The Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake

Decisions

2011-03-22T13:41:00.000-04:00

As many of my readers are no doubt aware, I'm currently preparing to go back to school this fall in order to get my MBA. The latest step in the process has been choosing a school, and it's been a hard decision. Each of my options had a lot to recommend it, which, as my future father-in-law very helpfully pointed out, meant that there was no wrong choice to make. That didn't make the decision any easier, but it did take most of the stress out of it.

Faced with a decision between three good options, I did what any military intelligence veteran and prospective MBA would do: I made a spreadsheet. I compiled a list of competing criteria, including everything from program rankings and student body attitudes to proximity of family and friends and survivability in a civilizational-collapse scenario. I rated each school on these criteria as impartially as possible, then ranked the criteria by subjective importance to me, had my fiancée do the same*, and multiplied the average of our rankings by the schools' ratings to come up with a value-weighted score for each school. And of course, my approach failed completely, leaving two of the three schools perfectly tied.

What next? Time to cook the books. I went back through the theoretically impartial ratings columns and adjusted them until one school started to pull ahead. Was I intentionally tipping the balance toward one school? Probably, but even in that case, my spreadsheet still did its job by revealing to me which school I truly most wanted to attend. And what was the result? Well, I'm happy to announce that I am now officially a member of the Wisconsin School of Business Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management Class of 2013.

It is a bit ironic, since I had initially considered it my third-place school, and I nearly didn't bother to finish the application after I was admitted to the school I had considered my number two. I only went to the interview and class visit out of a grudging sense of obligation to finishing what you start, but was so impressed during that visit that it suddenly became the school to beat. In the end, it was the only program I felt like I would regret missing if I went somewhere else, and that's what ultimately tipped the scales. I guess it's a good lesson in not closing doors or burning bridges.

So Madison-area friends, see you soon! And Chicago and Twin Cities friends, we'll only be a few hours away, and we're planning to have a guest room.

*My fiancée's independent prioritization of school selection criteria was nearly identical to mine. I'd say that's a good sign, no?

Against Intervention

2011-03-16T15:27:00.000-04:00

Opinions regarding the proper response to the situation in Libya cut across partisan lines, with the full spectrum from not-our-problem isolationism to something-must-be-done interventionism represented on both sides. The Right is convinced President Obama's handling it poorly, of course, but there's nothing approaching a consensus about what ought to be done. The confusion is clear at the conservative flagship National Review, whose editorial now supports a no-fly zone (though they initially opposed it) opposite a column from Victor Davis Hanson (one of the preeminent cheerleaders of the Iraq invasion) who opposes intervention.

It's appropriate that opinions are all over, I suppose. It's a fraught question. As VDH sums up the humanitarian argument,

Libyans have been living an ungodly nightmare since Qaddafi’s coup in 1969, and it would be a fine and noble thing to lend them a hand to end their four-decade-long misery. The world would be a better and safer place without Qaddafi and his odious clan in power.

Yes. But Qaddafi will have to be replaced. There is simply no indication that there is any significant core of individuals among the rebels who would be any better, and it is a deeply dangerous folly to suggest that things could not get any worse. Libya's modern history -- a lawless span of coast that nobody else wanted, so the Italians got it -- uncomfortably parallels Somalia's. And the probably-doomed rebels? Well, they're the enemy of our enemy, but it's not at all clear that they're our friends:

On a per capita basis, though, twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya -- and specifically eastern Libya -- than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East.

It would be whistling in the dark to suppose that whatever demographic cohort sent so many to fight and die in Iraq is not also front-and-center in the ranks of the rebels we are currently debating whether to support. The most cynical part of me might support a no-fly zone simply to even things up, to prevent this struggle from ending before it has worn down both sides. Like the Iran-Iraq war, it's a war you wish both sides could lose. Sadly, the real losers, as always, are the Libyan people, the majority of whom are by all accounts friendly, hospitable, and desirous of rational government.

I wish there were an easy answer, but there just isn't. This is the world we live in. Foreign policy is really hard. As I've mentioned before, my biggest concern about President Obama at his inauguration was that he seemed convinced that foreign policy is easy and everyone else had just been doing it wrong. He does seem at least to have been disabused of that notion.

Free Story Concept: Super Bowl Anti-History

2011-02-08T22:09:00.001-05:00

While watching the Super Bowl on Sunday (Packers won the Super Bowl! Packers won the Super Bowl! Packers won the Super Bowl!), I was struck by a thought during the ads for commemorative Super Bowl champions gear. I'm sure that these days they do most of the printing to order, but there's still a non-trivial amount of swag printed with the losing team as champion, "Dewey Defeats Truman"-style. It's a fair guess that all the Super Bowl XLV Champion Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirts then get dumped on the second-hand clothing market and ends up in the developing world. So there's my trope, free for the taking: all the "Super Bowl Champion" commemorative swag in the developing world tells an anti-history of the Super Bowl. Someone could make something of that.

Project: Fish Tank Stand Bookshelf

2011-02-07T22:07:00.000-05:00

I recently decided that while I'm happily unemployed, I can occupy my time by making myself some things that I will find useful in the future. The fact that I currently have my father's well-appointed garage workshop available is another incentive, as is the desire to develop my basic woodworking skills in the more challenging realm of furniture-making.

For my first big project, I settled on something that will accommodate a small portion of my absurd private library, as well as display a pursuit of mine that I don't think has come up before, tropical fish. This was also my opportunity to learn how to use Google Sketchup. Here's what I came up with:

The thin lines on the lower portion are dowels which will support the bookshelves. You may notice I neglected to include them on the rear verticals; Sketchup was giving me fits with the cylinders. The shelf above the tank will hold a deep tray for plants, with growlights for them mounted in the topmost frame. I don't know yet what I'm going to do for a finish. I'm leaning toward a dark stain to try to minimize the "clearly-made-from-2x4s" look, but I might just embrace that, put on a clear poly coat and use shiny hardware all over it.

Dinner: Sausage and Spinach White Bean Soup

2011-02-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

This is an original creation that worked out pretty well for a quick weeknight meal. I know dried beans taste way better and are a lot cheaper bla bla bla, but they also require something in exceedingly short supply for a lot of people: planning. You want to make it with dried beans, I'm not going to stop you. For the rest of us, here goes (sorry, no pictures):

2 fresh bratwurst

1 medium onion

1 box (9 oz) frozen chopped spinach

2 cans (15 oz) navy or great northern beans

1/2 tsp caraway seed

1/4 tsp ground cardamom

1/4 tsp black pepper

1 tsp lemon juice (adjust to taste)

salt to taste

Squeeze the sausage out of their casings into a medium saucepan over low heat, breaking it up as it starts to brown. Chop the onion. Add to saucepan and increase to medium heat, continuing to break up sausage as it cooks until onions are translucent and sausage is well browned. If you've had the foresight to thaw the spinach, add it to the saucepan now. If you haven't, no worries, just put it in the pan frozen, cover it, turn the heat down low, and wait a few minutes until your spinach block thaws. Add the beans and enough water or stock to bring it to the consistency you prefer. Heat to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or so. Add lemon juice and salt to taste. Enjoy.

30 minutes or so. Serves 3-4 as a meal, more as a soup course.

A New Direction?

2011-02-01T14:53:00.000-05:00

I've been having a hard time deciding whether I really have a reason to keep blogging. While I'm as plugged into politics as ever, I really don't have the expertise to justify opining about much, and Facebook has really become my venue for the daily heylookitthats. For that matter, my blog reliably gets more comments on Facebook than on the website. So instead of kicking myself that I really ought to be commenting on this or that world event (cough cough Egypt cough), I'm going to be blogging things that do matter to me personally: daily life observations, recipes, projects I'm working on around the house, that sort of thing. Dretful scorn will, of course, continue to be in the offing. It'll still be irregular and haphazard, but that's life.

Essay

2011-01-04T02:33:00.000-05:00

Hello, friends. Long time, no see, I know.

I'm currently working on applications to business schools, which means I've been writing a lot of essays. Tonight I was working on an essay about a time in my life when I took a risk. I'm going to have to do some major revision in the morning, but I think this is too good not to share, even in its rough state. Let this be an object lesson of the risks of writing application essays late into the night:

When a paratrooper is asked about risks he’s taken, the immediate thoughts are of risks quite concrete, of literal leaps of faith out the doors of perfectly good airplanes, but I don’t expect anyone wants to read about all the routine parachute jumps I remember. Rather more interesting is the jump I can’t remember, the one that nearly killed me, but since everything I know about that jump is hearsay, I don’t feel right repeating that, either. I took more than a few risks in Iraq, too, some for better reasons than others. I took a risk every time I entrusted my life to a complete stranger with a GED and an ASVAB waiver, but in a combat zone that’s a risk common enough to become banal. It was a greater risk when I entrusted my safety to Iraqi soldiers who might well have been al-Qaeda sympathizers, if not active members, but that’s how building legitimacy works, and anyway, I had orders to follow. So maybe it’s more useful to take a couple steps back and look at the first big risk I took, the one that got me into the Army in the first place.

Unlike most servicemembers, the military wasn’t something that loomed large in my family background. The last contact my family had had with the Department of Defense was my grandfather’s service in the occupation of Japan, and I made it to my senior year of college without ever considering military service a plausible option. I was on a solid path to an undistinguished but comfortable career in academia when a visit to the Commonwealth cemetery at the World War II battlefield of el-Alamein, Egypt, challenged my assumptions about my role in the world and planted the seeds of my dissatisfaction with the prospect of a sedentary academic life. As I approached graduation seeking opportunities for intensive applied language training, I was pointed again and again toward the military’s language training program. I looked into what the military language program had to offer, and something just clicked. It all made perfect sense: I would enlist in the US Army as an Arabic linguist and make my career as a military man. All that stood in my way was the minor practical matter that I was 70 pounds overweight and so desperately out of shape I couldn’t run a quarter of a mile without stopping.

The reality of weight loss and exercise is irredeemably dull, and if this essay were a movie, this sentence would no doubt be replaced by an eighties-rock montage. Suffice it to say that over the course of the summer following my college graduation, I had lost weight and gained stamina sufficient for me to ship off to Basic Training in the fall. I arrived at Fort Knox with absolutely no context or outline of what to expect beyond the vague Hollywood conception of “Boot Camp”, and faced a culture shock more extreme than any I ever felt circumnavigating the globe. I had joined the US Army as an Arabic linguist during the darkest period of the Iraq war. I knew where I was headed. What it would take to get there was a bit hazier.

I realize I’m writing an essay, not trading war stories at the VFW, so I suppose I should get to the point: what I learned from taking my big risk. I learned a bunch of little things, only some of which are motivational poster cliches: Meritocracy is the ideal, but patronage is the reality. Compliance is generally valued higher than competence. Always, always, always pay your mercenaries. I also learned a few big things: I am capable of working harder and enduring more than I ever thought possible. Individualism is bunk; my proudest moments have been as a cog in the best machine. And the antithesis of fear is not courage, but trust in the man ahead of you and behind you.

Train Madness

2010-11-24T12:52:00.000-05:00

Okay, this high-speed rail madness needs to get addressed. Most of the opposition to HSR attacks it either as a wildly expensive boondoggle, which it is, or comes from people who aren't concerned about the fundamental expected benefit of HSR, emissions reduction. But HSR doesn't work even on its own merits. Adding nationwide HSR would increase net emissions. Let me explain. A friend of mine recently shared this infographic from Yglesias:

Yes, but. The thing missing from this infographic is that these numbers need to be broken down by BTU per passenger mile per pound and compared to the other things they're replacing, that is, the marginal cost of what else we could be using those rails for. Air travel is fuel-inefficient, so we only use it for lightweight, time-sensitive cargoes like passengers and priority mail packages. Rail is very efficient, but isn't currently very fast, so we generally use it to move the heaviest things that need moving, i.e. bulk goods and freight. All the HSR proposals out there right now are trying to get comparatively lightweight passenger trains onto our rails and make them go faster than freight trains currently do, but none of these proposals address the reality that this will displace several times that weight of freight onto comparatively inefficient trucks on our highways, multiplying net emissions. Even if we built brand new dedicated rail corridors for HSR (which is what we'd have to do if we actually want shiny 200mph bullet trains, instead of just 90mph express trains like we had in the 1930s) we'd still reduce more emissions using those new rails for heavy freight than for light passengers. We'd save a lot of money on highway maintenance, too, since semis are responsible for the overwhelming majority of wear-and-tear on our roads. If we really wanted to be preventing emissions, we'd certainly be looking at ways to encourage and expand use of our nation's railways, only for freight rather than passengers. We would also be looking at what it would take to get our canal networks back into commission, since barges are an order of magnitude more efficient even than trains. As it stands, the current advocates for HSR are more interested in seeing shiny, sexy new passenger trains (and handing multi-billion-dollar construction contracts to political backers in the case of the politicians) than in actually reducing net emissions. It is fundamentally unserious.

Going in Circles

2010-10-28T21:03:00.000-04:00

Do you ever feel like you're just going in circles, like no matter how long you drive, you find yourself back where you started? I've felt that way in these first 850 miles of my epic post-Army cross-country road trip. And for a good reason: I have been going in circles, one big one, specifically:

I had to come back to Fort Bragg this morning to tie up some a few loose ends, and tomorrow morning I'm taking the GMAT here in Raleigh, my last big hurdle in the business school application process. After that's done, the road trip proper can commence. Up 'til now I've been making my way around Virginia and North Carolina, enjoying the natural and historic beauty of this part of the country, as well as good times with some old friends in Charlottesville, Richmond, and Norfolk.

You'll notice my path on the map above looks for all the world like I took an extended detour into the Atlantic. They're too narrow to show up on this zoom level, but I assure you North Carolina's Outer Banks are there, and they are absolutely beautiful. They have easily the nicest beaches I've visited in the US, and I'd put them comfortably in the top three beach regions I've enjoyed worldwide, along with Egypt's Mediterranean coast and Thailand's Andaman coast. Prices for vacation rentals are also shockingly reasonable, particularly in the off-season, and things just get cheaper the further down the banks you go. Most of the construction boom in the Outer Banks happened in an era when Americans were much more willing to drive a couple hours of two-lane road to spend a week doing nothing much, rather than just flying off to an all-inclusive resort. Which is to say, if you make the Outer Banks your next vacation destination, you will be being simultaneously counter-cultural and nostalgic. All right, enough boosterism.

Out

2010-10-22T19:07:00.000-04:00

I apologize for the lack of posting these past ten days. I was a bit overwhelmed with the process of getting out of the Army, and since then I've been trying to focus all my energies on studying for the GMAT, which I'll be taking a week from today.

You read that right, though, I'm out of the Army. Getting out was a miserable process, but I managed to get all the checks in all the right boxes and all the signatures on all the right forms, and I am now officially a civilian again. It's a great feeling. One day I'll get around to reflecting on my Army experience generally, but right now I've got a bit too much on my plate for that.

On Failure

2010-10-12T14:51:00.003-04:00

Everyone can celebrate the accomplishment and heroism of a man like Joseph Kittenger, who took the "long, lonely leap", skydiving from the edge of space in 1960 and setting a record that is yet to be broken. The Art of Manliness blog recently profiled his story for their "A Man's Life" feature. But what about the "magnificent failure" of the man who tried to break his record, Nick Piantanida, whom Art of Manliness profiled in a sequel to Kettinger's story. After a life of shoestring exploits, Piantanida died from the effects of a failed attempt to beat Kittenger's record. AoM sums up the question of Piantanida's legacy well:

Was Nick a reckless daredevil? His jumps were never about the thrill; he genuinely wished to aid scientific progress, to push the limits of what was out there, and to accomplish something no other man had done. Did he prepare enough? He did the best an ordinary civilian could have but inevitably lacked the opportunities for rigorous testing and the access to the very best and most experienced minds in the field.

What are we to make of a man like Nick? Was his inability to admit the risk of failure, and the chance he might leave his children fatherless a form of hubris? Or should we cheer his adventurous spirit, DIY effort, and manful demonstration that great daring is not reserved for the loners or the lucky?

I'm reminded of another great failure in history, Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Sure, that Norwegian fellow made it there first. And none of Scott's party made it back alive. Still, I think there is a place to celebrate heroism even in failure. Scott himself thought so, as he wrote in his journal these words, recorded on a memorial to the Terra Nova expedition in Queenstown, New Zealand:

For my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardship, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks; we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Continuity

2010-10-11T19:35:00.000-04:00

Indexed is a charming little webcomic that's almost always good for a quick morning chortle. It's a lot of fun to see the way she plays with graphs to tell stories, but it does often betray a somewhat blinkered lefty view of the world, though in a way that's not at all off-putting. Today's comic is a particularly good example.

The commenters spot the problem right away. Do you?

Dinner: Fasinjoon

2010-10-11T01:04:00.001-04:00

I finally got a chance to try out the recipe for fasinjoon that I got off one of my Iraqi teachers three years ago.

It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself, so I figured I'd share the recipe again, including my updates of what I changed. It's truly one of the world's great sauces. It would pair just as well with other meats, particularly lamb, but here's how I made it with chicken:

2+ lbs. chicken thighs
1 large onion
1/2 bottle (2 dl) pomegranate molasses (available at Middle Eastern groceries or online)
8 oz. walnut pieces
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp salt
Parsley and lemon to garnish

Chop the onion and begin sautéing in a deep frying pan with a little vegetable oil. Meanwhile, rinse the chicken thighs and skin. Toss skins into the pan to sauté with the onions so they release their chickeny deliciousness. Once the onions begin to caramelize, add the chicken thighs and enough water just to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer for 10 minutes. Remove chicken skins. With a blender or food processor, grind the walnuts finely. Add walnut meal and pomegranate molasses to the pan, stir to combine. Cover and continue simmering for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add cinnamon, pepper and salt when 10 minutes remain, uncover as needed to allow sauce to thicken to desired consistency. Serve over rice (basmati is most appropriate, but any will do). Garnish with parsley and lemon slice (I didn't, and the dish suffers visually, as you can see above).

Enjoy!

Why They Hate Him

2010-10-09T10:23:00.001-04:00

I wrote a bit the other day about the ongoing hate speech trial of Dutch politician Geert Wilders. The Wilders trial, of course, encompasses issues broader than freedom of speech. There's an apparently credible allegation (I can't really judge, other than that the Dutch media is covering it in earnest) that his trial has been orchestrated by his political opponents, who hate him perhaps more than his Islamist enemies do. Despite the fact that his party's platform on every subject but one is mainstream European social-democratic -- which is to say hard Left by American standards -- he and his party are regularly described as "far right" by their opponents and the media. Why the disconnect? It comes down to that one subject left out: immigration, which in the Netherlands mostly means Muslim immigration.

Wilders is loathed by his political opponents because he dares to argue that European nations should be proud of their cultures and should pursue policies of immigration and assimilation that will maintain and strengthen those cultures for the future. Why on Earth is this controversial to the point of being labeled hate speech? Firstly, the practical matter: there is simply no other way for a nation like the Netherlands to remain anything you or I would recognize as Dutch while continuing to welcome immigrants. Secondly, being a culturally-defined nation is one half of being a nation-state, and such cultural definition is positively uncontroversial elsewhere. The Arab League is made up of 21 countries that proudly declare themselves Arab nations and seek to maintain and strengthen their Arab cultural identity. The Organization of the Islamic Conference consists of 57 nations that declare themselves officially Muslim and enshrine Islamic jurisprudence in their constitutions. Is it really so offensive then for a Dutch political party to argue that the Netherlands should be proud of her Dutch culture and Enlightenment political philosophy? If this is hate speech, Europe is surely doomed.

Justified Jingoism

2010-10-08T15:42:00.007-04:00

In his September Diary, John Derbyshire shares a quote from the American music critic James Huneker regarding Chopin's Etude Op. 25 No. 11: "Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it." Derb kindly linked a video of a performance of this piece by young Korean pianist, Yeol Um Son, who made quite an impression on him. Me, too. Here's the video:

I had an interesting thought on watching this. I emailed Derb about it; I'll just share what I wrote him:

Reading your follow-up today I was struck by something you didn't explicitly address: Ms. Yeol is Korean, and yet she's devoted her life to studying and sharing music written by a bunch of dead white Europeans. How many Westerners have taken the time and effort necessary to become virtuosos of another culture's classical music? I would guess the answer is in the dozens. I say this not to tut-tut the West, but rather as a bit of unashamed cultural jingoism. Our culture produced this, and its surpassing worth is so universally evident that millions of students in east Asia -- confident and economically-successful cultures all -- choose to study it rather than the products of their own well-developed cultures. We're happy to share it, of course. Makes me awfully proud of my heritage, and also a bit guilty that I haven't studied it better, at least in this particular realm. I think Ms. Yeol has inspired me to fix that.

And she has. Also to get back to practicing piano.

On Speech and Freedom Thereof

2010-10-07T10:37:00.001-04:00

This is quite the week for the discussion of speech and freedom. The Supreme Court is currently hearing the case of Snyder v. Phelps, which hinges on the determination whether standing outside a fallen Marine's funeral with signs reading "GOD HATES FAGS" and "THANK GOD FOR IEDS" qualifies as protected speech. This, of course, is the penchant of the aforementioned "Reverend" Phelps, who with the few dozen blood relatives who make up his "church" has made an avocation of tormenting the bereaved beloved of this nation's fallen heroes, as well as those of gay victims of AIDS. The premise avowed by Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church is, as far as I can stomach to gather, that God is punishing the U.S. with military defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan for our collective sin of allowing closeted homosexuals to serve in the military under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Presumably God would be appeased if we only cleansed the Armed Forces in some sort of gay-baiting witch hunt, after which our Certified Straight® military would win the War on Terror. I'll admit, I'm not exactly clear on the theology involved.

In any case, the question before the court is whether the "Reverend" Phelps, his minions, and their odious ravings fall under the protection of the First Amendment. I believe they do, and I'll be rather surprised if the court doesn't come to the same conclusion. The protest in question was held at the statutory thousand-foot distance from the funeral, and was thus unable to directly interrupt the proceedings. The remaining argument is that their protest might constitute "hate speech".

Ahh, "hate speech". We are right to be a bit queasy about limiting any speech at all, so if we are going to say that hate speech is unprotected, clearly the definition of what constitutes hate speech becomes a very important matter. Much political advocacy is hateful to its detractors, after all, so it would seem obvious that to define hate speech based on the perceptions of the aggrieved effectively grants censorship authority to the thinnest-skinned in society. Our Supreme Court seems to have recognized this, as I understand they have historically worked from an exceedingly narrow definition of hate speech.

Not so in the Netherlands (you knew I was getting to this, right?). After prosecutors chose not to file hate speech charges against the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, Muslims aggrieved by his short film Fitna took the issue to the Court of Appeals, where they succeeded in forcing his currently-running trial. There is considerable evidence that Wilders's political opponents have been involved in orchestrating his trial. In a way, seeing this trial as just another function of machine politics as usual is comforting, more comforting anyway than seeing it as part of the "legal jihad" to put criticism of Islam off-limits worldwide (as in the UN's ridiculous "Combating Defamation of Religion" resolution). European countries are increasingly embracing a definition of hate speech based on grievance, and the result of the Wilders trial will signal whether Europe continues on the road toward mass censorship by the aggrieved. Speech doesn't become "hate speech" simply because it makes someone cranky. Be thankful that our Supreme Court has upheld that narrower standard.

Blog Bomb for Geert Wilders

2010-10-04T13:11:00.001-04:00

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who lives under police guard because his life is threatened by radical Islamists. Dutch Islamists have already murdered the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and forced Van Gogh's collaborator, the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to take asylum in the US. These three have been targeted for the same deeply ironic reason: they have all alleged that political Islam's penchant for violence makes it incompatible with Dutch society's traditional ethic of tolerance and commitment to Enlightenment values. Not to be outdone by the Islamists where irony is concerned, ~~Dutch prosecutors have chosen to put Wilders on trial~~ [Correction:] after Dutch prosecutors chose not to pursue charges, the Dutch Court of Appeals has ordered Wilders to be tried in response to public complaints regarding his outrageously hateful comments about how the people who are trying to kill him are, you know, trying to kill him. The Netherlands, see, despite her aforementioned Enlightenment history, has no freedom of speech protections that approach the weight of America's First Amendment (for what that's worth anymore).

This story needs to be told, so I was glad to hear from John Derbyshire that someone's gone and designated this Thursday to host a little blogoriot on the subject. Parapundit's got the scoop on how this works, but short of it is this: if you support freedom of speech no matter who feels cranky when they hear it, if you think the Wilders story is something America and the world needs to be paying attention to, then you should blog about it this Thursday. Tell your friends.

On Education, and Essentials Thereof

2010-09-28T21:08:00.000-04:00

I spent the past long weekend visiting a dear friend, an old Army buddy from all the way back in Basic training, Empty-Handed Army, as well as his lovely and perceptive wife. We three spent nearly the whole waking portion of three days in deep discussion of a huge variety of topics, usually approaching them from a philosophical angle well outside my own comfort zone of practical applications and real-world historical proofs. The topic of education popped up again and again, mirroring and developing conversations I'd had with friends during my past month on leave. What are the goals of modern education? Who ought to be seeking higher education? How much does public policy contribute to educational success? Previous conversations with a wide variety of educators -- Masters of Education students, inner-city "alternative" school teachers, radical unschooling homeschoolers -- all came back to the same point: the overwhelming contributor to education success is cultural while public policy plays an important but fundamentally marginal role. I was reminded of all of this by a reader comment shared by Jay Nordlinger:

If you asked a thousand people at random about their favorite teacher, how many would bring up how well the teacher employed education software, or whether she had a master’s degree from an ed school, or whether she took the class on fancy field trips, etc.?

To which Nordlinger follows up a quote from Dr. Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a former UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

Many years ago I participated in a discussion on the problem of international education. After many experts had presented their complicated theories, an old headmaster of a certain school got up and quietly said: “There is only one system of education, through love and one’s own example.”

Nordlinger responds, "I don’t think I have ever read anything truer on the subject of education." I can only agree. The children of the radical unschoolers I know are well-adjusted and whip-smart. I have no doubt at all that my other friend's inner-city alternative school students would end up the same if they were brought up in a similar loving environment with good examples, no matter what the outward form of their schooling. Public education policy cannot solve cultural failings that are antithetical to education. Meanwhile, a functioning culture can mold successful youngsters even in the most dismal of school settings (cough cough Asians cough). All of our arguments over education policy that are based on the presumption that the right policy will produce success are just wasted breath.

On Leadership

2010-09-23T14:10:00.000-04:00

Leadership means responsibility -- responsibility for the failure of one's subordinates just as for their successes. It's an old-fashioned definition, I know, but I'm not the only one who still believes it.

On the Surge

2010-09-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

It's a week late, but Walter Russell Mead's reflection on the 9th anniversary of 9/11 is still worth reading. In particular, his commentary on the turning point in Iraq circa 2006 is spot-on:

[But] the Sunni Arabs of Iraq made a choice. They saw Al-Qaeda at its best — volunteer freedom fighters come from around the world to fight for them — and they saw America at its worst: incompetent, insensitive, vacillating and violent. And they chose the United States... What those Sunni Arabs in Iraq came to understand is the basic truth of this conflict. The war unleashed nine years ago is not a clash of civilizations between Islam and the west. It is a clash between civilization and barbarism, and in that clash the Americans and true Muslims are on the same side.

The strategic realignment that occurred in the Iraq theater during 2006-2007 -- what was sold in the US media as "the Surge" -- laid a foundation for a far more momentous and far less heralded realignment of the Iraqi Sunni tribal leadership.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mead that the (self-)rehabilitation of Iraq's Sunni Arabs was more pivotal than any US Forces strategic decision. Furthermore, I attest (from my own conversations with Iraqis themselves) that a significant element of that realignment was distinctly generational in nature. The worst of the sectarian violence circa 2005-2006 was committed by Iraqis of my own generation, those with birthdates of roughly 1980-1990. These young Iraqis came of age during Saddam's most desperate struggles to hold on to power by playing sects against one another, and after the US invasion were egged on by foreign extremists, primarily from Saudi Arabia and Iran among the Sunna and Shi'a, respectively, who both looked to a bountiful harvest in political influence and cold hard cash resulting from the bloody collapse of Iraq. The violence finally ebbed when Iraqis of my parents' generation -- who fondly remember a long-ago era when nobody knew or cared who was Shi'i and who was Sunni -- stood up and said, "This is not the Iraq we remember, this is not the Iraq we hope for."

I, like Mead, am optimistic for the future of Iraq, and am guardedly so for the future of the Arab world as a whole, and that of the "Muslim World" beyond that. But it is worth remembering, with humility, how limited the American role in directing that future really is.

An Excuse, or No Excuses

2010-09-19T20:12:00.000-04:00

I apologize for the lack of posting this past week. I really did intend to, in fact I'd put off posting I was reasonably confident I could post regularly. Look how that turned out. This past week was spent in a leisurely journey from my homeland of Wisconsin back to my place of sojourn here at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was a lovely trip, during which I visited the Soprano in the Real World, A Round Unvarnish'd Tale, the Rebellious Pastor's Wife, the Elephant's Child, Excuses Excuses, Wit & Whim, Indiana Jane, the Scruffy Rube, and many other dear friends from high school, college, and beyond. I attended the service of the installation of Reverend Matthew Harrison as my church body's president, and was blessed to hear the sermon delivered by Archbishop Walter Obare of the Lutheran Church of Kenya. Does my personal life eerily mirror my blog following? Yeah, kinda. Am I a ridiculous theology geek? Um, yupp. No excuses.

On Mom's Basement

2010-09-09T15:29:00.001-04:00

Over brunch with a college friend, the Soprano in the Real World, we chatted a bit about changing family structures in America. An interesting point came up: American society in general is not particularly aware of how much we've lost as a culture with the loss of the extended multigenerational family and the enshrining of the nuclear family as the archetype. Specifically we spoke of the loss of support structures for young people and particularly young parents, and how our culture strangely treats the 1950's-era nuclear family archetype as if it were something deeply traditional, when it isn't at all. Yet there's very little general awareness that this significant cultural change even occurred, certainly far less than that of other contemporary changes such as women entering the workforce in large numbers.

Also, there's a really strange disconnect at work, where youth are expected to be more or less socially independent of their parents at the age of 18, while it is acceptable for them to remain economically dependent until their mid-20's at least. I mean, which 26-year-old does our society consider more respectable? The auto mechanic who lives with his folks because he's still single and thus has no particular reason not to, or the grad student who is entering his eighth year of spending other peoples' money? Living with one's parents in adulthood is often interpreted as a sign of hopeless immaturity, and yet our society doesn't seem to expect financial independence much before the age of 30. This is almost a reversal of the situation that would have been the norm a century ago, where an 18-year-old might quickly be expected to become a productive member of society (and indeed likely be engaged in productive work much earlier), but would not be expected to move out of his parents' home until he married.

On Baseball

2010-09-08T06:49:00.000-04:00

I don't care for baseball. While I don't care enough about any sport to really follow it, I'll still enjoy watching a good football or soccer game if I happen to catch one. But baseball fandom is just mystifying to me, so it's mostly with bemusement that I follow Peanuts From Heaven, the wacky baseball blog of two of my good school friends. But today, the Scruffy Rube explains baseball fandom in terms I can understand and respect.

On Flags and Freedoms

2010-09-07T22:40:00.000-04:00

Now that I'm back up and running on this whole regular blogging thing, I fear I'm obliged to make a comment on this Florida Koran-burning brouhaha. Firstly, I'll make perfectly clear that this so-called pastor's plan to celebrate 9/11 with a ritual Koran-burning is both un-Christian and thoroughly contemptible. It would be entirely appropriate for fine dining establishments to refuse him service and for elderly ladies to curse him in the street. I do not think it appropriate, however, for a US general to advise a civilian on the proper use of constitutionally-protected speech. Yes, if this church goes through with their imbecilic plan, US soldiers' lives will certainly be further endangered. But there are all manner of ways that adherence to the Constitution makes the military's day-to-day work more difficult. We could save more soldiers' lives if we set aside the fourth through eighth amendments, for example, but the Constitution of the United States is the very thing that we soldiers have sworn an oath to defend. That is the fundamental mission of the armed forces, and that doesn't change just because a particular exercise of that constitutional freedom is foolhardy and reprehensible.

Road Trip of Freedom 2010

2010-09-07T20:37:00.000-04:00

In early November, I'll be getting out of the Army after five years of service. I've got some complicated feelings on the subject that I might eventually share, but one very uncomplicated feeling will certainly be the most incredible sense of relief and release. What better way to celebrate my newly recovered freedom than to spend a few weeks roadtripping across this great country I spent five years of my life defending? Here's what my tentative itinerary looks like:

The only schedule so far is that I leave point A on the 4th of November, I need to be at point E by the 12th, and I'd like to finish at point L by Thanksgiving. Anyone anywhere within a couple hours of this general route who'd like me to stop by for a cup of coffee, a meal, or feels like offering me a bed (or couch) for the night, drop me a note and we'll see what we can work out. Oh, and anyone who'd like to join me for this, or even just for a leg of it, we should talk. I do really enjoy driving solo, but for 6,000 miles I'd certainly prefer some company.

P.J. O'Rourke on Afghanistan

2010-09-06T22:03:00.002-04:00

If you're having trouble pinning down exactly what exactly our involvement in Afghanistan is all about (and anyone who isn't is lying to himself), you could do worse than reading P.J. O'Rourke's turn as the 72-hour expert:

Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people. It’s not that Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people in a systematic, strategic, or calculated way. It’s just that we came to a place that we didn’t know much about, where there are a lot of sides to be on, and we started siding with this side and that side and the other side. We were bound to wind up on the wrong side sometimes.

This parallels my own experiences in Iraq, where our leaders were very much focused on determining which factions in the government, tribes, and security forces were "good guys" and which were "bad guys", when most of the time it was really just "these guys" and "those guys". At the same time, our leaders genuinely didn't think of this good-guy/bad-guy categorization process as "picking sides" while the locals most certainly did. Whichever faction in a given area first figured out the rules of the game and presented themselves to the local US forces as the "good guys" thus won the support of the world superpower, who nonetheless maintained delusions of impartiality. Has it been mentioned recently that counterinsurgency is really really difficult? Sure, and foreign societies are awfully tricky to understand even when you're not dodging bullets. On the other hand, sometimes I get the impression that we really weren't trying that hard.

On Locavorism

2010-09-05T21:10:00.002-04:00

I'm fascinated by food trends and issues of agricultural policy, and as someone who dreams of someday becoming a yeoman farmer himself, these are not purely abstract concerns. The "locavore" movement is certainly good news to one who hopes to be able someday to market the produce of a small, diverse operation. So it's not with great enthusiasm that I agree with the analysis that several of the primary reasons people cite for buying local really don't add up, namely the environmental and food-security. Here, a small local producer explains why the "buy local" food movement is just another sentimental feel-good trend, and why it would be an environmental disaster if it were actually embraced throughout the culture.

In short, the energy costs of agriculture and food shipment and processing are really quite small: we Americans use more energy powering our televisions than producing the food we eat. Without question the most significant environmental burden of our food production system is the sheer amount of land it takes up, so making a marginal reduction in the already-tiny transport costs at the expense of using more land is hardly a win for the environment.

Home

2010-09-05T13:08:00.000-04:00

Last night we celebrated my homecoming with a bonfire at my brother's place. Good food, good beer, good company. A classic Wisconsin evening.

In one way the party was sort of late, since I got back stateside in July. And in another it was early, since I'm not quite done with the Army yet; I'm on leave right now and still have to go back to Fort Bragg, NC for a while after my leave is up. But for now I'm home, and soon enough I'll be home for good.

A good friend of mine recently shared his own reflections on homecomings. I'd be hard-pressed to do better, so I'm happy just to share his.

A Visit to the Ovine-Infested Austral Isle of the Antipodes

2010-03-23T04:18:00.005-04:00

Hello, friends. It's been a while. Don't get too excited, I'm not breaking my blogging moratorium quite yet, but I just wanted to share some things. Consider this a hiatus from the moratorium.

A little while back I got my two weeks of mid-tour "Rest and Recuperation" leave. I knew I wanted to take advantage of the taxpayer-funded airfare (thanks guys!) by going somewhere with expensive fares, and I knew I wanted to get to the greenest, most un-desert-like place I could think of. So I went to New Zealand's South Island, and it was amazing. This picture sums it up pretty well:

From Enn-Zedd

Seriously, I could go on and on about it, but I'll just let you look at all the pictures. Oh, and yes, that album "outs" my real name. I'm okay with that at this point -- really effective internet anonymity being nearly impossible anyway -- and eventually I'll get around to fully onymizing this blog, once I figure out exactly what I want it to be and start posting again.

The Mud Times

2009-11-03T18:59:00.003-05:00

It's been raining here in our corner of the Iraq. It does happen, for a few months of the year. And real long rains, too, not just the 10-minute mudstorms we'd get down in the southern desert last deployment. There's something that just feels a bit more momentous about rain in the desert. It feels like an event. All the plants are greener, and everything looks a bit more vibrant, now that the summer's worth of dust has been rinsed off. But there's a downside, because all the dirt that blows around as dust all summer has now turned into mud. Slippery, sticky mud that'll be with us until April or so. There's really only two seasons in the Iraq: the Hot Times and the Mud Times. Happy Mud Times, everyone.

photo by Flickr user KristenKing

Classic Moments in Soldiering: Being That Paratrooper

2009-08-23T06:18:00.002-04:00

A certain cockiness is an integral part of the Airborne ethos. It was on full display in the following interaction between a colleague of mine and the Air Force crew chief on our flight to Iraq:

Crew Chief: So, have you guys had the aircraft briefing? You've all flown on a C-17 before?

Paratrooper: Yeah, we've all flown C-17's. Never landed in one, though.

Killing Time in Iraq

2009-08-22T09:17:00.003-04:00

So I'm in Iraq now. I meant to just take a blogging hiatus while I was on block leave, but then after I got back from leave things were pretty busy getting prepped to deploy, so the hiatus got extended. It'll probably continue for a little longer, at least until I'm settled in where I'm supposed to end up. See, I'm currently in trans limbo, stuck in a place I was never supposed to be in the first place. A couple of us left early to escort our equipment that was being shipped by cargo plane, and while we normally would have just changed planes at the first base we landed at in Iraq and been on our way the same day, somehow we've been stuck here for a week, trying to beg our way onto any plane or convoy leaving this place with room for us and our equipment. For me and one other soldier, it could take almost another week yet to get to where we're going. Meanwhile, the rest of our unit, who were expecting to find us waiting for them, are now waiting on us. Go figure.

I'm not exactly complaining, since it's become a strange sort of vacation, just killing time around here, but we do still have a job to do, and at the end of the day I'd rather be doing it.

Going On Leave!

2009-07-09T17:38:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-07T17:21:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-06T19:20:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-04T18:50:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-02T10:07:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-01T22:10:00.002-04:00

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

On Corruption

2009-06-28T23:17:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-28T22:39:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-28T22:16:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-27T15:49:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-27T13:04:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-27T12:22:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-26T16:25:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-23T14:16:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-20T17:56:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-20T15:00:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-19T15:13:00.002-04:00

Considerably simpler when you break it down:

(from Flickr user Bud Caddell, via Jaltcoh)

"We Meddle Because We Exist"

2009-06-19T13:00:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-19T12:07:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-19T11:27:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-19T11:06:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-17T22:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-17T08:06:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-16T21:02:00.003-04:00

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.

On Legalization

2009-06-08T13:18:00.003-04:00

I don't think any single writer has shaped my political philosophy as much as world traveler and prison doctor Anthony Daniels, better known pseudonymously as Theodore Dalrymple. It was Dalrymple in such books as Life at the Bottom; Our Culture, What's Left of It; and Not With A Bang But a Whimper who has meticulously proven to me that I am in no way a libertarian and encouraged me to embrace the label of "conservative", though he never labels himself such. The Skeptical Doctor blog provides a convenient portal to Dalrymple's writings in various journals, and this morning reposted his 1997 City Journal article against the legalization of drugs. If any single essay could present a microcosm of Dalrymple's political philosophy, this might be it:

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

It's 2009 Already...

2009-06-08T10:09:00.002-04:00

... where's my... my... huh? Okay, if past visions of the future tell you more about the time they were made, then 1992 was a strange, strange time.

Good Good Good: Hizbullah Defeated in Lebanese Elections

2009-06-07T22:33:00.003-04:00

The anti-Syrian March 14 coalition has secured 70 out of 128 seats in the Lebanese assembly, soundly defeating the Hizbullah-Communist-Socialist March 8 alliance. More importantly, the opposition has accepted the result (via Legal Insurrection):

"We have lost the election," said a senior politician close to the March 8 alliance. "We accept the result as the will of the people."

That's a phrase I'll never tire of hearing. Faster, please.

I Want One: Tata Nano

2009-06-07T22:28:00.003-04:00

It's coming to the US. And I'm totally getting one.

UPDATE: Autocar.co.uk's got a test drive up on YouTube. They seem impressed:

We'll Call It "Amsterdam Syndrome"

2009-06-06T14:14:00.003-04:00

I don't think we've talked about Geert Wilders on the blog. He's a Dutch parliamentarian who believes Western civilization is something worth preserving and that, therefore, current Dutch policy of allowing uncontrolled mass immigration of vocal and occasionally violent advocates of a pre-modern worldview might need a second look. This opinion, of course, has inevitably branded him "far-right" in the eyes of the global media, and gotten him banned from British soil as a hate-mongering racist.

The latest outrage has come after Wilders compared the mindset of Europe's elites to that of the Dutch journalist Joanie de Rijke, who has spoken repeatedly in defense of the Afghan Taliban fighters who abducted and serially raped her for six days. It's a dark, dark metaphor for the future of the West.

Do Take Some Time This Weekend

2009-06-06T13:00:00.003-04:00

Take some time to read Bruce Gee's eclogue on orchard work in Wisconsin. It's more than worth your time.

On Working With Your Hands

2009-06-06T11:52:00.003-04:00

I'm thankful to have come from part of the country and a family where nobody would have imagined the need to write a defense of craftsmanship. But for all my readers who've been raised and educated to be "knowledge workers" with no thought to the alternative, Matthew Crawford outlines "The Case for Working With Your Hands" in NYT Magazine, an abridgment of his philosophical treatise "Shop Class as Soulcraft" in The New Atlantis, which has now been expanded into a book.

American culture as a whole idealizes the thought of being one's own boss, and yet does not encourage promising young people to enter the only sector of the economy where this goal is not only realistic, but relatively commonplace: the skilled trades. Crawford's focus is on the mechanical trades, but the requirements of creativity and problem-solving and the rewards of concrete satisfaction and connection to the community are just as real for pastry chefs, florists, and cobblers (they still exist) as they are for plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics.

My goal is nothing less than the "miracle" of small-scale self-employment.

Milwaukee School Choice Targeted for Destruction

2009-06-06T00:40:00.003-04:00

Milwaukee's school choice program has been proving critics wrong for 20 years, and as a successful test case has inspired similar programs around the country. It must therefore be destroyed, as Madison is now seeking to do.

On Uniforms

2009-06-05T21:43:00.003-04:00

There are some people whose sensitivities are offended by the presence of uniformed policemen or soldiers in public, because they've been raised to see uniforms as symbols of oppression and militarism. In reality, uniforms are a concession to the people, and the most terrifying representatives of state power are the ones who don't mark themselves as such:

What possible message can be meant by parading plainclothes officers, other than a reminder that the eyes and ears of the Party are everywhere? 20 years after the massacre of Tiananmen, China seems to be holding its breath.

On Settlement

2009-06-05T21:24:00.003-04:00

The BBC Monitor publishes a digest of Israeli editorial reactions to President Obama's Cairo speech. I was most struck by this comment by settler Benny Katzover, published in Ma'ariv:

Obama reiterated his wish to establish two states for two peoples. Balance and equality between Jews and Arabs as it were. But Obama "forgot" that in the Jewish state there are more than a million [Israeli] Arabs who enjoy democratic rights unknown to their brothers in Arab countries. No one stops them from building… But for us Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] it is forbidden to live, build or to buy land. Obama, who is supposed to be sensitive to racism, has turned himself into a racist.

I'd never really thought about that, but if an Israeli citizen of Arab ancestry were to buy land and build his home in the West Bank, nobody would think twice. But when a Israeli citizen of Jewish ancestry does the same, he is "expanding the settlements" and it is a source of international condemnation and handwringing. Someone explain to me why Katzover is wrong, how this is something other than rank racism? Does it bother anyone else that we've somehow all accepted the premise that a Palestinian state must rightly be judenrein?

Obama Visits the Pyramids

2009-06-04T21:56:00.002-04:00

Of course, you can't go to Cairo without seeing the pyramids. Yawn. You've seen them already, I assure you. Only in the books and postcards, they make sure to take the pictures at an angle so you can't see the Pizza Hut and the rest of the sprawl that runs right up to them.

He took a tour of Sultan Hassan mosque, which is okay, I guess. By which I mean BOOOOORRRRING. He should have gone to Ibn Tulun, which is truly one of the great treasures of human endeavor. I suppose the location might have played a role. Security would be pretty tricky in the heart of Khan al-Khalili.

Cairo Quibbling

2009-06-04T19:05:00.002-04:00

So, here are the notes and quibbles I had with specific points in President Obama's Cairo speech. My general thoughts are here.

This cycle of suspicion and discord must end... I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning.

Sigh, don't we all wish it were that easy? And when will the administration figure out how obnoxiously American this wipe-the-slate-clean mindset is? Sorry, folks, the rest of the world's got history. There is no "reset button".

Obama extols the "common principles" between America and Islam such as "justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings". Exactly how common are those principles?

He's got a good pronunciation on "holy Koran". If you're going to try it, get it right. I also appreciate that the White House press release uses the English spelling and doesn't mess around with all that "Qur'an" nonsense. Who knows how to pronounce a Q? or an apostrophe?

The interests we share as human beings are more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

Again, it's a great thought. But is it true? I want it to be, certainly. But I'm not quite as confident.

Referencing his Muslim father and ancenstry is tricky, tricky ground. He is calling himself out as an apostate under the more extreme sharia jurisprudence, worse than an infidel. Even more moderate Arab Muslims will be very much discomfited by the idea of a son who does not follow his father's religion. This is an issue of Arab culture, whether Christian or Muslim. When Iraqi soldiers would ask me why I was not a Muslim, the simple answer "because my father is not a Muslim" was always a fully satisfactory explanation. Saying "I am not a Muslim, but my father was" will not score you any points with Muslims.

Throughout history Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of Religious tolerance and racial equality.

When and where, exactly? Yes, Jews were tolerated (and specially taxed) in al-Andalus, as Christians have been in Egypt, with only the occasional pogroms. But where is religious tolerance in Saudia Arabia, the beating heart of Islam, where I cannot hold a worship service, carry a Bible, or even pray silently in public? Where is it in Afghanistan, where conversion still carries the death sentence? And racial equality? Are you flippin' serious? The African slave trade exists still today, in Mauretania, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, and Saudia Arabia. The word 'abd -- slave -- remains the common term for Africans in much of the Arab world.

Partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't.

Unfortunately, this entire speech is based on what he wishes Islam to be, rather than what it is. That's not an indictment of the speech, setting high standards can shame someone who isn't meeting them. But it does make this line sound pretty dumb.

Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words -- within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum -- "Out of many, one."

It's a bolder defense of American principles than I had expected. Well done.

America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

That's a much bolder defense of Israel than I'd expected. Excellent.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed... It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That's not how moral authority is claimed; that's how it is surrendered.

Pull out the shame card. Good, good.

The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel's legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

He could have driven point a bit deeper, but I'm glad he brought it up at all. Unfortunately, the administration is still committed to a foreign policy based on the laughable assumption that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the cornerstone of region-wide peace.

I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

I'm glad the freedom agenda hasn't disappeared. I think this is actually a more realistic outline for internal reform than the Bush administration put forward with their overwhelming focus on voting as the cornerstone of democracy. Elections matter less than do rule of law, equal justice, and guaranteed freedoms. Elections without those things mean "one man, one vote, one time", as we've seen with HAMAS in Gaza.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

Free to get their heads cut off, you mean.

I don't really begrudge him the whitewashing. It comes with the territory, and President Bush was at least as bad. It still galls me, though.

Reflections on Cairo

2009-06-04T17:34:00.003-04:00

I've avoided any commentary on President Obama's speech to "the Muslim world" from Cairo this morning. I wanted a chance to watch and read the whole thing before I responded, so if I'm coming to completely different conclusions than all the pundits, it's because this is my genuine reaction. I've got plenty of line-by-line quibbling, but I'll post that separately, and keep this response on general principles.

I thought it was a great speech. If its goal was to raise America's approval rating, it will probably succeed, and it could very well cause many Arabs to rethink the reasons behind their knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Obama was more critical of Arab leaders than I expected, and more defensive of America and Israel, and for that I give him great credit. He addressed historical grievances without apology and demonstrated great respect for Islam without kowtowing. He didn't abandon the freedom agenda, but rather defined it more realistically than his predecessor. I got annoyed with his mannerisms and switched to the transcript, but everyone seems to love his style. I guess "robotic" is the "in" thing in rhetoric these days. Cicero would be appalled.

So far, so good. The problems come in the metanarrative. The issue is not his words, but the way he uses them; not the content of his speech, but rather the paradigms the speech concedes. This was billed as a speech to the "Muslim World", and he used the term throughout; he spoke repeatedly of Islam as if it were a country and Muslims its citizens. Insofar as there is a "Muslim World" it exists in the ideologies of militant Islamism, as Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish intellectual writes (via Inside the Asylum)

Islamist ideologues are the only group that strongly advocates the belief that all Muslims belong to a politically untied global community. These same ideologues advocate for the replacement of the modern nation state with a new Caliphate ruled by Sharia law. Why do we legitimize that view by repeating it ourselves? ...A Muslim World is Al Qaeda's conception.

There is a persistent philosophical struggle over Muslim identity between those who argue that Islam is and must be a global political entity and every Muslim's first loyalty must be to Islam, and those who believe that a Muslim can embrace a political identity and remain a faithful Muslim. In how he billed the speech and addressed his audience, Obama accepted the premises of the former. Even while condeming extremism, the very concept of his speech supported the Islamist paradigm.

The second issue is in the categorical confusion. For a speech about the issues of the "Muslim World", Obama focused overwhelmingly on issues of the Arab World, which is home to only a minority of the world's Muslims. Imagine a world leader declares he will address the "Christian World" from Rome, then focuses the entire speech on European issues, and at times even conflates the "Christian World" with Europe. Wouldn't Americans, Uruguayans, Zambians and South Koreans be a bit miffed? I'm quite sure they would be, so lets hope Bengalis, Malaysians, and Albanians are more forgiving.

Finally, by focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict in a speech to the entire "Muslim World" President Obama acknowledged that the conflict with Israel is a fundamentally religious conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict is an appropriate concern of the Arabs, the Israelis, and their partners and allies. On its geopolitical face, why should it be a central concern of American relations with Muslims in Indonesia or Pakistan? Again, insofar as Israel is a concern to non-Arab Muslims, it is so because of militant Islamist Jew-hatred that says Jews cannot be tolerated in Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam. By accepting the premise that non-Arab Muslims have a dog in that fight, Obama tacitly recognized it as a religious conflict, even as he called for a peaceful 2-state solution.

Time will tell what effect this speech will have. I suspect it will blunt anti-Americanism to a degree. But Obama's tacit recognition of the Islamist paradigm will increase the burden on those Muslims struggling to argue philosophically and theologically against political Islam. In general, it confirms my inaguratory fears about Obama and foreign policy: Obama believes that foreign policy is easy, and that his predecessor was just doing it wrong. He is campaigning for America, which is quite welcome, but he also seems to conflate American popularity with America's interests. Warm feelings don't solve problems, however, and even cold allies are still allies. His inability to parse the interconnected webs of implications -- not just of his words but of how and where and to whom he says them -- smacks of cocky amateurism. Foreign policy is fiendishly difficult, and I really hope President Obama doesn't have to learn that the hard way.

He Had Them At Hello

2009-06-04T11:48:00.001-04:00

Just catching up on the Cairo speech. Riotous applause for his al-salaam 'alaykum. Hehe, he truly had them at hello.

The Myth of Violence

2009-06-04T06:24:00.002-04:00

Steven Pinker on "The Myth of Violence". Fascinating stuff.

Pre-Blogging the "Muslim World" Speech

2009-06-03T21:26:00.006-04:00

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a 60 Years War that I genuinely doubt I will see solved in my lifetime. Tomorrow, our President visits Cairo to give his long-awaited speech to the "Muslim World" (on that poisonous term, see here and here). No doubt he will hold out hope for a 2-state solution. I suspect he will demand that the Israelis soften their position and make some concessions; I doubt he will demand anything of the Arabs. There's a good chance he'll buy into the Arab lunacy that argues that nothing can be improved anywhere in the greater Middle East until Palestine is free. And I know he won't remind Hosni Mubarak of his nation's complicity in creating the conflict. There were population displacements throughout the first half of the 20th century, and we've forgotten about most of them. Why does this one still fester? Oh, that's right:

Egypt's policy for the Strip was succinctly spelled out by the deputy governor, Muhammad Flafaga, in an interview appearing in the Danish newspaper Aktuelt on February 9, 1967:
Question: Why not send the refugees to other Arab countries? Syria would no doubt be able to absorb a vast number of them. Are you afraid that national bonds with Palestine will be loosened, that the hatred against Israel will vanish if they become ordinary citizens?
Answer: As a matter of fact, you are right. Syria could take all of them, and the problem would be solved. But we do not want that. They are to return to Palestine.
UNRWA reported in 1956: "One of the obstacles to the achievement of the General Assembly's goal of making the refugees self-supporting continues to be the opposition of the governments in the area."
Ralph Galloway, an UNRWA official who quit in frustration, observed bitterly: "The Arab states don't want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

Palestinians are despised and maltreated throughout the Arab world. Some are even starting to notice. But the Arab governments continue to feign concern and insist that no concern in the Middle East can possibly be addressed until there is a 2-state solution, because the Palestinians are their only effective weapon against Israel. And the US will swallow these ludicrous pretenses and play right along.

And the rest of President Obama's speech? Lots of feel-good hokum. Some riff on "religion of peace" will appear, along with references to the great achievements of the medieval Muslim world. He will mention his Muslim father, which will cause every listener to wonder "then why aren't you?". He will mention his childhood schooling in Indonesia, which will make as much sense to his listeners as if were visiting, say, Latvia, and brought up my childhood schooling in West Africa as if it gave me some special connection. Terrorists will not be mollified, authoritarians will not be challenged, and things will go on more or less as they have.

UPDATE: More on the folly of the "Muslim World" from Lee Smith at Slate:

Obama's speech to the "Muslim world" serves to erase the national borders of our Arab allies, and however questionable those allies are, their borders serve American interests, and erasing them serves Iranian ends.

UPDATE II: Asylum link-back. Thanks!

It's Called Soda

2009-06-03T20:58:00.003-04:00

Dialect maps are fun. They're particularly interesting for American English, which has lots overlapping changes. The soda/pop/coke split is sharper than I would have imagined:

It's interesting to me that eastern Wisconsin and the St Louis area would be islands of soda in a sea of pop.

Video Games and War

2009-06-02T18:10:00.005-04:00

Oh, BloggingheadsTV, what did we do without you? Other than, you know, not listening in on webcam conversations between stuffy academics and self-important policy wonks.

Here's a conversation between Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom and "philosopher of the mind" Tamar Szabo Gendler on the neuropsychology of video games, and the eternal question of whether video games are corrupting our morals: (note: a few times in the video they mention "alief", which is Gendler's term for conditioned responses, those things you know about the world without being conscious of believing them)

Gendler argues that in most cases, the physical actions portrayed in video games are so alien to the physical experience of playing the game itself that it's hard to see how they could effectively familiarize someone with the actual experience of firing a gun or throwing a punch. Bloom, a video game enthusiast playing devil's advocate, points out scenarios where the experience of playing a video game is very much like the real thing, such as firing a missile in a flight simulator game. Gendler takes the conversation in a completely different direction, so we don't get to hear them hash through what strikes me as a very valid point in this conversation: modern war is increasingly conducted by remote control. The control systems for a Reaper UAV or armed Talon robot look just like video games. They are video games, only with real people dying on the other end, and our video-game-raised youth are very, very good at them. I don't really have a conclusion. I just wish I could have heard their conversation on it. Thoughts?

Headline: Ambiguity Vanquished!

2009-06-02T17:22:00.003-04:00

Closely related to the Science News Cycle is the policy research cycle. Consider this headline:

Study: Public Schools Just As

Good as Private Schools

Wow, thanks Research! Way to smack down all those voucher waving moonbats! Oh, wait it only studied math skills? Only through 5th grade? And only over several years? How many is several exactly? 5? 3? Well, we know it's valid, right, because it's fully corroborated by "other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings".

Bluuhhh. Of the small number of people who actually order a copy of this study, precisely 11 will have the statistical acumen to judge the researchers' techniques of "controlling for demographic differences". For that matter, what was the testing standard? People complain about "teaching to the test", here the danger is testing to what's been taught. The best private schools in the world would fare poorly if the test looks just like the public school's curriculum.

But none of that's worth blunting such a beautiful headline.

On Taxing Sin

2009-06-02T06:24:00.003-04:00

A point from Splice Today, (via Reason Hit-and-Run), on the proposition to impose a national tax on "sugary" beverages:

Why stop at soda? How about a tax on every calorie-laden coffee drink served at Starbucks and its competitors? After all, a vanilla bean frappuccino with whipped cream is more than 500 calories, a beverage that health researcher Mike Adams calls “dessert in a cup.”

...I’m not attempting to be facetious here, but rather point out the gross inequities when new sin taxes are considered: it’s aimed at the déclassé products, such as soda and fast-food burgers, and protects—for the sake of general class description—the “Whole Foods” crowd from their gluttony.

...why not slap a heavy tax on country club memberships, restaurant meals that total more than $150 for a table of two, and increase the alcohol sin tax on pricey wines and premium brands of spirits?

Of course no politician could suggest something like that, because they'll hear no end of it at their next cocktail party. But taxing soda and fast food? The "Whole Foods" crowd can get behind that proposition, because they don't consume much of those things anyway.

AFTERTHOUGHT: And of course, many jurisdictions could save considerable amounts of money if they cut public funding for symphonies, opera companies, and the theater, which amount to a massive subsidy for the personal entertainments of the very wealthy. This is, of course, less likely than taxing Starbucks.

The Little Warbot That Could

2009-05-31T21:47:00.004-04:00

I wrote last week about Ember, iRobot's prototype for DARPA's LANdroid contract. PopSci has a profile up today, "Meet Ember, the Littlest Warbot". Cutest robot name ever. Someone needs to publish the children's book.

Millenial Resonance

2009-05-31T12:37:00.002-04:00

Not since the Navy's "Let the Journey Begin" ad campaign in the 90's made use of Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" has a recruitment campaign had such a powerful soundtrack as "Army Strong".

It's a stirring piece that seems to strike a particular chord with young men of my generation. And out of the blue, I realized why:

Man, those marketing guys are clever.

Solar Windbag

2009-05-31T00:37:00.004-04:00

Huh. So solar scientists are having difficulty predicting solar weather (HT Inside the Asylum)

"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

I mean, that's not really relevant at all, of course, since variability in solar activity has absolutely nothing at all to do with climate change on Earth. Riiiiiggght.

Boolean Logic

2009-05-30T22:50:00.004-04:00

I've been seeing a lot of people post their email addresses on their blogs with something like "send me an email at username at domainname dot com", thinking that this will outsmart spambots.

Object lesson: ("email" OR "mail" OR "message") {adjacent 3 strings to} ([Username] AND ("@" OR "at" OR "a") AND [Domain] AND ("." OR "dot" OR "point" OR "period") AND [top-level domain]).

Thing is, spambots are programmed by people. The first spammer who saw the old "at domain dot com" trick wrote up a Boolean string to get past it in about 45 seconds, like I just did. Probably a lot better than mine. Just sayin'. Not saying there's no way to get past spambots, but you've got to be a bit more clever than that.

"At Ease"

2009-05-29T21:50:00.004-04:00

A bit late for Memorial Day, but Maira Kalman shares a funny and beautiful tribute, "At Ease". Here's just a taste:

Chevy Volt Test Drive

2009-05-29T21:28:00.004-04:00

Popular Mechanics is suitably impressed with the pre-production tester for the Chevy Volt plug-in "hybrid". I'm glad to hear it, because Volt-type "hybrids" (really just an all-electric car, but with an on-board gas generator to extend its range) really do make a lot more sense than true hybrid drivetrains like the Prius. I'm still hoping that Toyota or Honda will suddenly reveal the electric-powertrain hybrid they've developed in secret for half the price of a Volt, because it kinda turns my stomach to think that "Government Motors" will happily take the credit if the Volt is a success.

On Jihad

2009-05-29T18:58:00.003-04:00

Fantastic interview from PajamasTV, with Walid Shoebat and Kamal Saleem, a pair of reformed terrorists. Please do watch the whole thing.

My first thought is a caveat: I do think these men overstate the immediate threat of terrorist attack. Recognize that they're coming from a very particular background, and even if they've rejected the ideologies of their upbringing, it's clear their default level of paranoia about the world is still set at "Palestinian". So while you take their predictions with a small grain of salt, their observations are pure gold (and you'll see by the end of my thoughts here why terrorist attack in and of itself isn't even the most serious issue).

The issue is at heart a conflict of culture, which is inextricably bound with the issue of religion. Both men blame the comparative decline of Christian chaplaincy in American prisons for the increasing radicalization of Muslim prison proselytes, such as those recently arrested plotting to attack synagogues in the Bronx. Shoebat is perfectly frank: the cure for terrorism is Christ.

"When I heard that, 'offer yourselves as a living sacrifice'... it is easy to die: you blow yourself up, you think you're going to go to Heaven. Now it's more difficult to live for the truth, and to live is to sacrifice... I spoke at the Air Force Academy, and I said that conversion to Christianity is one of the best methods that I've known to change terrorists, the media just went wild with articles that we're proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. We weren't proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, we were saying we need to proselytize to the Muslims."

That of course is an even more distressing proposition, from the mainstream media perspective.

I'm struck by the force of their argument that the "jihad" is about Jew-hatred above all else. It's just not part of the narrative, even though it's blindingly obvious when you look at it. Why did the "Newburgh Four" want to bomb Bronx synagogues, of all targets? Because of "Zionism"? Even if New York Jews did support "Zionism", why on Earth should that motivate American converts? And we should never forget how the butchers of Mumbai devoted a large part of their efforts to tracking down and torturing to death the sole rabbi in a city of 14 million.

All of this fits into the most important point Saleem and Shoebat make, which is to stress the centrality of the "cultural jihad". As the irreplaceable Oriana Fallaci never tired of pointing out, jihadist preachers boast openly that they will use the West's freedoms to destroy it. By claiming every right, demanding every entitlement, and litigating every grievance, they will make for Islam a preeminent position in the culture. And does anyone doubt that they have? As Shoebat points out, could Christopher Hitchens have published A||@h Is Not Great? The film Kingdom of Heaven portrayed the Church as genocidal and the Knights Templar as rapacious beasts, yet the likes of CAIR still claimed offense that the depiction of Salah al-Din was not quite saintly enough. And who could have ever thought that Britain would be mulling the merits of allowing a parallel legal system based on sharia? People have taken positions pro and contra, yet where's the "are you bloody serious?!?" that they're even having the discussion at all?

The cultural jihad is a totally different beast than counterterrorism. Successful terrorist attacks are a mixed blessing in the grand scheme of the jihad, after all, as they risk waking the infidels up to the threat. Many jihadist preachers have earned the coveted label "moderate" by renouncing terrorism not as a great evil, but as counterproductive to the cause. Preaching the cultural jihad, after all, breaks no laws, and if Islamists can breed, bribe, and bully their way to cultural dominance, what need is there for terror? And after sharia is enacted through the success of the cultural jihad, beheading nonbelievers will not be an act of jihad. It will simply be proper rule of law.

In this, as in so many metrics of the decline of the West, the United States is perhaps a generation behind Europe. Perhaps the declaration of the Salafi Emirate of the Netherlands or the Mamlakat al-Wahhabiyyah al-Britaniyyah will wake up the rest of those countries that still stand for Western civilization, but I'm not confident. Terrorism will never be an existential threat to the West. The worst imaginable terrorist scenario -- a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or London or Paris -- would do nothing but strengthen our resolve if we still had any. The success or failure of the cultural jihad will determine the future of the West, and if the jihad wins, we will have only ourselves to blame.

I Want One: Fluorescent Monkey Edition

2009-05-28T21:54:00.005-04:00

Well, if fluorescent cats and dogs aren't your fancy, now you can get a glowing green monkey! A marmoset, to be specific.

This is all in the interests of serious medical research, of course.

UPDATE: Bonus: its creepy glowing monkey hands will haunt your nightmares?

Lifting Copy

2009-05-27T22:11:00.003-04:00

Did they stop teaching attribution in journalism schools? First, the New York Times's Maureen Dowd goes and lifts pieces from a lefty blog called (heh) Talking Points, and now Newsweek's respected (nobody ever says by whom) Fareed Zakaria is lifting quotes from the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. And these people continue to blame their industry's collapse on everyone but themselves.

Festival Tour

2009-05-27T19:56:00.007-04:00

I daydream a lot about lazily traveling 'round the world (again). In one particular version of my daydream, I wander from country to country on the schedule of bizarre local festivals. Whenever I am ready to move on, I'll just see which nearby country is chasing wheels of cheese down hills,

breaking out into a city-wide tomato fight (but only after a ham has been retrieved from atop a greased flagpole),

dousing one another in bright pigments,

or parading toddlers affixed on top of 12-foot bamboo poles in front of multi-story towers covered in steamed buns.

Humanity is a fascinating thing.

Robot In My Pocket

2009-05-23T22:18:00.003-04:00

Along with the Department of Defense's mad scientist division at DARPA, our nation's military contractors also do their part to ensure that our future is filled with unimaginable terror. Household robot maker and military contractor iRobot makes robots that variously vacuum your rugs, clean out your gutters, disarm your IEDs, and invade your enemies' homes to riddle them with bullets. For now these functions are carried out by four specialized robots, but I'm sure they're working on the convergence piece.

They're also working on a cheap networked minibot named Ember to meet DARPA's LANdroid specs, seeking to create fleet of robots to disperse itself through a neighborhood, setting up a wireless network to transmit the information collected by whatever suite of sensors the user might choose to have installed. Ember is small and light, and iRobot hopes to make them robust enough to be hurled into action and cheap enough to be treated as disposable. As if I didn't have enough stuff to carry around in my cargo pockets.

Euromerica? Not So Much

2009-05-22T23:03:00.002-04:00

A lot of the conservative opposition to President Obama, such as it is, likes to paint him as someone who wants to push the US to be more like Canada or Europe. If only.

A Great American Story

2009-05-22T22:04:00.003-04:00

David Tran is the man behind my favorite stand-by hot sauce, Sriracha, and his creation is profiled in the NYT Dining section.

"I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese. After I came to America, after I came to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Heinz 57 ketchup and thinking: ‘The 1984 Olympics are coming. How about I come up with a Tran 84, something I can sell to everyone?’"

Success is sweet. Or spicy, as the case may be.

Undermining the Narrative : St Francis of Assisi

2009-05-22T20:29:00.003-04:00

Do penance, performing worthy fruits of penance, because we shall soon die … Blessed are those who die in penance for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven. Woe to those who do not die in penance, for they shall be children of the devil whose works they do and they shall go into everlasting fire.

--St Francis of Assisi

Oh, and that whole "preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words" line that makes such a great bumper sticker? Guess he didn't actually say that one.

A Study In Comparisons

2009-05-21T20:27:00.003-04:00

Last week in Jordan, speaking to the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, Senator John Kerry portentously heralded the new "absence of arrogance" in American foreign policy.

Today in Belgrade, Vice President Joe Biden:

"The only real future is to join Europe. Right now you are off that path ... You can follow this path to Europe or you can take an alternative path. You have done it before," Biden said, referring to the 1992-95 war. "Failure to do so will ensure you remain among the poorest countries in Europe. At worst, you'll descend into ethnic chaos that defined your country for the better part of a decade."

As Foreign Policy puts it: "Biden essentially telling Bosnia to follow his recommendations or continue to be known as a violent, poverty-stricken hellhole is American arrogance of near-Rumsfeldian levels".

India's Election Results

2009-05-20T17:30:00.002-04:00

Anyone who has a conversation with me about travels will quickly come to know that I'm a huge fan of India, personally and politically. So I find little to disagree with in Michael Barone's column on the significance of India's election result:

The election held over four weeks in April and May has produced a result very much to our advantage. The Congress party has been returned to power with a larger share of the vote than indicated by pre-election and exit polls, and will no longer need Communists and left-wingers for majorities in the Lok Sabha. The [Hindu nationalist opposition] BJP attacked Congress for being too close to the United States; voters evidently decided that this was not a minus but a plus.

[I]t would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.

As I heard expressed in many different ways in India, the world's biggest democracy and her oldest democracy are natural partners.

The Panic That Wasn't

2009-05-20T06:30:00.002-04:00

Jesse Walker writes in Reason Magazine about the media panic over the "panic":

The Time story offers thin gruel. It tells us that many Mexicans donned facemasks, as recommended by their government; that stores quickly sold out of masks and vitamin supplements; that schools in Mexico City shut down; that some people left the city and others stayed put. In other words, it tells us that ordinary Mexicans were taking ordinary precautions. The Bild report merely informs us that a few schools in New York had closed and that many children displaying flu-like symptoms were sent home. The Guardian timeline includes a series of links to Mexican photographs that allegedly "capture the sense of panic everywhere." Click through, and you'll see pictures of people calmly going about their business while wearing masks.

He quotes a "disaster researcher" who hints at the causes of the panic about panic, noting the perception driven by popular books and movies that any given group under stress is in grave danger of succumbing to blind panic. It's just not true, though. The sight of a planeload of travelers calmly filing out onto the wings of a jet slowly sinking into the Hudson a few months ago was a good reminder of how false that perception is.

Advice for Youth in These Times

2009-05-19T23:22:00.003-04:00

As summarized by a biographer of the obscure early-20th century ideologue Albert Jay Nock:

Ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permit, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.

Sounds good to me.

Well, There's One Way to Look at Things

2009-05-19T21:22:00.001-04:00

On the bright side, the end of civilization should be good for the Republicans.

So what do I propose for a Republican Party that will be relevant in the future? I’m thinking we need to work towards becoming a loose confederation of warlords. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, resources will be scarce and the strong will crush the weak — and frankly, those are conditions in which Republicans should thrive. The Republican Party will need to cement its rule through force, destroy the weak, and take their resources. Back to basics for the party, really.

On Interchanges

2009-05-18T23:14:00.002-04:00

Fascinating "Field Guide to Highway Interchanges" (and part II) from the Infrastructurist. Some pretty cool examples of the genre, though none quite as fun as Randall Monroe's imagination:

Huzzah For Bizarre Alliances

2009-05-18T22:13:00.002-04:00

MAKE, CRAFT, and Etsy crowd, meet the libertarians. These days, you're going to want to be in touch.

Takeaway lesson? Big business loves regulation at least as much as big government does. Big business already has a legal department to jump through regulatory hoops, and inspection and compliance costs per facility or per product hit the smallest producers hardest. Bottom line, no CEO of a regulated industry ever missed his tee-time because some upstart competitor introduced a game-changing product.

It's Over, Maybe

2009-05-18T21:56:00.004-04:00

The LTTE -- better known as the "Tamil Tigers" -- have admitted defeat. Only time will tell if this is truly the end of the conflict. If it is, it will stand both as proof that even a popular, well-funded insurgency can indeed be crushed with conventional brute force, and as a lesson in the human cost of such a victory.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the LTTE leader Prabhakaran is dead. Having no leaders, in addition to holding no territory, reduces the chances that the LTTE will fight on, God willing.

Nordlinger in Jordan

2009-05-18T06:36:00.002-04:00

Jay Nordlinger's posting his Impromptus from Jordan this week, sharing his comments from the World Economic Forum on the Middle East. There'll be a new column every day this week, so it's really as good a time as any to subscribe to Impromptus.