Going On Leave!

After a marathon few weeks, and a brutal sprint to the finish these last few days, I'm finally going on leave for two weeks and change. Blogging will probably be light, but with luck I'll get to see many of my readers in person. I'll be touring the Upper Midwest as usual, with the main stay at home in Wisconsin and forays to the Twin Cities and across the great grey-green greasy Limpopo to see the Elephant's Child and family in the flatlands of Illinois, whence we intend to make a pilgrimage to the Fort. Those of you who are up with me on Facebook, I'll have a more detailed itinerary up there. Otherwise, if you're in the area and would like to grab lunch or something, drop me a note and we'll see what we can pull off.

Classic Moments in Soldiering: TA-50 Bomb

TA-50 is the catchall term for Army-issued gear. It has a habit of 'sploding all over one's living quarters if not stored carefully:


Since I came back from Georgia, my room's slowly been getting disorganized as I sort and pack things for the Iraq. Then today I needed some gear for the rifle range, and had to dig through all my packed crates to find it in a hurry. And now my room's a disaster that I don't even want to look at or think about. Just thought I'd share.

Recipe Plug: Smitten Kitchen's Cherry Brown Butter Bars

This was too good not to plug. And I totally dropped the ball on getting a picture. I made it with about half blackberries and half the strawberry/blueberry mix left over from Independence Day Pancakes. I added a touch more sugar to compensate for the tartness of the blackberries and a splash of almond extract, well, because it was there. Next time, I'll do all blackberries, if only for the joy of saying "brown butter blackberry bars" three times fast.

Brown butter is amazing. You'll recognize it immediately as the aroma of baking shortbread or pie crust, but in dangerously concentrated form. Add fresh summer fruit, and the result is... well, you'll just have to make it yourself. It's assertive, though, so I don't think I'd go with anything less bold than cherries. Apples or pears would probably be overwhelmed. Currants and gooseberries would be delicious, and very Continental if you're into that.

Breadbasket of the World

Africa alone could feed the world.

That's not a claim most people would think to attach to a continent mostly known in the West for heart-rending images of malnutrition. But to anyone who's seen the way things grow in tropical African soil, and considering the amount of under-utilized farmland, it doesn't seem so far-fetched. The solution, according to the article, is a variant of the plaintive refrain I often heard from a Sudanese teacher of mine: "if only we had peace and good government, we would be a very rich nation". Ah, there's the rub.

Happy Independence Day

My sister made the pancakes. Delicious.

UPDATE: I should give proper recipe credit: these were the 4-Grain Pancakes from the most recent Joy of Cooking, which I'm currently coveting.

On Texas

I still love the culture and landscapes of the Upper Midwest too much consider permanently calling any other state "home", but boy I'd be happy to have a man like Rick Perry as my governor. And of the various places I've lived in the Army, West Texas is probably the only serious contender as a place I'd be happy to settle in if life happens to take me there again.

Schoolhouse Rock

This pretty much speaks for itself, I'd say (via Instapundit)

On Corruption

I recently shared our Fearsome Comrade's worries about the intersection of government and business in America. The Skeptical Bureaucrat shares a related concern, that of the incestuous world of "formers" consulting, in which former politicians become consultants advising businesses how best to deal with politicians. He recalls a conversation with a Turkish official:

He furiously resented a World Bank effort that was going on at that time to combat public corruption, which the Bank saw as an impediment to economic development. The Turk maintained that in the Third World public corruption is more or less benign, since it consists of small amounts of graft broadly distributed throughout society all the way down to the level of traffic cops, whereas the U.S. style of corruption consists of huge amounts of money passed out to a very few people at the top of the government-business nexus. I had no good answer to him then, and I haven't thought of one since.

I have to say, I had never, ever thought of it that way. And it's pretty strange, when you think about it, that Americans would be outraged at a traffic cop demanding a $20 bribe, but are relatively unruffled by millions of dollars in payola at the state and federal levels.

On Congressional Incompetence

Does it strike anyone else that there's insufficient outrage about the complete sham the Congress has become? It has become routine for Representatives and Senators to debate and vote on bills they cannot possibly have read. Congressional leaders sneer dismissively when legislators suggest they'd like a chance to do so. This is appallingly antirepublican, undermining the people's sovereignty and replacing it with a shadow oligarchy of congressional staffers. It's been going on for a long time, of course, but it seems to have reached a new level with the national embarrassment that was the "debate" over the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

Pushing for a Read the Bill Amendment seems over the top at first, but then again, an entire branch of our government has more or less abdicated their responsibilities, so perhaps a constitutional amendment isn't overkill. It would certainly have some nice follow-on effects, since it would greatly increase the incentive for concision in legislation, and force legislators to spend more time actually considering legislation and less time at bare-knuckles politicking.

Gustatory Pornography

For me, a gourmand hopelessly stuck in communal housing without a kitchen, food blogs are to cooking as pornography is to procreation. And the Pioneer Woman and Bakerella are my Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. Today, Bakerella's making pancakes:


See what I mean?

On Free-Range Kids

There are a lot of uninteresting one-cause blogs out there where strident people exorcise their own demons by beating dead hobbyhorses for the edification of the rest of us. Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids isn't one of them. It operates on a pretty simple thesis: American parents are driving themselves crazy with concern and smothering their children with illusory safety, all while America is as safe a place for children as it was in 1970. Quite simply, she's out to change the way Americans raise their kids. This interview with Salon lays out the argument pretty nicely. A few excerpts:

What are the statistics about crimes against children? What is the news that we're not hearing?

The crime rate today is equal to what it was back in 1970. In the '70s and '80s, crime was climbing. It peaked around 1993, and since then it's been going down.

If you were a child in the '70s or the '80s and were allowed to go visit your friend down the block, or ride your bike to the library, or play in the park without your parents accompanying you, your children are no less safe than you were.

But it feels so completely different, and we're told that it's completely different, and frankly, when I tell people that it's the same, nobody believes me. We're living in really safe times, and it's hard to believe.

[...]

Then there are products out there that will prevent [anything] from happening. Here is a helmet your child could wear when she starts to toddle, lest she fall over and split her head open and die, or suffer traumatic brain injury.

Kids have been toddling -- it's a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood -- ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you're supposed to think that it's too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy.

There are kneepads that you're supposed to put on your kid because crawling is considered too dangerous for the knees, as if knees weren't built for crawling. That's why they're cute and dimpled and fat.

Everything that we do has a product that we can buy that's supposed to make our kids safer, as if they're born without the requisite accoutrements. Then there is something we can do as parents to be more careful, to be more protective. The assumption behind all of that is that if you are a good parent, you should be protecting your child from 100 percent of anything that could possibly go wrong, and if not, you will be blamed and Larry King will shake his finger at you.

I'm probably one of the few single young men reading Skenazy's blog, but I was a Free-Range Kid, and I'll likely have a couple myself someday. Beyond that, the child-safety hysteria is a microcosm of larger societal forces. It is fed by the same psychological quirk that cripples security planning and counterterrorism, namely that human beings are pretty terrible at internalizing probabilities, and particularly terrible at estimating probabilities of things that scare us. Really, Lenore Skenazy is the Bruce Schneier of child-rearing.

On Arab Media

Here's another clip from MEMRI-TV to add to the "Al-Jazeera isn't what you think it is" file. In it, Iraqi author Najm Wali argues that the Arabs must pursue normalization with Israel if they are to have a future.

Najm Wali: I believe that normalization [of relations with Israel] is a cultural necessity for us, and it is the answer to all those who talk about a clash of civilizations. It is a historical necessity for us Arabs in particular, because it will take us to a new stage – a stage that will transcend the eternal conflict with Israel, and in which we will form new relations with the world. The eternal conflict with Israel has brought us nothing but material losses and loss of human life, as well as a chronic sense of defeat. The common Arab citizen feels that he is being defeated by this tiny country, Israel, which numbers only six or seven million, while the Arab world numbers 300 million.

The way to deal with this feeling should be through normalization. As you said at the beginning of this show, this is what the Islamic countries understood, long before the Arabs. The historical ties of Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia with Israel have gone beyond mere normalization. Turkey, Syria's partner and the mediator in the indirect talks [with Israel], has a strategic, military alliance with Israel. But I'm sad to say that the notion that prevails in the public discourse is that normalization is a trap for us, a deception. This notion will lead us to more defeats and battles, and the loss of more human lives. Look at other Islamic states, like Indonesia and Turkey. Not only are these countries international powers, which are even accepted as mediators, but they are also economic powers. Like the "Asian Tigers," they did not involve themselves in a daily conflict with a small country. This question has constantly made me wonder, even as a little boy: Why is this tiny state able to defeat us, even though we are 300 million? The problem lies with us. We have to think for ourselves, and build...

Interviewer: So the solution to this problem is normalization with this country?

Najm Wali: In my opinion, normalization is the first solution, so we can devote ourselves to economic prosperity. Economy is the problem in the world today.

Interviewer: Egypt normalized its relations with Israel some 25 years ago or more.

Najm Wali: And indeed, it regained the Sinai.

Interviewer: What has Egypt achieved since the normalization?

Najm Wali: Let's ask a different question: How many casualties has Egypt suffered since normalization? Egypt has not suffered casualties like it did in the past. [...] What I am saying is that this nation has to coexist in peace.

Interviewer: The Islamic nation?

Najm Wali: Yes, and especially the Arab nation, which is part of the Islamic nation. I consider it a historical necessity. In addition, peaceful coexistence – let's put aside the issue of Zionism... The Jews are no foreigners here. They've lived in the region for many years, throughout Islamic history. Even in terms of race, ethnicity, and history – they are our cousins. They lived for many years in the Arab Peninsula, in Iraq, and everywhere. We have to benefit from their experience in building a state.

I simply cannot imagine a scenario in which CNN or Fox News would give airtime to someone who would challenge America's fundamental image of itself the way this Najm Wali has challenged the Arabs. The willingness of the Arab media to give soapboxes to the most incredibly contrarian positions displays an admirable faith in the principle of free and open debate. I think we often overlook how significant this really is, particularly in the political context of the Arab world.

On Corporatism

Our Fearsome Comrade has a really important insight on the relation of business and government:

Corporations are going to get your money. The question is, will they do it by offering you a useful service or a valuable good in return, or will they do it by getting their friends in Washington to force you to give it to them for nothing?

When business and government collude, ordinary people lose. A laissez-faire policy is not based on some generalized affection for big business, rather the recognition that businesses that aren't threatened by the government have no reason to meddle in the government and no lust to control the government. If the government didn't have the power to bankrupt competing companies, funnel billions in tax revenue to favored industries, or force people to buy products they don't want, businessmen would have no interest in corrupting it.

Transformers Gets Dretful Review

My favorite sort of movie review is the kind that totally pans a movie, but somehow makes you want to see it even more. i09's review of the new Transformers movie is just that sort of review:

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that [director Michael] Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane.

Every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height.

In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

I need to see this movie.

The Lives of Soccer Players

The Iranian soccer players who wore green armbands in a World Cup qualifying match in solidarity with the protesters have been "retired" from the team. Yglesias makes a very astute connection to the tactics used by the East German government, as displayed in The Lives of Others, one of my favorite films:

One of the things The Lives of Others does very well is illustrate how a dictatorial regime that prefers to stay in power through “soft” methods can use the threat of destroying people’s careers. Instead of being put on trial and executed, becoming a martyr for the cause, you can just be rendered unemployable in the field of your choice in a decision nobody has to publicly defend but everyone understands. You become, then, not an imprisoned hero, but perhaps just an apparently pathetic person—in the movie it’s a theater director who can’t direct—a cautionary tale rather than an inspirational example.

This is not the martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the peaceful protester shot dead by the regime's thugs, but it is a sacrifice all the same. These players must have known full well there would be consequences, the ending of their careers possibly the mildest scenario imaginable. Whatever the result of this situation, its legacy will be a hundred thousand stories of courage. I hope someone tells them again, someday.

Making Up for Lost Time

Another statement from our President (emphasis mine):

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Bravo, Sir. Keep 'em coming.

Obama Speaks on Iran

There it is:

What you're seeing in Iran are hundreds of thousands of people who believe their voices were not heard and who are peacefully protesting and - and seeking justice. And the world is watching. And we stand behind those who are seeking justice in a peaceful way. And, you know, already we've seen violence out there. I think I've said this throughout the week. I want to repeat it that we stand with those who would look to peaceful resolution of conflict, and we believe that the voices of people have to be heard, that that's a universal value that the American people stand for and this administration stands for.

Was that so hard? Thank you, Mr President. (Notwithstanding the classic "as I've said before" Obamism flagging his change of position).

Success and Happiness

Considerably simpler when you break it down:


(from Flickr user Bud Caddell, via Jaltcoh)

"We Meddle Because We Exist"

Michael Ledeen on Iran yesterday:

Whatever or whoever Mir Hossein Mousavi was five days ago, he is now the leader of a mass movement that demands the creation of a free Iran that will rejoin the Western world. And yes, the wheel could turn again, this revolution could one day be betrayed, all kinds of surprises no doubt await the Iranian people. Yes, but. But today, there is a dramatic chance of a very good thing happening in Iran, and thus in the Middle East, and therefore in the whole world...

As Obama discovered just today, America will be accused of meddling on behalf of freedom, even if we do nothing. And the accusation will have been true, in the most fundamental sense, even though the State Department raced to deny it. We are the symbol of freedom in the modern world, and those fighting for freedom against tyrants will intuitively invoke our name and our Constitution in their struggle. They are right, for the very existence of America threatens the legitimacy of the tyrants.

We meddle because we exist.

Obama on Iran

I've been waiting for someone to sum up the arguments surrounding President Obama's (lack of a) stance on the post-election protests in Iran. James Taranto has published as good a digest as I could have hoped for. In classic blogographic style, I agree (why else would I have linked him?). I think Obama was right to avoid strident early support of the protest movement which could have undermined the protesters' confidence in the sovereignty of their own motivations. Nothing takes the wind out of authentic outrage faster than the suspicion you're playing into the hands of meddling superpowers. The regime's own propaganda machines are spinning this angle anyway, so it's a valid concern. But Obama's increasingly tepid responses over the past week are beginning to sound not measured and reasonable but absurd against the backdrop of the historic protests. As Taranto puts it:

The trouble with Obama's comments is not that they are insufficiently belligerent in tone but that they are craven in substance. If the president spoke with clarity and firmness, his doing so calmly would be a plus.

Self-Reliance in the Recession

If this isn't an argument for self-reliance, I don't know what is. Christina Davidson of the Atlantic visits rural West Virginia to see how the recession's hitting America's second-poorest state. Turns out, it isn't. According to lifelong resident Marietta Stemple:

We don't have foreclosure here because most people own their homes and have always owned their homes. Most people have jobs, and if they lose one, it probably didn't pay much anyway. We don't have much bankruptcy because most people know their limits. We don't have the expenses of people in the cities. I always sewed and made all my kids' clothes--I have five. I always cut their hair myself. We never bought what we didn't need. That's just how we live.

Maybe a lot more of the country will learn to live this way again.

Demographics of Resistance

Michael Totten shares what strikes me as an important point about the demographics of Ahmadinejad's supporters:

[The] strange meme in many media reports that Ahmadinejad has a “base” of support in the countryside is not only wrong, it’s backwards. The uprising we’re all watching on YouTube is taking place inside Ahmadinejad’s “strongholds,” such as they are.

Ahmadinejad is a “conservative” in the relative sense of the word, as he resists any and all reform of the 1979 revolution. He is not, however, a conservative in the traditional sense. Khomeinism and radical Islamism are 20th Century totalitarian ideologies. Traditional village people, conservative as they may be, have little use for them.

Michael Ledeen on Iran

If anyone has something to say worth listening to about the situation in Iran, it's Michael Ledeen. "Faster, please" has been his mantra for years. Now it's in sight. Maybe.

On Oaths

I just saw this Tweet on #Iranelection:

Sorry, @normankonrad, but I don't think it works that way. I don't know exactly how their oath reads, but I don't believe Iranian cops and soldiers are sworn to protect the people of Iran. Even in America, soldiers swear fealty to the regime, not to the people, by taking an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and to obey the orders of the President. Iranian troops are sworn to defend the Islamic Revolution. In our case, soldiers fight with the confidence that the Constitution we defend is on the side of the people. In theirs, let us rather call the army and the police to respect higher oaths than those they have taken. But even if the soldiers and police defect to the demonstrators, they still have to deal with the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij. There is still a long way to go.

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

While I was enjoying myself this weekend in splendid isolation in the awe-inspiringly beautiful Great Smoky Mountains, apparently the world's been falling apart. At least Iran. I don't know a lot about Iran. But even life-long Iran watchers and analysts admit that the great deal of that county's political decisions -- such as those surrounding this weekend's election result -- are made somewhere within the "black box", those inner councils of the theocracy whose workings are entirely opaque to outside observers.

What is transparent, however, is that something scary -- but also exciting and possibly even hopeful -- has been stirred up in Iran.



Whether it will grow and remake that country remains to be seen. Whatever the result, the world will experience it live and firsthand from thousands of participants. Follow them on Twitter.