REVALATIONS will destroy us, manipulated by the antichrist. Your brothers, your mothers, your dads and your uncles will have to rely on you to save them, and you must remain PURE to your oath, and PURE to Christ, because when those missiles fall down it is written that only the just, only the righteous, will survive."

Needless to say my scouting career was quite short. I could only imagine what my friends, who sat through things like this all the time, must've had running through their minds. And it was everywhere, anywhere you looked. Every military thriller ended the same way. Each one wrapped up with tragedy, the heroes on opposite sides nearly coming to terms, only to be shattered when one of the generals drew a dagger simply to kill an asp.

It only got worse when Reagan became president. Reagan inherited a shattered and weak military, incapable of even rescuing a few hostages in the desert. He inherited an economy weakened by inflation and recession. He inherited a press corps and international community happy for American weakness that made their jobs easier. Most of all he inherited a people who had sunk into despair and self-loathing over a stupid war in a stupid place that sent all too many sons home in boxes.

Reagan would have none of it. A charismatic man, someone you literally could not help but watch speaking, who had a mind like a razor and a love of country from a simpler time. He decided appeasement would not work, communism was a danger to the entire world, and only through confrontation would it be defeated. He rearmed, rebuilt, and reaffirmed America. For the first time in a very, very long time someone was standing up in front of cameras saying this country was the best country in the world, and you could be for us or against us, but you didn't want to be against us because we were going to win no matter what it took.

The rest of the world went bananas. This crazy old man, this actor, was going to get us all killed. The press did everything to tear him down. Almost the rest of the world (lead by, no surprise, France) heaped scorn and did their level best to keep America where it should be... beaten down and only just strong enough to keep the tanks from rolling through the Brandenburg gate and down the Champ Elysee. The Hollywood elite completely blew a gasket, convinced the plebes really had managed to elect Hitler himself to the Whitehouse.

In truth it was a scary time, because even though nearly everyone else liked Reagan, we weren't really sure if he actually was going to get us involved in a nuclear holocaust. A veritable deluge of books, movies, and TV shows rolled out showing in graphic detail what, exactly, would happen if it all really did come apart at the seams, if the bombs really did fall. The nightmares weren't going away, they were getting worse.

Every year it was the most entertaining part of graduation. You were supposed to predict what would happen, where you would be, ten years after high school was over. "In ten years, Jimmy Freeman will be flipping burgers and working for Tom Steward." "In ten years, Jane Summers will be married to Greg Banner and have two happy, healthy children." "In ten years Scott Johnson will be doing something exciting, far far away from here." All were typical.

Also, at least as typical, were these: "In ten years, Ted Murphy will be on the front lines, helping win WWIII." "In ten years, Roosevelt Smith will be living in his bomb shelter with his wife Latonya Hooper." "In ten years, Jim McGhee will be serving alongside Ted."

That was 1986, but in truth at that time even we were beginning to laugh at it. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev had been elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, the first Soviet leader who did not serve in WWII, a comparatively young man far more concerned with Russian people than with Soviet power. Seeing his own country rapidly approaching ruin, he decided to cut and run in the competition for world dominance with the United States. Taking a huge national, and in fact no less personal, risk, he reached out to Reagan. To nearly everyone's surprise, Reagan reached back.

It is every West German male's duty to serve in the military or the civil service. It's a requirement. It's also a requirement that every West German work toward re-unification with East Germany.

Two years later, and everyone chuckled as our European History professor so seriously intoned these words. Reunite with East Germany? The thought was self-evidently absurd. The Soviets would never, ever let it happen. Czechoslovakia and Hungary quite graphically demonstrated what would happen if either side tried. Anyone who studied the military situation around that border, and in that class we had all studied it, knew there were divisions of Soviet tanks waiting on one side and entire armies and air forces on the other poised on a hair trigger, a precarious balance that could, must, be maintained, perhaps forever.

Then less than a year later the goddamned wall fell down.

By this time the first George Bush was in the White House, a decent if rather colorless man. The media and entertainment elite proved incapable of absorbing that Reagan, their very own Hitler, probably was responsible for it all, and instead focused on the fact that really the entire world was caught flat-footed when it happened. I lived through it, and it really did seem like one day we were all gathered around ready to defend against an invasion, and the next a half-naked drunken German was dancing on top of the wall, surrounded on both sides with jubilant people holding hammers, smashing away at the everlasting symbol of their division.

And then it was over, so suddenly it was over. The Soviet Union collapsed, and we treated it with high drama but nothing compared to Kruschev banging his shoe. We signed nuclear reduction treaties with miniscule fanfare, utterly without somber comparisons on the evening news of cartoon stacks of holocausts, any one of which could end the world. The Cold War, which had been declared over and done with in 1968 by the 1977 press (as we cruised into purgatory of post-cold-war "detente"), was declared really, really over by that same press corps 15 years later. Everyone seemed to have forgotten what it really was like, as if by pulling Damocles's sword up into the shadows it had never existed at all.

"Daddy," she asks me, as she does every night, "tell me again what Grandpa did."
("Mommy," I ask her, as I did every night, "do you think the missiles will fall tonight?")

"Oh, your grandpa got to do really cool things. He got to help put people on the Moon."
("Oh of course not. We're going to be just fine")

"Oh I know that story daddy. What did he do before that?"
("But you say that every night.")

"Well, before he worked for NASA he was in the Air Force. He worked on Titan Missiles."
("I know, but really, it will be all right. I promise.")

"What are those?"
("But how can you be sure?")

"They were big terrible things that had huge bombs on them. We pointed them at Russia, which we called the Soviet Union back then. And they pointed ones at us too. If we'd ever actually used them, it would have been very bad."
("Because I'm your mom, and I know. It will be all right.")

"Wow, I'm glad we don't live back then."
("I'm scared.")

"So am I."
("So am I.")

Last week we said goodbye to the West Wing as it went on hiatus for the summer. We also said good by to its creator, Aaron Sorkin. I worry for the show, because I think it's smart, entertaining, even funny, and I think Sorkin was the key to making it so. I also worry because, with the departure of Farscape this year, it's really the only good science fiction show on television right now.

It may not have blasters, exploding planets, or funky aliens, but to me it has everything else good science fiction has. It is set in a world so disconnected from the one you and I live in it might as well be another planet. The heroes wield enormous power, with the ability to change the lives of millions of people almost at a whim. Yet they are constrained, constrained by rules that are not always obvious and sometimes not even particularly well understood. The villains may not have green skin or bugged eyes, but they are no less evil, and many times no less alien. What's more, not all of them are villains, some just have weird motivations, unreasonable expectations, or simply don't speak the right language.

It's even written like science fiction. These characters do not solve problems with their fists, they solve them with their minds. As with all good science fiction, the show exhibits an almost clockwork quality as the players interact with the situations they find themselves in not by smashing things, but by manipulating the rules of their world. And as with all good science fiction, half the fun of watching is trying to figure out through the half-spoken lines and weird referrals just what those rules might be. Because, unlike the physics, biology, and chemistry that surrounds most other science fiction like nuns outside a catholic school dance, we have the built-in advantage of a decade or more of civics and social studies classes. We know, or perhaps rather knew, these rules. They tickle at us, like a single lyric from a song that suddenly floats into our mind even though the melody is long forgotten. The payoff is remembering, even predicting, the rules and how they will affect the outcome.

I worry because time and again Hollywood has proven incapable of producing large numbers of writers who really understand the concepts behind science fiction. I fear that they will think the show is about peril and drama and the occasional belly laugh, different only that they're played out with six syllable words. Certainly it has these things, nearly every successful show does, but it also has a complexity found in very few other places. It has high-stakes puzzles that require brains and not brawn to solve. It has inside jokes that you can only get if you reach out to understand the game. It doesn't stop to explain the rules, assuming instead you're plenty smart enough to figure them out as they go along. Because really, you are.

Most of all the show, like all good science fiction, is as much about teaching as it is about entertaining, and I am deeply worried it will lose this once Sorkin is gone. The West Wing shows us in a truly dramatic fashion just how it all works. Idealized? Yes. Slanted? Of course. Condescending? Perhaps, at times. But really, that's not what science fiction is all about, and it's not what this show is about. Like all good science fiction, The West Wing gives us hope that the future will be better. It teaches us that it really is possible for the best and brightest to succeed, succeed in spite, because of, a humanity that we share with the characters on the screen. These are not gods, these are not the elite, these are simply people who in the face of unspeakable power and consequence still manage to make the world a better place, as best they know how.

In our government. Like I said, science fiction!

• No matter how hard you try, you're still going to die.
• Nobody really knows what happens when you do.
• Most of the people who claim to are insane.
• George Bush probably wasn't the best candidate the Republicans could come up with.
• Al Gore probably was the best candidate the Democrats could come up with.
• If you've gotten good at a driving video game you've probably had more training than 90% of the people on the road.
• One day you'll probably have to place at least one parent in a nursing home
• If you could figure out how to afford it, you'd probably wish you could check yourself in with them.
• One day, your kids will be in charge.
• No matter how hard you try, you'll still end up acting like your parents.
• You probably are already.
• There is a small, but non-zero, chance that humanity really is the best the universe can do.
• Your camera doesn't lie.
• Cosmopolitan's does.
• If you could get bigger boobs from a pill, every woman in the US would already have have D cups so firm you could bounce nickels off them.
• So would a quarter of all men.
• If you could get a bigger wang from a pill, half the men in the US would have ones so big they'd have to coil it in their jeans.
• The other half wouldn't be able to leave the house.
• The Osbornes are popular because they're weird looking but act just like your family.
• Only with less swearing.
• You would have to spend the next hundred years in an airplane to be at serious risk of a terrorist attack.
• You only have to drive to the grocery store to be at serious risk of getting run over by Buffy and her Magic Cell Phone.
• If you're over 40, somewhere someone has a picture of you in a leisure suit.
• If you're under 20, one day your parents will show your kids a picture of you with purple hair as a justification for your kids getting theirs done in stripes.
• Orange and green stripes.
• There are good kids out there who just don't have a chance.
• Sometimes you wish you could trade them for your kids.
• Anyone over thirty can't be trusted.
• Your parents thought the same thing.
• Little old ladies know more about sex than you ever will.
• Sometimes they'll end up on TV to prove it.
• The real reason Hollywood celebrities speak out about politics is it's the only time they're actually in control of anything.
• The real reason politicians speak out is it's the only way they can prove they're in control of anything.
• The people who hold real power never speak at all.

Next...

Ok, let's open our mailbag at work today, see who's going to piss me off...

From: [Mr. Mysterious]
To: Scott
Subject: (no subject)
Message:
I have a problem.

From: Scott
To: [Mr. Mysterious]
Subject: re: (no subject)
Message:
I will need more detail to provide you with assistance. Please elaborate on what, exactly, the problem is you are experiencing.

From: [Mr. Mysterious]
To: Scott
Subject: re: re: (no subject)
Message:
Hi; I have just returned from [my local chapter]. I am a member of [my local chapter] and I wanted some advise [sic] on a problem I have right now. They did not have the resources needed for help for me. Can you help?
[Mr. Mysterious]

From: [Ms. Forgetful]
To: Scott
Subject: Login problems remain
Message:
Every name that I use in order to login gets the message that "there is a problem with my account" and to contact the administrator. I would prefer to have "the problem" resolved so that I can simply login without bothering you each time. Please advise -

A brief search through my SENT messages (no accident that they go back 2 years) reveals 8 messages over the past six months, remarkably identical, consisting of:

try username: [correct username] instead
try username: [correct username] instead of [incorrect username]
you should try username: [correct username]
do not use [incorrect username], use [correct username]
try username: [correct username] instead
use: [correct username]
try username: [correct username] instead
please use [correct username]

From: [Mr. Guess My Problem, I Dare You]
To: Scott
Subject: (no subject)
Message:
What about my account being in question?

From: [Mr. Mind Reading Candidate]
To: Scott
Subject: I have a problem? [Mr. MRC] [Chapter Name] - President
Message:
 

From: [Yet Another F*cking Consultant]
To: Scott
Subject: StaffPres
Message:
[YAFC's name]
President
[YAFC's Company, which I'm never going to use]
[YAFC's Street Address]
[YAFC's City & State]
[YAFC's four, count them four, contact numbers, definitely going to call them the second I see them, yeah right]

Background: "staffpres" (not it's real name) is the name of a pan-organization mail group. I mean, doesn't everyone use mail group addresses as their subject line?

From: [Ms. Bet She's a Hoot with a Road Map]
To: Scott
Subject: Not Sure What is Wrong
Message:
Dear Scott,
I am not able to access [intra net] because it says that my address is already in use and that I should go back through at least six months of E-mails. Unfortunately there is not time to do this. I need to access [useless bureaucratic] documents for a teleconference today at 3:30 [message was sent at 11:00 am].

Actual text of error message she received:
The e-mail address you specified is already listed for another [intranet] member.

This is nearly always caused by you already having [an intranet] account. Please go back through your e-mail records for at least the past six months to see if you have not overlooked your [intranet] account notice.

From: [Mr. Excitable]
To: Scott
Subject: Posting on Our [Little Local Website, hosted on your server]
Message:
Dear Scott: [Yet Another F*cking Consultant, #2, that they actually hired] suggested that I send Scott the 2 pages for posting on our web site hosted by [you] [Did he now? Well wasn't that just peachy of him]. Please post under (What's New) page of our site, 2 pages that I faxed you at [god knows which fax machine this was] tonight. That fax # is the one I used last year [oh really?]. If [no you mouth breather, WHEN... fax <> web page] you have to manually enter the text it can be very plain, not "fancy" [I'm so glad you've given me permission]. Also please change the text in What New on (The 18th Presentation---to read (The 19 Pres----and 2004 Series:--) and delete the text under Details and add under Details(Please look here for the schedule and 2004 sign-up in December 2003. Sincerely, [Mr. Excitable]

From: Scott
To: [Mr. Excitable]
Subject: re: Posting on Our [Little Local Website, hosted on your server]
Message:
All items for posting to websites must be provided in electronic form. Please e-mail the attachments to this address.

From: [Mr. Excitable]
To: Scott
Subject: Re: POSTING ON [Little Local Website]2nd request [note helpful increment manually put in by Mr. Excitable]
CC: [My Boss]
Message:
Scott, I'm desparate [sic]! We do not have the ability to scan and deliver the 2 pages that I faxed you. Please review the material and put the essentials on our web site. This was done a few months ago and I realize it's a lot of trouble for you but we must have the site carry the material on the 2 pages. Best Regards, [Mr. Excitable]

Four hours of ass-busting later:

From: Scott
To: [Mr. Excitable]
Subject: Re: POSTING ON [Little Local Website]2nd request
Message:

[Link to very spiffy (if I do say so myself) work-up of even more than what they asked for (included a little Yahoo map to where this stuff was happening)]

Please make sure to include electronic copies in the future, as it makes things much easier to work with. Let me know if you spot any mistakes or need any changes made.

From: [Mr. Excitable]
To: Scott
Subject: Fw: POSTING ON [Little Local Website]
Message:
Please post this 1 page per the message.

[Awful barely understandable HTML spaghetti that vaguely resembles what was faxed]

You're welcome

It just don't get much better than this, folks.

America is a Christian nation. By moving away from God we have forgotten our roots and turned this country into a bubbling, reeking cesspit of secular depravity. All our troubles would become far easier to solve if we were simply to allow morality and good Christian values to be taught in our schools and become a part of our government. Nowhere in the constitution do the words "separation of church and state" appear, because the founding fathers knew that driving God from government would destroy the country.

Nowhere is this country's lack of perspective, understanding of history, and poverty of education more starkly lit than when activist Christians discuss the separation of power in their own country. What's worse, those of us who know they're wrong are saddled with the same inadequate education, and find it surprisingly difficult to argue against their lines of reason. After all, what exactly is the harm in learning the Lord’s Prayer? The Ten Commandments actually make sense when you read them, why not mount them on the walls of city hall? We ask these questions, even if only to ourselves, and are uncomfortable because most of us have difficulty coming up with good answers.

The thing is, the reasons behind it are simple. Like all basic truths, the trouble is it's so obvious it's hard to explain to someone who refuses to see it. We have a separation of church and state because history has proven time and again that, with Christianity at least, any other combination results in chaos, murder, manipulation, and oppression in the name of love.

Christianity is a weird religion. Notwithstanding the truly mystical riddles of the trinity, the resurrection, and the kingdom, there are some basic features that make it almost completely unique and more than a little, well, quirky. Unlike Judaism or Islam, its founder was humiliated and then murdered less than four years after beginning his ministry. His followers then experienced a full three centuries of at times grinding persecution that more than once threatened the extinction of the movement. Christianity, unlike virtually any other religion, developed rigid doctrines and powerful hierarchies simply to survive.

Christianity did not create a system of government, as both Judaism and Islam did, it was recognized by a system of government and then provided with the tools of civil power. The result was a disaster. For the next thirteen centuries it would be riven with breaches that literally threatened the souls of its followers, afflicted with doctrinal disagreements that frequently devolved into bloody wars, and used by power brokers both inside and outside its ranks to promulgate the ugliest and most brutal scenes of carnage the world had ever seen. Schism, apostasy, heresy, investiture, inquisition, all and more are words invented by a religion patently incapable of wielding civil power and yet paradoxically all too easily manipulated by civil power.

This all culminated in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), a conflict that claimed a greater percentage of Christians than any before (and probably any since). More were slain in a few decades of horror than in previous centuries of plagues. By the time it was all over it had become quite clear to many that the only way to real and lasting peace was to completely and utterly separate religious and secular power. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and countless others like them began to envision a society that did not rely on religion, because their own history showed religion as utterly unreliable.

These are the people who influenced our founding fathers. There were no examples of a "godless" society causing any sort of trouble at all, yet there were countless examples of the opposite causing untold suffering throughout the ages. By placing a legal firewall between religious and secular authority, the founding fathers sought not only to exclude religion from government, they also sought to exclude government from religion. Hence:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

If history is any example, it seems to have worked. A fanatic Christian may decide you will burn in hell for disagreeing with them, but for the past two and a half centuries they have largely been prevented from hurrying the process along with a little fire of their own. Conversely, police have stopped showing up at the doors of people accused of sedition simply because they believed the wrong number of angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Has it been perfect? Not really. Religion really does provide many, perhaps most, people the rudder, paddle, and compass needed to navigate the hurtling rapids and bubbling swamps that describe the human condition. Christianity, like all good religions, is hard enough to teach to a dedicated student. It's no wonder parents in this modern world of distraction and destruction feel they could use all the help they can get. Why not bring the schools in?

Unfortunately this just cannot be. Any recovering alcoholic can tell you sometimes all it takes is a sip of booze to send them rocketing down into a pit so black they can't even see their own shoes. Once inside the belly of this beast any number of horrific things become possible. The only real solution is to admit the problem and swear the stuff off completely.

Christianity went on what amounts to a thirteen hundred year bender with the liquor of secular power. Eventually the society it helped create became sick and tired of being sick and tired, and took away the drink. But as any spouse of a recovering alcoholic knows, it only takes one glass to turn it all inside out and upside down. They, we, just can't risk it.

And if you're a good Christian, neither can you.

Pretty much anyone who's made it all the way through high school and into college has heard it in one form or another from various professors:

Learning does not need to be fun. Learning is not supposed to be fun. Learning is work, and therefore never will be fun. Trying to make learning fun simply dilutes the knowledge that must be imparted, makes the lessons less relevant and full of unnecessary "fluff", doing the student a disservice in the long run.

In my case it usually came from tenured professors trying to make me read Thucydides or Marvin Harris. Yet they couldn't have been more wrong. As so many people often do, they were mistaking schooling's primary job. School isn't supposed to teach you facts, it's supposed to teach you how to learn them.

"You and I will never be rich," was the way a dialogue went in one of my Arthur C. Clarke books, "not because we're dumb, but because we don't know how to be rich. The rich are rich because they like to make money. You and I are not rich because we like to spend money."

On the face of it, the assertion seems absurd. Everyone likes to make money, because money is where it's at. Money gets us food, clothing, fast cars and cheap women (or, if it's your taste, expensive jewelry and obedient men), fancy boats and cool toys, and... well, if you run the list off in your head why money is important, I'll bet most of you find it really is about how you want to spend it.

In spite of what our jealousies make us feel, most rich people are rich because they really do like making money. They're all about investment opportunities, tax shelters, savings vehicles, bond issues, retirement goals, and all the other myriad ways money can be turned into more money. Rich people who stay rich typically spend very little. Sam Walton was famous for his worn out pickup trucks, Madonna is well known for never having any cash when she goes out, and LL Cool J pays cash for a Honda instead of a Humvee.

In other words, the rich get that way not because there's something intrinsically or genetically special about them, but because they are willing to sacrifice both great and small things for their one true love: the acquisition of more money. They enjoy making it, far more than spending it, and that's what makes them different. There really is no blue in their blood, no special gift bequeathed to them simply by birth.

Knowledge is, of course, a kind of wealth. Coming from the physical side of anthropology, I learned early on that in spite of many long and strenuous efforts, anthropology (and pretty much every other science) has been incapable of proving a link between sex, class, color, or religion and intelligence. Black, white, red, yellow, male, female, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, and all in-between have the exact same brains between their ears.

It did, however, lead me to a kind of problem. Accepting the position that there is no genetic cause for stupidity still left me with all these quite patently stupid people milling around causing trouble. Even weirder, people would call me "smart" even though I certainly felt, and occasionally acted, as dumb as the next guy. How can it be that the same organ that allows Steven Hawking to mathematically prove that black holes emit radiation also allows Tammy Fae Baker to believe the world is only 7500 years old?

It was a personal revelation that lead me to the answer. I was sitting in a waiting room while Ellen got her glucose test. I had forgotten my copy of Thucydides (which, fifteen years later, wasn't anywhere near as head-crunchingly boring as I thought it was when I was 19), was instead reading a statistical textbook on the environmentalist movement, while wishing I could finish up both so I could start on a new analysis of the Iranian revolution. In a flash, I suddenly realized something.

I was smart not because of any particular combination of genes, and not because I happened to be white or male, I was smart simply because I liked to learn. And not just about one particular subject, but anything. I was interested in how they made cereal, why an aluminum can has a funny pinch on one end, who Imam Ali was, how a steam engine worked and where the Bible was written. I wasn't upset about books I had to read, but that I had no time to read all the books I owned.

The more I thought about it, the more the hypothesis seemed to hold up. Everyone in my own personal life whom I considered "smart" enjoyed learning for its own sake. Maybe not about Everything, but certainly about one or more Somethings. Conversely, people who I considered dumb got that way in my mind because they had proven unwilling to learn oftentimes the most basic things.

It also provided a nice explanation for stupidity in its more general sense, without having to rely on the ugly crutches of racism, sexism, or religious discrimination. People believed dumb things not because they were brain damaged, or female, or black, or Christian, or any of the thousands of other trivial things that differentiate us. They believed dumb things because they'd lost interest in learning. Lost the taste for it. Their world had frozen in an amber-hard gem of belief, now incapable of being reshaped even as it slowly went cloudy and scratched from age.

Worse still were the people who'd never gotten the chance. Critical thinking is a skill hard won by humanity, one which entire cultures have learned, forgotten, re-learned, and forgotten again, sometimes at the cost of millions of lives. The chimpanzee lies very close to the surface in all of us, and it can take frighteningly little to turn it loose.

Human beings have to be taught to think. It quite simply does not come naturally to us. History has proven again and again that without years, sometimes decades, of drill we will many times lose the ability to think for ourselves. When this happens the best that can be hoped for is a culture of poverty and entitlement. All too often it ends in the abyssal hell of the fanatic.

This is why learning must be fun. A society may decide the minimum number of things it's important to know, but without the will, the knowledge, the passion of learning the only result is a person with a minimum knowledge of things. A bad teacher forces in dry facts and mistakes knowledge for education, blaming ignorance for the sleepy heads and glassy stares. A good teacher instills a love of the mechanisms of learning, understanding knowledge will take care of itself, far beyond the time and space of the classroom.

Even more important, while it is possible to lose the ability to think critically, love learning, it's also possible to get it back. A person can't simply stop being black, or female, or Jewish, or any of the hundreds, thousands of other stupid, useless things that entire swathes of humanity have been written off over. It's not easy, not by a long shot. Critical thought is to our intellect what enlightenment is to our spirit. Re-learning it is probably one of the hardest things an adult can do.

But it is something anyone can do.

Anyone.

I haven't heard it voiced out loud yet, but I know it's only a matter of time before someone says, "the US's ability to wage war while sustaining almost no casualties means they're much more likely to engage in future conflicts." On the face of it, it even makes sense. It's the cost of a thing that determines how often we use it, right? By minimizing the cost in human life to the victors, war will automatically become easier to engage in, yes?

One of the more crass but no less predictable comments on the Columbia disaster was, "there were just seven people on that thing! Thousands of people are killed [by whatever petty injustice is on their mind today] every day, how dare you be upset by seven people!"

The difference is, of course, that we can know these seven people. We learn their names, know how many children they had, what each individual's history was. Instead of faceless statistics, they become real in our minds. Further, they were our best and brightest, doing something that nearly all of us see as worthwhile and meaningful. We know that every one of them understood the risks, and considered what they did not brave, but simply part of the job.

It's simply a cold, hard truth of humanity that we sympathize only with what we can identify, humanize, or incorporate into our own experiences. The most effective way of motivating people over an enormous humanitarian crisis is not to drone on with statistics, or even tell stories of refugee camps or show pictures of dozens of skeletal bodies mummifying on a road, it's to focus on a single person and tell their one compelling story as effectively as possible.

That's what this so called "modern war" allows. Cynics at Hollywood parties and college cloak rooms will eventually crow about "video game warfare" and "the puppet press brigade", all the while missing the real point. We can never know the thousands of faceless soldiers who marched shoulder-to-shoulder at Gettysburg, who went over the top at Verdun, up the cliffs of Omaha Beach. When death is counted in the thousands, we can't understand that each statistic represents the body of a high school linebacker being rolled in the surf, a sophomore chemist in a frozen foxhole with his eyes fixed open, or a pharmacist floating alone in the middle of an ocean, the nearest land a thousand miles away.

But when the casualties number in the tens, instead of ten thousands, every soldier has a name. Every one of them is mourned not only by their families, but by communities, counties, states, a nation. We can know their faces and their history. They have a future we can all see was cut short too soon, and by seeing their sacrifice on a personal level we work all the harder to make sure it has a meaning.

Some may say fighting a war that kills a mere hundred is no war at all. To them I ask how many is enough? To them I say how dare you make yourself the judge of the amount of death needed to create "equality." To them ask if they will say these things to the faces of the families of those hundred, that the death of their child, a child the rest of the nation mourns, means nothing. I call coward any who prevaricate, refuse, or bluster.

When money is like water it is spent as if the gates of heaven have opened wide. But when each penny leaves dear, each dollar let go only with regret, the wisdom of Solomon himself can't convince a people to part with it. That is the lesson of this war. By individualizing every death an entire nation re-learns the wisdome of Robert E. Lee when he said, "It is well that war is so terrible--we should grow too fond of it."

Representational governments (not just democracies, but any form of government in which the citizens of a country get to pick their leaders themselves) have proven over time to be the safest, least-worst form of government humanity has created to date. Yet, if it's so self-evidently good, why does it always seem to go so wrong? Why do so many governments start out as representational, but end up monolithic dictatorships or oligarchies?

The answer is actually hard for people who live inside these governments to understand. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to a successful representational government is learning to accept that just because people disagree with you, doesn't mean they're out to destroy the country and exterminate your way of life. Remember, the only people who really want to run a government are people who have an axe to grind, who's belief in their causes make the pope look like someone who's a little interested in religion.

Really, when you think about it, we're no different. Here in the US whichever side is out of power bleats the same bleats against those who are: "AAAG! Those [fascists/communists] are out to ruin this country and [deny us our rights/take all our money]. They're just so [stupid/evil/greedy/ignorant] we can't trust them to [keep their hands off the help/speak without drooling], let alone run this country!" I mean, when it comes right down to it the only real difference between Rush Limbaugh's opinion of the opposition and Barbara Streisand's is the sex of the speaker. The words, attitudes, and opinions are all the same.

Britain was the first major nation, perhaps in history, certainly since the fall of Rome, to actually get a grip on this problem. Even then it took centuries of false starts, blind alleys, and at least one major civil war until people started to understand it was possible to disagree without suspecting the other side of selling everything out to the pope. For nearly the next three centuries most of the other places in the world with functioning representational governments had ancestors that either left or were thrown out of Great Britain.

They succeeded in no small part because of the tradition, in most cases centuries old, of "the other side" holding power, if only occasionally, and not actually setting the pets on fire. Very few other places, pretty much anywhere in the world, had this advantage, and it showed. Romantic poets, philosophers, and basically anyone else with a brain but without a job, would wax eloquent over these foreign people’s ability to govern themselves without once understanding this was something granted through blood, not wishes.

Because without this deeply ingrained tradition passionate, powerful people (and at the very top they are all passionate about something) see those who disagree with them not as adversaries, but as traitors to the state. And perhaps the only thing all governments across the world agree on is the proper way to treat a traitor.

It's a formula that is followed almost without fail to this very day. A group of revolutionaries, typically but not always from the military class (because it's easier to have yourself a revolution if you've already got the guns), band together secretly and form a cabal to overthrow the utterly and obviously corrupt ruling regime. Because they are so obviously and utterly corrupt the only people supporting these regimes are outsiders (for the past sixty years either the United States or the Soviet Union), and so the government implodes in a matter of days (when the great powers didn't care) or decades (when they did).

As everyone is merrily dancing in the street pulling down statues and looting the local government office, great promises are made to Give the People a Voice, and most of the time the people now in charge actually mean it. Unfortunately what actually happens is those in charge come to understand that not everyone agrees with Our Grand Vision for the Great Push Forward. Worse still, some of those in the "opposition" are unbelievably obstinate and seem to be willing to resort to nearly anything to stop them. Almost as if by reflex those in power start passing laws to ensure these maniacs are never allowed to take the reigns of the state they risked so much to free, and from there it's a very, very short hop to holding polychromatic celebrations in the national soccer stadium for the Great Leader's birthday.

Is there a way out of this downward spiral? A pessimist would say no. Europe embraced representational government only because everyone else had taken away their guns. Their governments were forged in the fire of not one but two utter apocalypses, with the hammer of the United States beating them against the anvil of the Soviet Union. Japan only looks like a democracy from the outside. In truth nobody's really in charge of the place, and everyone in power is utterly convinced that if they really were to give the people a crack at running it all the very best they could hope for was an entire nation running naked in the streets.

There are, of course, some exceptions. Israel built itself a functioning democratic government with little if any help from the outside world, although one wonders if this was perhaps the only way a people willing to defy a god could function at all. South Africa looks promising, but with such an overwhelmingly powerful main party it's far too early to tell if they'll end up "Japan-ifying" themselves over time. The Latin American states are shaping up nicely, but far too many remember the stability, if not prosperity, given to them by the Juntas and the Generalissimos.

Regardless, it's incredibly important to understand, and therefore hardly ever truly understood, that representational governments are hard. They are not some sort of magic box you simply open up in front of the people of a country that suddenly allows them to be enlightened. Even the very brightest, especially the very brightest, can all too easily and with the best of intentions pervert it into something dark and twisted. This ain't no party, this ain't no disco. Life during wartime is easy compared with making your way through the peace that follows without cracking the skulls of the people who disagree with you. It is most especially not something that can be bequeathed quickly nor easily by a group quite patently just passing through.

They have to want it. And badly. We can only light the way. Always remember it's up to them to pick up the torch.

The United States has no stomach for casualties.

The people of the United States are so naive they insist no innocents be killed in war, and in war there are of course no innocents.

The United States can be relied on to use airpower alone, and airpower alone is easy to circumvent.

Vietnam proved that the United State’s own citizens can be manipulated to the advantage of their adversary.

Mogadishu proved that if you hit their military hard enough, even once, the United States will fold and run.

The soldiers of the United States insist on air conditioning and television, hot coffee and cold beer. They know nothing of hardship, and are too soft to fight.

Surprise attacks, even spectacular surprise attacks, happen all over the world every day. It's been more than a year now, the people of the United States need to move on, and it just shows how decadent and weak they are that they haven't.

This is what the world believed about us. In the richly decorated halls of countless governments, in the dark hearts of temples and mosques, and in the ivory towers of academia this is what was known about us. With unflinching reassurance the lives of tens of thousands were wagered on bets made with these odds by old, mean, ignorant men.

There will be many good lessons learned from this conflict. Unfortunately because people are, well, people, there will also be many bad lessons learned. However, without a doubt these are lessons that should be learned:

The citizens of the United States do not enjoy having their soldiers come home in boxes, this is true. However, our nation's history is one steeped in the valor of sacrifice, and the religion of our founders teaches us that such sacrifice is not only good, but sometimes required for success. We understand that in war soldiers die, just as well as anyone else in the world. What we will not tolerate is the sacrifice of our soldiers for causes we do not understand, over time periods which have no clear ending, in places where we have no clear interest.

The citizens of the United States strongly believe in the concept of the blood of the innocents. We want justice, even victory, not destruction, and never slaughter. We have spent trillions of dollars over the past sixty years creating weapons so accurate that nowadays we sometimes don't even bother to attach explosives to them. A quarter-ton lump of concrete dropped from 25,000 feet has enough inertia to quite handily crush an antiaircraft battery, APC, or tank, and leave an adjacent house standing, as long as you can put that rock right down the tube of the gun. We can, and so the "concrete bomb" is a real, effective, weapon.

Vietnam did in fact prove that the US is chock-full of "useless idiots", even powerful ones, and the citizenry of America was eventually manipulated to the advantage of the enemy because of them. Such anti-war protests may have in fact resulted in the end of an unjust, badly run, and brutal conflict, but it also resulted in the barbaric treatment of young men who quite literally were given no choice but to participate.

From this distance it all looks like one long tie-dyed drug-addled rock concert, but people who lived through that time know the country came closer to tearing itself apart over Vietnam than it had since the civil war. Rightly or wrongly, this torment has been laid at the feet of those who protested, and ever since (as any modern protestor can assure you) a majority of Americans suspect protestors of at best giving aid and comfort to our enemies, at worst outright sedition. We shall not be manipulated into spitting on our own soldiers again.

Mogadishu proved several things, but none of them have anything to do about our inability to absorb a shock. It proved that the American people have no tolerance for our soldiers being killed and humiliated over an explicitly humanitarian mission. It proved that if a foreign land wishes to descend into anarchy and is willing to kill anyone trying to help them out of it, we are quite willing to let them cut open each other's babies until there are no more left.

Most importantly, it proved that if cornered Americans fight with unbelievable efficiency and lethality. What is never emphasized enough is that in Mogadishu an entire city attempted to destroy just a few units of American special forces. A few dozen men isolated and outnumbered more than 100 to 1 not just surrounded but encapsulated by enemy forces were not exterminated, not even routed, but survived as units and got out losing exactly 18 of their own. Nobody even bothered to count how many of Mogadishu's citizens bled their last into those city streets that day, but rest assured the city's dogs were well fed long after.

American forces are no stranger to adversity, and can accept deprivation that at times surprises even themselves. "All the comforts of not-quite-home" does not represent decadence, it represents efficiency. "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics" is never more true than in the way we support our wars. We give our soldiers the occasional creature comfort not because they cannot fight without them, but because it costs the war effort nothing to provide them. America has at least since the civil war been an absolute master at logistics. We do not out maneuver, out think, or out fight our foes, we out manage them. In WWII the Japanese could either build bases or build airplanes, but not both, while we had so much gasoline available we were washing our airplanes in it to get an extra 10 miles per hour in the air. We've only gotten better at it since then.

Finally, no one has the right to tell anyone else how long they must mourn. Only the egregiously arrogant or the hopelessly ignorant would ever even dare the attempt. The United States has been surprised, attacked, and defeated on its own soil only twice in the past two hundred years. We are not, cannot, and will not get used to it.

Want to know how long 9-11 will be on this nation's mind? We brought the world to the brink of nuclear war because of our paranoia over surprise attack, more than twenty years after Pearl Harbor happened. Mine is perhaps the last generation to hear adults talk frequently about the shock and implications of December 7th, and at that point it was thirty-five years in the past. The west in general has a very, very long memory for such events. To this day a trumpet is cut off mid note on a tower in a church in Krakow, Poland, a symbolic memorial commemorating the alarm for an invasion that ocurred seven centuries ago.

We are not dictators. We have no wish for empire. The constant bleating from far corners otherwise merely shows the blinkered ignorance of people quite patently being manipulated by forces far beyond their understanding or control.

In 174 B.C. the King of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, invaded Egypt, threatening the stability of the region and a supply of grain Rome was becoming increasingly reliant on. Instead of sending legions to destroy both him and his country, Rome instead sent a single man, Gaius Popillius Laenas, as a representative of the Senate. Meeting the king near Alexandria, Laenas presented him with an official decree, demanding his immediate withdrawl from Egypt. Antiochus asked for time so he could consider. Laenas agreed, but used his staff to draw a circle in the sand around the king, and told him he must give an answer before he stepped out of it.

Antiochus’s response, and the consequences to him because of it, was most instructive.

Preface
One of the problems with being a lifelong student of military history is you start assuming everyone knows things that very few people actually do. There have been many times in the past few weeks where I've shouted "DUR!!!" at the TV only to be confronted with a quizzical look from my wife. So, apologies if this all seems a bit too obvious to you, or a gross oversimplification. I'm just trying to make sure we're all working from the same page.

One of the primary, even historic, strengths of the United States military is its reliance on air power. At times we've relied on it too much, and certainly its advocates can be a bit strident. Airpower's popularity took a nosedive after Vietnam, when it became obvious that no amount of bombing could overcome really stupid leadership, but re-thinking strategy and tactics, as well as improved technology and leadership, have brought it back to the fore.

One advantage of airpower is the comparative immunity to interception it provides. In spite of common perception, it's actually extremely difficult to shoot down a modern combat aircraft. What's more, to ensure expensive airplanes and even more expensive pilots are not shot down the first move in any modern battle is to disassemble the other guy's air defenses. Once the sophisticated computer controlled systems are eliminated, aircraft become effectively immune to interception.

Oh, it's still possible to knock them down, especially if the air guys are being stupid (that's what got that stealth fighter shot down over Yugoslavia, not some super-secret development), and there's always just plain dumb luck. Unfortunately you can't rely on stupidity and luck to destroy an entire air force. Once the anti-air system has been brought down, tactically and strategically an air force as a whole becomes unstoppable.

The next advantage is freedom of movement. It's one of those things that is so obvious it's never really examined, but aircraft are fast. It can take hours to move up heavy artillery or big horking battleships within range of a target, while an aircraft can be within range in a matter of minutes. Freedom of movement, and the ability to move rapidly, is a monstrous advantage on a battlefield.

The kind of ordinance (fancy word for "stuff that blows up") an aircraft can put on a target is generally orders of magnitude larger than any other platform available, and this ordinance can be delivered at any point on a battlefield, even far behind the lines. A 2000-pound general-purpose bomb is just a fantastically powerful weapon, quite capable of completely gutting a large office building all by itself. And that's just the biggest general weapon most aircraft can carry. We have a specialized weapon for just about any purpose, and (so far) they all seem to work as advertised.

The traditional weakness of airpower, its lack of precision, seems to have been solved in the past decade. The GPS bomb in particular seems to be a favorite weapon for both close air support and strategic attack. Precision is important not only because it keeps civilian casualties* to a minimum, but because it maximizes efficiency. In WWII, it took 10,000 men in 1000 bombers dropping 8000 bombs to partially disable a single factory. Today that factory can be destroyed by one guy with one bomb.

It's important not to lose sight of the fact that airpower is not an end in and of itself. This was a very hard lesson for the US armed forces to learn, one that has had to periodically be re-learned as time goes by. Airpower, like pretty much every other advanced form of weaponry, is ultimately a support tool for the infantry. The whole point is to make the ground force's job as easy as possible. When used correctly, airpower does this very, very well.

Every ground unit on a battlefield is amazingly vulnerable to attack from above. If guided with precision (and our weapons are nothing if not precise), there is literally no mobile ground unit available today that can withstand even a medium-sized (500-pound) direct hit. They are simply blown to pieces by such things, and again once the air defenses are destroyed there's nothing they can do to defend themselves against such an attack. On a battlefield in which your enemy has achieved air superiority if you move, you die. The problem is you must move in order to fight. Which is why even the fastest armored division is utterly helpless if the other side has free use of the skies.

For a long time the answer was to dig a very very deep hole, crawl in, and pull the door shut behind you. Wait until the invaders got close and then pin them down with whatever you have. Positioned correctly a fortress could be nearly impossible to hit even from the air with unguided munitions, and so the invaders would have to do it the hard way by throwing as many people into your meat grinder as possible in the hopes that someone would get close enough to take you out. If you were smart, you'd have dozens of emplacements like this, making them do it over and over again. Sometimes the other side would stop because there just weren't enough soldiers left alive to continue.

With the development of modern precision guided munitions this doesn't work very well either. Using a slick combination of GPS receivers, radios, and laser designators, a single GI can transmit the exact co-ordinates of your bunker's location to a bomber circling as much as five or six miles overhead. The targeting is so exact that a bomb can literally be put through the gun slot of your bunker, and suddenly your comfy hidey-hole is merely a very short, very noisy ticket to the front of the reincarnation line.

So now you can't move to confront the enemy, and you can't hide in a place he'll have to move past. Even if you set up a temporary ambush you only have a matter of minutes before the sky simply falls on you. And, to repeat, there's nothing, nothing at all, you can do about it.

The only real solution is to take off your uniform and hide in amongst the civilians in the hopes you can start a guerilla campaign against the bad guy's supply lines. If you're lucky, the bad guy is stupid and starts setting villagers on fire in the hopes he'll get the rest of you. In cases like this the villagers will give you food and protection and replacements just to spite the Yankee invader.

If you're unlucky the invaders start setting up their own villages with running water, free cattle, and a plot of land for every peasant able to walk across the lines. If you're really unlucky the guy you work for has made himself extremely unpopular with these villagers already. In such cases the invaders don't even have to do anything special because the traitorous, ignorant, weak, and foolish peasants will turn your ass in faster than you can say "Allah Ahkbar." The last thing you'll notice right before the 500 pound GPS bomb hits will be how there suddenly aren't any peasants around anymore.

What I'm hoping you all take away from this is the understanding that if you hear of an ominous concentration of enemy troops moving toward the front you should be ecstatic, not worried. A large concentration of bad guys on the move is a huge target, not a threat. When you hear about a known concentration of enemy forces dug deep in fortifications you should take heart, because such a concentration is even easier to destroy than guys on the move. The only cause for even a modicum of concern is when the bad guys start trying to melt into the general population. And airpower, combined with the land forces they support, makes it all possible.

What you watch for then is how patient our guys are. The Iraqis have no love for us, because we are invading their country. Never, never lose sight of this fact. It doesn't matter if we're there to "liberate" them... we're big, scary, weird looking, and in their front yard. Only by being patient, by removing the bastards with the sniper rifles and the mortars without killing anyone else will they decide we are the lesser of two evils. When that happens they'll do our work for us, because unlike us they know Achmed's kid Achmad is no damned good and has been playing with some awfully smelly stuff in his basement lately. It is only with the villagers' help that we'll transform a successful suicide bombing into a dumb kid sitting in a cell.

I've gone on record many times saying that the west fights wars like no other culture in existence. While history has proven without question that our methods of warfighting are superior to all others, what is not often pointed out is how idiosyncratic they can be. No place is this quirkiness thrown into a starker light than our conception of the special status of a "prisoner of war."

These perceptions originate with the ancient Greeks. No culture up to that time had ever attempted to compose its armies of relatively free and equal citizen-soldiers. Unique in all the world, a Greek soldier had the expectation of protection under law, and the ability to speak his mind without fear of arbitrary reprisal. By enshrining these beliefs in the core of their culture Greek soldiers ceased to be merely chattel and acquired an intrinsic value, became more than simply a shrieking rabble whose individuals were patently expendable simply because the general didn't like the way they smelled that morning.

The next innovation would be brought by Christianity. By instilling a core doctrine of universal love, by preaching that all human beings are intrinsically valuable, and by firmly placing the concept of a universal, immutable law to which even despots and emperors must obey at its center, Christianity allowed the definition of "value" to be spread from the soldier to the serf. Certainly these concepts would be eclipsed and ignored in brutal ways, but they were never completely forgotten, and, in this particular combination, they were powerful and unique.

Unfortunately the inheritors of the Greek traditions, the Romans, like every other culture ever to contact the near east, became seduced by the concept of god-emperor. As they adopted more and more of the trappings of absolute power the very beliefs that made them the rulers of the known world gradually corroded into dust. What the barbarians eventually destroyed in the forth century of the common era would have been unrecognizable to a senator of the third century BC, and in no small part even to Augustus himself four centuries before the collapse.

The Germanic tribesmen who swept away imperial rule in the west may have been primitive and illiterate, but they brought with them powerful and new beliefs in the supremacy and sanctity of the warrior. It was still possible, even acceptable, for a Visigoth or Merovingian chieftain to lop the head off a soldier due to incompetence, cowardice, or even insubordination, but that chieftain was then expected to compensate the soldier's family a fixed amount of gold for his fit of temper.

What gradually developed in the time between the fall of the empire and the rise of the nation-state was a unique culture that not only saw the value of the combatant at war, but also of that same combatant in surrender. By distributing land and rights to a comparatively large number of noblemen and welding this to innovative methods of finance, feudalism imbued the elite warrior with a certain kind of "equity" that made his life as valuable to his enemy as it did to his lord.

Unique in all the world this culture evolved an entire economy based on the concept of ransom. Anywhere else on the planet a knight or soldier unhorsed or disarmed was seen as merely an inconveniently (and therefore ever-so-temporarily) wriggling piece of meat. In the West, however, that selfsame helpless enemy was not seen as an impediment, but rather as an opportunity, a poker chip wrapped in a tin can valuable only as long as he lived.

Knock a knight off his horse and you were entitled to all his stuff, but if you stayed calm enough not to kill him you could offer it all back, for a price. More than one noble family got its start in the chaos of the tourney field when a freeborn boy got a lucky blow in on an unsuspecting knight, and conversely more than one literal king's ransom had to be paid because an effete nobleman decided the coincidence of birth outweighed the strength of desperation.

Elaborate rules were drawn up for ransoms, not just on the battlefield but in tournaments as well. Mercy for a surrendered foe gradually stopped being a novelty and more and more was expected of a "civilized" gentleman. Rituals were developed for the recognition of individual surrender, rules were created for what constituted proper and improper treatment, and an entire infrastructure was built up almost exclusively for the exchange of prisoners for gold.

It's important to emphasize that this culture of chivalry existed nowhere else in the world. Islam may hold itself up as the guiding light of religious tolerance, but the emirs and sultans thought nothing of slaughtering thousands of disarmed foes like livestock in a single day. In the Americas a victorious warrior could often expect a drunken, colorful, but most of all extremely short and sharp victory celebration, and in Asia a head could be separated from a set of shoulders literally at the twitch of an eye.

Of course, a peasant didn't fare all that much better in the West. After all, what good is ransoming someone who's worth less than the land they till? Mercy toward a common foot soldier developed relatively late in the west, as the concept of personal liberty and universal justice took hold in the enlightenment of the seventeenth century. Even then it was more a redrawing of the boundaries of who could benefit from chivalry rather than a transformation of the concept itself. The sense of "fair play" and "fair game" at its core survived. When Europe boiled out of its rapidly industrializing homeland for the final time in the sixteenth century, it took with it not only the unique concept of warfare as a form of cultural extermination, but also that there could actually be rules to govern this horrific idea.

The more traditional, but no less sophisticated, agrarian societies of the rest of the world were confronted with a juggernaught of unprecedented lethality and efficiency which paradoxically demanded nearly inconceivable mercies to it combatants. It was beyond surreal to such cultures that these incredibly vicious and always victorious white men expected to be spared simply because they threw down their arms. Even worse, to slaughter these devils as proscribed by tradition lead to even worse predations rained down on your head. Not only were these maniacs undefeatable, they were insane.

In a strange sort of way it's like football (US rules) or cricket... you simply have to grow up with it for it to make sense. A westerner will have no trouble understanding the distinction between a bomber crew dropping firebombs on a city being "fair game" and that selfsame crew in parachutes suddenly "off limits". That the only difference between the former and the latter is now the victims of the bombing have an extra set of mouths to feed is immaterial to a westerner. The city was, after all, being defended with anti-aircraft artillery. To be called subhuman for shooting the perpetrators of a terrifying attack simply because they're floating within easy reach beggars the imagination of most other cultures.

The rest of the world did eventually catch on, deciding that this bizarre fascination for the west's defeated and dishonored could be used against them, a chink in our armor they have been studiously prying on ever since. What they do not understand is our concern for captives is actually one of the strengths of the way we fight wars. Time and again returned prisoners insist the primary source of their strength in captivity was the knowledge that their government and their countrymen were doing everything in their power to get them out safely. Our soldiers take calculated instead of suicidal risks because of this fact. Finally, by caring humanely for our own captives we ensure that the next generation is raised with a father to teach instead of a legend to avenge.

Because you see for us, at root, to do anything less would be barbaric.

I came to my study of Christianity relatively late in life, shortly after I graduated college in my mid 20s. Before that time I was, at various points, atheistic (no god), agnostic (prove it), or deist (yeah, ok, God, but boy are His religions f'd up or what?) So for the vast majority of my life up to that point I had no real conception of just how deeply ingrained Christianity is on western societies, not just in America but everywhere considered "western". Most shocking of all to me was the discovery that Christianity in no small part created the secular and scientific society I loved and my "evangelical" associates hated. I had discovered that the belief system whose most vocal adherents literally made my toes curl in their ignorance was actually what made my way of life possible. How did that happen?

By melding the philosophical practicality of the Greeks with the organizational skill of the Romans, the early Christians created a powerful system to allow people to reason their way to faith. The works of men like Clement, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian and others instilled a tradition of logical criticism heretofore the exclusive pervue of the Grecian Jewish communities like that in Alexandria.

Of equal importance was Christianity's emphasis (again, copied from earlier Jewish communities) on monasticism. When the tides of Germanic and Nordic tribesmen finally overwhelmed the battlements of Europe and washed away the crumbling supports of the classic western world, the monasteries remained like rocks on a storm-swept beach. They remained not just as repositories for books that would otherwise be used to wipe the backside of a nose-picking Viking, but also as islands preserving the tradition of men (and, far too infrequently, women) dedicating their lives to learning for its own sake, indeed for the sake of their eternal soul.

European thought seemed to take a nosedive into the "dark ages" not because of a disdain for knowledge in and of itself, but because the instability of the countryside made it too dangerous to travel outside the walls of a monastery. Even when it was safe to travel there really wasn't anywhere to go. Largely rural even at the height of Roman power, Western Europe simply didn't have libraries on the scale of Alexandria or Antioch. Certainly the Muslims, who simply had the dumb luck of invading the most ancient and literate section of the planet west of the Himalayas, were in no hurry to share the hoards of knowledge they'd inherited, stolen, from the Infidel.

So the engine of Christian thought was forced to sit idle not from a breakdown of its parts, but from a lack of fuel to fire the boiler. It would take most of eight centuries for that fuel to be found, rediscovered, as crusaders brought back crates of books from both Spain and the holy land, and bilingual Jews made themselves available for their translation. The tank was filled, the parts were cleaned and oiled. It would only take someone turning the key to start the machine wheezing and chuffing back into motion.

That someone would be Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant thirteenth century thinker who set about harmonizing the spiritual world of developed medieval Christianity with the hard-nosed philosophy of the "rediscovered ancients". He did so with such insight that some of his arguments are still used today, eight centuries later. However, by even making the attempt he, and hundreds, thousands, of his monastic compatriots set a powerful precedent... Christianity would forever after be seen as a religion that both invited and paid attention to criticism not just from theological grounds, but from more secular "philosophical" ones.

Less than 75 years later the Death came and changed everything. By culling perhaps as much as one third to one half of Europe's population, the great plagues of the fourteenth century transformed nearly every aspect of European culture. The scarcity of labor forced a reliance on technology, which in turn created a practical market for the exchange of ideas that worked, not through the esoteric assertion of a monastic propeller-head, but through the school of hard-knock reality.

It was at this point that the engine lit by Aquinas was routed onto a side rail that took both its passengers and its purported engineers down the track to our modern world. The man who pulled that switch was named Galileo Galilee.

A brilliant, practical man with a tendency to speak the truth as it was proven instead of as it was given, Galileo was at first actually supported by the gigantic enveloping power that the Christian Church had become. Were it not for the movement founded by a truely meddlesome and hard-headed monk and the utter intransigence of a woman who refused to recognize she had no business ruling a country, let alone a church, Galileo's teachings would probably have been embraced outright.

Of course, it didn't work out that way, but through a series of technological and political coincidences, it didn't need to. The development of the printing press allowed Galileo's theories, and more importantly his techniques, to be spread literally faster than they could be burned. The rise of Protestantism allowed the nascent practicality of science to survive not because of any innate value, but because anything the pope hated was by definition something of value.

The fact that any nation that utilized the discoveries of these scientists almost automatically became a military and economic power was not lost on anyone paying attention. If that meant ignoring the growing number of increasingly uncomfortable theological questions their research was rapidly uncovering, well, as long as it meant our cannons blew the heads off of those who chose not to ignore them better and faster that was just fine.

Eventually though, the discoveries were so obvious, so powerful, and so revolutionary they could not be ignored. Science was proving that at nearly every point the Bible touched the natural world, it was getting it wrong. The child of reason, so carefully nurtured at the very heart of the religion that protected it for so long, had returned unrecognizable, seemingly intent on consuming the parent.

At this point, occurring roughly everywhere around the late nineteenth century, western civilization suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. Faith, still a core requirement for a well-rounded human being, became far harder to realize in a world where one could not relax comfortably in the warm pages of the inerrant book of one's ancestors. It suddenly had to be found through serious inquiry, long and hard quests for both internal and external knowledge, commitments people from western cultures many times simply found too hard or too frightening or just too much work to accomplish.

Two avenues were chosen, neither worked very well. Europe slid into a cold steel hell of nihilism, fascism, and communism, ultimately resulting in millions of its own citizens murdered in mechanized meat grinders so efficient we simply have no clue as to exactly how many were shoved in. The United States suffered a flat failure of nerve, with large sections of its society choosing to ignore and deny and fight any knowledge, any fact, that might upset the grand illusion that allowed them to accept the results of knowledge while repudiating its implications. The result was a citizenry often breathtakingly ignorant of the workings of the modern world, coming all too close in word and deed to the amber-frozen medieval Muslim fanatics they ridiculed from their own pulpits.

It would be tempting to think this leaves us at a crossroads today, but this is merely the narcissistic conceit of a culture still unable to come to terms with the universal truths of morality and mortality. We are instead still barreling across this dark and dangerous plane, riding an engine going so fast it broke the sound barrier long ago. It is badly dinged and worn in spots, and burns the unwary who touch it in the wrong places or at the wrong times. But its lights have guided us forward, steered us clear of the abyss of fanatacism and the cliff face of nihilism, even if it occasionally teetered or banged into each, hurling the willfully ignorant into one or the other at each turn.

And painted on its side, covered with decorations from a billion hands, intertwined with the symbols of a million beliefs and a thousand formulas, defining the debates even of those who utterly repudiate it, is the unmistakable symbol of the cross.

I've always been fascinated by history, I'm not sure why. For me, it's always been amazing that things haven't always been like This. There weren't always TVs, there weren't always cars, and people once used to crank a pump to get gas and a spin a propeller to fly through the air. Clothes were different, houses were different, even the very words we used would change over time.

But, deep down, to me it was all very abstract. Oh I understood on an intellectual level that the events and transformations I was reading about in history books and watching on TV actually happened, but if I didn't witness it personally, on some subconscious level it was as if it occurred in some other abstract place. It took me a long, long time to realize these were not just words on a page, not simply images on a screen.

I think nearly everyone makes this mistake, at least at first. The miracle of learning by language is that it allows someone else's memories, someone else's knowledge, to become yours. But of course this knowledge, this history, "feels" very different from what we experience with our own senses. The ability to remember words has been with us only perhaps a quarter of a million years, but the ability to remember sight, sound, taste, and smell has been part of our genome for more than half a billion.

Technology both increased and decreased this cognitive dissonance. The development of writing meant you didn't need Plato standing there telling you about his Republic, but it also meant you couldn't ask him a question if (when) you got confused. The telegraph caused an entire generation to absorb certain experiences as rhythmic beeps, clicks, and taps. A later group would remember only disembodied voices coming from a dark wooden box. Movies allowed us to see things as they might have been, and later television would allow us to watch them as they happened, but only through a prism that removed all color, or softened the shape and texture of what we saw.

And so that's how most of us remember what we are taught, by remembering how it was taught. Aquinas and Caesar are flat on the page, disembodied voices denied even the reality of actual sound. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas are wax-figure stiff and gray and weirdly alien in high-contrast monochrome. Lucy and Desi move through our imagination in two-dimensional black and white, as do Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill. Vietnam happened in sienna tinted color, soft on the edges and low in contrast.

I'm not sure when I stepped back from it all and realized just how disconnected my perception of history had become from its actuality. I think perhaps it was when I started noticing things I clearly remember happening in my own life beginning to go yellow and curly at the edges. Commercials that were completely clear when first run are now muddy with wonky color balance. Live news events replayed on videotape look too bright and clangy, all burn throughs and shadows. Color photo albums bleed to pastel while the images in my head remain as vivid as a razor cut, as solid as a hand on hot metal.

This existential bit of amusement may have been triggered at first by the clanging sledgehammer blow of being called "Mister" by a strange kid for the first time, but it eventually has lead me to understand much, much more. History is not about stale numbers and dates, names and places, events and occurrences. History is about people, people exactly like me and yet completely different from me in weird and wonderful ways. I have found I can take the common experiences everyone goes through and place them on the shoulders of the people whom I read about. In that way I find a grounding, a crossbeam from my world to theirs which allows me a far more vivid appreciation not only of what we have in common, but of what makes us different.

When I look up into the sky in the middle of a hot day I know I feel the heat of the same sun Constantine blinked at when he saw a cross in the sky and changed the world. The cold cotton smell of spring mist as I walk out the door in the morning gives me a base to imagine what it might have felt like to walk Ann Boleyn out into the courtyard and watch the crystal clear three-dimensional reality of her ascending the scaffold. The match-crack snap of a broken twig in the cold dark woods of a night hike gives me just enough of a taste to imagine the stomach-churning fear of a soldier on patrol in the black woods of Germany.

For me, when I do this, history ceases to be dried bones dusting the pages of endless black ink words and instead becomes real, as real as the crunching gravel under my feet (on the road to Damascus), the smell of rotted mud (in a trench near Verdun), and the sound of surf on a beach (when everything that lived was in the ocean). It helps me realize these were people, people who had to eat and go to the bathroom, people who marveled at birth and mourned at death, people who had no more idea how it was all going to turn out than I do today.

Does it actually put me in these places? No, not really. History is different if for no other reason than I know how it turned out and they didn't. But by stepping outside the dry words of a book, by allowing color to leech into gray combat footage, by putting the very real sites, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations of my own life into the lives of those I learn about, I don't just allow these people to become real again. I allow them, for however brief a moment, to live inside of me.

I'm a car guy. Well, actually, I'm a machine guy. Cars just happen to be the most accessible complex machine I can get my hands on easily. There's pretty much nothing about a car I haven't tinkered with or thought about tinkering with or broke when I shouldn't have been tinkering with. I'm not alone, but I'm definitely in a minority.

To most people, cars are simply convenient lumps of metal useful for, even critical to, getting around in our daily lives. Oh there's definitely style involved, and competition. It does have to be pretty, even better when it's fancier than the neighbor's next door. Few know, or even care, what makes it tick, how it moves, why it works the way it does. If it breaks, they take it to get it fixed, and if it does so too often they get rid of it and buy a new one. What makes me so different? What makes car guys (or girls) tick?

I wasn't always this way. The first fifteen years of my life weren't dominated by cars, they were dominated by spaceships and airplanes. If it flew in the air or went into space, I was all over it like an octopus on a lobster. Cars were things that took me to places I could see airplanes.

1983 was when it all changed. Reagan was president, Michael Jackson's nose was still attached (we only thought he was weird looking back then), and Duran Duran was climbing the charts. 1983 was also the year the "4th Generation" Corvette premiered, and I was never the same again.

I lived Corvettes, I breathed Corvettes. I ate Chevy small blocks for breakfast and fiberglass bodywork for supper. I drove my parents insane with constant chatter about one feature or another of this amazing automobile. To this day I can tell the difference between a 58 Corvette and a 59 from a hundred paces. At $22,000 it was cheap for what it was (just as at $55,000 it's cheap for what it is today), but it was more than I could pull at $3.35 an hour, let alone what the insurance would've been.

But a funny thing happened on the way to fiberglass dreamland. The car magazines I poured through constantly didn't just talk about Corvettes. 1983 was the dawn of the age of emissions performance, when car companies were finally coming to terms with the odious (if necessary) tailpipe and safety regulations that nearly destroyed the car culture that came before.

Every month new and interesting cars were reviewed. They talked about what things did, and where they went, how they could be improved and what might be done if they were broken. They talked about new cars I could never afford and used cars I might have a shot at. They even talked a bit about the prettiest little Italian convertible I'd ever seen, and how anyone could own one if they just knew where to look.

Most of all they talked about how cars Worked. What made them tick, what each piece did, and how it fit in the whole. Turned out cars were every bit as interesting as airplanes, damned near as complex, and unlike airplanes all I had to do was walk into the garage to see one. Eventually people started asking me for car advice. Sometimes what I gave was even right.

I learned to appreciate that cars were in many ways rolling works of art. Some came off the factory floor that way, remarkable because of the passion and precision invested in their design from the outset. Others were transformed by their owners from cookie cutter transportation with all the character of a stale saltine to something utterly unique, literally like no other, sculpted according their will and wishes.

I learned there were posers and provocateurs, people who thought if it looked fast it must therefore be fast, or that if it got you envy or lust or power bedamned with whatever soul its designers gave it. I've seen countless innocuous Hondas transformed into booming, wheezing clown cars and innumerable BMWs treated like appliances because of these people.

Less contemptible but more numerous were the mundanes, people who would look at me and shake their heads at my lack of common sense. "What is wrong with you?", they would ask.

"Just get rid of it and get another one."

"You know, one of these days you're going to have to grow up and get something reliable."

"Do you have any idea what you just did to the resale value of that?"

"You know, with what you just spent you could probably have bought [something ugly, stupid, and boring]"

And on and on and on. In spite of their irritation, I have to pity them, because they just don't get it.

They think because they sometimes feel a little warm and fuzzy about their cars that I, we, all my fellow car nuts, simply magnify that emotion and turn our vehicles into surrogate metal children. They do not understand that we know quite well these things are machines, that, no matter how full of character they are or may become, they are still just metal and plastic. That, far more than they, we know these machines are neither warm nor fuzzy and are quite capable of inflicting pain, injury, or even death if abused, ignored, or neglected.

They do not understand that what we seek is extension, to become ourselves yet more... better. What we all reach out for, either through purchase or transformation (at times even both) is something that fits us like a second skin. Something that becomes transparent in our minds, melding and melting until, in that perfect moment, we feel the road under our tires, we sense the weight balance to get us through the next curve, we know exactly what it will take to shut down the challenger in the next lane, even when, because of, family members crying out from the back seat to stop us.

We cherish these vehicles not because we have made some infantile substitution for pets or children, but because they are Tools. Our very genes are stitched with the understanding of the power of tools, and these allow us to do things our ancestors could never dream of. With feet and hands we are able to run faster than the fastest horse, span distances in minutes that once took days, turn more quickly and with more precision than the most powerful leopard ever conceived. These are our chariots, and by controlling, maintaining, improving them we do, however briefly, become like unto gods.

If all this makes you sit back and sneer because we're arrogant or stupid or unrealistic I'm still going to feel sorry for you because you still don't get it. Just like you we know there are mortgages, and bills, and kids, and families, and responsibilities enough to crush Atlas to dust. Unlike you, we know with the turn of a key, the motion of a foot, the flick of a wrist, and the tool we picked or made for ourselves we become, however briefly, so much more.

You can still sit there, but if you do you'll never know what it's like to have the canvas thump of warm summer morning air on your face, decorated with the smell of fresh cut grass and dew, dancing with hands and feet to balance yourself and your vehicle, hearing the song of cams and chains and fire and noise all under your control as you swirl clippings in your wake, disappearing over the horizon with a roar and a shriek that echos through the empty mountains.

Go on. I dare you.

Turn the key and dance...

Dedicated to K & D, for both inspiring this essay and teaching me that just because it looks like a box and acts like a video game, doesn't mean it can't have a soul.

The so-called "pro-war" crowd likes to think of itself as better educated, more enlightened, than the so-called "anti-war" crowd. Certainly people carrying signs equating Bush to Hitler and celebrities being quoted as being anti-war because it's "hip" doesn't help. Yet for pro-war folks to call anti-war protestors "un-American" is to express an equal, perhaps greater, ignorance. There's almost literally nothing more American than protesting war.

The open questioning of military leaders is a Western tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The entire Bill of Rights can be seen as an elaborate legal mechanism to preserve the right to poke our government in the eye. Anti-war dissent in particular has been with us since at least the Civil War, starting with the draft riots of 1865.

Foreign wars have been especially fond targets of our dislike for armed conflict. Without exception each expedition into the heartland of someone else's country has triggered at times massive civil disobedience and protests. Especially when conscription meant compelling young men to risk their lives whether they wanted to or not, protesting against war has been as natural for an American as watching baseball or eating apple pie.

The funny thing about today's anti-war protestors is that for many their motivation comes from a place normally thought to be the heartland of conservatives and Republicans-- a deep distrust of federal power. Conservatives worry what the federal government might do with their money. Liberals worry what the federal government might do with their kids. Both seem incapable of understanding the common ground they share: that government should not, must not, be unquestioningly trusted with things we hold dear.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows."

Anyone who says anti-war protests have never brought anything but misery to this country needs to go back and read their history books more carefully. Anti-war protests stopped the Civil War practice of "commutation", the ability for the rich to use their money to either buy their way out of the draft or pay someone to die for them. They also ensured that diplomacy got more than its fair chance during both world wars.

Korea and Vietnam are the only two large-scale conflicts in our history that weren't preceded by some form of anti-war protest, and neither of them could be considered stellar victories. Vietnam in particular stands as a shining example of what can happen when politicians are trusted without question with our armed forces. The liberal elite's near fanatic and, far more important, unquestioning support of Bill Clinton resulted in eight years of inconclusive and ongoing conflicts precisely because, as the traditional heart and soul of the modern anti-war movement, they remained silent.

It may be true that going to war without France is like going camping without an accordion (in both cases one is only leaving noisy and useless baggage behind), but, for America at least, going to war without questioning our motives is like trying to make steel without carbon... the result is often brittle, inflexible, and prone to failure. We need this kind of debate, if for no other reason than to make the politicians answer tough questions and make proper plans to ensure a war is prosecuted quickly and decisively.

It's perfectly OK to say the current anti-war movement is elitist and poorly thought out. I do. It's fine to disassemble their arguments like the badly constructed tinker toys they are. I do that too. It's even OK to point out that the leaders of the movements may have agendas at odds with those of their members. I've done it before.

It's not OK to call them un-American. It's not OK to call them traitors. It's not OK to refuse to listen to them, or to attempt to silence them. Anyone who does these things, anyone, is simply an ignorant thug who's out to attack people just because they disagree with them. It means you have become exactly what they accuse you of... someone who should be clever but has instead gotten mean.

Really, for the most part it's not particularly difficult to drop their arguments to the mat and pin them for the three count. Sometimes, though, it won't be that easy. Sometimes you'll run into someone who's every bit as skilled at argument as you, every bit as prepared for each point you make. They may not convince you. You may not convince them. But you'll both have a better appreciation for each side when it's over, and your own beliefs will be stronger for the examining.

And that, my friend, is the miracle of America.

To me, one of the more puzzling features of the human psyche, or at least the American one at any rate, is the concept of "survivor's guilt." People who survive incredible disasters in which large numbers of other people (even complete strangers) did not are often overcome with tremendous feelings of guilt and remorse, guilt and remorse even when the disaster was quite patently not their fault because its origins were simply beyond their control.

As a nation we are told innumerable times by academia and the media that our country is built on theft, lies, deceit, treachery, oppression, and murder. In high school we're shown pictures of the aftermath of Wounded Knee, we read the declarations made about "manifest destiny", and hear about the stories of honorable treaties broken and torn. Everywhere we look we're taught and told we have no reason to be proud of who we are because we got here riding the backs of people who walked on the corpses of our victims.

The hardest part about it is these are not lies. This is not propaganda. Innocent people really were killed in the building of America. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were subject to oftentimes brutal oppression in the creation of this so-called "free" society. Treaties were broken at a whim, and entire peoples were rolled into obscure corners of the land all in the name of "progress". How dare we be proud of this gore-spattered, blood-soaked country of ours?

As with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, our guilt comes from having only part of the truth that makes up the whole. It arises partly from our own naiveté, and through the subtle and not-so-subtle machinations of elite nihilists and academics with an ill-disguised contempt of the "commoners". What started out as a much-needed injection of realism into the perception of our own history ended up getting manipulated into an almost paralyzing self-loathing, and twisted into a fear of the "bad old days" of patriotism and optimism that characterized the very fiber of this country.

We are told that we stole this country from the Indians. This is quite true. What we are not told is that there really weren't all that many Indians around to steal the country from. It's all too tempting to transliterate the colonial experiences of Eurasia, which was heavily populated and comparatively literate, with those of the Americas, which, especially in the north, was neither.

Most native North American cultures were not highly organized, and for the most part varied between hunting and gathering and horticulture as a method of subsistence. These lifeways simply did not result in the population densities experienced by highly organized agricultural societies such as those in, say, India. Furthermore, through a sort of bio-geographical coincidence, which was completely out of the control of the European explorers and colonists, much of the population that did exist had been mercilessly culled by the scythes of virulent diseases against which the natives had no immunity.

The land was, by and large, empty of settlements because of these factors. But, in spite of perceptions in our history books and popular culture, these native Americans quite patently did not go quietly into that great dark night. Especially during the colonial era, what tribes and nations there were quite merrily made war on settlers when they either thought or were convinced it would be in their best interest to do so. Neither side treated civilians with any distinction. Unspeakable brutalities were commonplace regardless of skin color. No quarter was asked, and none was given. The treaties signed toward the end of the conflicts were not made between two nations of equal power, but rather were an attempt by the Native American nations to shield themselves from an onslaught against which they knew from bloody experience they were unable to roll back themselves.

Does this excuse what happened, somehow make it right? No, it doesn't. But I didn't cause those things to happen, and neither did you. And, I'll wager, neither did your parents, your grandparents, nor (for most of you) your great grandparents or even great-great grandparents. I refuse to feel guilty about the conquest of America because there's nothing I can do to stop it. I was born at least a hundred and fifty years too late to do a damned thing about it. And so were you.

What I can do, and what you can do, and what all of us can do, is recognize that our history is no better, and, far more importantly, no worse, than the history of any other nation on the planet. England has Ireland, and France has Algeria. Canada has its Inuit, Japan its burakumin and India its untouchables. We are by no means unique in having minorities that experienced brutality and oppression.

America is unique in that the costliest war we ever fought was over the liberation of one of these minorities. A war, it should be pointed out, in which only Americans were killed. We may have herded them into camps and denied them their rights, but at no point, at no point, have we ever made an effort to consciously and systematically exterminate them. Great Americans of the twentieth century are defined not by their glory in battle, but rather by their struggles on behalf of these very minorities to overcome the discrimination of our forefathers. Like survivors coming to terms with their continued existence, some of us have decided to put the past behind us and instead fix the present to make the future meaningful.

Others, however, do not see it this way. Like some Old Testament prophet, they have decided that the sins of our forefathers must be visited on us a hundredfold. They have decided that because of the decisions made by a generation that has been dust for more than a century we must not be allowed to feel proud of who we are. They have decided that because of the policies of dead presidents it is somehow justified that more than three thousand living, breathing families were forced to bury pieces of meat in the ground.

I look back on my country's past and I am not ashamed. Neither am I proud. I look back instead and see a body of people who, no matter how misguided, genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. I see a body of people who sacrificed their sons when it turned out they weren't. I see a body of people who do not simply accept problems as they are, do not try to ignore them in the hopes they go away, do not pick a fight with someone else because they're not willing to do what it takes to solve them. More than anything else, I see a body of people who sincerely want the world to be a better, safer place for their children. Unique in all the world, I see a people who have both the power and the inclination to try and make sure it's safe for everyone else's.

We are human. We do, will, screw it up. But we try not to, we try damned hard not to, and when proven to be in the wrong are nearly always one of the first to ask "what can we do to make it right?" Sometimes we can't. Sometimes we screw it up so badly nothing can make it right, and for that I do feel guilty, and will try to do whatever I can to at least make sure it doesn't happen again. But I find it obscene that someone should suggest I must feel guilty simply because I exist.

Background: A few weeks ago I receive an e-mail from Z4, stating that the president of the board of directors (the boss's boss's boss) and Z4 have decided that Z5, a member of a "special needs" volunteer advisory council, has inadequate Internet service and should be provided a gratis internet account from us. This is not an unprecedented request. I say, "fine, I can definitely do that, but..."

You see, 99% of the members of this advisory council have the computer skills of a sea sponge. Most of them literally do not know how to turn one on. I have not met this particular one, so I'm very political about it, "they'll need to have a technical person who can come out to their house to set it up for them."

Why so specific? Why so harsh? Because the last time around we provided an entire computer to a different member of this advisory council and it sat in the box for two months because they literally did not know how to get it out. I am not making this up. Getting your fingernails pulled out is only slightly less painful than having to explain over the phone which end of the power cord goes into the wall.

You see, setting up an internet connection is a real Russian roulette kind of operation. In order to work, it has to sink some hooks pretty deep into your computer. 90% of the time it goes in slick as oil on ice, but 5% of the time it blows up in some obscure way, and the other 5% of the time it takes the computer with it. You do not want to be half way across the country on the phone with Forrest "since-life-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates-lets-stick-one-in-the-floppy-drive" Gump when this happens. And for me, it always happens.

So yeah, I set the bar pretty high. They're getting an internet connection for free fer chrissakes. If they want it bad enough they'll dredge up a local techie or their IT-professional relative (ASK