More Ruminations on Animals and People

Incorporating the same human/animal meme we blogged yesterday but taking it in a different direction (many different directions, actually), Sigmund, Carl & Alfred does a splendid job integrating equally splendid posts by Dr. Sanity and The Anchoress.

It is true we share DNA with much of the animal kingdom, but that by no means is relevant to who we are. We, as humans, cannot be defined by the lowest common denominator. We are defined by our capabilities and achievements. We may share an environment with other species, but sharing an environment does not make us equal... The 'We know what's best for you' kind of society has left a trail of human misery- Hitler, Communism and now, the decay of socialism in the name of 'multiculturalism,' in many European countries will bring more misery to more millions. Great societies and cultures will disappear because of pandering to man's lowest common denominators. The governments of Norway and Sweden, for example, could have challenged Mulsim populations to achieve greatness. Instead, those governments (and much of their society) capitulated and wallow with those most comfortable in the sewers of selfishness and violent impulses.

SC&A begins with Freud's observation the veneer of civilized human behavior is rather thin and delicate - especially vulnerable to Islamofascism (and other 'isms') that would seek to impose anti-creative political orthodoxy on their fellow man - a tendency latent in all of us.

We won't attempt to further summarize a richly unsummarizable post. SC&A offers much to think about: great fodder for a leisurely (though hardly casual) weekend read. Advanced students of political philosophy and psychology may want to compare and contrast his observations and assumptions with those of one Ms. Ayn Rand. Discuss.

The Hype of Climate Change

[See long rant update below a/o. 11:30 Saturday morning.]
The BBC gets off the bus on climate change - if only temporarily.

"...the 11C figure [for global warming] was unreasonably hyped. It's a difficult line for all scientists to tread, as we need something 'exciting' to have any chance of publishing... to justify our funding," one scientist wrote us.

UPDATE I: In remarks he probably didn't think of as ironic, much less doubled-edged, Al Gore noted in a Newsweek exclusive promoting his new book and movie on global warming that: "At some point, reality has its day. I hope they’ll change. I think there is a chance they’ll change."

So do we Mr. Gore. So do we.

UPDATE II: Somewhat belatedly, we give credit to an astute reader who noted this April 18th PBS NOVA episode, "Global Dimming", and the gaping holes in its methodology. A study cited in the show purports to measure changes in temperature in the few days before and after 9-11 when U.S. aircraft contrails were temporarily absent. Reader 'J' writes:

"They used the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority several times... What we see is that 9/8-9/10 was slightly below the average difference between high and low, 9/11 to 9/13 was way above the average, and then magically they didn’t talk about the days of the 14th-16 and even tried to cut them out of the frame... when flights started back up on the 14th, they weren’t anywhere near the pre-9/11 levels for several weeks. If that is the case, and if this guy’s theory is true, we should still see greater disparity between highs and lows on those days too, since there would be fewer contrails due to fewer flights. But what the graph showed was that there was actually smaller disparity between highs and lows for those days then for the pre 9/11 days... They talked about how there’s been a 0.6 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures over the last 30 years. I believe this is probably in reference to the much discredited hockey stick graph..." [link added]

Thank you 'J'! As a thought exercise however, let's be generous for a moment. Let's assume that the study is true in the sense that its data is valid. (I.e., in the narrow sense that they observed what they observed and didn't make it up out of thin air - so to speak.)

What could we possibly conclude from it? What could one claim based on a few weeks' worth of limited temperature data supposedly the result of a phenomenon confined exclusively to North America?

Not much. Or rather, nothing more than any other local study - and probably a great deal less given the incredibly narrow base of data in question here. I.e., it is interesting but not useful to the purpose that NOVA, Al Gore and the rest of the climate change worry-worts wish to prematurely put it.

We used to think more highly of NOVA and its mission to inform and enlighten. Sadly, like the National Geographic Society, they seem to have fallen into the trap of boosting ratings and circulation by drawing conclusions well beyond what their data will support.

Allow us to get on a soapbox we feel entitled to stand on, having studied this stuff (geology, environment, climate) in some depth in a formal academic setting. We won't belabor the point (much), but a complex adaptive system like global climate simply does not lend itself to the kind of "aha!" generalized scientific revelation that led say, to the discovery of the atom or the germ theory of disease.

In the case of climate, thousands of variables are in play - many of them not even identified, much less measured. Billions if not trillions of interactions are possible between them (not the data points, but the variables). And the data points needed to populate each variable in such a vastly complex equation (if it could ever be fully described) are simply impossible to collect. Not 'difficult'. Impossible. And most definitively so. Why? In a complex system, one can miss or improperly observe even one variable and end up with long-term conclusions that are as wrong as if one had been missing five hundred variables and making up data with a random number generator.

Trying harder won't fix that fundamental set of truths about complex adaptive systems (of which climate is perfect but hardly unique example). Knowing the state of every cubic meter of air, water and land at a given moment in time would still not be sufficient. Increasing the granularity of observation to say, every square centimeter of the planet's surface and every day for the last 100 years wouldn't do it either (much less data stretching back say, a few thousand years, which is what would be necessary to generate the kind of longitudinal depth one would want to start thinking out for one hundred).

A complex adaptive system - by definition - is subject to too many fundamental uncertainties to make far-out prediction possible. Full stop. All of the computing power ever invented (or likely to be) won't help. Throwing more observations into an essentially Newtonian frame for thinking about it will do no good.

Making those observations and running those models is satisfying in that it gives one a feeling of understanding the known world. But again, it is not the same class of problem as most of the 20th century's major scientific discoveries. To acknowledge what we've described above - i.e., that one's understanding is ephemeral, even illusory - is to give up a psychological crutch in feeling in control of one's destiny. (We've written before about how this need for control and understanding and transcendance can be understood as a kind of substitute for a supernatural 'other' (i.e., God) to whom we can confidently outsource that worry.)

Drawing sweeping conclusions about global climate change over the next 100 years from a study such as the one cited on NOVA falls into the same hubristic trap that central planners and macro economists fell into last century. Economies (and ecosystems) cannot be predicted, much less managed in any meaningful way. If one begins 'managing' anyway, one quickly discovers unintended consequences as fast as one discovers new variables. Making the kinds of claims NOVA does based on such a laughably small study is like attempting to build a skyscraper balanced on a foundation made from the point of a pin. It is theoretically possible... for an instant... in a perfect universe where uncertainty can be assumed away. In practice it is not. Ever.

We find it endlessly ironic, irritating and sad that the left, in its quest to make global climate change a defining issue, often paints the right as simplistic and un-questioning in its approach to the issue. Instead, it is the left's hubris and lack of sophistication - i.e., in failing to acknowledge limits to human understanding and the presence of fundamental uncertainties and complexities - that leads to a premature and overly broad set of conclusions. In that light, the conservative position (we don't and can't know enough to justify decisive action) is the more nuanced and thoughtful.

Illegal Occupation

We direct your attention to today's Day-by-Day Cartoon (above) and its especially sharp zinger of an argument: If we're in Iraq "illegally", then what are all these undocumented Mexicans doing here? The argument works just as well in reverse. And no, that is not an good reason to install world government.

People Confusing Animals With People... When It's Convenient

This post began to germinate last weekend when we decided as a family that one year of doglessness is enough. (Our old pooch had to be put down last year, shortly after my brother was diagnosed with leukemia. It was a sucky Spring. It was a sucky year.)

We've touched on this subject before, e.g., here and here. We also note a particularly unbelievable bit of doggie foolishness by a wacko-liberal neighbor. (Midway through a semi-drunken dinner monologue on global warming and the evils of going into Iraq "for oil", she had mentioned without a trace of irony, her habit of driving their family's ill-behaved Golden Retriever across the street in the family SUV to go on walks.)

In searching for a new Rover or Snoopy Maru, we've been amazed at the passion and dedication of the animal rescue community. Relying largely on volunteer labor and charitable contributions, these people simply can't stand to see animals abused or maltreated. That's an admirable thing. Too many cowards take out petty aggression on their pets and/or treat them as they might a houseplant. For the record, we find that sick and irresponsible. Who wouldn't?

We've come to learn that there's a virtual underground railroad devoted to bringing stray dogs from the south to New England to find homes. Plentiful supply of bleeding hearts, I guess. Apparently spaying and neutering are less common practices down there and the timeline for strays to be kept is much shorter.

No Mr. Kerry, that would not be your cue to propose federal legislation on the subject. Hold that thought for a moment.

Postings on PetFinder.com are diverse but revealing. (The site is an excellent resource for anyone in the market - on either end.) Here are some typical pleas:

Take care of me when I get old. You, too, will grow old. Go with me on difficult journeys. Everything is easier for me if you are there. Remember, you are all that I have and I LOVE YOU!... Please, please, please love me. Please. I've been neglected...

There's lots more where that came from. You get the idea. Giving voice to the voiceless. Pleading for love and compassion for the overlooked, downtrodden and abused. No objection from us.

In a similar vein, we find Pamela Anderson's op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal (free at OpinionJournal). Yes, that Pamela Anderson. That Wall Street Journal. No, there are neither pictures nor the classic WSJ etchings.

Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, with at least 95% of the same DNA. We're closer to them than they are to gorillas, so when I see chimpanzees being used as on-screen comedians, dressed up in silly costumes to sell credit cards, I think, Is this any way to treat a relative?

It goes on from there. Anderson (or more likely, her publicists) make a few legitimate points about the mistreatment of chimps in the film industry. They studiously avoid extending the logic of that narrow set of observations. Savvy readers will have figured out where this is going.

We detect a double standard: a growing undercurrent of public opinion that runs the life-is-precious compassion equation in one direction while cutting it off at its source - natural human sympathy for life leveraged exclusively for the benefit of animals. Left unquestioned (if not denied altogether) is any notion of where that sympathy for life comes from, much less how it ought to be applied.

Have pity on this emaciated, cowering stray... but force Terri Schiavo to die of thirst. Adopt this sweet cute puppy... but don't get in my face about adoption as an alternative to abortion 'cause we all know that's unrealistic and intrusive. Isn't it horrible that Snoopy was almost put down last week in Alabama? ...but don't talk to me about the sanctity of unborn life or mess with my access to Dr. Kevorkian. Isn't it just awful that some states gas strays en masse within days? There should be a law! ...just don't talk to me about the anti-democratic process behind Roe v. Wade because that would mean a return to... some states taking their own course on that too.

Comparisons like Anderson's between animals and people, and pleas for how animals ought to be treated are most often used in service of upside-down conceptions (pardon both pun and image) of life and the order of the universe.

If animal rescue/rights activists were to consider for a moment their philosophical (if misapplied) kinship with the human Pro-Life movement, they might be startled at what they discover. Let's start by actually reading Genesis instead of turning it into a PETA, Earth-Day, global warming pseudo-religious rant. Doing so might make it clearer to folks like Anderson, (no doubt well-meaning and sincere... the road to hell being paved as such...), that for consistency's sake if nothing else, their compassionate energies ought to be redirected and rebalanced.

Pitt Shrugged, Jolie Smiled

Hmm... haven't we seen this film already... on the evening news? It's interesting to read the wide range of reactions to news that Ayn Rand's classic 'Atlas Shrugged' may finally make it to the big screen, starring (it is rumored), Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. (Hmm... still can't figure out why they aren't casting Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey or Warren Beatty...)

NY Post: "...considered in many polls to be one of the most influential books in history"

Variety: "The violent, apocalyptic ending has always posed a challenge but could prove especially so in the post-9/11 climate."

More of a challenge than 'Flight 93'? More apocalyptic than 'Independence Day', 'Saving Private Ryan', 'Armageddon', 'Platoon' or about a hundred other grim end-of-world or war-is-bad flicks? C'mon. The only group for which Atlas Shrugged would represent an apocalypse would be Hollywood socialists or, to be more succinct: Hollywood.

Instead of aliens, Hitler or Nixon as villains, the difference here is that the bad guys look a lot like... the Democratic party leadership and to be fair, what congressional Republicans are fast becoming if they don't close the checkbook and remember who put the de-fib paddles on the conservative movement back in 1980.

'Shrugged is about as violent and apocalyptic as... the collapse of Soviet Communism, the beast after all, that inspired Rand to write 'Shrugged in the first place. And we all know that the film industry has been dogged and realistic in its portrayal of that one...

We had to smile at the outspoken take by the Orlando Sentinel on its movie blog:

The world's favorite commie-hating novelist, Ayn Rand, is about to have one of her most famous books made into a movie... Rand was a Russian expat (Jewish liberal parents) who wrote furious and passionate novels about what happened to Russia when the Bolsheviks took over, and what the world would be like if individualism was suffocated by the collective Red Menace. Most people outgrow her when they get over fascist heavy metal and hobbit literature. But hey, an interesting writer to turn up on movie screens, for sure.

Hmm... would "most people" include Ronald Reagan? (Must squelch image of the big man listening to Gorgoroth, Darkthrone and Slayer while reading Tolkien's trilogy.)

The mention of the 'Shrugged story in the New York Times or other MSM outlets? Don't bother looking. We already did. It's not there.

UPDATE: Hewitt opines on the actors, but is outdone by an exhaustive 'dream cast' scenario painted by Stephen Green (aka, Vodkapundit). Ed Driscoll will believe it when he sees it. Kos predictably goes over the top, comparing it to 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', failing - again - to recognize that Socialism and Fascism are twins separated at birth.

Iranian Chutzpah, Part II

Continuing our post from yesterday, this afternoon brings more nonsensical threats from Iran about things they are already doing:

"The Americans should know that if they invade Iran, their interests around the world would be harmed," supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying by state television. "Iran will respond twofold to any attack," Khamenei added...

Hmm... would that include things other than orchestrating and supplying irregular forces causing mayhem in Iraq, actively sponsoring multiple Islamofascist terrorist groups and their bombings of innocents around the world, harboring Al Queda operatives, building nuclear weapons, taking diplomatic hostages, making credible threats to wipe Israel off the map, conducting terrorist reconaissance on U.S. civilian installations (and bragging about it) not to mention cozying up to half a dozen rogue states, two them close to our southern border?

Just asking...

Shoulda Used Dem-Proof Steel Radials...

This one should remain in the MSM headlines for oh, maybe... a few minutes.

A [Democratic] congresswoman's son and three Democratic campaign workers were sentenced Wednesday to four to six months in jail for slashing tires outside a Bush-Cheney campaign office on Election Day 2004... The state Republican Party had rented more than 100 vehicles to give rides to voters and poll monitors on Nov. 2, 2004. The cars were parked outside a GOP campaign office when the tires were punctured. The vandalism left the drivers scrambling for new vehicles... Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes in the 2004 election ended up going to Democrat John Kerry.

That last sentence was the very last line of the article. It's virtually impossible to imagine it being an afterthought had the parties of all concerned been reversed. Can we stop hearing about Floridian hanging chads now?

Orwell Returns? Waiting for a Principled Liberal

I used to be an Andrew Sullivan fan. I seldom read him anymore. He is prolific, intelligent and insightful, yet utterly irritating - following a path he thinks of as right-center, but which to our eyes has swerved all over the ideological road on personal whim, running over livestock and pedestrians seemingly at random. If we had to sit through dinner with one living British-born liberal columnist icon, it would not be Sullivan but Hitchens - a more consistent, better disciplined and more talented thinker and writer.

Nonetheless, a rare and serendipitous visit to Sullivan's blog today tips us off to The Euston Manifesto - a document he compares with the clear-headed visions of Truman and Orwell. Maybe. It could be a potentially important break with a 70+ year history of left-wing apologia for the excesses of dictators opposed to their domestic opponents. Or not.

Seventy years of collective psychological dysfunction is a lot to overcome in time for an election. When victory for such a document involves getting pro-war and anti-war liberals to agree to even speak to one another, they're already starting with a handicap in the political race.

Too many powerful liberal politicians and media magnates have a vested interest (if only in pride and self-image) in shooting this down, drowning it out, marginalizing its impact, or mindlessly co-opting its slogans. If for some reason they are unsuccessful (Michael Moore, call your agent!), then neocons could find themselves outflanked in the next two election cycles. Maybe. If the neocons were outflanked by this kind of too-little too-late academic tune-up for the sputtering 'progressive' movement, it would serve them right.

Our guess is that turning the Democratic political ship around will take a lot longer than six months. Absent a complete implosion of this administration and everything it touches, it will probably take more than thirty. And no, though it may add to the liberal's case, $3 gas does not count as "complete implosion". Nor does a fantasy of Iraq becoming Vietnam. It simply isn't.

Waiting and watching for evidence of that implosion has become almost sport on the left (sometimes with help from a right wing that's forgotten what it's like to lose). Waiting for failure has become a sad, tired, sick sport: grubby old men at the track, betting and continually losing because their theories are flawed.

Maybe Bush isn't an idiot after all?

Nah, says the liberal gambler. He's a chimp. A fool. A tyrant. A loser. Two bucks says this time he'll really fall flat. This time, he thinks, I'm gonna win big. Just you wait. This time it's gonna be big. Really big. That bet will come true... any day now...

It will have its shot, but we're not holding our breath for the Euston Manifesto to win, place or show.

Low Tide for Partisanship and Bias

Under the clever title "Our Rotten IntelligenCIA", the WSJ (subscription required) editorializes today on the gross double standards the MSM has adopted with regards to intelligence leaks.

The CIA leakers are arrogating to themselves the right to subvert the policy of a twice-elected Administration. Paul Pillar, another former CIA analyst well known for opposing Mr. Bush while he was at Langley, appears to think this is as it should be. He recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that the intelligence community should be treated like the Federal Reserve and have independent political status. In other words, the intelligence community should be a sort of clerisy accountable to no one.

CIA Director Porter Goss is now facing press criticism for trying to impose some discipline on his agency. But he not only has every right to try to root out insubordination, he has a duty to do so because it undermines the agency's ability to focus on the real enemy. The serious and disturbing question is whether the rot is so deep that it is unfixable, and we ought to start all over and create a new intelligence agency.

The press is also inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not "come to harm" for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post's editorial page said her exposure may have been an "egregious abuse of the public trust."

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

Like the low tide, this new low water mark for raw partisanship in public service and draining away of once sacrosanct media standards exposes many things fishy, mucky and foul-smelling. Hopefully CIA Director Goss will get some help in dredging and restoring to relevance what has become a kelp-entangled, silted-over and increasingly unusable port. As we wrote in February, relating a speech by Richard Perle that we'd attended, the CIA's deep dysfunction is hardly new.

Perle went on to talk about how the CIA has been openly "at war" with the Bush administration since the latter's election to office, engaging he noted (by way of illustration) in a campaign of vilification against Ahmed Chalabi. The red meat only got redder, even as Perle never raised his voice or changed his steady, confident pace. The true nature of militant Islam he said, is very poorly understood at the CIA, an agency deeply flawed he opined, by "an appalling lack of knowledge" and that "doesn't understand the big picture": about the Koran, about Arabic language, about the goals of our enemies, about what's at stake and about what sources we should be relying upon in the region.

In what could have been mistaken for the conventional critique of the State Department, Perle went on to criticize the CIA as having - counter to the popular Hollywood impression - a strongly "liberal orientation" without any sense of toughness, military common sense or street smarts, all burdened by the heavy weight of bureaucratic agendas and foolishness that can plague any large, poorly accountable organization.

He related the horrifying story (timeframe unclear but the impression was that it was in the past decade) of a CIA manager who wanted to increase the volume of reporting out of Iran. And he got exactly what he wished for... through the "same bandwidth channel". Lots more reporting... until the mullahs figured out that nobody could possibly be writing that many legitimate letters to their uncle Henry in Des Moines... at which point the entire U.S. intelligence network in Iran was rolled up and summarily executed. Oops.

What is new in the Mary McCarthy affair is the exposure of the problem - she being just one more among many gasping fish (albeit a rather large and grizzled one), flopping in the sun. And in that context, perhaps credit is already due to Mr. Goss and low tide may not be the best analogy.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the gradual draining of a swamp. Given what's at stake with our real enemies, we can only hope it continues.

The liberal partisans need to put their petty and monomaniacal (yet imagined-to-be-virtuous) battles with the Bush administration into the proper perspective. A career in public service inside of a healthy democracy virtually guarantees that one will periodically suffer through administrations some of whose policies one will disagree with. Our mentally healthier friends involved in such careers have disciplined themselves not to ride too high on the partisan highs and not sink too low on the lows. In a counter-party administration, the wise public servant does his or her job competently and obediently while putting more emotional energy into home, family and avocations... where leaking critical national security information to the press is not considered a valid avocation.

Rather than projecting her late-career gripes onto Mr. Bush and his policy decisions, Ms. McCarthy should be looking to the continuing slide into irrelevancy of her own party's ideas and ideals as the root cause of her frustrations. If she's the big Democratic donor that public records say she is ($2,000 to Kerry and lots more to the DNC), they might even listen to her. Instead, a sympathetic MSM is more likely to make her into a martyr, spinning the most despicable kind of betrayal into self-justified virtue... which would be perfectly in line with the media's light happy and utterly backwards spin on the Gospel of Judas. Hey, maybe hell has hired a more PR-savvy tour operator: "A warm place to spend the afterlife!"

Iranian 'Transparency'

Pardon us while we de-convulse ourselves from paralyzingly incredulous laughter at the sad/sick irony of Iran stealing the very definition of the word 'chutzpah' from its Hebrew originators (just as they plan to take Israeli land for a big glass parking lot they have in mind).

Ali Larijani, the top Iranian nuclear negotiator [said]... "If you take harsh measures, we will hide this [nuclear] program. If you use the language of force, you should not expect us to act transparently..."

The program that they claim does not exist. The sites buried deep underground, many of which we know nothing about right now. The 'transparency' that has amounted to a stream of epithets and a raised middle finger pointed at anyone standing in their way.

What's as or more ridiculous is the Guardian's utter earnestness in reporting this: "Iran Threatens to Hide Nuclear Program". Next thing you know, the U.S. will be: "Threatening to Invade Iraq and Depose Saddam". Big news, folks. Big news. Keep those presses hummin'.

Villains and Traitors

We got to wondering last night as we caught up on the TV news and the mind-blowingly obscene case of CIA bigwig Mary McCarthy...

• Would some future jury considering her allegedly trairorous, criminal actions be presented with a collage of faces of her victims - as is being done in the sentencing phase of Zacharias Mousawi's trial?
  
  
• What kind of punishment would such a jury be willing to consider for the woman who some are already comparing to Oliver Ames and Jonathan Pollard?... given that she's a woman - ironically seen as an amerliorating circumstance by some in the '70s-era ERA-supporter set.
  
  
• If the leaker had been a Republican sympathizer under a Democratic administration, would the media have reacted as sympathetically as it has in this case? (Sorry. I've found that a little Windex gets that coffee and bagel mash off the computer screen right quick.)

Just asking...

Gitmo's Nomads; China's Brutality; Europe's Eloi Hypocrisy

The Wall Street Journal this morning carries a short editorial (subscription required) concerning fifteen 'Uighur' detainees held at Guantanamo. Originally from a Muslim, "Turkic-speaking" area of eight million in the Northwest corner of China, the group has been brutally repressed by the Chinese government. Would that be the same 'reformed' Chinese government that Bill Gates and pretty much anyone who is anyone in business or government is slobbering all over, busy making excuses for? One and the same. Suffice it to say that we are not surprised. Tiananmen Square is still very fresh in our minds. Different post...

The Uighurs "are not considered 'enemy combatants' by the U.S. military, which wants to release them."...to any country but China... for obvious humanitarian reasons. I.e., they'd most likely be tortured and summarily executed. That's something the U.S. could easily have done with these anonymous men, but didn't (and we believe, wouldn't even seriously contemplate) - a critical point entirely lost on the MSM.

Why not bring the Uighurs to the U.S.? Well, aside from the pretzel political logic that that would entail amidst a war of words about Mexican illegals, there's the fairness issue vis a vis our "allies". As in: Hello Europe! We're spending copious blood and treasure protecting your liberal values and halcyon way of life as much as our own.

As the WSJ points out, these men were picked up in the "good war", i.e., Afghanistan. That's the one, you may remember, that lefties and Europeans (the latter being for all intents and purposes a subset of the former) always like to claim as having been thoroughly justified. Oh yes... that one you see, was unavoidable... (Sticks out dark, turtleneck-clad chest under tweed sport coat, stares out penthouse window overlooking the Charles River or San Francisco Bay, and pours himself another glass of Chablis.)

If only to show themselves as not being reflexively or unilaterally soft on terrorist states, the "Afghanistan good" card must be played by any liberal hoping to win an election. How else to give their relentlessly repetitive harangue about Iraq a shred of credibility? Again, we digress. Too much coffee. Not enough running while recovering from the marathon. Another post due on that soon. Back to the WSJ piece and the guts of the issue:

Washington is looking for a third country willing to grant sanctuary. Sweden, France, Germany, Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey are among those that have been approached, according to news reports. You'd think that Europe, so critical of U.S. detention policies, would jump at an opportunity to reduce the prisoner pool at Gitmo. Yet not a single country has offered to take them in...

The German daily Die Welt reports that Berlin rejected Washington's request because it didn't want to offend Beijing... even [Angela Merkel] she found it necessary to open her first visit to Washington in January with a call to close Guantanamo. Ms. Merkel will be back in Washington next month... Reserving 15 seats for the Uighurs on her flight back might do the trick.

Once again, the European position is an adolescent mix of freeloading, blame-throwing, and wilfull ignorance: anything that will help make the Bush administration fail; anything that will burnish anti-American credentials within the socialist milieu. Anything but a sober dose of reality and global responsibility. As the death toll from Islamofascist terrorism in Europe continues to climb and the 7-7 (London bombing) anniversary approaches, the overarching motivation of the Europeans still seems to be that of H.G. Wells' Eloi. It's an analogy that's been made before but one that remains sadly apt.

Those fictional characters - pale, weak, timid souls so dependent on a system whose workings they forgot long ago - were incapable of caring for themselves in the face of harsh reality. In Wells' story, the Eloi were cute and almost sympathetic. The modern European ones are Eloi with attitude. Good riddance. We should take the Uighur in. They'd be better off here anyway. Fifteen years from now - in America - we'd bet that at least a third of them would be thriving small business owners... if the Dems and their victim/nanny state don't get 'em first.

UPDATE: Chester has an excellent piece of tangential interest, pondering the relationship between economic equality and democracy within Islam, within Europe and at their intersection, e.g., the little-policed Islamic ghettoes there.

The Left, Consistency, and the State of U.S. Intelligence

After endless crowing by the left about American intelligence failures in Iraq (some valid, some not), one would think that two things would now be true: 1) they would be expressing more enthusiasm and perhaps eating a bit of humble-pie as the truth finally starts to come out there and 2) they would be turning into raving hawks, questioning how John Negroponte can be so certain that Iran is 'years away' from having operational nukes. If intellectual honesty and philosophical consistency were serious concerns, that is...

Russian Slavery

Next time some politically correct mandarin launches into a long tired speech about reparations or other forms of enduring white guilt for pre-20th-century American enslavement of Africans (Unconscionable? Yes. Unique? No.), try this on them.

“In recent years, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, has met twice with Vladimir Putin. They discussed North Korea’s debt, which dates from the days when the Soviet Union was supporting its North Korean ally.” Putin remained intransigent: cancelling North Korea’s debt was out of the question, despite its economic situation: “To pay off the debt, Pyongyang said it would keep sending workers.”

...We arranged to meet our witness under the cover of a church... There he told his tale: “Working hours vary from camp to camp. I was working way up in a remote camp, for 16 or 17 hours every day of the week. Those employed at the main camp, on distribution or other jobs, worked only 12 or 14 hours. Counting New Year, Kim Il-sung’s birthday, Kim Jong-il’s birthday and the anniversary of the founding of the party, we used to get one week’s holiday a year. In winter it’s very cold, at night the temperature can reach -60C. Your hands, feet and face all freeze. But the hardest thing was the food. They only gave us 150gm of rice and a bowl of soup per meal. That was all.”

Same trick works if they start soap-boxing about Russia's new 'moral stature', American 'atrocities', Russia's 'moderating' or 'diplomatic' influence with regards to Iraq or Iran or the poor treatment of illegal Mexican immigrants.

Palestinian Protection Racket

Still a little groggy after running the Boston Marathon on Monday, we can't help seeing a pattern in the following stories:

Passover bombing in Tel Aviv is defended by Hamas

"Gaza Rallies to Hamas After Bomb"

Hamas "lawmakers" whine about having their Jerusalem residency rights revoked (Hmm... would Lincoln have let Jefferson Davis live in DC during the Civil War?)

Israel decides not to retaliate (A rare story amidst the moral equivalence, Israel as brutal aggressor line the MSM usually likes to take)

Germany is top European donor to the Palestinian Authority - by a factor of two. Interesting. Darkly, ominously interesting...

Iran happily fills in with $50M in aide - a move that some blame on the inflammatory policies of the United States... the implication being that we should give money to anyone for anything lest it become clear that they have more in common with rogue states than with Western values.

Joe Satriani Rocks

I just got back from a show here in Boston featuring guitar legend Joe Satriani, promoting his new Super Colossal album with Eric Johnson warming up. (Great Satriani picture archive here. Official website here.) Fantastic talents both. I don't have the vocabularly to describe all the ways in which they're able to express themselves through a guitar. 'Satch' is an acquired taste but a taste that's hard to shake once acquired. He grows on you.


A friend had scored us four free front row tickets. I had the center seat: "front and center". How often does that happen? Well, once in my lifetime - as of tonight.

My younger daughter accompanied me (her first rock concert), along with a friend of my late brother. 'R' had taken my brother to his last concert a few months before he was diagnosed with leukemia. At the time, he didn't know it was his last, of course, but enjoyed it as if it were - a lesson for all of us, I suppose. It was only fitting then, that 'R' was able to join us this evening.

Try as I might, I could not give away the fourth ticket. Fittingly, it went unused - six months to the day after my brother passed away. Just like the Passover tradition - a chair left open for Elijah. A nice kid wearing a little crucifix ended up sitting in it, grateful that we didn't kick him out. I suppose that's fitting too. My brother: a Catholic convert. The evening: Good Friday. There are no accidents, only divine order, meaning and love. It is our choice to perceive.

Towards the end of the show, I sat transfixed and a little misty-eyed as Joe played a soul-bendingly beautiful rendition of "Always With Me, Always With You" (turn your speakers on before clicking the link). Joe was standing eight feet from us at center stage for most of it.

A huge rock music fan, collector and former DJ, my brother was with us for sure.

Diving Deep on Iran

Chester has done a fabulous job finding and digesting several thoughtful, strategic perspectives on Iran... far deeper than the typical "Get down! He's off his meds and he's got a gun!" rhetoric we've been hearing (and echoing) on Ahmadenejad and the nuclear crisis. Unfortunately, the scholarly analysis he's unearthed tends to point - albeit in fancier language - to the same basic street-smart conclusion: Ahmadinejad - a kind of modern day, real world Captain Ahab - is fixated on creating and dominating an Islamic empire, totally unwilling to listen to reason.

Most interesting to us is Chester's part one, in which he quotes Ken Pollack on Iran's longtime top negotiating demand: "respect". It is, as Pollack notes, a mushy, bottomless requirement, impossible to define and equally impossible to meet. What's worth exploring further is how closely aligned that mindset is with the political correctness movement. When the standard is how a group feels rather than the rules to which individuals' actions will be held accountable, we are truly through the looking glass - into a world in which "off with her head" is the standard of (ir)rational discourse.

Sixteen Days

Those on the fence about attending the religious observance of their choice this week might want to err on the side of doing so, staking out a pew before they all fill up later this year.

Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said. Iran will move to "industrial scale" uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant, the Associated Press quoted deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi as telling state-run television today. "Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days..."

To paraphrase an old teacher of ours: "Pray now, avoid the June rush."
(His tongue-in-cheek version: "Flunk now...")

Beyond Belief

An unusual blogad at Haloscan led us to this - something so bizarre that our first guess was that it must be a conservative prank designed to make atheists look spiteful and sad. They succeeded in that. Only it isn't the conservatives doing it.

Declaring War on Easter, Beyond Belief Media has launched a preemptive attack on the Christian holiday, the company announced today. "Operation Easter Sanity" has already begun.

Using its documentary THE GOD WHO WASN'T THERE as the chief weapon, Beyond Belief Media is covertly planting DVDs of the film in churches throughout the United States. The popular movie, currently ranked #1 on Amazon.com's independent documentaries list, is critical of the irrational beliefs of Christians and asserts that Jesus Christ did not exist.

A total of 666 DVDs will be hidden like "Easter eggs" in sanctuaries, church yards and other holy areas by Beyond Belief Media's national team of volunteers. The DVDs will be slipped into hymnals and other locations where they are likely to be discovered by unsuspecting worshippers.

If some on the right could be accused of exaggerating the "War on Christmas", this one stands on its own. BBM's self-congratulatory blog is here. Look on it and understand what Jesus knew as he was mocked and derided. As we noted last week, aggressive atheists seem to be filled with "the abject nothingness of pure left-brained self-worship run amok".

With time on their hands, chips on their shoulders and fear in their hearts, these folks are going to a lot of trouble for... what? To prove that faith is a matter of... faith?

While the left enshrines tolerance as their highest ideal, and others enshrine narrowly left-brained reason, this militancy (new in one sense, but actually as old as time) shows itself as neither tolerant nor capable of perceiving a manner of knowing that is far more than an SAT score. Declaring truth to be accessible only on their terms and tolerance to be whatever they say it should be, they reveal their angry, self-centered fundamentalist agenda. Which is more than a little bit ironic. They need our prayers.

UPDATE: Stones Cry Out has a similar take: "Some folks thought that the 'War on Christmas' was mostly a self-fulfilling prophesy by the Christian Right. Think again. At least with Easter, the war's been formally declared." This appropriately named liberal blog asserts that its no big deal and that "Brian Flemming [BBM founder] is obviously just having some fun". Which we might be inclined to agree with except for the utter hypocrisy. It is liberals, after all, who've been lecturing us for years about respect and tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism and sensitivity to differences. All except for this difference, that is.

At least one liberal is properly agast, noting: "A media stunt to sell a movie I know. But holy people take this stuff seriously and it hurts THE CAUSE." Hmmm... THE CAUSE... must be an inside code word for something really important. Apparently the BBM site has been hacked - which is pretty foolish and juvenile whomever did it. Given the tenor of the rest of their tactics, we wouldn't be surprised if they hacked it themselves.

Stop the ACLU notes: "It’s a free country for this guy to spread hate, I won’t deny him that. But it sure is ridiculous and pitiful." And proving that everything new is old, Don Singleton had this to say 13 months ago when the attacks were more benignly directed at the Easter bunny (an easily dispensible if harmless pagan fertility symbol): "I don't expect people of other faiths (or no faith at all) to celebrate the Birth of Jesus or his Crucifixion and Resurection, but I wish they would just ignore the holiday, and let the 80 - 90 percent of us that do believe in Him, to have our celebration." Nicely put.

United Flight 93

LGF has the transcript. God rest the souls of those brave passengers.

WSJ Trifecta

Three subjects covered in four brilliant pieces (three of them freely accessible) appear on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page today. They should be common sensical to anyone with the most basic grounding in history, economics or science. Alas, the very term "common sense" has come to mean something more akin to political correctness in educational circles these days.

In "Iranian Bomb Scare", (free at OpinionJournal) the editors take up another aspect of the subject we were blogging on Monday, noting:

...we only hope the Administration has a full range of military contingency plans for Iran. Such planning is in one sense routine--the Pentagon constantly devises war games for every conceivable situation against every conceivable adversary. But it would also be irresponsible for the Administration not to draw up contingency plans given the threat Iran increasingly poses--a point that should be especially well-taken by critics of the Iraq War who claim the Bush Administration was negligent in its postwar planning.

Just as important, overt military planning is essential if diplomacy is going to have any chance of succeeding with Iran. The only time the mullahs have given any sign of bending on the nuclear issue is when Europe and the U.S. have appeared to be united in holding Iran accountable. Even Jacques Chirac seems to appreciate this, since he's the one Western leader, or shall we say cowboy, who has actually suggested using nuclear weapons against Iran if it came to that. The phrase "whoever wishes for peace, let him prepare for war" was not coined by George W. Bush.

Meanwhile Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT writes on one of our favorite topics, outlining how scientific inquiry into the workings of climate is being stifled in myriad ways:

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming... [emphasis in original]

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear...

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift.

In a subscription-only piece, the editors take on the new 'universal' health care legislation (aka, "RomneyCare") proposed here in Massachusetts. Most commentators are swallowing the PR hook line and sinker, not noticing that to make it work without falling into socialist traps and higher taxes would require repealing basic laws of economics and common sense. Under the plan, they note that the state would:

...[force] people to buy insurance many will need subsidies to afford, which is a recipe for higher taxes and more government intervention down the road. Could this be why Mrs. Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the Families USA government medicine lobby are all praising it to the skies? Just asking.

...Americans have far better health coverage than the media and liberal politicians contend. A vast and expensive ($330 billion a year) Medicaid system covers people who are genuinely poor, and emergency rooms must treat anyone regardless of ability to pay. In Massachusetts as in every other state, about 20% of the "uninsured" are Medicaid-eligible but haven't bothered to sign up. Yet they can sign up whenever they need care. Another hefty chunk of the uninsured (40%) can easily afford insurance but choose not to buy it...

The real people to worry about are those who are too well off to qualify for Medicaid but are priced out of the insurance market thanks to mandates and other regulations. The Romney plan will subsidize them for buying the compulsory insurance, but it does little on the regulatory side to make that insurance more affordable.

On the same topic, but free on OpinionJournal, Brendan Miniter (brother of the better-known Richard) gets to the crux even more succinctly:

If there is one redeeming value to [Romney's] approach, it is that it starts with the presumption that even the poor should pay something for their health care. That's not a trivial point...

Requiring consumers to pay at least part of the bill is essential to striking a reasonable balance between consumption and total cost. That means copayments for drugs and doctor visits, deductibles, or other fees. For pointing this out, [Tennessee] Gov. Bredesen has been blasted by Sen. Ted Kennedy and other Democrats...

What Tennessee and Massachusetts now have in common is that as lawmakers look for health insurance plans that are cheap enough for most people to afford, they're going to run headlong into the reality that buying health coverage is very expensive. The reason isn't just that health care across the country is expensive. It's also that health insurers are prohibited from offering coverage that pays for only catastrophic events, such as a serious injury or heart attack. Rules vary by state, but in most places insurers are forced to cover everything from routine checkups to chiropractic care. Remove these mandates, allow deductibles and "copays" to be raised high enough, and in an instant the price for some health plans would fall to about that of dinner out and a movie for two. [emphasis added]

Here's a thought: what about requiring standardized curricula and participation in courses in economics, history and scientific method in high schools, filling the time now devoted to diversity awareness training and a host of other liberal claptrap? Just asking...

Nuclear Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Where to start?...
How 'bout with this: "You will not surely die," the serpent said...

Flashing ahead to the other end of time, we find Satan using the same tactic... because it still works.

[Iranian President Ahmadinejad] said Iran wanted to operate its nuclear program under supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency and within its rights and regulations under the regulations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

It is the lie of total contempt, calculated to enable fantasies latent in the listener.

Deep down, all of us - right, left, center and agnostic - would like to believe it's a bad dream. Maybe, just maybe, Iran just needs more electricity, we think. Maybe they care about CO2 emissions. Never mind that they've got more oil reserves than they could ever possibly use for their own energy needs and don't care a whit about Kyoto, the IAEA, the UN or any other international body. (Hmm... and the reason we do despite the persistent fecklessness of those institutions is... what... exactly?) Maybe Russia has got them under control, we imagine. Unless they're actually all in cahoots - allied against us, still bitter after losing the Cold War.

Maybe they are building nukes, we think, but they'd never actually use them if they did. After all, they're not insane. Except that our version of 'sanity' starts (or at least used to) with the sanctity of individual human life. Theirs doesn't. Full stop.

Deeply rooted in our Western, Judeo-Christian consciousness, whether we believe it or not, God's image is staring each and every one of us in the face in the mirror every morning, even if it's a bad hair day, we haven't shaved and middle age is starting to show. Our religious and cultural heritage makes it extremely difficult and painful to comprehend a society (like Nazism or dhimmitude) in which individual worth can be negated by dictatorial fiat.

What Iran says it wants to do is immaterial at this point. Their actions belie their words. They may say they want to cooperate with the IAEA or the NPT, but only with a version of those institutions and rulesets that's different from what they really are.

I'd like to obey the speed limit... if only they'd change it to eighty five miles per hour.

I'd like to obey the immigration laws of the United States... if only Congress would grant me and my illegal family amnesty.

The original lie is still the most powerful because language is cumbersome and imperfect to understanding. In the gap between word and meaning lies enough wiggle room for a clever speaker to be technically correct while grossly misleading his audience. The most effective lies will always contain a shred of truth to which the lie-teller can retreat if necessary.

No, you will not 'surely' die, says the serpent. Not right away anyway. Not in the choke-and-swoon Snow White poisoned apple manner you imagine it. No, thinks the serpent to himself, you will die in a thousand other, deeper ways that I'm not going to enlighten you about if you're too stupid to see them and too disobedient to care.

No, "I did not have sex with that woman" says the president. Not in the way I've chosen to define "sex". No, thinks the president, I did a dozen other naughty things with her that I'm not going to enlighten you about if you're too stupid to decipher my clever evasions and so caught up in my aura as to vote for me unquestioningly.

No, there weren't stockpiles of WMD in Iraq and no known ties to Al Qaeda, shouts the left. Not in the quantities we'd like to have seen them. Not in the investigative timeframe we'd like to arbitrarily impose. Not in the months leading up to the war. Not after considering 1% of the untranslated and loosely perused evidence. Not after the efforts of the presumed-to-be-competent UN. Not in Iraq (because moving them to Syria doesn't count.) Not the kind of smoking-gun video newsreel of Mohammed Atta schmoozing it up with Saddam in the palace. No, thinks the left, there may have been plenty of evidence but we're not going to admit it so long as 'that man' is in office.

The original lie is still the most powerful because we're children of God. We're wired at birth to trust and hope and wish that evil and deception do not exist in the world. We're ill equipped to know with our acquired layers of intellect, words and logic what depth of evil lurks in another. We stand transfixed by the beauty and cleverness of the snake... until it strikes. It's a strike made all the more painful by the flash of insight before it all goes dark:

We knew it all along. We knew it in our gut. We chose to deceive ourselves. Et tu, Brute? Et tu?

The Century War With Islam - Reflections From the Future

A must-read fictional chapter by Dan Simmons. H/T: Galdalf at Up Pompeii

“Where will my grandchildren suffer this dhimmitude?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly so dry I could barely speak.

“Eurabia,” said the Time Traveler...

The clock in my study chimed midnight.

...Did I want to hear such words about 2006 and the rest of the 21st Century from the Time Traveler?

“Ahmadenijad,” he said softly. “Natanz. Arak. Bushehr. Ishafan. Bonab. Ramsar.”

“Those words don’t mean a damned thing to me,” I said as I scribbled them down phonetically. “Where are they? What are they?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” said the Time Traveler.

“Are you talking about . . . what? . . . the next fifteen or twenty years?” I said.

“I’m talking about the next fifteen or twenty months from your now,” he said softly.

UPDATE: Inexplicably, the Simmons website seems to have been rearranged overnight - his excellent removed. Google cache version here.

More on Hersh and Iran

Updating our post from yesterday, two hat-tips are in order:

First, to Rocket's Brain Trust for this piece by Jay at Wizbang raising the question of whether Hersh is an unwitting tool of a clever all-fronts Bush administration negotiating policy with Iran (oh be still my beating heart and relish the richly ironic thought of the Bush-bashing Hersh being used in this way!):

I once read that "diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while reaching for a stick." In that sense, that very well could be the Bush administration's notion of diplomacy with regards to Iran. And with the current Iranian regime acting like a mad dog, it might just be the right approach.

Traditional diplomacy has followed the carrot and stick approach. Go along, and get a reward. Cause problems, get whacked. Liberals show their disdain for the stick, preferring to go for the carrot/no carrot model. That is a nice, moral, ethical position, but doesn't take into account the situations like Iran, when they don't put much value on the carrot...

We even have bombers practicing the "over-the-shoulder" bomb-tossing maneuver that has only one application -- releasing a nuclear bomb, and then getting the hell out of the bomb's blast area... Could this whole story be a deliberate leak by the Bush administration, playing the good cop/bad cop game? Could Hersh have been used to deliver a message to Iran and the world at large, making threats on behalf of the Bush administration while not committing them to actually carry them out? [emphasis added]

Second, to ShrinkWrapped for this column by Caroline Glick:

On Monday, Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that part of Ukraine's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal may well have found its way to Iran... 250 nuclear warheads... will remain operational until 2010...

It is impossible to assess the accuracy of the report. The Ukrainian government has dismissed its allegations. Russia may well have invented the story to shift media attention away from the growing awareness that Russian support for Teheran, Damascus and Hamas effectively places it in the enemy camp in the US-led war against global jihad... [emphasis added]

So stepping back about ten paces, we've got the U.S. and Russia shadow-boxing again, with Iran as proxy, inciting everyone to fight. We hope that Mr. Bush has had an opportunity to privately revisit his public assessment of Vladimir Putin as someone he "can do business with", and suspect he has (if the statement was ever sincere). Glick's piece goes on - a must-read big-picture synthesis of the many moves Iran has been making. In particular she notes Iran's financial preparations for war.

Iran's recent financial maneuverings also indicate general preparations for global war. The Swiss newspaper Der Bund reported the Iranian regime recently withdrew $31 billion of its gold reserves and foreign exchange from European financial institutions...

With at least one of the 1979 hostage-takers allegedly now in power now, we suspect that they've learned to put their cash under the matress before the West wakes up to the threat. Glick also weaves in something we've been talking about for some time - the Syrian angle - something Iran is taking very seriously indeed. (See also here, here, here, here and here.) Glick:

This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces now control Hizbullah's posts along the border with northern Israel and are developing an advanced intelligence gathering network for spying on Israel. A senior IDF commander told the paper that Hizbullah posts built and fortified by the Iranians just meters away from the international border are "now Iran's frontline with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbullah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it."

Having blown it repeatedly on timing, we're going to avoid making any further date-sensitive predictions other than to point everyone to the Tradesports chart in the left-hand sidebar. There's not been a lot of movement above the levels of last week (~9% chance by June), tempting us to buy into the market on the rumblings outlined above. Of course if this really is the big final Gog-Magog-Israel dance, then a big 'win' on that bet wouldn't do us a whole lotta good, now would it? Selfishly, we're hoping this all holds off until after our run here next week.

UPDATE: Eric at The Pool Bar points out the contradictory rhetoric against attacking Iran.

Iran, Negotiations and the Nuclear Option

The allegation by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that the Bush administration is considering the use of special, tactical nuclear warheads in order to penetrate deeply buried Iranian nuclear weapons development bunkers is creating a major kerfuffle. In an otherwise check-mated situation is it more rational to keep one's queen out of play and resign the game or to bring her out and prevail? The question had barely been asked before the administration's critics and old-line thinkers have come out pounding the simplistic idea that 'nuclear' automatically means 'insane'.

Most adults are conditioned by decades of Cold War imaginings and popular culture to thinking of nuclear weapons in apocalyptic terms. Giant airbursts leave dozens of cities flattened, killing millions instantly and pushing humanity to the brink of extinction. The living envy the dead as their skin falls off, vomiting their way through days of radiation-induced agony or years of malignant cancer to a horrendous early demise. We can escape those ideas no better than anyone else of our generation. They are deeply ingrained and emotional. Left unchallenged, they crowd out reason at every opportunity.

For anyone over the age of 25 or so, it is no more possible to purge those images and substitute new ones than it is to say "Christmas" and not think of evergreen trees, snowfall and sleigh bells (or shrimp on the barbie for our Australian readers). Such images have come to define the term nuclear in a military context just as Pavlov induced his dogs to salivate on cue. Say 'nuclear' in the same sentence with 'war', 'conflict', 'weapon' or 'strike' and the effect is to block out any further thought about how reality might be different in the future.

Such a reaction is natural. Abstract thinking about conflicting facts and ideas is much harder than pulling a vivid template from the archives and screaming: "just like that! It would be just like that!" For decades a shared mental tape of American GIs torching villages, firing indiscriminately from '60s-era helicopters and carpet-bombing dense jungles informed our view of war... until those images began to be replaced (grudgingly) by the sheer facts of rapid, overwhelming success and immense restraint by American troops in Iraq.

In a similar manner, our vision of nuclear weapons and their use remains a linear extension of what the world witnessed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - thankfully (and miraculously) the only data points we have. And in that regard, the collective abhorrence of nuclear weapons - the common vision of how awful they can be - has been extremely useful to the world. What else but a deep, shared rejection of that future (and recognition, under MAD that there was no way 'round it) ever got us through sixty years without further use of them? War is hell. Repeat twice lest one ever imagine otherwise. That is the starting point for discussion. And yet, the quiet wars of fear, domination and the failure to check evil can be worse as they set up larger wars for future years. Chemo sucks. Dying of cancer is worse.

And yet any rational discussion of nuclear weapons must start with an assumption that Truman and his successors (including the current holder of that office) have been rational and largely moral men. Whatever else may be said about the American system and its dysfunction, the serpentine gauntlet of American politics, plus the checks and balances in the American system ensure that the Manchurian Candidate is and will in all likelihood remain a Hollywood fantasy. Unhinged Bush-bashing rhetoric aside, that scenario is so extremely unlikely as to be laughable.

One cannot secretly harbor a megalomania of Hitlerian, Stalinesque of Maoist proportions and reach the Oval Office, much less exercise once there the kind of insane power they did. Our presidents have all had their flaws. They are neither saints nor kings nor gods. (That thought itself is something of an American innovation.) Yet the worst haven't even approached the delusional psychosis of say, a Nero or Pol Pot.

U.S. presidents may have differed on much, but they have shared one thing: an understanding that nuclear weapons should not be used unless there is clearly no other way to prevent an even greater evil befalling the world.

Most sane people (including level-headed Japanese) understand that Truman did the right thing. Given what was known about the atrocities of Imperial Japan, their expansionist actions and ambitions, the likely future stakes in lives and suffering (both military and civilian - on both sides) and the utter intransigence of their leaders to any kind of reasonable diplomacy, there was no other rational choice. Horrible as was the use of nuclear weapons in WWII, the world is a better place than what it would have been had they not been used. We have challenged our detractors on this point and never heard a satisfactory response.

But this post is not about Japan. Back to Iran. What's different? What's the same?

As with Imperial Japan in the early '40's, it has become clear that diplomacy with Iran is nonsensical. When even the most generous overtures by 'bridge' countries (e.g., Russia, China) are loudly, repeatedly and summarily rebuffed, the conventional notion of diplomacy becomes meaningless. The standard diplomatic process of acknowledging fact (e.g., violation of the NPT, violation of UN charter, etc.), identifying mutual norms and values (however few they may be), recognizing reasonable interests (with an emphasis on 'reasonable'), giving, taking and ultimately compromising are replaced by a refrain of "I want it all. I want it now. And I'm not going to listen to anything you say." As any parent knows, that is not a conducive environment in which to talk, much less negotiate. The relationship must move to a new phase in order to avoid giving all power to the one throwing the tantrum.

We read of leaders advocating further diplomacy with Iran without any reference to what that means, how failure might be defined or what might back it up should failure occur. Diplomacy has become a code word for unilateral pacifism.

The flow chart of if-then options irrationally reverts back to where it began no matter how dire the consequences. If overture A doesn't work, then: let's talk. If overture B doesn't work, then: let's talk. If Iran develops nuclear missiles and warheads and threaten to wipe an ally and UN member off the map, then: let's talk. If they accelerate their nuclear program, throw out all inspectors and lie about it, then: let's talk.

The proper response if one is a megalomaniac bent on developing nuclear weapons and wiping Israel off the map is to keep that endless loop going - playing one's opponents for the fools they too often can be. All options lead to talk and they know it. One side is bargaining in bad faith. The other side is bargaining with utter naïveté - wishing and hoping that their opponents don't really mean what they say and will "come to their senses", play by Queensbury rules and lose gracefully.

Another thing that's the same vis a vis Japan is the intent of the nation's leadership. Iran has repeatedly stated its intent to destroy both the U.S. and Israel and has supported groups working to take down both (not to mention Europe). The tactics and pace may be different from Tojo's but the intent is the same: world domination by a fascist empire.

One thing that's different compared to Imperial Japan should be obvious: if left unchecked, Iran will have nuclear weapons at its disposal to carry out those ambitions. There will be no warning - no grueling, drawn-out firefights, island-hopping or conventional land invasions to warn us of the encroaching enemy. One day Iran will not have nuclear weapons and then one day they will. And on that on that day, they will use them.

We challenge anyone to argue why that would not be the case. I.e., why they would not carry out their stated intent. It is a reasonable argument to make, but an extremely difficult one in that it tacks against an extremely poor track record for sunny Chamberlainian rhetoric or pre-Wilsonian isolationism. In a post 9-11 age of nuclear proliferation, the room available to make that argument is so thin as to be non-existent.

What's less obvious but significantly different from 60 years ago (or even 20 years ago) is that our weapons systems and tactics have become far more sophisticated and discriminating. Few like to acknowledge that the fire-bombing of Dresden with conventional weapons was more devastating than the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even individually, some conventional weapons are now more powerful than some nuclear ones, while guidance systems are extremely precise in four dimensions (up/down, x, y, and time). Furthermore, the East-West standoff is no longer on hair trigger. The Cold War is over. The limited use of nuclear weapons does not automatically mean a crushing apocalyptic response and the mass extinction of human life. In sum, 'nuclear' does not automatically mean hundreds of millions of dead before tea.

Where the weapon is detonated also matters. One hundred feet underground is vastly different from 1,000 or 10,000 feet above it. Yes there is concussion. Yes there is a great smoking hole and radioactive fallout. But is that worse than a broader campaign of conventional surface bombing that fails in its objectives? Is it worse than an invasion in which tens if not hundreds of thousands might be killed? Is it worse than an Iranian nuclear airburst over Jerusalem? Is it worse than an entire region held hostage to Iran and its police state out of fear? Is it worse than the regional nuclear proliferation that would follow as Egypt and Saudi Arabia (lest we forget, the home state of the 9-11 hijackers) seek to protect themselves and pursue their own evil interests with force? Can one really imagine a 'MAD' doctrine coming into existence in the Middle East under its current leadership?

Random thought (which we know has costs in terms of American lives but is nonetheless worth considering): Give twelve hours' warning. E.g.: "Citizens of Natanz: please leave the city immediately. We have no quarrel with you. We seek to destroy your nation's nuclear weapons capability. The bombers are in the air. This will be your only warning."

Those who like to quote Hobbes ("...life is nasty, brutish and short") nearly always leave out the pre-qualifier to that statement: "Without Leviathan..." Without a benevolent power to provide options beyond mindlessly looping through 100 variations on ineffective talk, life is indeed nasty, brutish and short - especially for women, and potentially for us and our allies.

At least one person in the White House is asking and thinking about those gut-wrenchingly difficult trade-offs and making decisions as he must. If you aren't praying for him, you should be. Most would be paralyzed if not crushed under that load.

Failing to acknowledge those options and questions - substituting the easy mental tape of "The Day After" or Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to stop thinking and fail to engage on the options and consequences before us right now. To date, there's been general consensus that all options on Iran stink. For the record, the nuclear option Hersh has uncovered does too. It just may turn out to stink a little bit less than all of the others. We still pray that diplomacy will work, but recognize that it would be insane to assume that it will, or to engage it to no purpose.

Seymour Hersh is asking us to buy into the notion that thinking beyond the bounds of conventional wisdom is a bad thing and that not prevailing in this conflict is somehow optional - its consequences immaterial to our well-being and that of our allies. That anti-intellectual stance is deeply ironic for an icon of the liberal intelligentsia. Thank goodness for butterfly ballots.

Sewer-Diving an Atheist's Manifesto

For those with a stomach for deep, God-hating vitriol (aka, atheist fundamentalism) disguised as academic inquiry, several hours to kill, and an appetite for big philosophical/existential debates between really smart people conducted via two-page comments consisting of four-tiered compound sentences and obscure references to other obscure references, the very long comment thread on this very long post by Sam Harris (pit-bull atheist and author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason") is good for some Friday amusement and a window into the abject nothingness of pure left-brained self-worship run amok.

What was that about compound sentences again? ;-)

The piece begins:

Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself.

That ugly and easily-fiskable* line was apparently not enough to deter a few hearty souls (e.g., 'Thomas' - see comment #5350**) who either appreciate a call to reach beyond the already faithful or who didn't get the memo about throwing pearls to swine and being torn to pieces. Their presence makes the thread worth skimming amidst the hundreds of other sad sycophantic souls who think they can reason their way into happiness without understanding the basis for their 'reasoned' ideas about good and evil.

*Methodism (the president's denomination) is not "fundamentalist". It is considered 'mainline' Protestant. Fundamentalist denominations are actually in decline. The body count on "religion-based terror" is not only skewed heavily to one religion recently, but over time as well. I've lost the reference, but the tally for all of history is roughly 100 to 10 to 1 comparing absolutist non-religion (Marxism, Fascism) to Islam to Christianity (the Crusades). The phrase "progressive tolerance", is as most readers of this blog will already appreciate, both nonsensical (progression towards what?) and oxymoronic. I.e., it is narrowly 'tolerant' only of ideas inspired and vetted by an insular Marxist-inspired elite.

**A few comments that made this more than the typical Kos sewer-swimming expedition:

That which is absolute good is also absolute being and absolute truth. The atheist must justify his use of suffering as evidence of evil. Yet, what is evil in an atheist’s universe? In short, as a believer, I cannot adequately ‘solve’ the problem of evil (though I can demonstrate that it does not contain a formal contradiction), where as an atheist cannot ‘raise’ the problem of evil. Ultimately the question the atheist and the agnostic must answer is this: Is the moral sense (as opposed to the logical sense which does not exist in this problem) of the problem of suffering (evil) adequately addressed by saying that there really is no problem after all because there is no such thing as good and evil or right and wrong in a universe absent a divine reality?
-------------
His diatribe against all us fools who believe in any kind of god is rather sad. The proof of god which he claims is missing is right there in his fingertips as he types, but, as I did for so long, he won’t look at it. His own abject faith in the god of reason will likely kill him before his time. I hope he finds what it is he’s searching for before then.

Word to the wise: as with all sewers, be careful diving into this one.

UPDATE (Dec. 14, 2006): For reasons not immediately obvious, this post is being tossed around like a table/paper football over on the ESPN NFL message board spiking traffic to my humble little blog. Go figure. Those asking about whether they need to keep being nice to the boss because the world is about to end might also be interested in these two recent posts and/or this magnificent thought piece by Ravi Zacharias.

P.S. "Go Pats!"

More on Iran

Thinking further about what our new sidebar feature may be saying, we note Dan Drezner. He opines that the decision to attack Iran may already have been made, though he doubts its potential effectiveness, concluding: "all policy options still stink". Right Wing Nuthouse concurs with the second part, outlining serious reservations on a potential attack:

One sure way to make Iraq a lost cause is to bomb Iran... would put at least 350,000 angry Shias in direct military confrontation with US forces... missile counterstrikes against our bases in the Middle East... I doubt whether we would be able to destroy [Iran's] ability to cause enormous problems for tankers [in the Strait of Hormuz]...Then there is the probability that the Iranians would engage in so-called “asymmetrical warfare” or terrorism... it is extremely unlikely we will be able to delay the Iranian nuclear program more than 2 or 3 years... they will make it that much harder for us to strike the next time...less sanguine about a regime change having any effect whatsoever on Iranian nuclear ambitions. The only alternative at this point seems to be former President Rafsanjani...

Could we get a little more pessimistic? Nobody ever said this was an easy problem to solve. For the record, we'd rather not expand the 37 year war with Iran if we don't absolutely have to. Their threats to destroy Israel and hit the U.S. homeland with WMD via proxies force our hand. We cannot let that possibility come to pass. We cannot wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9-11.

RWNH's conclusions (and others like them) run off track in their basic assumptions.

Would attacking Iran escalate the breadth or ferocity of the opposition we're already dealing with in Iraq? Somewhat. But not necessarily to the extreme degree that RWNH assumes (forced U.S. withdrawal in shame a la Saigon). Some in Iraq (even Shiia) would be absolutely delighted at the effective castration of a longtime enemy.

Would gas prices leap to $5 a gallon at the loss of a few tankers in the Persian Gulf? And if they did, would they stay that high for an extended period of time? No. Or at least not likely. There's more resiliency in the system than that. The Iran-Iraq tanker war in the 1980's led to all kinds of messiness but never became globally deblitating. And back then, we weren't being all that proactive about putting a stop to it.

Would the Iranians "engage in so-called “asymmetrical warfare” or terrorism"? Hello! Is RWNH really a right wing blog or has it wrapped around the end of the spectrum and been commandeered by Kos? Iran already IS doing precisely that in Iraq and elsewhere via Hamas and Hezbollah. They're threatening to do much more here and in Israel whether we attack them or not.

To repeat the oft-repeated but seldom learned: they hate us, attack us and seek to destroy us because of who we are, not what we do. There is no action (or non-action) we could engage in which would materially alter their behavior or intent. If that was unclear before, the intransigence of the Iranian leadership in the face of every international agency's and major nation's objections and diplomatic overtures should put that one to bed for good.

Is it really so unlikely that we could not delay the Iranian nuclear program by more than 2-3 years? Opinions are all over the map on this one (as well as on how close Iran is to having the bomb - ranging from right now to this weekend to ten years out). What we picked up from the gestalt at the IIS in February however, was a sense that their bunkers are not invincible and that we do not need to strike all of them (or even a majority) to set back the program significantly. That might be 2-3 years. It might be more. It might be less. Time buys the Iranians some advantages, but it buys us at least as many. With operational nukes in hand, the game is up as soon as it's up - on their terms. So long as Iran does not have them, all of the old options remain on the table, including but not limited to regime change.

Is Rafsanjani the only alternative? Oh c'mon. Ahmadenejad was a virtual nobody until the mullahs elevated him. Given the proper support and enough time and motivation, anything is possible. The entirety of Iran has not gone mad, just its leadership who are running scared enough to keep the propaganda machine and dissent repression in high gear. We don't see the good alternatives because the current regime doesn't want us to.

It's good to remain aware of the negative consequences of a particular military action, but equally important to stay aware of the consequences of inaction. It did not suddenly become true that we could live with a nuclear Iran just because they called our bluff on round one and we got better at tallying up the costs and side-effects.

Some bad things always occur when the dogs of war are unleashed. We can't know in advance which ones will. Fertile imaginations (particularly in the media) can give rise to magnificently bad, if not 'worst-case' scenarios but they almost never occur (think predictions of chemical warfare and 10,000 American dead on the way to Baghdad). They're as foolish to contemplate for long as are the rosy scenarios painted by generals. Yet everything goes wrong in the worst possible way only when one fails to think, act and adapt. That's one set of skills that a free, democratic and entrepreneurial American system - on the whole - is reasonably good at compared to our monomaniacal opponents.

Boomers, Immigrants, Abortion... and Dr. Seuss

Joshuapundit floats a theory that we haven't seen before:

The massive increase in abortions and the massive influx of illegal immigrants both started in the early `70's, when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Since then, the USA has been averaging about a million abortions per year, overwhelmingly from consensual sexual relationships as a form of retroactive birth control. Do the math... that's over 33 million Americans who never grew up to work, pay taxes or pay into Social Security to help support the retirement of the very generation that killed most of them off - the Baby Boomers.

It couldn't have worked out better than if a diabolical insider with the Federal Government had planned it: let a group of people into the country illegally who will provide plenty of cheap labor and drive wages down. Business will love it. These folks'll also pay into the Social Security fund and help fund the retirement of all those Boomers, but most of them won't be able to utilize the system. And the cost of their medical care, schooling and other social welfare costs will be a problem for local governments... while the Federal Government looks the other way.

JP's abortion-immigration theory seems broadly plausible, but we'd like to see more data. An R-squared value (correlating illegal immigration and abortions year by year) would make the merely provocative truly fascinating. It's part of a much longer piece in which (among other things) JP proposes a more structured approach to immigrant assimilation (another highly sensible VDH theme), offering Israel as a model. That idea alone lights up a dozen thought rockets concerning Israeli-U.S. parallels. Fodder for a future post... e.g., can you say: active military duty as a fast-track to full citizenship? JP's piece is definitely worth reading in full. He's a member of the Watchers' Council, a group we hold in high esteem.

We haven't posted much on abortion, but couldn't help connecting JP's thought with a post we've been mulling since attending (twice) a middle school production of Seussical the Musical a few weeks ago. 'STM' combines several Dr. Seuss classics, revolving around two: Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg. (To our utter non-surprise, the result of this test - pardon the awful ad clutter - was close identification with... Horton: a lonely moral absolutist standing fast against the nasty taunts of a self-absorbed popular culture.)

What was amusing sitting through it (aside from the predictably zany awkwardness inherent to any middle school performance) was how oblivious the 80-90% liberal audience seemed to the play's strongly conservative, pro-life themes. Over and over, Horton is heard repeating: "A person's a person, no matter how small." in reference to a small city floating on a speck of dust. A chorus of "bird girls", a cynical "sour kangaroo" and pretty much every other character save one loudly tells him to get real and ignore what he senses. When that doesn't work, Horton is abducted at gunpoint and the speck is carried off to be summarily boiled in oil. Why? Because everyone is sick of hearing Horton talk endlessly about it and - quite literally - don't want to hear the truth.

Sitting on an egg that's been abandoned by a strutting sexpot 'bird' who repeatedly lies to him and runs off to party in Palm Beach, Horton repeats: "I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent." Fidelity, much? (Ominously, most of the play's cast felt that the lying, strutting sexpot 'bird' was more compelling than Horton. Sigh.)

Most people know both stories so we'll stop there. We're hardly the first to make the connection. To be fair, Theodor Geisel (the real-life Dr. Seuss) was a complicated figure, claimed by pretty much everyone across the political spectrum. As PBS notes:

...during World War II [Geisel] drew editorial cartoons for the left-wing New York newspaper PM... made army propaganda films with Frank Capra [e.g., "Why We Fight"]. Many readers didn’t know that The Sneetches was inspired by Seuss’s opposition to anti-Semitism, that Horton Hears a Who! was a political statement about democracy and isolationism, or that The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book were parables about the environment and the arms race.

Some sources indicate that the Horton stories (written in the 1950's) were inspired by Geisel's time in Japan immediately after WWII. Perhaps so. There's no record of Geisel being actively pro-life. But as a commenter on another blog pointed out: God uses all kinds of people to make His points, even if the messenger never wakes up to their role.

What's astounding is how the play ever made it through the hyper-PC scrutiny that public education authorities (and this school system in particular) seem to be applying these days to even the most classic authors and artists. Score one for subtlety, fun and the power of a good story to sneak in an enduring message. (Reminds me of the reaction of a Jewish neighbor showing The Matrix to a group of girls including my daughter: "You know it's a Christ parable, don't you?", I asked. Stunned look of complete surprise. "You're kidding...") We digress...

Which brings us back to the possible immigrant-abortion connection. If it's true (leaving aside the dark, top-down plot element of it), then the ultimate irony would be the triumph of pro-life values as Latin American Catholic immigrants become legal citizens and vote in larger numbers. (Lax voter fraud enforcement makes that proper sequence of events - citizen then vote - frustratingly questionable if not entirely moot in many jurisdictions.) This also presumes continued adherence to Catholic tenets, which so far the data seem to show.

All of which helps explain the pitched rhetoric over immigration. The already-deep passion many feel over immigration is partly explained as displaced passion over the continuously white-hot abortion issue. Our psych-blogger friends probably have a more precise term for it. Call it simply another front in a broad war of culture and values. Grab this bloc's loyalty (if one can think of anything as a bloc anymore - always a dangerous assumption) and one has 'won' much more than a single debate or election.

Which brings us to this (scroll down for pictures, e.g., see placard at right). H/T Running for the Right. On the one hand, we've got militant Islam insisting that no corner of this planet is ours to inhabit because we're all apostate Judeo-Christian scum to be converted or beheaded. On the other we've got a bunch of Marxist historical revisionists playing off deep liberal guilt (would they please get off the smallpox rant?), feigning righteous anger at Mayan and Aztec failure to invent gunpowder, steel and Christianity (innovations they're happy to adopt, of course), all while telling us to leave our own country - the same one that allows them the freedom to hold up their placards and bite the hand that feeds them without fear of violent retribution.

Has anyone seen this type of behavior from other immigrant groups? Not often and not recently and certainly not with this level of chutzpah. What's dangerous is not the sentiment but our reaction to it. Give in and drop demands for assimilation and the country (and the immigrants) will be no better off than if the wave of 19th-century Irish kept speaking Gaelic and refused to learn English or Eastern European Jews insisted on Yiddish over English. Balkanization. Europe-West. Give us a break. Our in-laws came to this country from Europe for greater opportunity 40+ years ago, not speaking a word of English. Now they read half a dozen English newspapers every day. They could probably write credible columns in half of them.

What's scary about the immigration thing is that we may be at risk not only of losing a major voting bloc but of losing the war on terror. With sentiment like this running freely through the Hispanic community, is it that much of a stretch to envision the Castro-Chavez-Ahmadenejad alliance being put to use? A physical wall wouldn't necessarily solve that problem ("security theatre" as some experts call it). The time-tested method (insisting on assimilation) probably would. So long as the left insists on honoring every culture but our own, the task is going to be more difficult than it needs to be.

Like Dr. Seuss (aka, Theodor Geisel), we needn't apologize for pressing enduring moral and cultural values and particularly American ones. Neither do we need to apologize for insisting on fluency in English. What we can do is make the process fun. Here's an idea: make Seuss required reading for the citizenship exam. We could do a lot worse than filling INS offices with the mellifluous rhymes of the Horton books. If they managed to get by the PC police at our liberal local school board, they might just slip by the national left-wing mandarins. Worth a try...

New Feature - Tradesports on Iran Attack

In lieu of a wholesale blog move (very tempting after Blogger's last set of hiccups), a friend has motivated us to do some cursory housecleaning. Longtime readers will note a few changes in the sidebar, the most exciting of which (to us anyway) is a graph showing the latest Tradesports betting on whether Iran will find itself on the receiving end of a U.S. and/or Israeli air strike on or before June 30th. (Note that dates are in European format. I.e., 9-11 means the 9th of November, 2005) The markets are often wrong on such closely held matters, but the latest line (equivalent to an 8% chance) is non-trivial. Hey, we'll be the first to admit to great joy amidst red-facedness at being spectacularly wrong about calling the end of the world for last Friday. D'oh! :)

At least we didn't have any money on it.

Immigration - Playing all the Angles

We've seen up close (via legal, resident-alien in-laws living here 40+ years) how byzantinely bureaucratic the U.S. immigration system can be for even the most intelligent, literate individuals who really want to do it all by the book. And as is true with the tax code, complex law breeds evasion. It just does. One can rail all day about rule of law (and we do!), but if the law is cumbersome and the incentives to avoid it high enough, lawbreaking happens - right or not. Many former Iron Curtain countries figured this out and dramatically simplified their tax codes after 1989. The same could be true for immigration. It's a basic notion that could help pull a lot of disgusted libertarians back into the president's camp.

In New England, we also have the luxury of some distance. There's the annual summer influx of Irish kids who keep the short house-painting season humming. There's the lawn crew working next door. Both may have cut off opportunities for local teens to make some money the way we did in our youth. Or not. The very idea sparks a giggle, followed by a big, hearty belly-laugh that just won't stop as we fall to the floor with tears rolling down our cheeks. The teens we know wouldn't be caught dead doing such work. Times have changed. If they can't get a summer internship in daddy's law firm then... it's off to Italy or Paris or an expensive summer camp. Like it or not, we've grown dependent on immigration - both legal and illegal.

As we noted recently, it took about a day for the immigration "debate" to get old. We like Sean Hannity (or used to), but we've heard precious little about what should be legal - and not. Every afternoon immigration is the only subject, and its been disappointingly monochromatic. It's the same on other talk shows. Is it really that critical compared to everything else going on in the world these days? Everything? Really? Are we learning anything more about Iran, China or a dozen other subjects as or more likely to shape our collective strategic future in significant ways? For those who didn't read last week's piece, let's start there:

We have laws. They should be enforced. They need not be hyper-criminalized for political effect. Perhaps they should be amended. Lots of people in the streets (especially if they're illegals for goodness sakes) shouldn't influence that one way or the other. However...

Putting a mile-high fence with dogs and motion sensors and laser beams and a no-man's land peppered with mines and razor wire along every inch of both terrestrial borders will not solve the terrorist threat we face. All of the 9-11 hijackers were here on visas - legal until they overstayed them.

We suspect that immigration is staying 'hot' for at least four reasons:

1) It's close to home and easy to understand. Virtually everyone living in the U.S. has some kind of direct exposure to immigration, whether legal or illegal. Everyone's an 'expert'. Everyone's got an anecdote and thus an opinion. It's perfect for talk radio. The same cannot be said about Hezbollah, Koranic law, or North Korean nuclear technology. The idea that "you're not supposed to be here: go back" is as easy to think about as a game of soccer. It's easy to keep score. Terrorism, by contrast, is like a game of three-dimensional chess. It takes enormous concentration just to figure out who's ahead - if one even understands how the game is played.

2) It's something that - at least in theory - we could control if we wanted to. That's appealing. It's human nature. We like to contemplate that which we can do something about. We don't like to worry about a giant meteor striking the earth or an earthquake leaving us crushed, trapped and slowly bleeding to death under a freeway overpass. Compare that to Islamofascist terrorism and Iranian nuclear ambitions and it's a riff on the old joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the streetlight rather than where he dropped them. Why spend mental energy on something that's uncertain, risky, fear-inducing and hard to manage when one can feel better contemplating something where the worst-case scenario is increasing economic pain over years and decades instead of a great smoking hole where Chicago used to be.

3) It's perceived to be politically costless to Republicans. This is a miscalculation. It seems more likely that the current monomania will erode already dicey support for the president and his realist policies on immigration, while making "compassionate-conservative" sound like a complete oxymoron in 2008. (Up to now, the concept has had some legs. Candidates like Mitt Romney will need those legs if they're to run effectively.) One comparison I heard yesterday was between being tough on immigration and tough on terrorism. I.e., if only the president would stop 'triangulating' to avoid offending Spanish-speaking voters, then he could say he was tough on all kinds of border security. That's overly simplistic. One can do the calculus on "tougher" immigration and the ledger has two sides, both of which are largely economic. One can do the ledger on finding and stopping foreign terrorists and the ledger has one giant obvious negative (a WMD strike on the homeland) that must be avoided, even if the costs of doing so are high.

4) It plays to a natural human foible: ego. As much as we're strongly sympathetic to the rule-of-law argument, the level of chest-beating xenophobia and misplaced righteousness in this debate sets off our biblical alarm bells. Yes, we have laws. Yes, we must enforce them. But we needn't do so with such jingoistic glee. We will return to dust just as certainly as will the poorest lettuce-picker who's been taking advantage of the system for years. We were handed the privilege of being Americans. It is a weighty responsibility - one that we'd like to offer to everyone over time, but realistically can't. Not all in one fell swoop anyway. The fact that we've managed to steward a better system through 230-odd years of conflict and challenge does not make us an inherently superior class of souls when we stand naked at the throne on the last day.

Victor Davis Hanson - one of the few with any deep credibility on the subject (due to his book, 'Mexifornia', his conservative thought-leading credentials, his professorship in history, and his ownership of a working farm) is one of the only ones consistently making sense:

Even the fiercest critics of illegal immigrants in the American Southwest never seem to check first the legal status of those who fix their roofs, mow their lawns or wash their dishes... [they] lament the skyrocketing costs of incarcerating thousands of illegal immigrants, and providing health benefits to many others. They ignore that such public-entitlement costs are partially offset by the private subsidy that the cheap labor amounts to.

On the other hand, supporters of the status quo tend only to cite statistics showing how illegal immigrants prop up the American economy — as if workers who have little education, less English and no legal status will not get ill, hurt or in trouble. ...we talk of a guest-worker program as if the million willing Mexicans a year who won't qualify for it will smile and stay home. And, even for those who do qualify, a guest-worker program is a bad idea, for it perpetuates the notion of "good enough to work, not good enough to stay." We should evolve from, not institutionalize, the two-tiered system of "them and us."

We also talk of deportation as if it were feasible to send back 11 million people to Mexico in the largest population movement since the British partition of India.

And we don't talk of the greatest collective violation of American immigration laws in our history.

Read it all. And (note to self): turn off the radio. We can't hear it over the happy Guatemalans running the leaf-blowers next door anyway. ;)

Misogyny Writ Large

Noting a frightening 'debate' among Islamic scholars in Egypt about female circumcision (aired last week on Kuwaiti television), Dr. Sanity has the line on a woman-fearing, sex-obsessed Islamic culture and its implications for the world:

Interviewer: What if she says: I don't want to be circumcised. What happens then?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: If a girl says she doesn't want it, she's free. No problem.
Interviewer: Is this what happens in reality?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: I have no relation to reality. I am talking about how things should be.
Interviewer: You are a religious sheik, from Al-Azahar University. You cannot say you have no relation to reality.
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it.
[emphasis added]
---------------
[Dr. Sanity]: ...the treatment of women under Islam is not only the key to understanding the pathology of the culture, but also the key to developing an antidote to its most poisonous and toxic elements... [Islam's] attitude toward women most certainly has no relationship to reality... Psychiatrists generally refers to this state as "psychotic" and "delusional".

Where is NOW on the issue? NOWhere. As usual. Choice only matters when it's theirs.

UPDATE: If malignant misogyny weren't characteristic of Islamic culture, then who'd ever try using it as a defense?

A New South Wales Supreme Court judge has rejected a claim by a Sydney gang-rapist that his strict Pakistani upbringing meant he did not know his actions were wrong. [emphasis added]

H/T: Sister Toldjah

Theology of Death

On an ordinary day, we might have dismissed this as a bizarre aberration unworthy of serious attention. None of the wire services have picked it up, nor has the New York Times. Had it been posted a day later (April 1st) we would have thought it a joke:

...there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. [emphasis added]

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us.

Today however, was far from ordinary. Thus we take notice. The professor is wrong about one thing (other than the spectacularly obvious): the public may be very ready to hear what he has to say. Frighteningly ready.

How ready? And how was today extraordinary? Two things.

First, we were treated to a sermon by a substitute pastor that could have passed for an Earth First! ad. Delivered by an environmental lawyer called to ministry late in life (by what or whom, we're not sure), it caused us to wonder whether he'd grasped the idea that changing professions entails changing focus, or at least changing the standard rant to appear that one has done so.

Gone was any sense that God sent His Son to earth, much less to save people. Gone was any traditional notion of humans having dominion, of being first among created things, or of going forth and multiplying. Replacing it was a chip-on-the-shoulder twenty-minute lecture (interspersed with laughably silly 1970's-era hymns I didn't even know existed) emphasizing the importance of opinion polls on global warming, and generally making the point that in the greater scheme of things, humans are no better than lily pads, leeches, or lichens - probably worse because we've changed the environment. For a church that prides itself on tolerance and openness (on certain left-wing subjects), the line "some of you might not agree with me but that doesn't matter" made us guffaw with irony.

We've learned to endure such things. There are other reasons we attend and are active in this church. The periodic swerve into misguided theology goes with the territory. The self-professed Buddhists, Atheists and Agnostics are welcome for their obvious hunger for the bread life as evidenced by their regular attendance. Others have characterized the congregation as made up of "spiritual anorexics". But we digress.

The wiser and more centered of our fellow parishioners - at both ends of the political spectrum - agree that such politically charged sermons are counterproductive even if one happens to agree with them on any particular day. Sadly, this one was seen - by a woman I spoke with afterwards - as one of the best she could remember.

That too would have passed as unremarkable were it not for what she said next. This woman's father is confined to a nursing home, beset with numerous late-life issues that have rendered him frail, sick and mentally unstable. "If it were up to me," she said, "I'd bring him home and hold a pillow over his face." Those were her exact words. We can empathize but not sympathize. Watching a loved one slip away is never easy. The mind recoils. Smart, achievement-oriented people (and she is nothing if not those things) are accustomed to being in control. That can make them especially vulnerable to the notion that they have the right and ability to control everything: the environment, life and especially death.

Let's be clear: stewardship of the earth is a fine thing. Yet some have come to worship it above all else. They have created a separate idolatrous god. The eternal souls of their brothers and sisters matter less than what a status-seeking academic with a computer model has to say about whether winters may be a few weeks shorter and summers a little hotter and low-lying beach property a little less wise of an investment... in 100 years. In this chilling but increasingly pervasive world view, human beings are mere meat puppets, best disposed of once they've outlived their usefulness. Dr. Pianka's Nazi-esque vision is merely the next logical extension. His time may well have come. Radical environmentalism - meet the culture of death.

UPDATE: kowalski over at Redstate also connects Pianka's remarks to the predisposition of the global warming crowd, while nickfirenze worries that Pianka and/or his students might pick up a sample of Ebola in their travels and try a little freelance experiment. WorldNetDaily has the wrap, emphasizing Pianka's statement that "we're no better than bacteria".

Random reflection: The broad undercurrent of nihilism and self-hate that Pianka's remarks have brought to light helps explain global ambivalence to news of Saddam's biowarfare capabilities. If you're thinking that life is meaningless and holocaust is a dandy idea to keep SUV sales in check, it doesn't much matter who wreaks the havoc.

UPDATE II: George Will on global warming, err, cooling, err... we don't know. The Anchoress is wisely taking the Pianka story with a grain of salt, with pointers to Okie on the LAM who has a comparison to a Tom Clancy novel here, and more here. Meanwhile, DarkSyde over at DailyKos notes that someone dropped a dime on Pianka to Homeland Security... which sounds just fine to us. A Kos commenter, drawing on Wikipedia observes that the first reporter on the Pianka story "is a creationist and is involved with the Discovery Institute"... which also sounds a lot less ominous to us than it might to those over at Kos. Finally, Anchoress points us to this blogger's post from March 9th. She may be the second witness to (and, it seems - shudder - a supporter of) Pianka's talk.

UPDATE III: A recent comment reminds us of two previous musings (here and here) on the frightening re-emergence of eugenics from two generations of deserved taboo.