Vita ab Alto

The Somali Pirate Story - A More Complete Picture

2009-04-25T11:45:00.014Z

All'y'all,

I got this from a source whom I implicitly trust, who knew the author through the Naval Academy. I believe it's authentic because a) I trust the source and b) its author displays internally consistent knowledge of naval military detail that bespeaks someone in a position to know (e.g., the capitalization of ship names; something a naval man commonly does, but others don't do) - it "rings true." So far as I know, this has only been distributed in military channels. I saw it for the first time yesterday (that is, it's not yet "viral"). I have not modified it in any way, except to clean up the raw text formatting and spell out a few acronyms (oh, and add a couple of pix).

The most interesting aspect of the whole affair, other than the heroism and great exertion of the Navy and the Seals, was the President's involvement. Why was his intervention even remotely necessary? This was a matter that Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (who requested Seal Team 6) and the Capt of the Bainbridge could - and did, ultimately - handle. And note the Presidentially-directed interference of the Feeb (FBI) team - Obama's "guys." It's clear that O the Great and Powerful doesn't trust the military; is he also beginning to use domestic national-level law enforcement as his Gestapo? You decide...

Monk

This post splendidly fills in the details not then available when
"BAINBRIDGE - Pirate Story What Really Happened" was distributed on 20
April 2009.

Real story of Obama and the hostage

Your "Real" story is not exactly the way I heard it, and probably has a few political twists thrown in to stir the pot. Rather than me trying to correct it, I'll just tell you what I found out from my contacts at NSWC [Naval Surface Warfare Center] Norfolk and at SOCOM [US Special Operations Command] Tampa.

First though, let me orient you to familiarize you with the "terrain." In Africa from Djibouti at the southern end of the Red Sea eastward through the Gulf of Aden to round Cape Guardafui at the easternmost tip of Africa (also known as "The Horn of Africa") is about a 600 nm transit before you stand out into the Indian Ocean . That transit is comparable in distance to that from the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans to the tip of Florida at Key West -- except that 600 nm over there is infested with Somalia pirates.

Ships turning southward at the Horn of Africa transit the SLOC [sea line of communication or sea lane of commerce] along the east coast of Somalia because of the prevailing southerly currents there. It's about 1,500 nm on to Mombassa, which is just south of the equator in Kenya. Comparably, that's about the transit distance from Portland Maine down the east coast of the US to Miami Florida. In other words, the ocean area being patrolled by our naval forces off the coast of Somalia is comparable to that in the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River east to Miami then up the eastern seaboard to Maine.

Second, let me globally orient you from our Naval Operating Base in Norfolk, VA, east across the Atlantic to North Africa, thence across the Med to Suez in Egypt, thence southward down the Red Sea to Djibouti at the Gulf of Aden, thence eastward to round Cape Guardafui at the easternmost tip of Africa, and thence southerly some 300 miles down the east cost of Somali out into the high seas of the Indian Ocean to the position of MV ALABAMA is a little more than 7,000 nm, and plus-nine time-zones ahead of EST.

Hold that thought, in that, a C-17 transport averaging a little better than 400 kts (SOG) takes the best part of 18 hours to make that trip. In the evening darkness late Thursday night, a team of Navy SEALs from NSWC Norfolk parachuted from such a C-17 into the black waters (no refraction of light) of the Indian Ocean-- close-aboard to our 40,000 ton amphibious assault ship, USS BOXER (LHD 4), the flagship of our ESG [Expeditionary Strike Group] in the AOR [Area Of Responsibility], the Gulf of Aden). They not only parachuted in with all of their "equipment," they had their own inflatable boats, RHIB's [rigid-hull inflatable boats] with them for over-water transport. They went into BOXER's landing dock, debarked, and staged for the rescue -- Thursday night.

And, let me comment on time-late: In that the SEAL's quick response-- departing ready-alert in less than 4 hours from Norfolk -- supposedly surprised POTUS's staff, whereas President Obama was miffed not to get his "cops" there before the Navy. He reportedly questioned his staff, "Will 'my' FBI people get there before the
Navy does?" It took the FBI almost 12 hours to put together a team and get them packed-up-- for an "at sea" rescue. The FBI was trying to tell him that they are not practiced to do this-- Navy SEALs are. But, BHO wanted the FBI there "to help," that is, carry out the Attorney General's (his) orders to negotiate the release of
Captain Phillips peacefully-- because apparently he doesn't trust GW's military to carry out his "political guidance."

The flight of the FBI's passenger jet took a little less than 14 hours at 500-some knots to get to Djibouti. BOXER'S helos picked them up and transported them out to the ship. The Navy SEALs were already there, staged, and ready to act by the time POTUS's FBI arrived on board latter that evening. Notably, the first request by the OSC [on-scene commander] that early Friday morning to take them out and save Captain Phillips was denied, to wit: "No, wait until 'my' FBI people get there."

Third, please consider a candid assessment of ability that finds that the FBI snipers had never practiced shooting from a rolling, pitching, yawing, surging, swaying, heaving platform -- and, target -- such as a ship and a lifeboat on the high seas. Navies have been doing since Admiral Nelson who had trained "Marines" to shoot muskets from the ship's rigging -- ironically, he was killed at sea in HMS VICTORY at the Battle of Trafalgar by a French Marine rifleman that shot him from the rigging of the French ship that they were grappling alongside.

Notably, when I was first training at USNA in 1955, the Navy was doing it with a SATU, Small Arms Training Unit, based at our Little Creek amphib base. Now, Navy SEAL's, in particular SEAL Team SIX (The "DevGru") based at NSWC at Little Creek do that training now, and hone their skills professionally -- daily. Shooting small arms from a ship is more of an accomplished "Art Form" than it is a practiced kill. When you are "in the bubble" and "in tune" with the harmonic motion you find, through practice, that you are "able to put three .308 slugs inside the head of a quarter at 100 meters, in day or night-- or, behind a camouflaged net or a thin enclosure, such as a superstructure bulkhead. Yes, we have the monocular scopes that can "see" heat -- and, draw a bead on it. SEALs are absolutely expert at it-- with the movie clips to prove it.

Okay, now try to imagine patrolling among the boats fishing everyday out on the Grand Banks off our New England coast, and then responding to a distress call from down around the waters between Florida and the Bahamas . Three points for you to consider here:
(1) Time-Distance-Speed relationships for ships on the high seas, for instance, at a 25-knot SOA (Speed Of Advance) it takes 24 hours to make good 600 nm -- BAINBRIDGE did.
(2) Fishermen work on the high seas, and (3) The best place to hide as a "fisherman" pirate is among other fishermen.

Early Wednesday morning, 4/8/2009, MV ALABAMA is at sea in the IO about 300 miles off the (east) coast of Somalia en route to Mombassa Kenya . Pirates in small boat start harassing her, and threatening her with weapons. MV ALABAMA 's captain sent out the distress call by radio, and ordered his Engineer to shut down the engines as well as the ship-service electrical generators-- in our lingo, "Go dark and cold." He informed his crew by radio what was happening, and ordered them to go to an out-of-the-way compartment and lock themselves in it-- from the inside. He would stay in the pilot house to "negotiate" with the pirates.

The pirates boarded, captured the Captain, and ordered him to start the engines. He said he would order his Engineer to do so, and he called down to Engine Control on the internal communication system, but got no answer. The lead pirate ordered two of his four men to go down and find him and get the engines started.

Inside a ship without any lights is like the definition of dark. The advantage goes to the people who work and live there. They jumped the two pirates in a dark passageway. Both pirates lost their weapons, but one managed to scramble and get away. The other they tied up, put tape over his mouth and a knife at his throat.

Other members of the crew opened the drain cocks on the pirates boat and cast it adrift. It foundered and sunk. The scrambling pirate made it back to the pilot house and told of his demise. The pirates took the Captain at gun point, and told him to launch one of his rescue boats (not a life boat, per se). As he was lowering the boat for them, the crew appeared with the other pirate to negotiate a trade. The crew let their hostage go to soon, and the pirates kept the captain. But, he purposefully had lowered the boat so it would jam.

With the rescue boat jammed, the pirates jumped over to a lifeboat and released it as the captain jumped in the water. They fired at him, made him stop, and grabbed him out of the water. Now, as night falls in the vastness of the Indian Ocean , we have the classic "Mexican" standoff, to wit: A life-boat that is just that, a life-
boat adrift without any means of propulsion except oars and paddles; and, a huge (by comparison) Motor Vessel Container Ship adrift with a crew that is not going to leave their captain behind. The pirates are enclosed under its shelter-covering, holding the captain as their hostage. The crew is hunkered down in their ship waiting for the "posse" to arrive.

After receiving MV ALABAMA 'S distress call, USS BAINBRIDGE (DDG 96) was dispatched by the ESG commander to respond to ALABAMA 's distress call. At best sustainable speed, she arrived on scene the day after-- that is, in the dark of that early Thursday morning. As BAINBRIDGE quietly and slowly, at darkened-ship without any lights to give her away, arrived on scene, please consider a recorded interview with the Chief Engineer of MV ALABAMA describing BAINBRIDGE's arrival. He said it was something else "... to see the Navy slide in there like a greyhound!" He then said as she slipped in closer he could see the "Stars and Stripes" flying from her masthead. He got choked up saying it was the "...proudest moment of my life."

Phew! Let that sink in.

Earlier in the day, one of the U.S.. Navy's Maritime Patrol Aircraft, a fixed wing P3C, flew over to recon the scene. They dropped a buoy with a radio to the pirates so that the Navy's interpreter could talk with the pirates. When BAINBRIDGE arrived, the pirates thought the radio to be a beaconing device, and threw it overboard. They wanted a satellite telephone so that they could call home for help.

Remember now, they are fishermen, not "Rocket Scientists," in that, they don't know that we can intercept the phone transmission also. MV ALABAMA provided them with a satellite phone. They called home back to "somebody" in Eyl Somalia (so that we now know where you live) to come out and get them. The "somebody" in Eyl said they would be out right away with other hostages, like 54 of them from other countries, and that they would be coming out in two of their pirated ships. Right-- and, the tooth fairy will let you have sex with her. Yea, in paradise. The "somebody" in Eyl just chalked up four more expendables as overhead for "the cost of operation." Next page.

Anyway, ESG will continue to "watch" Eyl for any ships standing out. The Navy SEAL team, SEAL TEAM SIX, from NSWC briefed the OSC (Commander Castellano, CO [commanding officer] BAINBRIDGE) on how they could rescue the captain from the life boat with swimmers -- "Combat Swimmers," per se. That plan was denied by POTUS because it put the captain in danger -- and, involved killing the pirates.

The FBI negotiators arrived on scene, and talked the pirates into sending their wounded man over for treatment Saturday morning. Later that afternoon, the SEAL's sent over their RHIB with food and water to recon the life boat but the pirates shot at it. They could have taken them out then (from being fired upon) but were denied
again being told that the captain was not in "imminent danger." The FBI negotiators calmed the situation by informing the pirates of threatening weather as they could see storm clouds closing from the horizon, and offered to tow the life boat. The pirates agreed, and BAINBRIDGE took them under tow in their wake at 30 meters-- exactly 30 meters, which is exactly the distance the SEALs practice their shooting skills.

With the lifeboat under tow, riding comfortably bow-down on BAINBRIDGE's wake-wave ("rooster tail"), had a 17-second period of harmonic motion, and at the end of every half-period (8.5 seconds) was steady on. The light-enhanced (infra-red heat) monocular scopes on the SEAL's .308 caliber Mark 11 Mod 0 H&K suppressor-fitted sniper rifles easily imaged their target very clearly. Pirates in a life boat at 30-meters could be compared to fish in a barrel. All that was necessary was to take out the plexiglass window so that it would not deflect the trajectory of the high velocity .308 round. So, a sniper (one of four) with a wad-cutter round (a flaxen sabot) would take out the window a split second before the kill-shot -- no change in sight-picture, just the window blowing out, clean.

Now, here's the part BHO's "whiz kids" knew as well as the Navy hierarchy, including CO BAINBRIDGE and CO SEAL TEAM SIX. It's the law in Article 19 of Appendix L in the "Convention of the High Seas" that the Commanding Officer of a US Ship on the high seas is obligated to respond to distress signals from any flagged ship (US or otherwise), and protect the life and property thereof when deemed to be in IMMINENT DANGER. So, in the final analysis, it would be Captain Castellano call as to "Imminent Danger," and that he alone was obligated (duty bound) to act accordingly.

Got the picture?

After medically attending to the wounded pirated, and feeding him, come first light (from the east) on Easter Sunday morning and the pirates saw they were being towed further out to sea (instead of westward toward land), the wounded pirate demanded to be returned to the lifeboat. There would BE NO more negotiations-- and, the four Navy SEAL snipers "in the bubble" went "Unlock." The pirate holding Captain Philips raised the gun to his head, and IMMINENT DANGER was so observed and noted in the Log as CO BAINBRIDGE gave the classic order: WEAPONS RELEASED! I can hear the echo in my earpiece now, "On my count (from 8.5 seconds), 3, 2, 1, !" POP, BANG! Out went the window, followed by three simultaneous shots. The scoreboard flashed: "GAME OVER, GAME OVER-- NAVY 3, PIRATES 0!"

I hope you found the above informative as best I know it-- and, please excuse me in that after more than 50 years the Navy is still in me. I submit that AMERICA is going to make a comeback, and more than likely it'll be on the back of our cherished youth serving with honor in Our military. So, let's Look Up, Get Up-- and, Never Give Up!

God Bless Our Troops, and GOD SAVE AMERICA!

Holdomor

2008-12-31T14:58:00.000Z

It's only fitting that we note a very sad anniversary before this year slips away. 2008 marks 75 years since Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine's "kulaks" in order to force rural collectivization and destroy Ukrainian nationalism.

The world gets tied up in wads about “The Holocaust” – and it should. The Holocaust is the archetypal genocide and one of the most hideous acts of deliberate evil in history, but we should pause occasionally to remember how horrific much of the 20th century was and that Europe’s Jews were not the only victims of genocide. (Just ask the Armenians, Ukrainians, Cambodians, Tutsi, and so many millions of Russians and Chinese…)

Perhaps six million died in the Holocaust. The Holodomor killed about seven million Ukrainians and over 14 million died all across Russia during forced collectivization. Learn more here and here. (Other links in updates as I find them.)

This begs the question, of course, of why events like the Holodomor are not remembered when the Holocaust is. Perhaps – just perhaps – it has something to do with the fact that socialism is coming back into vogue (if it ever went out) among the left that controls the West’s media. Perhaps it is inconvenient to show the real human cost of trying to implement socialism in the real world (as communism – yeah, I know, I know: “not the same thing!” Bullshit. Same religion, just different denominations). Deprecating Hitler costs the left nothing (nor should it); pointing out that former heroes of the left like Stalin and Mao were savage, ravening, mass-murdering monsters creates more problems.

So… few around will honor those who died in the Holodomor. Count me among those few.

Monk

Matt, Zachary, and Lyle

2008-12-27T23:32:00.011Z

I deeply regret that I missed this comment when it was posted [it refers to this post]:

"I have just read the account of Zach's passing. I knew Lyle in High School. He and I shared my great times together. He was like my brother. After he got out of the Air Force we lost track of each other. It is with incredible sadness that I read this about his son. This should never have to happen to a parent and especially to someone as great as Lyle and Lois. I know it has been almost two years but now my heart breaks anew for both of them. I hope that they find peace in their lives. Lyle - Know that I pray for you and Lois and Zach.
Sincerely, Matt"

Matt posted this on 23 Sep 08. I am an idiot - I let Vita ab Alto languish for over a year, not posting or even checking comments, so I missed this when it came in. Matt, if you ever see this, I apologize.

Lyle was best man at my wedding to Karen Annie Sweetheart. We spent many years together in the Air Force, helping define the term "nerd" in ways that are approached only in places like Step Brothers (in fact, we wore NVGs together, but it was purely professional, I assure you) or Napoleon Dynamite (I seem to remember something like a Liger in one of Lyle's D&D games...) We had some pretty unique experiences, too: On one of the several TDYs I concocted to the Sacramento area as an excuse to visit KANH before we got married, Lyle volunteered as my copilot. His family was in Yuba City, so it was a win-win. However, we were both so familiar with the drive from Reno NV to Sacramento that, when we passed Reno VORTAC, we convinced ourselves that we had a good two hours before landing. Of course, it takes about a tenth of the time to fly the distance in a B-52 as it does to drive it... I think I got the flaps to 100% about midway down McClellan's runway and I think Lyle was still apologizing to Sac Approach on rollout. We (and the rest of the crew) walked away safely, nonetheless.

I, too, began to lose contact after Lyle and I left active duty. I'd heard nothing for almost a year before Zach's death. Of course, that was the time that the Sisson's were dealing with the final staqes of his disease.

I remember Lyle telling me about Matt many times, and once, when on one of those Sac TDYs, Lyle tried to link us up, but we weren't able to make it work. Nonetheless, I feel like I've met Matt and I regret that he, too, has lost contact with the Sissons.

I hope that both Matt and Lyle will see this some day. I, too, hope that Lyle and Lois have found peace in their lives and I pray for them frequently. I hope that Lyle and Lois will reappear someday and initiate contact with us and with Matt...

Maybe this Christmas season will see a change...

Monk

A New Form of Embarrassment

2008-12-24T13:35:00.013Z

...
Thinking to add a touch of culture to our lives, we bought season tickets to "Broadway Across America" in Birmingham. The season culminates in Wicked, which we all realy want to see. The initial offerings are not quite as well known, however. The first, which we attended last weekend, was Avenue Q. It's...umm...a puppet show. I knew it won a Tony and was popular some time ago. The ads said, "not for the very young." "That's okay," I thought. We have two teenaged daughters. "A little risque humor, an off-color joke or two - maybe a 'Will and Grace' sort of vibe - won't hurt them. Nice of the theater to warn people not to bring small children, though, thinking this is Sesame Street."

Well...

It IS Sesame Street.

...If Sesame Street were written by Will Farrell and John C. Reilly - "Step Brothers" meets Snuffleupagus. Better yet, think of the stoned high school "theater types" of Walter Kerr's God on the Gymnasium Floor saying, "hey, dude, let's make, like, a DIRTY Sesame Street!"

More F-bombs than GBU-12s on an Afghan wedding party; Bert is a gay Republican who secretly loves Ernie; Tellie Monster ("Trekkie Monster") is a porn-loving misanthrope; full-frontal puppet nudity... Like, totally EDGY, man! Oooh, they really stick it to educational television!

Still, Ave Q succeeds... Ultimately, a lot of it is cute and sweet; it has a nice ending; and you can't help but laugh, even at the Nasty Bits. Still, there's no form of embarrassment that quite equals sitting with two teenaged girls watching puppets have sex on stage...

Congratulations, Hans!

2008-12-16T00:04:00.009Z

Okay, I'm blogging again...after almost a two-year hiatus. Why? I've been inspired by publication of a book by friend and estwhile Vita ab Alto correspondent, Hans. Hans' real name is Rob Tate and I am now disgustingly jealous of him. He's just had a beautiful coffee table book published: "Hans-Joachim Marseille, an Illustrsated Tribute to the Luftwaffe's 'Star of Africa'."

I've called Rob "Hans" for years because he's had a serious man-crush on Marseille his entire adult life. (He gets me back: He calls me "Dieter.") Now Rob's put his encylopedic knowledge of his hero to good use and realized a long-time dream. Many friends of mine have been published, but never in such lavish fashion. His subject is interesting, too. Marseille was one of the Luftwaffe's uber-fighter pilots, of course, but he was also a complicated man and never a Nazi hack (despite the use the Reich's press made of him). If he'd been born in America, he would probably have been a Swing Kid.

I believe I will blog awhile longer now; I've become bored with my own professional writing and could use a more creative outlet. Besides, there's certainly no lack of things to comment on these days.

In any event, congratulations, Rob. Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance in praise of manly Germans!

Blogging Again?

2007-05-11T12:13:00.000Z

This seems like a pointless gesture, since no one reads this blog, but I can't bring myself to abandon the medium entirely. The last month has seen much activity -- a cruise, work-related trips, child care concerns -- that interfered with active blogging. Nonetheless, I will maintain this site as a means of recording some thoughts, even if the potential for generating threads of conversation is diminsihing. That's what I set this site up for, so if former frequent correspondents lioke ChefJeff still view the site, respond to this post and I will try to revive frequent blogging.

Monk

God Has a Sense of Humor, Part 20,070,402

2007-04-02T18:38:00.001Z

God has proven to me that he has a sense of humor more times than I can count.

One of the most notable examples for me was when The KANH and I vowed we'd NEVER return to Alabama (and weren't we glad to be out of that place). We not only returned, I retired in Alabama, work in Alabama, and have chosen to cast what's left of my fate there (although at least one of my kids wants to go to school in Tennessee -- her maternal grandfather would be proud).

The latest example of God's sense of humor regards the lefty but perceptive military analyst Bill Arkin. I have been one of the select few chosen to review and comment on drafts of a book Arkin is working on for the Air Force. It details Israel's recent campaign in Lebanon -- one that has plenty of "lessons learned" (read: mistakes) for airpower practioners to learn from. I hope Arkin doesn't read my blog. (Highly unlikely.....era-ending asteroid hitting the earth in the next five minutes unlikely, fortunately.)

Even more to the point regarding God's Sense of Humor: the book so far is perceptive and very well written. It's critical of airpower -- and my inputs will only make it more so -- but I am compelled to like it. More on the specifics later, when I can comment.

Still, I have to just shake my head and smile.

Monk

God on God's Side

2007-03-29T01:26:00.000Z

Apologies for having abandoned the Blog for over three weeks. I know I have disappointed my readers (both of you), but I am a chapter away from completing a book and, unlike James Lileks, I cannot blog and write books (and chew gum) at the same time.

My apologies also to new commenter, Paul of Suffolk (no relation to Paul of Tarsus), who left the following comment on my last post:

Not sure guns and pressurised cabins really mix well !

Anyway I'd be genuinely interested in your comments on [his blog]: http://of-course.bravejournal.com/entry/22763

I won't go into the details concerning types of ammo that mix well enough with cabins while not mixing well with the human body, except to say that some pilots and all air marshalls have carried guns for years. There are ways, as they say, to do these things.

Paul's blog is interesting; he seems a rather typical sort of skeptic -- I don't expect believers in Europe or Britain. (And yes, I distinguish the two. The UK is part of the Anglosphere; The Continent is not. Despite both bodies sharing a gernally post-Christian secularist culture, they're not the same beast.)

Paul says that is Jesus did exist, he was a socialist. Strictly speaking, I disagree. since "socialist" carries inappropriate political baggage; but I do believe he preached a form of socialism (yes, he was a long-haired, radical, socialist Jew...) Unfortunately, it will only work in a benevolent absolute dictatorship among an infinitely benevolent citizenry. Since we won't see such a thing until Christ returns, "socialism" in any other form eventually equals, at best tyrrany; at worst, mass starvation and/or genocide. Ask Robert Mugabe's subjects.

Paul categorizes believers as, one, those who wish to lord it over others using the Almighty as an excuse and, two, the irredeemably thick who want a certainty about life that doesn't exist.

Remarkably, it seems he's never encountered an intelligent person of serious belief. I suppose the last such people in his nation passed with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. (Although Polkinghorne is still around, unless he's moved to Missouri or something). I know many who fit in one or both of Paul's categories, but I am surrounded by serious people who lead examined lives and yet believe in a literal and personal God.

As to God being on "our side" (as his title puts it), He is, but on everyone's equally; He is beyond our petty squabbles. An infinite being loves infinitely and equitably.

Maybe Paul is our archetypal modern citizen; the model denizen of the Age of Hooper. I don't know. I do know, however, that he used to blog under the title of "Ale Fan," and that means a) we have something in common, and b) he can't be all bad.

Monk

Another Dry Run

2007-03-05T22:53:00.000Z

Here's one you won't hear about in the MSM, via LGF:

“This is not meant to scare, but it probably will. Consider yourself informed and warned that the threat is real. This crew reported that they were not prepared that something of this nature could be happening to them.

Flt 62, Paris to MIA [Miami], a few weeks ago. 2 maybe 4 mid-eastern types causing minor disturbance from the get-go. Nothing that the FAs [flight attendants] couldn’t deal with, but, in hindsight, they seemed to be pushing the envelope. Cross-cabin activity, hanging out in the forward galley, complaining about everything, etc. Mid-Atlantic, the FO [First Officer, or Co-Pilot] called to return to the cockpit after his crew-rest break. One of the perps [perpetrators] was in the forward galley, was instructed by a FA to go aft, but didn’t. As the cockpit door opened, another perp suddenly appeared from around the galley, dropped his shoulder into FO while the first one got in the way of the FO’s attempt to block the other…here I’m not certain…so….wait for the movie.

FO (one of our first FFDO’s [Federal Flight Deck Officers*]) was about to pull his flashlight to use as a weapon in a counter attack, but thought better of it not knowing how many more perps he might have to fight, called “lockdown” to the FB [secondary “B” First Officer], inside the cockpit, who slammed the door. As soon as the perps heard the word lockdown, they retreated to their seats.

I’m not doing justice to the story, but, if not an attempt on the cockpit, this was a serious probe.

Crew considered divert, but since the threat diminished and seemed to be contained, they pressed on towards MIA. Flight was met in MIA by FBI, FAMS [Federal Air Marshal Service] (none aboard, by the way), AA [American Airlines] Security suits, etc. During the de-brief, which lasted several hours, the FAMs told the pilots that they would have “dropped” both of the perps with the first shove near the cockpit door. Perps claimed to not understand English, were detained for 4 days and deported, back to Paris, when they are free to attend Sunday school, tell their buddies of their Adventure and plan their next move.

Enjoying the story so far? It’s good we can’t carry guns on Int’l [International] trips, eh?

Upsetting is that we all have to learn of this, by happenstance. Why didn’t you and your last crew know of this? We took a delay yesterday while this FB detailed the entire event to my crew. Believe me, there were no disbelievers that the terrorist threat is real in my crew by the time we boarded.

I’m more than upset that this is still a secret! The FB is a man I’ve flown with often, trust completely and attended FFDO (Federal Flight Deck Officer) training with a year ago January. I hope I’ve presented his story accurately, but am certain that the basic details are very close.

More reason to give every airline pilot a sidearm.

Monk

A Message from Iraq

2007-02-26T17:11:00.001Z

Here's a message from the pointy end of the spear to the American-Idol-besotted lemmings back home.

I can hear this Marine easily saying these words:

"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to one who rises and sleeps under the very of freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said, "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand to post...

...Either way, I do not give a DAMN who won American Idol or the Oscars."

Damn the traitors and backstabbers. Damn all of them.

Monk

Nothing Like a Good Cuppa Joe and a Quagmire on a Friday Morning

2007-02-23T04:51:00.000Z

Yes, folks, yet another quagmire:

An American Congress has got itself into a war it can’t win. It is stuck. Can’t move forward, can’t move back. And Congress is starting to take casualties. It doesn’t know which way to turn. It’s a quagmire.

The situation is dire, and congressmen everywhere are increasingly beleaguered. They have been unable to come up with any strategy for success, but more seriously, they haven’t been able to agree on a strategy for failure. One of their leading lights, Rep. John Murtha, has already been reduced to an object of derision and the danger is he will drag more of them down with him.

Congress spent four days … four days! … yammering earnestly, and then cast a strong, uncompromising, forceful non-binding resolution with a self-negating caveat. The president of the United States, in reaction to this devastating congressional shock-and-awe campaign, said, “Thank you, that was interesting.”

Since then, the Senate minority, wielding flimsy, antiquated procedural weapons, has tied down the Democratic juggernaut in the Senate.

The situation is increasingly desperate. Americans, who had seen in the Democratic Congress a chance to extricate themselves from an unpopular conflict, appear to be coming to the conclusion that Bush’s war is a more attractive choice than the Democratic peace. Here are some of the ugly facts on the ground:

Public Opinion Strategies found that 67 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction and 60 percent think Iraq has no future as a stable democracy. But 57% believe “The Iraq War is a key part of the global war on terrorism” and that we have to keep our troops there and finish the job.

Hillary Clinton, trying out out-Obama Obama, is playing to the hard left in classic pre-primary strategy. That would be the 17% who favor immediate withdrawal.

A majority, 56 percent of likely voters, say “Even if they have concerns about his war policies, Americans should stand behind the President in Iraq because we are at war.” And 53 percent say, “The Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw the troops from Iraq.”

Other recent polls have found support for Bush’s troop surge surging, and while opposition to the war is high, so is opposition to (a) surrender, (b) losing, (c) defeat and (d) compelling the troops do do any of them same.

This poses a frightful dilemma for Dem Cong strategists. How to surrender without giving up? How to compel defeat without being seen to cause us to lose?

How indeed?

The "Dem Cong." Hadn't heard that one. I like it. Note by: Napalm sticks to Democrats.

Monk

"Surge" Iraq? Bomb Iran?

2007-02-19T05:27:00.000Z

Mudville Gazette, an excellent military site, has a good take on late the troop "surge." He says, with greater authority than I have in such matters, that the "surge" represents more a change in tactics than troop numbers:

Prime Minister Maliki has instructed his security forces that there will no longer be any political interference in military operations. Iraqi commanders have also been assured no neighborhood and no target is off limits.

That's a change for the good. Our troops have been operating under too-restrictive rules of engagement and rules for the use of force for most of the last several years. This declaration, coming from the Iraqi senior leadership, represents progress.

General Petraeus is adamant that to win this conflict we have to protect the population. Consequently, Iraqi army, Iraqi police, and coalition forces will actually live together in joint security stations throughout Baghdad in order to be closer to the Iraqi people that they are protecting. The additional forces will also enable us to create more transition teams to assist, teach, mentor and coach the Iraqi security forces. There will be both an increase in the number and size of the teams, and they will reach down to the lower-level units within the Iraqi army and police units.

Another change for the good, straight out of the Army and Marines' excellent (if airpower-ignorant) new manual on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24. .pdf available here. (Thanks, Rant Street.) We are finally doing something other than trying to chase insurgents out of their sanctuaries and then returning to our cantonments. That, and convoying between cantonments, is what most of our troops have spent the last two years doing. Al qaeda, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and other "interested parties" have chosen Iraq as their place to make a stand and have staked much of their future on hurting us there. This is their fundamental strategic error (just as ours was to assume things would automatically go well once we toppled Saddam). So far, we've let our enemies win by not taking and holding their sanctuaries. Now..."straight out of the book"...we will deny those sanctuaries, stabilize them enough to hand them over to Iraqi security entirely, and then be able to use US forces to seal the borders with Syria and Iran. This represents what has changed much better than the MSM's stories of a "surge" in troops designed to "quell the insurrection" with "brute force."

How goes it? Powerlinehas a good take:

The sense is that the Sunni insurgents (or at least elements thereof) are choosing to stay and fight, while the Shia militias are mostly biding their time. This was proabably to be expected. The Sunni killers are the more desperate of our two adversaries. Moreover, to the extent that the Shia militias melt away, the role of the Sunni insurgents becomes increasingly problematic even within the Sunni community because they no longer can claim to be providing protecting against said militias. If the insurgents leave, it's unclear that they can return. If they stay but don't fight, they probably will be hunted down with increasing efficiency as their support erodes. Thus, their best option is probably to stay, blow things up, and hope that the Democrats can find a way promptly to abort our effort.

The Domocrats aborting our efforts? Say not so! A token example: John "Marine" Murtha is looking to hamstring our troops in Iraq, in order to ensure we can't win. This accords well with the aims of the left. If this isn't (or doesn't beome) Vietnam, how can the left congratulate itself for its romantic heroism, standing astride The Man's evil plot, yelling, "stop"? Allowing our troops fewer, not more, restrictions might actually create conditions that permit victory -- and US-Iraqi victory is the last thing the Democrats and the left want.

Back to Mudville: our friends there did make one intriguing comment that warrants touching on--

I suspect the media - in spite of vigorous denials by the administration - is trying to portray the US as on the brink of war with Iran. This allows Democrats - and Hillary Clinton in particular - to vociferously oppose this non-existent war. (To be fair, this also gets some conservatives very excited over the prospect of "taking out" Iran - their hopes will be dashed.) [emphasis added]

Astute, in the main...but I must address the issue of conservatives' "hopes being dashed." This comment may result from a perfectly understandable ground-pounder's misunderstanding of how we would go to war with Iran, should that become necessary. As I've pointed out elsewhere, we are able to take effective military action against both Iran's ruling regime (to isolate, not "decapitate") and its atomic infrastructure. However, the other way to read that comment is, I think, the correct way: their (our) hopes will be dashed because there is no reason to attack Iran right now. In fact, military effectiveness right now might be politically counterproductive -- and thus counterproductive in terms of producing the desired end state -- because Ahmandinechimp is not particularly popular in his own country right now. He came out of the political woodwork promising housing and riches for his country's poor population. Mismanagement and socialism-lite in the country have led to extremely high inflation and unemployment. This report does a good job of showing the situation Iran's leaders are facing -- and things have only gotten worse since it was published. It's so bad, you'd think Jimmy Carter was in charge of the country. Iran's large middle class is very discontented and may yet make things untenable for Iran's "elected" government and the Mullahs that really rule. Ahmandinejad is already routinely heckled at public appearances where he is actually in front of the public, rather than before a field of Revolutionary Guards goosestepping past ballistic missiles, or in front of a crowd of adoring savages at the UN. Much of Iran's atomic bluster is designed to rally the country around what the regime wants the public to believe is a foreign threat. This is also why Iran is playing its hand so openly in Iraq. It's always the way with failing dictatorships: rally the country around the flag to take their minds off of crappy conditions at home.

No...right now we should let events take their course in Iran. We can always bomb later if the regime does not bog down in its own "quagmire." Still, despite Mudville's opinion on the matter, we can do what we need to with bombing, should the time come.

links to a good summary of the situation in Iraq and Iran from Steve Natschke:

I recently de-mobilized after spending a total of three years at CENTCOM HQ beginning in Feb 2003. I didn't work on the OIF plan but I do know something about it. Phase IV was the least planned (by CENTCOM) part of OIF since nobody knew what would happen after the end of major combat activities and the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was supposed to do the planning and carry out many of the activities. In the end, there was little humanitarian assistance to be carried out and little reconstruction due to combat. Declaration of Phase IV has many legal implications in regard to the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Land Warfare, etc... I also believe that it is the demarcation of when the Department of State takes the lead. In any case, the slides, if they show anything, show that the enemy has a vote in how things turn out.

As I see it, things are turning out better than we expected from a GWOT point of view. Al Qaeda's decision to make a stand in Iraq has provided us with an opportunity to deal them a significant blow. They have invested many resources - there aren't that many suicide bombers out there - and much of their reputation counts on defeating us in Iraq. All we have to do is stay and we win. Iran is over-playing its hand and will see just as much trouble on their side of the border as they instigate in Iraq. All we have to do is stay and we win.

On the down side, of course, is our inability to play in the information war. I think this is part of the reason that the terrorists and the Democrats are natural allies - they are willing to say the most outrageous things and no one holds them to account. The truth may be on our side but it is not enough - it needs to be marketed. Unfortunately that is easier said than done and we, as a government, are not set up to do it. In fact, we are not set up to win wars efficiently. The very structure of our government prevents us from prosecuting wars efficiently and I doubt a change would be politically feasible. Aside from DoD, no one prepares for their part of the war fight and they don't train for or fund any activities that contribute to war time success. For now we will have to settle for less efficient war fighting

he's right about losing the "strategic communication" campaign (the doctrinally correct name for what he's talking about), but his central paragraph is the most important: things are better because our enemies have decided to make a stand in Iraq, Iran is overplaying its hand (because it has to for domestic consumption), and "all we have to do is stay and we win."

True. Unfortunately, we live in 2007, not 1957. There is no broad, bipartisan consensus about how to deal with the enemies of the West. And that is our greatest strategic weakness, one our enemies within islam and on the left are counting on.

Monk

On Iran: A Disease and its Cure

2007-02-14T22:25:00.000Z

Andrew Sttaford at National Review Online quotes some "straight talking from Anne Applebaum" concerning the possiblilty of military action against Iran. It reperesents a fairly good summary of the "we can't hit Iran and do any good" school of thought, so it deserves some serious attention.Here's most of the article, along with my comments:

Fact Number One:Iran is a large country containing 75 million people, in possession of a large and competent army.

The idea that Iran possesses a comptent army, born of communist/fascist-like images of troops goose-stepping before the Mullahs and Monkey Man in Tehran does not equal a competent miitary. Four well-placed, well-guided Mark-84s, followed up by a few CBUs to catch the stragglers, would take care of the complete parade. The ability to look good on parade does not equal military competence, at least against the US and UK. Besides, taking out large, competent armies is an American specialty.

We don't have the men, we don't have the machines and we don't have the money to stage an invasion.

Who, I might ask, has expressed any inclination to invade Iran on the ground? Where does this (prevalent) idea come from? Certainly not from competent military sources, who know what has to be done and how to do it. The mere question proves ignorance of how the military works and of the capabilities of air and space power.

If we were even to contemplate such a thing, we would have to reduce force levels
elsewhere, but where? In Iraq, the policy is to send more troops, the war in Afghanistan isn't going away anytime soon,

Of course we would have to move troops from somewhere else; one of the reasons we will not seriously contemplate putting "boots on the ground" in country. American ground forces in Iraq present a much more credible threat as a coercive presence -- implying that we can invade if the need arises. Implied pain is often a much more powerful convincer than actual pain. Military action against Iran will come from the air (and from sea-based air, of course).

...and, just as diplomacy there is starting to produce results, this isn't a great time to start monkeying about with the military balance on the Korean peninsula either...

No...a different situation presents itself there, because the DPRK possesses the ability to reduce Seoul to rubble -- causing millions of casualties -- even if we do succesfully take down their atomic infrastucture and national leaderhship from the air. The tens of thousands of gun tubes sitting in caves, pointed south, already have their orders. We can't act from the air there without incurring horrendous friendly civilian death and chaos. Iran presents no such difficulties -- its atomic capabilities are more dipersed, but still accessable, and its leadership/command-control infrastructure is just as contralized. AND...a vital difference...Iran does not present a credible conventional threat to us, in Iraq or elsewhere, and they know it.

This is one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory, and he is already fighting an unpopular war.

Who better to launch further miltary action? His popularity has already tubed. What are the Demos and the people going to do -- vote him out of office? The Senate cannot vote to impeach, because it only takes 41 senators to fillibuster and, last I looked, the Repubs had 49 (and possibly Lieberman). It wouldn't be popular, but it would be effective and his actions might go down in history as equivalent to Truman's policy of containment, roundly criticized from both sides of the aisle back then. It may also contribute to a postive legacy and make his successor's job, Demo or Repub, easier.

More to the point, his credibility on intelligence matters was damaged - perhaps the better word is "eviscerated" - by the Iraq intelligence debacle, so no one is likely to believe his claims about Iranian nuclear prowess or Iranian anything, whatever the evidence.

Yes...it shows the danger of believing what the opinion of the beaurocratically mired, consensus-oreinted, and politically hostile intelligence "community" thinks about threats. Much of the information on Iran's atomic and missile threats come from what the Russians used to call "national technical means" -- factual inteligence that is subject to very little analytical interference. Much more credible stuff.

More to the point, Iran is not Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had been under UN surveillance for a decade. It is a sovereign state which has relatively normal relations with America's allies, not to mention China and Russia.

America, with respect to this war and future military action anyway, has no real allies save within the Anglosphere, and even if it did, China and Russia would certaily not be among them (even though Russia is fighting much the same fight we are.

If we were even to contemplate such a thing, we would have to reduce force levels elsewhere, but where? In Iraq, the policy is to send more troops, the war in Afghanistan isn't going away anytime soon, and, just as diplomacy there is starting to produce results, this isn't a great time to start monkeying about with the military balance on the Korean peninsula either.

Again, no one in his or her right mind is considering a ground campaign in Iran. It's a huge country with naturally defensable approaches to its interior cities. Its population would probably be less hospitable to our invasion than Iraq's was. It might wind up a lot like Spain did to Napoleon, even through his troops were vastly superior in quality for most of that campaign. Our commanders know this.

Fact Number Two: even if we were to contemplate a more limited military strike - the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, for example - there are some pretty serious obstacles to overcome. The most serious is the fact that we don't know where all Iran's nuclear facilities are located, which is not a minor problem if we are contemplating their destruction. Even if we could hit a few of them, which we probably could, that would merely delay Iran's nuclear programme by a few years.

You underestimate the airpower of the dark side. Were not talking about a few cruise missiles thrown casually at empty training camps, as the Clinton Administration did. We're talking a full-blown campaign to destroy fixed infrastructure, command/control mechanisms and missile facilities (along with, most likely, attempted regime decaptation and suppression of Iran's air defense system). President Bush is making the case for regime take-down by connecting the al-Quds brigade's cadres in Iraq directly to its national government -- Achdumminimonkey and Mullah al-Shaitan are valid and legal miltary targets only if they are directly tied to command of military operations. Further, it won't matter if we don't get everything in Iran's atomic program. Setting them back ten years is a still a laudible goal. Ask the Israelis about bombing the Osirak atomic complex in 1981 about the validity of such a "limited" objetive.

What's more, we will have demonstrated that we have the capability to do this, which will create significant coercive power -- over Iran and other nations -- and our capability will only be better in ten years. An atomic bomb program is a big industrial enterprise and is much harder to hide and harden than chemical and, especially, biological capabilities are. This will not change with time. Even if Iran locates its atomic infrastructure below ground, we have a) weapons capable of reaching them, and b) can seal them underground for a long time (we're pretty good at finding air vents, for example).

Such a limited result hardly justifies either the political fallout or the (literal) environmental fallout which would follow. Even the Israelis, who do indeed believe that Iran's nuclear programme is designed to create the bomb that could destroy their country, appear unconvinced, at least for the moment, that selective bombing can succeed.

Bullshit. Much of the immediate political fallout will sound negative, but the real impact will be for governments around the world -- even our "friends" -- to rock back on their heels and say, "holy f&*K. The US can do this and they're serious." This will yield considerable coercive power and that is ultimately more important than popular opinion, despite what the chattering class thinks of the matter. Also, a campaign conducted from the air would take down much more than just the atomic program's indutrial infrastructure: air defense systems, Revoltionary Guards command/contol (C2) systems, central government C2 systems, making Tehran dark without killing anybody (an old Star Trek tactic) just to show that we can, and, if the right opportunity presents itself, perhaps taking down the regime's leaders as well.

Fact Number Three: neither at home, nor internationally, does the Bush Administration have a shred of support for military action of any kind.

And this is relevant because......?

This is one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory, and he is already fighting an unpopular war. More to the point, his credibility on intelligence matters was damaged - perhaps the better word is "eviscerated" - by the Iraq intelligence debacle, so no one is likely to believe his claims about Iranian nuclear prowess or Iranian anything, whatever the evidence. More to the point, Iran is not Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had been under UN surveillance for a decade. It is a sovereign state which has relatively normal relations with America's allies, not to mention China and Russia.

To quote one the great generals of the 20th century, Vo Nugyen Giap, "that fact, while true, is also irrelevant." The fact that Bush is in negative popularity numbers and is still digging gives him an advantage a first-term Repub or any Demo won't have: leeway -- the weather guage. Who cares? He's a fascist, jack-booted imperialist, evil, evil, evil cow-monkey (did I mention evil) to the netroots crowd already. Military action now may give moderates the same opinion, but who cares if action now makes the next president's job much easier?

Further, the UN's opinion? No longer relevant or credible. Thanks, Kofi!

Fact Number Four: contrary to some other British press reports, America is "talking" to Iran, or at any rate using diplomacy to deal with what is a nasty regime. In fact, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has pretty much staked her reputation on her belief that diplomacy, in co-operation with Germany, France and Britain, will produce results in Iran, just as it now appears to have done in North Korea. So far, it is true, these results - a weak UN Security Council resolution and some huffing and puffing - are thin.

I hope Condi Rice understands that negotiation and treaties can at best delay the use of force when that becomes inevitable. In the worst cases, it becomes a vehicle that a weaker power can use to strengthen itself while hamstringing a superior power. The Washington Treaties between World War I and II come to mind, as does SALT I. Diplomacy never works unless it involves a power with demonstrated unlimited power over a defeated adversary using it to hold knife to the defeated enemy' throat while going to concentrate on something else. (Most of Napoleon's diplomacy comes to mind.)

Nevertheless, President Bush on Monday night repeated his preference for diplomacy, calling the Iranians a "good, honest, decent people" with a "government that is belligerent, loud, noisy, threatening". America's, objective, he went on to explain, "is to keep the pressure so rational folks will show up and say it's not worth the isolation". For those who need a translation from Texan dialect, that means: "We really do hope they'll remove Ahmedinijad as rapidly as possible."

Standard presidential boiler plate. Maybe ahmedinisimian will be overthrown by his people. Maybe pigs will learn to fly while it begins raining beer. He has to throw around this kind of bullshit.

Of course it is true that American rhetoric about Iran has lately taken on a harsher tone, and that America is using some of what one Middle East expert, Tamara Wittes, calls "coercive diplomacy".

The administration has started to apply selective sanctions - restricting Iran's access to hard currency, for example - and has pointed out, rather late in the game, the fact of Iranian support for Iraqi militias and terrorists. They've sent a few ships in Iran's direction, and have also tried to get other Arab states to push back against Iranian intervention in Iraq as well as Lebanon.

There is some evidence that this sort of thing is working. It does indeed seem as if the good, honest, decent people of Iran are getting sick of their loud and noisy leaders, at least if election results can be believed.

Last weekend, Iran's nuclear negotiator also sounded more conciliatory when he offered to re-open the stalled Iranian-European negotiations. Iran's president has also gone out of his way to say that his country poses "no threat to Israel", despite earlier promises to "wipe Israel off the map".

Whatever. An aggressive will always tell a weak-willed adversary what it wants to hear.

But it is also true that at least one of Iran's tactics is also working. For some time now, the Iranians have been trying to play America off against Europe, so as to relieve the pressure on themselves. After all, if there aren't joint American-European sanctions, then the Iranians will find it that much easier to ignore them. Thus do the "war in Iran" headlines - guaranteed to stir up fear and loathing of the American government - feed right into Iranian interests.

Which matters: for we are at an unusual juncture in history. If Britain, France and Germany go along with America's "coercive diplomacy", that diplomacy might stand a slim chance of success. If they do not, then yes, the distant, but not completely unthinkable military option might begin to loom larger in the minds of politicians in both Washington and Tel Aviv.

Having started an unpopular war already, having no prospect of being re-elected to anything, President Bush might decide that, in the absence of allies, there is no other way. For the first time in a long time, it really is up to Europeans to influence what comes next.

Like I said before, Bush has the weather guage becuase he has nothing to lose. That's why his rhetoric is becoming more "coercive" (how can rhetoric "coerce" without force or its implied use? Go back and read your Schelling) as the planning goes on...

Monk

Outrage, a Bit Late

2007-02-13T04:48:00.000Z

I've met Bill Arkin. He did some fine reporting back the '90s concerning Iraqi WMD and UNSCOM's failures to adequately monitor Iraqi programs. When he held a colloquium with some of us back when I taught at Air University, he did not seem anti-military, especially for a self-proclaimed liberal.

So it came as something of a surprise when, week before last, he delivered one of the most egregious anti-military screeds yet heard from the left. It has taken me a week to calm down enough to respond in a relatively reasoned manner. Thursday before last he wrote:

I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people...
>
...[NBC reporter] Engel relayed how "troops here say they are increasingly frustrated by American criticism of the war. Many take it personally, believing it is also criticism of what they've been fighting for."

...These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect...

...Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order...

...So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

...But it is the United States, and the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work...

...I'll accept that the soldiers, in order to soldier on, have to believe that they are manning the parapet, and that's where their frustrations come in. I'll accept as well that they are young and naïve and are frustrated with their own lack of progress and the never changing situation in Iraq. Cut off from society and constantly told that everyone supports them, no wonder the debate back home confuses them.

America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform. I don't believe America needs a draft though I imagine we'd be having a different discussion if we had one.

Outrageous. I have never seen a more insulting swipe at the military and their families.

Last week, I wrote a fisking of his column, using language that was very insulting to the public, to those elements of the public who don't support the war, to Mister Arkin, and to members of his lineage. I will not repeat it here. However, decent wage? That's why half of the enlisted in my previous squadron were on food stamps. We are not robots, we are not idiots, we are not baby killers...and, Mister Arkin...the public owes us, we do not owe the public.

Preventing the kind of stab in the back we recieved from the mainstream media and the anti-war crowd in Vietnam is one of the main reasons I joined the military...voluntarily Mister Arkin, not as a mercenary...and I vowed then that I would never see my country go through this again -- taking whatever means are necesary to prevent it..."all enemies, foreign and domestic"...is the oath we swear. Those are words Mister Arkin would do well to remember. He would do well to remember these words as well:

Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? ...I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for [the public] and curse the [military]; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that [a trooper's] death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use them as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand to post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think...

...Mister Arkin. 'Nuf said.

Monk

Update 23 Feb 07: Further Bill Arkin sophistic treason:

The troops need a little re-education...

As Stalin did in his "re-education" camps, presuably.

...I'm also critical of these troops' commanders, who indoctrinate these troops and teach these troops about the nature of American government, about the war, about the struggle they're involved in...

Mindless automatons and blank slates, which the evil officers inclucate war-kill-war, like the clone armies in Star Wars.

...Ultimately, those young men are our servants, we are not thier survants...

Yeeze. True as far as it goes, but I do not serve those who represent domestic enemies, per the sacred oath I swore so many years ago. There is a superiority to our domnestic enemies, Mister Arkin, and thus there is a Rubicon to be crossed when more of the public opposes the troops than support it. We may be pretty f&ckin close to that line now, you son of a bitch. Closer than you realize.

Okay, I'm getting emotional again. Hard not to when the issue of "the public" vs.the "miltary" comes up.

Arkin also offered a non-apology in a CSpan press conference the day following the blogstorm of reaction to his orinal screed. Apology most certainly not accepteed Mr Arkin.

Mr Arkin also responded with a condescending Wapo column a few days after the controversy over his remark started to boil (albeit the MSM didn't pick it up for about a week after the original comunm):

The Arrogant and Intolerant Speak Out

These are opinions about the war in Iraq and the "war" against terrorism. They aren't facts. I understand people need to believe that the United States is engaged in a grand and noble mission to continue to support the deaths and sacrifices being made by American forces. Nonetheless, there is also an equally valid opinion that not only is the United States NOT involved in some fight for our lives in Iraq but that our military actions merely increases and complicates our insecurities tomorrow.

An army Major with the 1st Cavalry in Baghdad writes: "there is no way to accurately opine about the war unless you've been on the ground."

KJ (and many others) adds that I am just "sitting in the lap of luxury that is the United States."

Again, I understand the frustration of those in uniform and the supporters of the war. But these are not the only people who have a valid opinion, and there is great danger for the nation - as Bush-Cheney and company have already demonstrated - when people arrogate to themselves the sole determinant to make a judgment about national security.

The Army Major goes on to say that "soldiers -- unlike journalists -- have values inculcated from the very beginning of basic training."

D speaks of "last week's leftist freak show in D.C." to describe anti-war protest.

"Sitting in the lap of luxury" hits the nail on the head. There are many in the US who perform vital and noble roles -- firemen, doctors, ministers, etc. -- and perform them well. This group most certainly does not include journalists -- the chattering class -- nor does it include those Americans who care more about the next episode of "American Idol" and when their next shit is coming -- and who disregard thier right to vote -- than it does about those with the vocation of defending our way of life. And it is a vocation, Mister Arkin. Make no mistatke about it. Most every member believes he is defending that "wall."

Further...if understand you correctly, Mister Arkin, those with pro-war sentiments -- especially those in the mindwashed military -- don't have the right to defend the war, because they are members of the poplation living under the delusions created by our Evil Masters, while you and your noble Resistance are the only ones with the moral right to speak out against the war, precisely beause you don't support it. Am I getting this right? And those who believe we are engaged in a larger war than Afghanistan and Iraq entail are equally mindwashed and have similarly pathetic beliefs.

For you and those like you, Mister Arkin: there are only two types of opinion, valid and invalid. Generally, those closest to the source on which the opinion is based have the advantage of being bolstered by facts.

Monk

Global Balding

2007-02-01T17:21:00.000Z

Via Pajams Media, England's daily mail has an interesting story about how (human caused! -- Al Gore) "global warning" (junk science! -- reputable scientific community) has caused hedgehogs to "go bald" -- losing their prickles:

A nice, soft fluffy coat is of little use to a hedgehog.

But poor old Glen is having to make do without any prickles - apparently thanks to global warming.

Vets believe his freak appearance was caused by the stress of missing out on his winter hibernation.

Alison Pearson, who runs the nearby Border Beasties hedgehog sanctuary, said: "A lot of creatures miss out on hibernation. They don't recognise it is autumn because the weather is too warm or they hibernate and wake up after a few days of mild weather.

"We believe this little fellow missed out on his hibernation altogether and the stress of still being awake and trying to fend for himself has caused him to shed his prickles."

What could be the cause of this except the SUVs and cow farts that Al Gore -- now up for an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize -- has identified as the source of the 1...no, 3... no, 350-degree heating that the surface of the Earth is melting under. If the bourgeoisie only stopped driving its gas guzzlers and quit exloiting cowdom, all would be put right (or left).

Never mind that this is junk science. There has been a one to two degree rise in surface temperatures over the last few decades, but there is no direct evidence that this is solely, or even partly, due to human activity.

Meawhile, the sheeple have been stirred into a froth of global warming worry due toAl's and the MSM's / leftist establishment's uncritical effort to undermine any form of Capitalism that does not directly benefit them (like the small private jet and mansion (say...28,000 square feet) industries).

It was amazing to me back in the early '90s how quickly the left turned from support for communism and the Soviet Union to support for the anti-Capitalist green movement. They didn't miss a beat. The fringes of the environmental movement want nothing short of an enviromentally / Veganish new Dark Age to "bring us back to year zero." They would, of course, running the dictatorship of the envronmentally-aware bourgeoisie. Only now, however, are they wielding significant influence through the global warning scare.

To do my part, I drive a large SUV (and before that drove a high-top van that got 10-11 MPG), a fast sedan, and next year am contemplating buying a large diesel truck to better pull my dual-gas-engine 24-foot boat. As a conspicous consumer and polluter, it's all I can afford for now, sadly. But I drive a gas-powered ridding lawn mower. Might buy some cows too and feed them burritos laced with jalapenos.

Ahh, the sweet smell of bovine flatulence... Next to afterburned jet fuel, it's the best smell of freedom I know!

Monk

Is Europe Lost?

2007-01-30T19:07:00.000Z

Is Europe already lost to islam? Bernard Lewis, the world's foremist islamic scholar, thinks so:

Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.

The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.” Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?” The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

Lewis, whose numerous books include the recent What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, would set no timetable for this drastic shift in Europe, instead focusing on the process, which he said would be assisted by “immigration and democracy.” Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.

“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism,” said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

The threat of extremist Islam goes far beyond Europe, Lewis stressed, turning to the potential impact of Iran going nuclear under its current regime

You surprised? Shouldn't be.

Monk

Death of a Mahdi

2007-01-29T18:12:00.000Z

In Arabic, "Mahdi" means "Messiah." The words are directly cognate and the second is a Greek attempt at transliteration of the first. People of the region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent have been looking for one for at least three thousand years.

Of course, there can be only one -- an idea that's lost on muslims.

The real one died on a cross about two thousand years ago.

But that is not the topic of this post. Since Shi'a and Sunni separated following the death of Mohammed, the Shi'a have had (at least) dozens of Mahdi. One died of typhus a few years before Lord Kitchener's army tore his troops apart with machine guns at Omdurman in 1898 (where Winston Churchill won his first fame).

Another died on January 28th, apparently at the hands of Iraqi infantry, supported by US helicopters, tanks, and (most effectively, of course) aircraft.

The fact that the Iraqi Army can dispose of extraneous Mahdi is tesimony to the improvement in their capabilities, but you won't hear that in the mainstream media. There, you'll only hear that an American helicopter was shot down and two Americans were killed -- just as you would have heard from them as they were stabbing the US military in the back during Vietnam.

This also shows that the US and Iraqi governments are making some progress in counterinsurgency, although I was hoping they'd go after Sunni insurgents first, especially with the Shi'ite holiday of Ashura coming up so soon. It sounds as if Iraqi and US forces encountered both, but the Mahdi's army lost most of its fighting strength -- around 600. Good job, boys -- both Iraqi and American

Monk

Izmud: Squishy Conservatism

2007-01-16T05:50:00.000Z

Correspondent Izmud left a comment after a long hiatus. I'm glad to see him back. Welcome! He comments:

Izmud scored 22 -- very interesting. I didn't like some of the choices.

He refers to this post. I have to admit that I didn't like some of the choices either, although I scored a 35 (the higher the score, the more conservative the participant.) I suspect Izmud is much further up the scale, naturally inclined toward a 45 (40 is the max), which puts him only five points behind Hitler.

Nonetheless, his published score puts him in line between Colin Powell and Bush XLI: a squishy-soft, fence-sitting "moderate." You know the type: right between "don't kill too many of the enemy when we go to war" and "let's raise taxes more than any Democrat in history" after promising "no new taxes."

Let's build a political quiz of our own, with real choices like:

"Which better describes your attitude toward foreign policy:"
A _ Fascist jackbooted Amerikkka deserved 9/11
B - Kill them all; let God sort them out

My answer is "B"

Monk

Iraq's Natural State

2007-01-08T18:03:00.000Z

Tech Central Station today features an excellent summary of a brilliant pamphlet and expands its discussion to include implications for our venture in Iraq. The book is The Natural State: The Political Economy of Non-Development (available as a .pdf). The article is "Iraq's Natural State," by Arnold Kling.

The Natural State delineates three types of societies:

Primitive orders are small bands of hunter-gatherers.... Limited-access orders are societies that provide meaningful political and economic rights only to narrow elites. Open-access orders are capitalist democracies that give political and economic rights to most citizens. [The pamphlet's authors] argue that limited-access orders are the "natural state:" they are stable, they resist economic progress, and they only rarely make the transition to open-access orders.

The pamphlet goes on to describe the characteristics of the limited access orders that make up the bulk of world governments:

The limited access order is a social equilibrium. The equilibria share common characteristics:

1) Control of violence through elite privileges.

2) Limits on access to trade.

3) Relatively strong property right protection for elites and relatively weak property right protection for non-elites. To the extent a natural state is characterized by the rule of law, it is for elites.

4) Restrictions on entry into and exit from economic, political, religious, educational, and military organizations.

The central feature of the transition is the development of impersonal exchange among elites. Personal exchange involves a personal, on-going relationship between the exchange parties so that repeated dealings can be a central aspect of exchange enforcement. If one party cheats another, they risk losing the relationship and the benefits it implies. The necessity for repeated interaction limits the range of exchanges of any one individual.

In contrast, impersonal exchange involves parties without long-term personal relationships who may make a single exchange. Impersonal exchange requires that the parties to the exchange be confident enough that their rights and obligations will be secure despite the absence of repeated dealings. Impersonal exchange therefore requires some form of third-party enforcement.

The pamphlet argues that there are three conditions necessary for a limited-access order to transition to an open-access society:

1. The rule of law for controlling elites

2. Perpetual life for basic social institutions (i.e., not requiring just personal relations between their leaders to remain functioning)

3. Civilian control of the military

Ultimately, institutions are held together by personal, family, or tribal loyalty. Open-order societies are impossible under such structures. The pamphlet also states that the natural alternative to the limited-access order is chaos (and, as our founding fathers understood, ultimately greater tyrrany).

Implications for Iraq. Kline states:

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a limited-access order, or "natural state." NWW claim that such states resist the change to open-access orders. They resist our attempts to stimulate economic development, because true economic development requires fair competition, which threatens the privileges that are the stabilizing element in limited-access orders. Although NWW do not discuss "nation-building," it seems reasonable to infer that they would take an equally dim view of that notion.

Iraq was never on the "doorstep" of becoming an open-access order. The major factions are not willing to give up their weapons and concede military power to a central coalition. There are no perpetual-lived organizations that can make long-term contractual commitments. There is not even a willingness among factions to grant one another rights under the rule of law.

Accordingly, I would say that there is no chance that the United States will succeed in its objective of establishing an open-access order in Iraq. The best we can hope to do is restore Iraq to a natural state, meaning a limited-access order where rights and power are exclusive to certain elites, who will be subject neither to economic nor political competition as we know it.

For a limited-access order to emerge, the leaders of each major faction in Iraq must have a stake in peace. For each leader, that means having enough exclusive economic and political rights to feel that he has more to lose than to gain by resorting to violence.

If we want to set up a limited-access order, then we have to determine which factions we want to have in the governing coalition, and we must give each of them something of value in return for maintaining peace. To put it crudely (so to speak), one could imagine giving each major party in a coalition government control over a particular set of oil wells. Factions that we do not want in the coalition (Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example) would have to be hunted down and killed. Factions that receive an allocation of oil wells but continue to engage in violence would have to be declared outlaws and deprived of personal security, with their oil resources confiscated and redistributed to other factions.

Daunting prospects, but accurate I think. Iraq ruled by a strong oligarchy well-disposed toward us better than Iraq's growing chaos,

Monk

A Political Quiz

2007-01-05T21:52:00.000Z

Via Instapundit, here's a neat little quiz to determine your "political quotient." Zero (approproately enough) equals extreme leftist veiws like Jesse Jackson's. The highest score (40) puts you in company with Ronald Reagan. I scored a 35, despite broad agreement with liberal friends like Chefjef on many issues.

What's your score?

Monk

First Amendment, Smurst Amendment...

2007-01-05T05:24:00.000Z

An indication of what our incoming congressional majority thinks of the right to free speech, via Pajamas Media:

Rep. John Conyers [Democrat - Michiganistan] sponsors HR 288 which “condemn[s] bigotry and religious intolerance, and recogniz[es] that holy books of every religion should be treated with dignity and respect.” Baron Bodissey calls it “a CAIR-sponsored Trojan horse, ready to be rolled through the gates into the First Amendment.”

Pelosi's agenda: Let's make the whole nation a bit more like the UC Berkeley campus. Let's see if it passes.

Monk

In Holland, Christianity is Dead...Long Live Christianity!

2007-01-04T21:36:00.000Z

Via the Weekly Standard, a very encouraging report from the Netherlands -- no longer a nether land for Christian worship:

God is back in Europe's most notoriously liberal country. Or rather: The Dutch are moving back to God. It seems an implausible hypothesis. After all, Europe was supposed to have entered the realm of post-Christianity, to use C.S. Lewis's term--a state of eternal unbelief from which there is no return. And yet, [authors of a recent study] claim, the Dutch are turning back. Take the almost unnoticed reintroduction of crucifixes and other religious artifacts into the classrooms of Catholic schools throughout the country. Years of gradual but seemingly unstoppable secularization have given way to a reaffirmation of old religious identities.

The reason the Christian population of Holland has stopped shrinking and is likely to avoid further decline is a phenomenon that until now has been largely overlooked by commentators on Dutch politics and society: Christian immigration. Analysts usually focus on the one million Muslim immigrants and their offspring who have made the Netherlands their home since the early 1950s. But in the past decade, Muslim immigration has been overtaken by a larger stream of immigrants, namely Christians from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. An SCP estimate puts the number of Christian immigrants in Holland at around 700,000 -- and rising fast. Recent immigration reports suggest that for every new Muslim moving to Holland, there are at least two new Christian immigrants.

Excellent news all around. Let's hope this phenomenon extends all across the Decadent Old Man. This sort of demographic pressure will change the face of Europe -- for the better -- and perhaps prevent a war with islam for its possession (or at least help us win that war...)

Monk

The First Hundred Hours...

2007-01-04T05:50:00.000Z

...begins today. We will see what the new Congress holds for us. Will the uni-partisan hundred-hour sequestration produce a responsible and ambitious legislative agenda that will help bridge partisan divides, or will it try to usher in a tribute to Haight-Ashbury hippy culture native to its leader, Nancy Pelosi (which translates as "water pipe" in idiomatic Italian). Some of the initiatives sound reasonable: a reputed moratorium on pork barrel bill riders and severe curtailment of lobbyist perks. Much of the rest remains murky, and probably deliberately so, since it may not play well in Peoria. Or across the aisles.

Again, these first few weeks and months of the 110th Congress will give us a chance to see whether the Democrats will attempt to govern responsibly (which for them means "business as usual in Washington") or will attempt to play to their radicalized base (where Speaker Pelosi claims her roots).

Much of their program is to be revealed today and tomorrow. Those of us disgusted with both parties will watch carefully to see whether Iperial Government continues its perk-filled romp, the pot-head left attempts to usher in Hippy Heaven in the halls of the Capitol, or there will be some genuine effort to change things for the good. I honestly expect some combination of the three.

I do not fear what I know is coming from the left in foreign policy: leftist internationalism, appeasement, and defeat in Iraq. Every sign of weakness we show now only hastens and makes worse the war we will have to fight later. Hastening it is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Nothing the Democrats can do, short of winning the war we are already fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, can prevent the war that is to come. By hastening it, they may even reduce the severity of the measures necessary to win it. In any case, their inevitable wavering and appeasement will certainly encourage our eneies -- perhaps making them take us for granted, as did Germany and Japan in WW II. Let's take the long view and hope so.

Monk

Update 4 Jan: I t appears they've gotten off to a decent start, by booting Rep WIlliam "Frosty" Jeferson off the House Ways and Means Committee by an ooverwhelming majority, after a debate in which only speaker Pelosi publically defended his removal. Several members of the Democratic Black Caucus objected that Poleosi was acting like an "empress," but she held her ground and defended the move. This bodes well. I'm no fan of Pelosi's, but this is an encouraging sign and represents a much more neutral stance than I expected from the incoming Congress.

Zachary

2006-12-26T13:43:00.000Z

It is very sad to have to report the death of another young hero. Zachary Sisson, the son of Lyle and Lois Sisson, passed away on 15 Dec. at the age of ten, after battling brain cancer for a couple of years. The story below shows how and why Zach was a hero.

Lyle, his father, was best man at my wedding to KANH many moons ago and Lois, his mom, has also been a great friend over the years. Lyle and I were squadron mates for years, flew together, and shared many...uh...interesting...experiences. I knew vaugely that Zach had been ill on and off for some time, but we had no idea of the specifics, or the severity, until a mutual friend told us of Zach's death five days ago. I remember Zach as an infant and only wish I had known the fine young man he had grown into. I deeply regret that I slipped in the last few years as both a friend and a correspondent, and so lost the opportunity.

The Rocky Mountain News (which has been a stalwart in reporting the highjinx of Ward Churchill) had a very fine story on his ordeal, reprinted in full:

Fifth-grader Zachary Sisson, 10, displayed a buoyant spirit
By Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News
December 26, 2006

Sisson endured the hell of cancer and died from it Dec. 15 at age 10. But he moved through his trials with staggering goodwill, only rare complaints and an adaptability that saw him swap rambunctious outdoor playfulness with quieter indoor hobbies better suited to so many rest days.

Grown-ups who knew Zach were baffled by his buoyant nature. Joanne Szuch, a 39-year- old family friend, said she was surprised to hear Zach tell her he was "good" when she called his hospital room one day.

Answering her confusion, Zach said, "What, I can't be good when I'm in the hospital?"

About two weeks before he died, Zach asked his parents whether he could go for a bike ride. They did, on a gorgeous Colorado day.

Only a few times, recalled Zach's father, Lyle, did Zach state what was so obvious to everyone else: "This isn't fair."

The rest of the time, he busied himself with a mishmash of interests: a fledgling effort to learn viola, slapstick comedy, fireworks, arts and crafts, and a fascination with all things mechanical and electrical. His dad started calling him Sparky.

Zach was diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer in mid-2005. Nicholas Foreman, a pediatric neural oncologist at Children's Hospital in Denver, helped beat it back using chemotherapy, radiation and - as it refused to go away - high-dose chemo. That last attack worked for a while. In March, the family, who lives in Arvada, had a party to celebrate the end of cancer therapy.

About two months ago, though, the cancer returned. "It came back angry. It was mad. It moved very fast," Lyle Sisson said.

His son had pain when he walked; he limped. Tumor growth was discovered in his pelvis and femur. Foreman turned the family over to his colleague at Children's, Dr. Lia Gore, for experimental chemotherapy.

"In the end, that didn't end up working too well for us," said Lyle Sisson, who had high praise for the doctors. "It was a good try."

Help poured in from the community. A spaghetti dinner for fifth-grader Zach at his school, Vanderhoof Elementary in Arvada, raised $8,000. Martial arts master Dan Klenda brought in $4,000 in pledges by doing 700 consecutive sit-ups, and pilots at United Airlines donated days off so their colleague Lyle could spend time with his son.

On Zach's last evening at home, he overcame a coughing fit with a stiff dose of pain meds. Freshly articulate and with a little surge in energy, he left his parents laughing as he instructed them meticulously on how to properly arrange his sheets and blankets so he could rest more comfortably.

They laid down for bed, one parent on each side of Zach. They said their goodnights like the Waltons on TV. Zach slipped into unconsciousness and passed away in his sleep.

"He had a bunch of life and energy, and he wanted to give us one last burst of it," said his father of that Friday evening. "That was his last gift to us."

In addition to his father and mother, Lois, Zach is survived by his brother, Lyle. Services were held Friday.

The family prefers that donations be made to cancer doctors and researchers at Children's. The address: Children's Hospital Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders c/o Marylou Houston, Children's Hospital Foundation, 1245 E. Colfax Ave., Suite 400, Denver, CO 80218.

We offer our heartfelt love and condolences to Lyle, Lois, and Lyle IV.

Monk & KANH

Aerial Anal Aroma -- or -- Pooting on a Plane

2006-12-08T17:04:00.000Z

Instapundit released this:

NO IMAMS WERE INVOLVED: Farts spark emergency landing:

The flight from Washington to Texas landed at Nashville airport, in the southeastern state of Tennessee, after passengers alerted the crew to the smell of burning sulphur.

Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for Nashville International Airport Authority said all 99 passengers and their luggage were taken off the plane and searched.

An unlucky canine team was also brought in to sniff the aircraft for explosives.

After intense questioning by the FBI, a woman passenger admitted to lighting matches on board the aircraft to conceal her gas, Ms Lowrance said.

“For a long time she did not admit to striking matches and I think that was just out of embarrassment,” she said.

“She did finally admit to it saying she had a medical problem about excessive gas.”

Glad I wasn't on that flight.

Umm ... yeah. Good thing she didn't light the .... oh, never mind!

Monk

Moxie

2006-12-07T17:50:00.000Z

Fred Barnes, in last week's Weekly Standard, has some excellent suggestions for how President Bush can avoid being just a lame duck and a poltical nonentity. Now that his accountability is shot to hell anyway, he might as well:

a) Fire the Generals. Lincoln did it until he found some that would fight. Most today are more worried about politics and procurement than about winning. We don't need more F-22s or Strykers, we need effective counterinsurgency and the ability to take military action against Iran and Syria.

b) Keep John Bolton as UN ambassador. Assign him to the State Dept and then detail him to the UN, where he could act as the Black Prince -- the power behind the throne. Let the latte-lovers, panty-wastes, and mewling barbarians at the UN screech. It will be music to my ears, at least.

c) Stop earmarks. Veto every bill that comes down the pike with even a hint of pork. Take a muslim stance toward it. The government would come to a screeching halt for a time, but the people are always safer with less government in their lives.

d) Give recess appointments to all his Congrssionally-verboten judicial nominees. Put that in your hashpipe and smoke it, Kos.

e) Talk up the military options with Iran and Syria. Hell, why not? Both the Iranian nuclear program and and the Syrian kleptocrats could be removed with airpower and the Air Force is not particularly busy at the moment. This would accomplish to things: a) possibly reduce Iranian "truculence" (read: farting in our general direction) and b) make the world press scream. Again: music.

f) Declare to Korea that any nuclear event from it against the US or any allied power would be dealt with as a direct nuclear attack on the US and would be dealt with accordingly. The Kennedy option. North Koreans in the countryside would never know Pyongyang had been nuked. They'd still be starving or in extermination camps, and Kim Mentally Il would be a shadow on the pavement.

g) Push radically for energy independence. This should get bipartisan support -- All except for drilling off the southern California coast, which would ruin the view for all the decadent social insect Hollywood types in their Malibu mansions and might even provoke Rosie O'Donnel to start an earthquake.

h) leave "a final gift to the world," as Barnes puts it: actually carry out aerial destruction of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. More about it I cannot say, except that it is most definitely "do-able." Again the world press would go absolutely apeshit, heads would explode in the Boston Globe's press room and in Hollywood, Rosie would jump up and down (look out, those along the San Andreas), and the world would "hate us."

So? The world, except for a very few die-hards in England and Australia, hates us anyway. Who cares? More to the point, they would fear us a great deal more. Now, they and the muslim enemy regard us as a boneless chicken. Why not prove them wrong? And as for the complaining, again: Miles and Thelonius playing a duet to my hearing. Unlike Barnes, however, I think his penultimate act before leaving office should be another gift:

i) Take all the cockroaches in Gitmo, shoot them, and throw their bodies over the fence into Cuba. It'd save a lot in lawyer bills. Might even put a few radical trial lawyers out of business. All good.

Of course, Bush will do none of these things. He wants history to "like him." Unfortunately for him, history will like him only if he changes things and wins.

Won't happen...

Monk

Stress and the Next Two Years in Iraq

2006-12-06T18:00:00.001Z

Sorry for recent lack of blogging -- crazy busy at work and I'm finally doing some serious research again. This time, its in the applicability of animal stress response to collective groups of animals. Stress response in everything from cephalopods to humans is well understood, and pretty well described in layman's terms in the works of Selye, Sapolsky, Hobfoll, and others. But do groups of animals (packs, units, scieties, etc) experience stress by an analogous process?

What we lack is scientific evidence that the responses to stress animals experience applies to societies of animals, particularly those of humans. Intuition and anecdotal evidence suggest that it does, but hard evidence of this is very new and incomplete. If it's true, it has profound implications for how we take down and build up complex systems like armies and societies (can you say Iraq? I knew you could...) SLA Marshall's Men Against Fire and John Warden's work provide some justification, but I seem to be barking up the wrong tree scientifically.

In any event, the President is getting a lot of advice concerning his next moves in Iraq. The Baker Commission seems poised to produce a somewhat more moderate timetable for defeat than the Democratic Party in Congress does and has even hired a PR firm to help sell thier ideas, but the result will be the same: "honorable" defeat, a la Vietnam. The left wants another Vietnam-like ending to, a) demonstrate its power; b) to prove to old heads that the current koskid crowd is as committed to leftist ideals as their parents, the Baby Boomers, were; c) to weaken the efficacy of the military as an instrument of national power; d) to enhance the efficacy of internationalist bodies like the UN; and e) stick it to Shrubbychimpler the antiChrist. Plus it gives them another chance to spit on our soldiers, which they are ecstatically love to do.

Among the right and even among moderate Democrats of my acquaitance, a consensus seems to be growing that we are not doing enough, not that we're doing too much and need to pull out. This may signify the beginning of the Jacksonian "America gets pissed off and kills everything in sight" phenomenon that I spoke of in previous posts. Good. Better that it happen here, in a more controlled environment, than in the War the Is to Come. If we can get the President to listen to the people, we may have a chance of preventing that larger, much uglier, war. If we withdraw from Iraq, everyone in the world (except perhaps the political and chattering classes in the US) will know its a defeat and will know that we don't have the will as a nation to stop radical islam in its quest for lebensraum and religious "purification" of the globe.

Besides the timetable for defeat, the Baker report offers nothing new and basically recapitulates what we're alreay doing over there. "Give the Iraqi army and security services more responsibility for patrolling and securing parts of Iraq." What the hell do they think we're doing now?

I agree with those who have sutdied successful counterinsurgencies (the Brits have the most experience, but we have a decent record in the Philippines and Japan). You don't win by just killing insurgents (although you must do a bit of that too). Rather, you place troublesome portions of the population in internment (caoncentration, but not extermination) camps, fortify friendly villages against insurgent attack, and directly involve not just the indigenous army, but local villagers in helping provide their own security. The people are the center of gravity and you can't catch and kill all the enemy in situations like this. Rather, you must go after the center of gravity directly and punish the recalcitrant (internment camps have a way of greatly reducing active insurgency too) and reward those who "play ball" with us. Then you use your army to provide security from external threats (like sealing the border with Syria and bombing Iranian nculear facilities to demonstrate zero tolerance and hopefully frighten them away from some of the active subversion they've been guilty of.

As a last resort, divide Iraq into three separate nations, guarantee their sovereignty and border integrity, and permanently occupy the center sunni section to use as a "base of fire" against other nations in the Middle East. Intern troublesome parts of the of sunni population and level those parts that refuse internment (civilians and all). Demonstrate our committment in absolute, unequivocal terms. Many civilians died during the battle for Fallujah. Many more might have died if we had done what we should have: made a loud announcement that Fallujah had 48 hours to evacuate, after which it would have been completly flattened. Soldiers and marines should have held out at the berm (they built around the city) and shot everyone who tried to escape -- women and children included. Many "innocents" would have been killed, but the entire world would have rocked back on its collective heels and said, "f&*k, they mean business! I guess we shouldn't piss off the US too badly." Then and only then should we have instituted concerted counterinsurgency programs (what the Russians failed to do after flattening Grozhny). This should have been a single act, with the implication that worse would follow. Fear is a much more effective instrument of coercion than constant (and adaptable) pressure.

International "law" you say? War crimes, you say? F*^k international law. Only Euroweenies, fern-loving Bluestaters, and a couple of panty-wetters on the Supreme Court care about international law. Our enemies do not and will never extend its provisions to us; why should we extend it to them?

The 75,000 or so soldiers, marines, and airmen this program would require should be added back into the mkitary through new recruitment, perhaps of as many as 100,000 (rather than, for example, cutting the Air Force by 40,000 in order to "recapitalize" with the damned F-22). Those who advocate a draft are leftist extremists who realize perfectly well that, a) the modern military would have no use for 2-3 year amateur soldiers and, b) a draftee military would make it much more difficult to fight and to get into fights (due to inevitable civilian-attitude griping and Congressman-calling). This is one of the aims of the Charlie Rangels in Congress, who want nothing short of crippling our military's ability to perform anything but CONUS home defense.

So...that's where I stand. I have a pile of Christian carnivals to post, but am not in the mood right now, as perhaps you can tell.

Monk

Benedict (Arnold?)

2006-11-28T19:32:00.000Z

I surrender?

Hope all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I have been in Florida, not thinking about wifi or blogging at all for a week. Now, however...

The Bishop of Rome is in Turkey right now, trying to "mend things" with our muslim brethren:

Pope Benedict XVI began his first visit to a Muslim country Tuesday with a message of dialogue and "brotherhood" between faiths, and Turkey's chief Islamic cleric said at a joint appearance that growing "Islamophobia" hurts all Muslims.

Benedict, seeking to ease anger over his perceived criticism of Islam, met with Ali Bardakoglu, chief of Turkey's Religious Affairs Directories.

Admittedly, he's there primarily to mend things with out Orthodox brethren, which I commend. I only hope he makes no more apologies on behalf of his portion of the Visible Church. He should insist that there be no more apologies from Christianity until every imam and Friday prayer leader apologizes for calling Jews and Christians "pigs and dogs" and advocating their deaths.

Monk

Much Later Saturday

2006-11-18T19:07:00.000Z

Yea, Bucks! War Eagle! Congratulations to both teams.

Monk

Saturday

2006-11-17T21:10:00.000Z

GO BUCKS! Beat those communist Arabs from Michiganistan!

WAR EAGLE! Beat them rednecks from Tuscaloosa!

Monk

Dump Pelosi?

2006-11-17T20:42:00.000Z

She looks worried, doesn't she? Why? Because the Democrats may be ready to dump Pelosi before she's even taken over. Slate says,

I'll admit my timing could be better, since the incoming House Democrats, on a unanimous voice vote, just made Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaker of the House. But I think her party should give serious thought to dumping her.

The New York Times in its editorial, "Speaker Pelosi Tempts Disaster," says,

Nancy Pelosi has managed to severely scar her leadership even before taking up the gavel as the new speaker of the House.

Guess the honeymoon's over before it began. Understandable, all things considered.

Monk

There's Reason

2006-11-16T22:50:00.000Z

Here's a great little essay on evolutionary microbiology in National Review's Corner. I agree with the following paragraph:

There is a reason why devout Christians are easier to find in the hard sciences than in the humanities and social sciences. Many of the great discoveries in evolutionary biology—the theory of molecular co-evolution, for example—were made by scientists who see no contradiction in simultaneously exalting the ethical doctrines of their faith, and discovering the mechanistic contribution that population genetics makes to the development of those doctrines. They see God's design in the wonders of the universe — everywhere and in everything.

Exactly.

Monk

Free To Choose

2006-11-16T21:56:00.000Z

Milton Friedman died today. Instapundit has appropriate words, as well as links to several good interviews:

MILTON FRIEDMAN HAS DIED. It's hard to say that someone has been plucked untimely at the age of 94, but it feels that way. His Free to Choose won over many people to the cause of liberty -- as did his Capitalism and Freedom. So, for that matter, did his Free to Choose documentary.

I was one of his converts. I first read Free to Choose in college and even got to meet the Grand Old Man (he was old even then -- in his early seventies) at a George Mason function.

"Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men"

Rest in peace (and freedom).

Monk

Mizz Facelift Suffers Defeat

2006-11-16T19:13:00.000Z

The House Democrats voted Steny Hoyer in as House Majority Leader today, which is good news for the country, but bad news for Nancy Pelosi. As SFGate reports, the House Democrats, "spurning [her] handpicked choice," elected Hoyer 149-86.

Mother Hippy said, after her unanimous election to be Speaker of the House (Kos Kidz: only two bullets away from the White House!), "We will not be dazzled by money and special interests." Yes...it's hard to be dazzled by something you've been swimming in for a hundred years.

So much for Pelosi's political clout and adroitness. I guess this makes my Option 2 more likely: Hippy Heaven in the Halls of Congress. Maybe Hoyer can keep her in check. But then, maybe not...

Monk

We Suck

2006-11-15T19:33:00.000Z

This comment on Free Repuplic today summed up conservative consensus on the Republipork Party and its ardent political death wish. The party has made Mel "Open the Borders and Let 'Em Pour In" Martinez the RNC Chairman and is considering bringing Trent "Lotta Loot" Lott back from the dead to be Minority Whip.

This party needs to get back to its conservative roots or it will be out of power for twenty years. Instead, the party hierarchy is bringing in more of the type that got us where we are today into leadership positions.

Michelle Malkin has a good summary, taken from around the web:

John Hawkins: Make no mistake about it, the GOP base is upset, demoralized and disappointed in the performance of the Republican Party, and if the columns, blog posts and comments I'm seeing around the net are any indication, a lot of conservatives still aren't convinced that anyone in Washington is listening to them. That's understandable because conservatives were pointing out many of the problems that cost the GOP the election in 2006 for YEARS without anyone on Capitol Hill, including the President, seeming to pick up on it or care.

The American Pundit: We really needed someone who is quoted on Porkbusters’ front page as saying “I’ll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina”.

Right Voices: Between this and Mel Martinez, we’re really on a roll.

PostWatch: Combined with other inspiring actions like the Sen. Mel Amnesty Martinez becoming the head of the Republican National Committee, it appears the GOP has decided it needs some time to recover from the burdens of leadership. Say, ten or fifteen years.

Captain’s Quarters: We sent Republicans to clean up Congress, not to clean up for themselves in porkfests that rival anything that came before them. Trent Lott represents the worst of that class, and the mere idea that he remains in consideration for a leadership position after his commentary this year proves that the GOP hasn’t listened hard enough.

The Bidinotto Blog: Trent Lott, just elected Senate minority whip by his GOP colleagues, represents the worst of the old-boy network in the Republican Party: an aphilosophical, wheeler-dealer, pork-peddling pragmatist with a long, ugly record of compromises, sell-outs, and “me-too’ing” in the face of liberal Democrat intiatives. Lott wouldn’t know a moral principle if it walked up and spit in his face.

None sum it up better than the Freeper post, however. The American public would never -- and should never -- vote for this crowd. We need a third party now more than ever.

Monk

True Colors

2006-11-15T04:56:00.000Z

By backing Rep John "Cut & Run" el-Murtha for majority leader, and by refusing a vote on the excellent John Bolton for continued service as UN ambassador, House speaker-to-be Nancy "Killer Chihuahua" Pelosi has shown her true leftist colors.

I agree with the WaPo's Ruth Marcus -- hardly a conservative -- that Murtha is unfit to be majority leader. She cites Abscam, but I think his other anti-American and pro-islamist behavior -- his prescription for US defeat and islamist victory in the "War on Terror" -- disqualifies him to be called an American, much less to be House majority leader.

John Bolton has been the most impressive UN ambassador since Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Moynihan, Bolton has taken no krepp from the UN's collection of tinhorns and barbarians, but has hammered out some tough agreements (which are meaningless, since the UN refuses to act on them).

I think we can expect more of the same from Pelosi, meaning that my previous Option 2 looks as if it will be her most likely course of action: Hippy Heaven for one and all in the political boiler room (with apologies to Tom Wolfe). The next two years should be most amusing.

Monk

Advice for the GOP

2006-11-12T19:28:00.000Z

I missed this a couple days ago because my internet access has been down, but here is some very good advice to the Republican Party from the Examiner:

The GOP majority’s electoral fate was sealed by the corrupt political culture embodied in the Bridge to Nowhere and the congressional leadership’s inability or unwillingness to put a stop to anonymous earmarking.

So what now? The first order of business is fresh leadership. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., has announced for House Minority Leader. Pence is a charismatic Reaganaut who has often led the conservative majority of the GOP in opposition to the Bush administration’s Big Government Republicanism on issues like spending and entitlements.

Pence clearly understands the GOP’s problem. . . .

On the Senate side, nothing would better demonstrate a new GOP commitment to its conservative principles than the promotion of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who more than anybody else in the Senate in recent years demonstrated an unswerving devotion to advancing conservative principles and programs.

Coburn particularly makes sense when it is understood that the Senate minority leader is not so much a legislative position as it is first and foremost a bully pulpit for articulating the case for reducing federal spending and intrusiveness, shining more light in the dark corners of Washington’s entrenched bureaucratic corruption and projecting creative ways of expanding individual choice and freedom for all Americans. Coburn has some rough edges, to be sure, and Old Bulls like Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Trent Lott, R-Mo., have fought him at every turn. But listening to Old Bulls in great part is what got the GOP in its present straits.

Yep. Need to get back to basics, folks. Political death concentrates the mind wonderfully. (via Instapundit.)

Monk

Rummy, We Hardly Knew Ya

2006-11-09T20:15:00.000Z

Victor Davis Hanson sums up my own feelings about Rumsfeld better than I could:

Vaya Con Dios, Rummy!

Here is the record of Donald Rumsfeld. (1) Tried to take a top-heavy Pentagon and prepare it for the wars of the postmodern world, in which on a minute’s notice thousands of American soldiers, with air and sea support, would have to be sent to some god-awful place to fight some savagery—and then be trashed live on CNN for doing it; (2) less than a month after 9/11 he organized the retaliation against al Qaeda in the heart of primordial Afghanistan that removed the Taliban in 7 weeks, when we were all warned that the U.S., like the British and Russians of old, would fail; (3) oversaw the removal of Saddam in 3 weeks—after the 1991 Gulf War and the 12-years of 350,000 sorties in the no-fly-zones, and various bombing strikes, had failed. (4) Ah, you say, then there is the disastrous 3-year insurgency—too few troops, Iraqi army let go, underestimated “dead-enders” etc.?

But Rumsfeld knew that in a counterinsurgency (cf. Vietnam 1965-71) massive deployments only ensure complacency, breed dependency, and create resentment, and that, in contrast, training indigenous forces, ensuring political autonomy, and providing air and commando support (e.g., Vietnam circa 1972-4) is the only answer—although that is a long process that can work only if political support at home allows the military to finish the job (cf. the turn-of-the-century Philippines, and the British in Malaysia). He was a good man, and we were lucky to have him in our hour of need.

Monk

We All Saw It Coming...

2006-11-09T19:06:00.000Z

Scott Ott has the details:

November 9, 2006
Pelosi Calls Talk of Bush, Cheney Pardons Premature
by Scott Ott

(2006-11-09) — At a post-luncheon news conference outside the White House today, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, said talk of pardoning President George Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney was “premature.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Rep. Pelosi, who as House Speaker would stand third in the presidential succession line. “There are no specific charges or articles of impeachment at this point, and so it’s silly to speak of pardoning them.”

“Let’s not be too hasty for emotional closure,” the California Democrat added. “Our long national nightmare has only just begun.”

Monk

After the Elections

2006-11-08T18:52:00.000Z

The Belmont Club agrees with the sentiment I expressed in Vox Populi this morning:

Now that the Democratic Party has taken the House and has an extremely good prospect of taking the Senate it's possible to speculate about its consequences. The Israeli experience probbly provides a good comparison. Faced with the difficulty of a security threat they retreated, some would say, into pacifist fantasy. But the enemy eventually brought parts of Israel under threat and the response, when it came, was still half-hearted. Olmert temporized and another war in Lebanon is expected presently. Is this the fate that awaits America?

Maybe. Not in particulars but in structure. There is now a much smaller chance that the terrorist problem can be resolved at a low level of conflict. There is a greater likelihood that it will be allowed by neglect or paralysis to metastize into a canker which will develop into a catastrophic confrontation in five or ten years time. A likelihood, but not a certainty.

If America is lucky then a bipartisan national security consensus can be rebuilt before any catastrophe overtakes. But America's lucky streak has just run out. Two things now have to happen. The Democrats have to start responding to the threats that they will face now that they are in legislative power and they have to resolve the tensions between their left and right wings. In that respect, the election of Lieberman is some kind of proof that not everyone in the Democratic party is a Pelosi-ite. But a whole lot are.

At any rate, it's a new political game. With North Korea, Iran, Iraq on the burner and Nancy Pelosi running the House there will be enormous challenges to simply hold against the threat. The time of easy security is past. Nothing is assured.

Incidentally, Rummy stepped (and was pushed) down today. Big mistake. He wasn't done with his job of pissing off every general in the Army (not a bad thing, in the balance...) This would have made sense if Dubya had done it a week ago.

The Tosser

My First Hostile Comment!

2006-11-08T09:29:00.000Z

Yea!! I just got my first (but hopfully not my last) hostile comment! I reacted instinctively and moderated it as "reject" when it first came up, but them I thought about it and decided that this put me in the same class as Glenn Raynolds and Charles at lgf. I'm on the road to fame and flame now!

The comment, from the ever-brave "Anonymous," read "are you a complete tosser or have you just had lots of practice?"

I assume the chap or chapette is a Brit, since its unlikely a 'Murcan would use the term "tosser" insultingly (unless referring to an enemy quaterback). (Note to Mons. Tosser: Quarterback: that's a term from football. Football: that's the Fascist Imerialist Jackbooted kind, not soccer.)

Anyway...I really have no response to that comment, so here's a picture of a man with a bicycle through his face...

Monk

Vox Populi

2006-11-08T04:58:00.000Z

Why is this woman smiling?

Well, you know why. And I wish her joy of yesterday's conquest.

Contrary to what most of my conservative friends may think, this is not an unalloyed Bad Thing. When Pelosi becomes speaker, one of three things will happen:

1) Her savvy as a politician will belie her apparent goggle-eyed stupidity and she will exercise her first real power with moderation -- that is, she will grow into the job. That is essentially what she promised yesterday as she took her victory lap. (She also promised "change," as all the Demo's have been throughout the campaign season. What change she didn't say, nor has any Democrat so far.) This is a real possibility, since, contrary to chihuahua-like appearances, she seems to be an adept political maneuverer. She helped engineer yesterday's victory, after all.

2) She will return to her San Frangerbilist nutroots and it will become hippie-freak heaven for one and all in the halls of the Capitol. This will be alarming, but ultimately harmless (assuming the terrorists don't realize their Esalen encounter-group window of opportunity and strike us big during this time), since she will thus ruin the chance for the Democrats to hold any real sort of power for the next generation. The only people who will vote for them will be the Daily Kos crowd. They assume this will happen, since they are really crowing now.

3) She will become a vindictive, obstructionist bitch and attempt to investigate everything Dubya W. Chimpler has "lied" about over the last six years, as well to impeach him. This is the best possible situation, since the government will be able to get nothing else done, the military will be left relatively alone (except, perhaps, to be made to provide Comfy Chairs to every detainee in Gitmo), and the people will thus be safe.

I give each of these about a 1/3 chance. All in all, it will soon be business as usual. Heck, this blow might even shock Dubya into being fiscally responsible. Unlikely, but who knows?

In any case, the Democrats will probably try to insist on some kind of timetable for defeat in Iraq -- a phased withdrawal. The President will be able to hold this off for the next two years, but the Demo's will eventualy prevail. I assume they won't try anything as draconian as cutting off funding -- that would never make past any president's desk.

Once we withdraw, our enemies the islamofascists will rightly see it as a victory and plan further advances and mayhem. Eventually, they will get to the point of so pissing off the American people that we turn cities to glass parking lots and people to shadows on the pavement. It will hasten the inevitable war we must fight. We are fighting it in a civilized manner now, just as Rome did Carthage in the First Punic War. I urge you, however, to look to the end of the Third Punic War...

In the meantime....

"I, for one, welcome our new Democratic overlords"

The Next Two Years

2006-11-07T19:57:00.000Z

James Lileks sums up his expectations:

I expect the next two years to go poorly, I’m afraid. Then again, I’m often wrong; perhaps it’s possible for a country to win a war with apologies and investigations. Perhaps we’re not at war at all; perhaps Iran and the jihadists are merely an illusion conjured up by the puppetmasters, just as they turned Iraq – the veritable Monaco of Mesopotamia – into a Threat, and just as they defended Israel against the brave Defenders of the Apartment Buildings in Lebanon. I really should relax. I mean, if you’re driving down the road and you see a car coming towards you head on in your lane, there’s no reason to worry. You’re in the right. What else matters?

Monk

Responsible Policy

2006-11-07T16:46:00.000Z

Nancy Pelosi has announced a responsible policy concerning redeoployment. Scott Ott has the details:

If Votes Fall Short, Dems to Redeploy from Congress
by Scott Ott

(2006-11-07) — As Americans went to the polls this morning, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, announced that if Democrats don’t achieve a “clear, immediate, overwhelming victory” in the House and the Senate, she will lead them in a “responsible redeployment” from Congress.

“We don’t want to get tied up here for years in a sectarian battle that we can’t win,” Rep. Pelosi said. “Either we get what we want now, or we cut our losses and return to our home states.”

The woman who would be Speaker of the House if Democrats win the majority today, rejected critics who said her remarks were “just another example of cut and run from the Democrats.”

“When you’re in a quagmire,” she said, “with a long history of bitter partisan tensions, it’s foolish to think that if you stay just a little longer you can fix it. The smart and brave thing to do is get out of there”

A White House spokesman said President George W. Bush today offered the same advice to Rep. Pelosi and her colleagues that he’s offered about their strategy all year: “Stay the course.”

Monk

The Honourable Muslim from Minnesota

2006-11-07T06:02:00.000Z

Keith Ellison, occaisionally known as Kieth Ellison Mohammed, is "poised to become the first muslim in Congresss."

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Here's a little bit about the guy.

And here's what the predictably Bluestate Norm Coleman has to say (the liberals' Keith Ellison talking points):

I am tired of being whipped into a froth by floggers and bloggers who want me to worry how bad my life will be if fanatic taxi drivers make me walk home with my wine, or if Sharia law should force women to veil their faces (a proposal that has some appeal to it, depending upon the face). And I am tired of how Fifth District candidate Keith Ellison, poised to become the first Muslim in Congress, is being ripped for the intifada when his only concrete bad was not paying his parking tickets. In this Congress, that makes him a Boy Scout. After Tuesday, you can stop calling him Muslim. And start calling him The Honorable Muslim from Minnesota.

Monk

This Pretty Much Says It All...

2006-11-06T20:52:00.000Z

From Cox & Forkum

Monk

Global Incident Map

2006-11-06T18:46:00.000Z

Here is a very useful little item. It is a constantly updated (at least, every 300 seconds) Google Earth-based map and crawl of terrorism-related incidents around the world. It shows, for instance, the placement of listening devices in the Memphis TN homeland security offices. Each incident has accompanying detail. Here's the detail on the Memphis find.

On another, but related, topic, James Q. Wilson has a brilliant article in the WSJ Opinion Journal. It examines The Press at War:

The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

The article includes a very detailed account of how the US government and military were stabbed in the back by the press during Vietnam, and why we lost because of this. Read it.

Monk

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow...

2006-11-06T05:53:00.000Z

...is the day. The day this woman...

...sorry, this woman...

...will either be very happy or very sad.

It will also be a day that will make this man...

...sorry, this man...

...very happy or sad, for the same reasons.

Or should I say, "treasons?"

Monk

Blue Dart 1

2006-11-06T05:44:00.000Z

A number of those in my profession have been requested to produce "think pieces" for the Air Force on any topic that might provoke further thought, research, etc., in the field of military affairs and/or the theory of conflict. I have produced one so far and am working on two more, but this one is unlikely to see the light of day in its current form (my boss has already said, "it needs to be more closely tied to operations and/or planners" -- so much for free thought), I will publish it and its like here, so at least they are recorded somewhere besides my hard drive and backup. So here goes:

Cause and Effect – Implications for Operations

For centuries, Western science has assumed for the sake of logic and convenience in performing experiments, that cause and effect are easily separable things: that “independent variables” represent those items outside the experiment that don’t change and that “dependent” variable are the items changed by the experiment. We have assumed for the sake of experimental ease that variables are easily separable and mutually independent, giving us the ability to clearly and neatly determine cause and effect relationships. This phenomenon affects social sciences like economics every bit as much as physical sciences like meteorology.

Unfortunately, this is not how cause and effect work in the real world. A generation of new scientific thinking has revealed much more clearly how systems change over time and how “independence” and “dependence” among variables in experiments are mutually dependent – that is, how changes in “dependent” variables often change macro-level behaviors of “independent” variables, and how interactions of the two create emergent behaviors that the variables would not have produced if isolated and that are not always easily predictable.

This new scientific approach has become known by a variety of names: catastrophe, chaos (perhaps the lease enlightening), complexity, emergence, and complex adaptive systems theories, among others. Each of these deals with a slightly different aspect of system behavior, but all contain important insights and all have several crucial aspects in common:

They all focus on the macro level of systems as a whole – how they interact with surrounding systems, rather than on the reductionist behavior of system components themselves

They all focus on non-linear aspects of system behaviors and their components, which have pronounced implications for how systems behave

All agree that both within and among systems, that the behavior of the whole system or system-of-systems far exceeds the sum of the component parts functioning in isolation (“the whole is grater than the sum of the parts”).

All agree that new behaviors emerge from the interactions of systems, many of which are hard to predict, but which may replicate structures or behaviors present at lower levels

So…what are practical implications for commanders and other war practitioners today? Plenty, since many of our officers are still educated in the traditions of the physical sciences and engineering of the last four centuries. Here as some of the biggest implications:

First, that cause and effect are non-linear, not proportional. Proportionality assumes small input equals small output, and vice versa

Implication: In reality, very small inputs can yield very big macro emergent behaviors as time passes.

Example: Doolittle’s raid did insignificant tactical damage, but had huge operational and strategic consequences; four years of WW I’s industrial meat-grinder produced millions of casualties for a few miles of ground

Second, that the whole equals the sum of the parts, In systems theory, the whole always exceed the sum of its parts.

Example: A disciplined unit is always better than a mob

Third, that, as in a lab experiment, a given input always yields the same output. Due to the non-linear nature of many system behaviors, no form of analysis is “predictive (claims to the contrary); they are at best anticipatory and estimative. They can give statistical probabilities that a given COA will perform as intended, but not eliminate risk

Implication: “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t” – Chief Dan George

Fourth, it is easy to ignore the effect of time. Many effects take an unpredictable amount of time to work their way through a targeted system. Anticipated effects may not happen on schedule, because system effects are non-linear.

Implication: Commanders and their staffs must counsel patience to superiors to allow time for effects to work their way through targeted systems

Fifth, as a corollary of four, there may not be good, objective or quantifiable assessment measures of effectiveness available as one awaits a desired emergent behavior.

Example: No one knew Milosevic was about to give up until he did so.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, one’s adversary, friends, neutrals, and all actors in a given operation are all complex adaptive systems. They respond adaptively to our actions and force changes of COA and continuous re-examination of strategy

Implication: Robust wargaming of blue, gray, and red COAs should start iteratively in planning and continue throughout operations

Armed with a more sophisticated understanding of what emerging scientific thought is bringing to many disciplines and how indeterminate cause and effect can be may aid commanders in making operational decisions based on more realistic expectations, thus saving valuable lives, resources, time, and opportunities

Monk

Aim Points

2006-11-02T17:52:00.000Z

I don't generally like to toot my own horn, but I received an unexpected complement today, in the form of an Air Force Magazine op-ed that was picked up as a Heaquarters Air Force Public Affairs "Aim Point":

It's the effect, stupid (Op/Ed)
BY: Robert S. Dudney, Air Force Magazine
11/02/2006

For much of US history, the American way of war was simple: destroy the enemy's forces, occupy his territory, and then accept his surrender. It worked, but it produced, inevitably, horrific battle casualties, burned-out cities, and massive costs.

Things began changing after the 1991 Gulf War, which introduced stealth, precision strike, and advanced information systems. Meat-grinder-type battles, it was said, no longer were inevitable. US forces could win, in some cases, by creating highly targeted battlefield "effects."

The idea was to bypass a foe's main strength and attack pressure points that would influence his power or willingness to keep fighting.

The concept is, to put it mildly, still very much in dispute. While the Air Force and much of the Joint establishment embraces these so-called "effects-based operations" or "EBO," others -- mostly advocates of land forces -- still vigorously oppose the idea.

Retired Army Col. Ralph Peters, a prominent critic, warns that EBO is just "a sales pitch" and that the only effects that matter "are those that destroy the enemy's military, the opposing leadership, and the population's collective will." Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, retired former head of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, calls EBO confusing and overly restrictive. "It's a damn virus," he told reporter Elaine Grossman of Inside the Pentagon.

To be sure, the EBO concept was largely shaped by Air Force officers and is seen by many as favoring airpower. USAF leaders, in fact, are often called on to defend or explain the effects-based approach to wider audiences.

As it happens, the Air Force recently produced its fullest thinking yet about the subject, a 12,000-word exposition contained in the new Air Force Doctrine Document 2, Operations and Organization. The service uses it to lay out its EBO principles and planning considerations.

It is a strong presentation. The document shows that Air Force thinking about the concept has deepened and matured in the past few years, and it makes several key doctrinal points.

Among the most important, AFDD 2 declares the "ultimate aim in war" is not to destroy a foe, but to make him bend to our will. As a result, EBOs "focus on [enemy] behavior, not just physical changes." USAF does not rule out the use of attrition warfare, which it says "can still be valuable," but it emphasizes that better and less costly routes to victory usually can be found.

In the Air Force view, mission success comes first, and considerations of efficiency come second. Commanders should plan operations at the lowest possible cost -- in lives, money, time, or opportunities" -- but these commanders "must accomplish their assigned missions," period.

Far from being inflexibly mechanistic, EBO doctrine sees war as "a clash of complex adaptive systems" that is, "a collision of living forces that creatively adapt" to new situations. Planners must be flexible and seek to know how the enemy will respond to planned actions, and incorporate this information in operations.

A corollary, says the doctrine paper, is that success comes "at a price," which is a need for "comprehensive knowledge" of the battle space and its actors. US knowledge must go "well beyond" just the enemy order of battle and include enemy thinking, influences, and tendencies. USAF notes that, in Vietnam, the US failed to detect the "implacability" of Hanoi's leaders, with lamentable results.

While new analytical tools can help, warfare "can never be a perfect science in a world of complex systems," and planners need to prepare for the unexpected.

Under EBO, says the Air Force, planning, execution, and assessment of operations must be integrated, because "doing one inevitably involves the others." Remove one of the three pieces and military forces will start "blindly servicing a list of targets." With integration, however, each combat action will have a purpose.

According to AFDD 2, planners must take into consideration "all possible types of effects," unintended as well as intended, indirect as well as direct, negative as well as positive. Bombing a bridge might inhibit movement of an enemy force, but it could also enrage local citizens, with unpredictable consequences. A commander must weigh the competing courses of action.

Effects-based planning is not prescriptive when it come to weaponeering or tactical planning. It produces standard mission-type orders, and leaves choices of platforms and weapons to the lowest appropriate level.

According to the document, operators must not forget that "the law of unintended consequences is always in effect." Long-term consequences of certain actions cannot be reliably predicted, and "effects cannot be easily anticipated or quantified." Planning and execution, as a result, "must be flexible and adaptive."

In truth, says the Air Force, the effects-based approach is not really new; figures as different as Sun Tzu and Napoleon have thought in similar terms. However, modern military systemsâ€”especially those of air and space powerâ€”produce an unprecedented array of effects, with utility greater than mere attrition.

What emerges from a review of the new document is a sense of greater realism about the possibilities and problems of effects-based operations.

No one presents EBO as a magic-bullet solution for all US military challenges. Nor does anyone contend that we have seen the end of major conventional war, with its bloody, force-on-force clashes.

Moreover, the document clearly evinces a healthy regard for the sheer unpredictability of events and of the actions of potential military foes.

In the end, its major contribution may be to draw attention to the obvious.

In Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential race, campaign aide James Carville posted in his office a written note, usually phrased as, "It's the economy, stupid." It was a constant spur to Carville to focus on what was truly important. Defense planners occasionally could use such a reminder, because, in most cases, the important thing about any military action isn't its degree of destructiveness. The important thing is its effect on the enemy.

I'm happy because I wrote those 12,000 words. As for Peters and Van Riper, I say only, "the machine gun will never stop a determined cavalry charge" and "contrary to popular opinion, a battleship has never been sunk by an aerial bomb."

Monk

The Troops Respond

2006-11-01T19:57:00.000Z

The MSM may be trying (on page two) to suppress Mr Kerrys gaff, but it will not soon be forgoten by our men and women in uniform, nor should it be. This election, in which both houses may stay in Republican hands, well may come to be called the "stuck in Iraq" campaign.

They may be stuck in Iraq, Mr Kerry, but you're stuck on stupid.

Thanks, you arrogant supercilious preppy richy-rich jackass. You've done us a big favor!

Monk

Update 1 Nov 06: Victor Davis Hanson is brilliant, as usual:

The Democrats should use this occasion to have an autopsy of Kerryism, or this strange new tony liberalism, that has turned noblisse oblige on its head. It used to be that millionaire FDRs and JFKs felt sympathy for those of the lower classes and wished to ensure that the hoi polloi had some shot at the American dream. But today's elite liberals-a Howard Dean, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, George Soros, Ted Turner-love the high life and playact at being leftists simply because they are already insulated from the effects of their own nostrums that always come at someone poorer's expense while providing them some sort of psychological relief from guilt.

Hideous Skull-Faced Monster Arises to Insult Troops on Halloween

2006-10-31T22:13:00.000Z

Yes, it's true folks, just in time for All-Hallow's Eve, the Creature from the Swiftboat Lagoon rose up and delivered a flesh-tingling (and, I hope, career ending) insult to those who serve in Iraq. This creature is known to be mad and often ignore the entreaties of the party that spawned him. Here's what he said:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Here's the YouTube video of him saying it
Apparently no intelligent person would deign to join the miltary. I've been regarded as reasonably intelligent and made a conscious choice to serve my country, which I did on active duty for twenty-one years.

Skeletor has apparently refused to apologize:

Kerry, who is considering another run for the White House in 2008, angrily fired back.

His statement called Republicans "assorted right-wing nut jobs."

And at a hastily arranged news conference in Seattle, Kerry said: "I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy."

Kerry said the comment in question was "a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops ... and they know that's what I was talking about."

Yes, Skeletor, we know exactly to whom you were talking. And we will not forget it.

Monk

It's the Great Jihad, Charlie Brown!

2006-10-30T21:35:00.000Z

One of the funniest, most tasteless things I've seen in recent years. I expect it will only be a short time before the mullahs insist it be shown around Christmas.

Monk

A Short Life Well Lived -- Update on A Hero

2006-10-27T21:08:00.000Z

The funeral for PFC Stephen Bicknell, 2 Btn, 505 Regt, 82 AB Div., was held today. It was a fine ceremony. I wish I had pictures of the numbers of people lining the funeral procession's route to the cemetary. Most of the town turned out to bid him farewell, waving flags and doffing their caps. The odious insects from Westboro Baptist Church failed to show, which was a wise move on their part.

Monk

Git Mo' Food ... Korans ... Soccer ...

2006-10-27T04:45:00.000Z

From limited news reports and from the blogosphere, I knew the Gitmo detainees had life easy. Until I read this first-hand report from National Review Online, did not know the disgustingly PC details:

many of the detainees try to maintain their fight against America, in any way possible, no matter how small. One camp had to be retrofitted because detainees were taking apart the push-button faucets in their cells to get at a metal spring inside that they would stretch out to be used as a weapon. The Asian-style toilets on the floors of the cells used to have foot-rests, until the detainees started wrenching them from the floor to use them as bludgeoning weapons. The guards are routinely splashed with urine and feces, and wear chest protectors and sometimes neck protectors to protect against stabbing.
...
While always mindful that they are dealing with dangerous men (who are always shackled when in the presence of the guards), the Americans do their utmost to treat them humanely, even sensitively. Seemingly every surface has a small painted arrow pointing toward Mecca. Every detainee gets a Koran, and should it be necessary to search one it is done by one of the Muslim translators, not the guards. After the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions became almost wallpaper, posted all over the place in every language spoken by the detainees.
...
The detainees are amply fed. They are offered 4,200 calories a day. They don’t have to eat it all, but the idea is to offer them choices. U.S. combat troops get 3,800 calories. The average detainee has gained 18 pounds, and one detainee went from 215 to 410 pounds. Visiting reporters are fed the same lunch as the detainees: a hot Middle Eastern meat dish (unidentifiable to this Western palate), along with vegetables, egg shavings, and tuna fish; plus yogurt, a couple of bananas, several granola bars, and a piece of homemade baklava to mark Ramadan, when the detainees always get sweets. They get fresh-baked bread three times a day.
...
Detainees sit in a La-Z-Boy chair during interrogations... [not the "comfy chair!"]

They are much better treated than the poor, or even many pets in our own country. This is a crime against mankind. These men are murderous thugs who should never live in comfortable circumstances and should never see the light of day again.

The Democrats will undoubtedly set them free and allow them to sue the US for violations of their civil rights. Heck, they might even let them appeal to the World Court to charge their captors with war crimes.

I recommend to President Bush that the day he leaves office, he has every one of these animals shot in the back of the head and has their bodies dumped over the fence into Cuba.

Monk

Suffer Not a Traitor to Live

2006-10-26T05:55:00.000Z

since Congress has established a policy of allowing members of the Department of Defense to express their personal opinoins without fear of retribution (even if they are on active military duty), let express one of mine in response to this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 200 active duty U.S. armed service members, fed up with the war in Iraq, have joined an unusual protest calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, organizers said on Wednesday.

The campaign, called the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, is the first of its kind in the Iraq war and takes advantage of Defense Department rules allowing active duty troops to express personal opinions to members of Congress without fear of retaliation, organizers said.

"As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq," states the appeal posted on the campaign's Web site at www.appealforredress.org.

"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home," it adds.

My opinion: each member of the miltary that signed this petition and those who wrote and distributed it are traitors for actively aiding and abbetting the enemies of this country.

And traitors should be incarcerated for life or shot outright.

Monk

Another Update on a Hero Passing

2006-10-26T05:41:00.000Z

Members of the Westboro Baptist "Chruch" have announced that they intend to show up at Stephen Bicknell's visitation tonight, in roder to protest the memory of anyone who has died for the America they hate (because it gives civil rights to "fags"). They claim to have attended hundreds of military funerals. I have written about this odious group before.

My reaction to their announcement is the same that Russian Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich gave to Rasputin when the latter asked to come to the Russian army's Stavka: "Do come; we'll hang you."

Monk

The Fruits of Appeasement

2006-10-26T04:40:00.000Z

For the last thirty years, France has supported muslim causes around the world, even to the extent of directly supporting Palestinian groups like Hamas and helping Saddam Hussein build atomic reactors (before the Israelis blew them up). France has gladly accepted milions of North African muslims, to do jobs the thirty-hour-workweek French populace will not do.

What has this garnered them? Pajamas Media has the answer:

As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year.

A leaked French intelligence report warns that during the first week of November, a school holiday (Nov. 1 or All Saint’s Day), Muslim riots could convulse the country.
...
Last year’s intifada lasted three weeks. It petered out when the authorities asked the media to stop devoting attention to the riots.

The situation, however, never returned to normal. Unless one considers (as some French officials seem to do) the current situation as “normal.” In the first six months of this year there were 50,000 acts of urban violence by Muslims. On average 15 police officers, fire fighters or other public officials are attacked per day and 100 cars are set alight per night.

Gangs of immigrant vandals operate in a paramilitary fashion. A spokesman for the French police officers union, himself a policeman, has that France is in the midst of a “civil war.”

Interestingly, no public official said the union was exaggerating.

No Pasarain! has more:

4 buses torched in one night (one was first hijacked and driven around by an armed gang). French youths have decided to up the violence a notch. Cars are for small time hoods and anyway, torching cars is like soooooooo 2005. So, French youths are movin' on up.

In the midst of a "civil war" is what you get by appeasing muslims and trying to honor their appeals. How long before it begins to happen in Canada (aka Cancukistan) and here, in places like Michigan and upstate New York that have large muslim minorities?

Monk

Update on A Hero Passing

2006-10-25T05:33:00.000Z

Stephen Bicknell was not a Ranger, as I reported earlier, but was assigned to 2d Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82 Airborne Division. Sgt Lester Baroncini was also killed when the HumVee they were in hit two landmines planted by Mohammed's followers, members of the Religion of Peace.

The 505th, ironically enough, was the unit "Private Ryan" belonged to in the movie.

Visitation for Stephen is at the Prattville High School Gym on Thursday. The funeral is at First United Methodist Church Prattville (my home church) on Friday.

Salud, mon ami. You placed all upon the altar of liberty.

Monk

A Hero Passes

2006-10-18T18:48:00.000Z

War isn't personal until it comes home.

Several days ago in Iraq, a hometown hero was killed. Pvt. Stephen Bicknell was a Ranger, had been in Iraq for only two months and had just gotten certified to drive the HumVee he was killed in when it ran close to an IED.

He leaves an 18-year-old wife, his high school sweetheart, who is five months pregnant. He was the star quarterback for the Prattville Lions football team -- the team I support -- leading the Lions through four state playoff, including the championship game in 2004. He graduated from Prattville High in 2005.

I knew him vaugely from his field exploits and our church's youth group, knowing his parents somewhat better. This has been devastating to them, of course.
I honor his service and the accomplishments he achieved in his short years, as should we all. Inevitably, there is now some local discussion of why he needed to die -- is the conflict we are in really worth it if it snuffs out such young lives? We must remember that if we fail to win, we will dishonor this superb young man's sacrifice; he will have died in vain. The victory that he and his comrades in arms believe in will be the true way of honoring his memory.

Monk

Earthquakes! Nukes!

2006-10-16T18:59:00.000Z

I knew somehow that the quakes in Hawaii were Dubya Chimpler's fault! Now Daily Kos has the proof:

Whenever you blow up stuff deep underground, you run the risk of forcing the tectonic plates to shift.
http://geology.er.usgs.gov/...

Recall how there were no nukes in North Korea under Clinton, when the adults were in charge of foreign policy. I hope that Hawaii residents can put two and two together and vote Democratic because the GOP's idiotic mishandling of North Korea is a clear and pleasant danger. Heh, the smoking gun just fired, Dee-dee-dees!
http://www.cnn.com/...

GWB's hard-on for more war and instability in the Middle East (the successful results of his conscious actions and inaction) have led to a world that is less safe in myriad ways.

Dat ol' debbil Dubya, he be up to his ol' tricks again.

Monk

Politically Correct Racial Segregation

2006-10-16T18:21:00.000Z

Lileks was a parent helper at his daughter's school on Friday. This is life in cold, blue (state) Minnesota:

At one point the Hispanic students came by. The Hispanic students are not mainstreamed, but held in special separate classes until third grade, at which point I gather they are magically integrated into all the social relationships that have built up over the three previous years. It really was quite remarkable. The teacher led a line of brown-skinned students through the atrium, and of course they all looked at what we were doing. (“We” at this point included two white kids, an Asian kid, and an African-American kid.) I noted to the other parent: I never thought I’d see the days when schools were racially segregated again.

But that’s progress.

Meanwhile, over in the source-fount of liberty under law, the NYT notes that much the same thing is happening with muslim children:

But the visible differences — the way female teenagers wear the full-length dress and head-covering and the boys wear black robes and skullcaps — play into a ferocious debate about the sense of separateness or readiness to integrate Britain’s estimated 1.8 million Muslims, about 3 percent of the population...

...“Muslim children in this country tend to live separate lives anyhow,” said Mark Halstead, a professor of education at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. “Whether they go to Muslim school does not make much difference to their segregation. They are concentrated in the inner cities. They could be attending a state school that is 90 percent Muslim anyway.”

...but that's progress, no?

Monk

War Eagle!

2006-10-16T17:51:00.000Z

I know I'm a day late in offering congrats to the boys at Auburn for their outstanding win over No. 2-ranked Florida Saturday night. It was one of the more exciting games I've seen in recent years (and certainly puts my Deadskins' dreadful performance against 0-5 Tennesee on Sunday to shame).

Congrats also to Alabama, who bested Ole Miss in overtime, despite the problems on defense that have been plaguing them all year.

Looks like Auburn came out #4 nation-wide in the BCS poll (the most scientific of the rating systems -- i.e., probably about as good as a five-day weather forecast, vice, say, Harris or AP, which are accurate only for the next day's "weather.").

Thanks for a memorable weekend of football!

Monk

Four Options

2006-10-13T18:00:00.000Z

Reflecting on the war since 9-11, I came to the conclusion some time ago that there are really only four potential outcomes and/or grand strategy options in the West's war against islam. I don't usually post in my blog about subjects I write on professionally, but herewith are my thoughts on the four outcomes:

1. Take the Fall. This option is what our enemy seeks: nothing short of destruction of the modern secular West, replaced by an Umma that probably includes all of Europe, a fatally injured and greatly reduced America, and the rest of the world at war as India and China resist islam with, shall we say, less compunction about civilian casualties than we have. The ideal for the islamofascists, of course, is a worldwide salafist, sharia-ruled Umma, or a world entirely shi'a, ruled by the Mahdi. Maybe the sunni and shi'a would make a deal to divide up the world...who knows.

2. Build a Wall. Just as the Israelis are doing around the West Bank and Gaza, this is the most literal form of containment. It would eventually involve deporting (or interning) most muslims in Western nations, building massive physical barriers in some places (like Israel), and establishing real and virtual blockades of the muslim world in order to seal it off as a danger to the West and Far East. This would entail acts of war against every muslim-ruled nation on Earth and would likely exacerbate islamic extremism, as the world became physically divided into dar al-islam and dar al-harb. It would last for decades, if not centuries, greatly increase the suffering of captive muslim populations, and quite possibly delay their "growing up" -- getting to the place we got to about 400 years ago, when we in the West decided to stop killing people for religious differences, and the Far East got to about a hundred years ago. This option also requires a very signifcant outlay of capital and constant maintenance costs for decades at least. It's unlikely that the West has the stomach for this.

3. Make Them Small. This, in one form, is the strategy we are persuing and the one that ultimately defeated communism. We used soft power to isolate, co-opt, and subvert segments of the enemy's population, while using hard power to isolate (e.g., the East-West German divide) and/or resist enemy expansion and aggression (e.g., Korea and Vietnam). This strategy has its dangers and limitations: a) islamofacism is in its early, earnestly religious phase of expansion. Its true adherents cannot be negotiated with; they must be destroyed and/or isloated until their power has waned and their system has settled into stasus and either collapses of its own internal contradictions (e.g., the Soviet Union) or evolves to more closely resemble the West (e.g., China). b) Hard power must be used successfully, or we will become disheartened and lose will. With traitors on out TV screens proclaiming our soldiers to be baby-killers for the first time since Vietnam, we have little enough of that already. c) Again, it requires will to carry out and probably will extend for decades or longer. A great advantage of this approach is that it allows for flexibility: uses of soft power (economic, social, poltical, informational...) can involve engagement (a la Syria), or can involve bribery and co-option for those willing to "play ball" (e.g., Pakistan). This can entail miltiary action of more limited scope: brushfire wars to take out the worst or most strategically placed enemy enclaves and regimes. Iraq was such a campaign. Bombing Iran's nascent nuclear facilities would be another (and there would be almost no negative consequences to doing so).

4. Kill Them All. aka, "more rubble, less trouble." This is the outcome I most fear, because, being a Christian, I don't cotton to seeing half a billion people flashed into smoking meat hunks. That, however, is what I think will happen when the West (and, perhaps even more likely, the East, as represented by China and India, both of whom reortedly have thermonuclear weapons) finally gets fed up or some catastrophe happens that truly threatens its existance. B-52s delivering big, Cobalt-salted, city-busting B-53s to every muslim capital in the world is not something it is pleasant to contemplate, but that very may be what happens if the West finally decides to invoke its millenia-old tradition of quick, decisive victory. Millions may die in the West and East; many more will die in the dar al-islam and the survivors will envy the dead. I fear such a war will make all the losses in all the wars and totalitarian-utopian slaughters of the 20th century pale by comparison.

I hope we never have to invoke No 4. I think only competant conduct of option 3 is the only way to prevent it, however, and the anti-war crowd -- truly treasonous in much of its conduct -- is making this more difficult. Why not? The international Left has the blood of tens of millions on its hands from all the utopian schemes it endorsed in the 20th Century. Why should we think it would shy away from the death of a few hundred million in its eternal quest to destroy its own civilization and bring us back to Year Zero?

Monk

VDH and Amadenijad on Friday the Thirteenth

2006-10-13T04:52:00.000Z

Two good reads for this supposedly unlucky day.

The first is Victor Davis Hanson's column in National Review Online yesterday. He asks and answers the musical question, "do we have a strategy in the war?"

Against the terrorists, our strategy is a six-pronged approach:

1. Beef up security to such a degree at home that it would require far more training and expertise to penetrate our defenses than what was necessary for the September 11 attacks;

2. Arrest, imprison, and kill enough Islamic terrorists in the United States and abroad to make it nearly impossible for them to carry off another September 11-like attack;

3. Take out the worst authoritarian regimes in the Middle East that sponsored terrorism and attacked their neighbors, while pressuring others like a Saudi Arabia and Egypt to cease funding terrorists;

4. Support the creation of democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon to offer Muslims choices other than autocracy or Islamic radicalism, while trying to encourage reform in the Middle East at large;

5. Wage a worldwide war of ideas that frames the struggle as the freedom of the individual, liberal values, and Western economic prosperity against the Dark-Age nihilism of the world of the caliphate and Sharia law;

6. Hope that while our enemies’ world is static, ours is not. In other words, while they endlessly redefine the 7th century, we use reason and science to wean us off dependency on their oil, seek sophisticated missile-defense systems, and hope instant global communications (which also facilitate their televised beheadings) can undermine their entire hierarchical society of imams and patriarchs.

I agree and although I am not sold on its efficacy, I believe this is the only humane set of strategy options open to us. The alternatives are surrender (which many in the West have already done) and "more rubble, less trouble." Neither are things I wish to see happen. VDH continues his observations:

As the United States and the Islamic fascists each respectively pursue their own strategies, the constituencies that matter — the Western and Middle Eastern publics — watch the battlefield, adjusting their outlooks to the perceived victory or defeat of either side. When we are doing well, a Bob Woodward writes Bush at War rather than State of Denial, a Chris Matthews sputters that “We are all neoconservatives now,” and enemies in Syria and Iran show real apprehension. But when we seem stalled, suddenly Democratic senators compare our soldiers to Nazis and worse, Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan start appearing with mainstream Democrats, and Hezbollah’s Nasrallah comes out of hiding to brag of his hatred of the U.S.

So the uncertainty is not whether the United States has a sound strategy in this long struggle against savage enemies of the Dark Ages — we have many wise ones — but rather whether we still have the will or the desire to see the war through to the bitter end.

I don't believe that we do, and won't until something much worse than 9-11 happens. After that, the deluge; if not the Apocalypse.

There is also a very good article on the nexus between Iran's medieval shi'a thocratic utopianism and moden leftist nihilism as found in President Amadenijad (which means "monkey-ass mullah-lover" in Farsi):

We would do well to take the Iranian president seriously, for he is proving himself a charismatic and clever leader. As he demonstrated recently at the United Nations, Ahmadinejad is adroit at putting aside Islamist themes when convenient and joining secular dictators like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe in their Marxist cant protesting American imperialism and economic hege mony. Like many totalitarian rulers, including Hitler and Stalin, he professes a love for mankind and world peace. In these ways, Ahmadinejad reflects the Iranian revolution's assimilation of traditional Islamic categories of faith to a Marxist lexicon of violent revolution. It is therefore more important than ever to realize that the Iranian revolution's brand of jihadism has close structural similarities to--and is historically descended from--strains of European revolutionary nihilism, including that of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis, and extending to later third world offshoots like the Khmer Rouge.

All of these revolutionary movements have a common set of genocidal aims, now reemerging in Ahmadinejad's lethal rhetoric. They all envision a return to what the Jacobins called the Year One, a grimly repressive collectivist utopia in which individual freedom is obliterated in the name of the common good, and people are purged of their vices, including property, freedom of thought, and the satisfactions of family and private life. Returning to a past so pure and distant requires the destruction of all received tradition, including religious traditions, extending back centuries, and so is, paradoxically, at the same time a radical leap into the future. That is why neither the purportedly Sunni vision of the Taliban nor the purportedly Shiite vision of the Iranian revolution bears any close resemblance to the traditions and restraints imposed by those faiths, especially restraints on this-worldly political extremism, terrorism, and the slaughter of noncombatants.

There is no negotiating with such an enemy. His vision is a matter of faith and apocalyptic in nature -- he is seeking to "emanentize the eschaton," as William F. Buckley might have had it; to bring about the end of the world by creating conditions favorable for reappearance of the Hidden Imam (the Mahdi), just as Hitler tried to bring about Gotterdamerung and Stalin sought to create conditions for the triumph of international communism and the end of history. Such a faith must be destroyed; it cannot be reckoned with.

Monk

The Post About the Blog About Books

2006-10-11T17:36:00.000Z

Guy of Houston -- Methodist Pastor, friend of Official VaA Spiritual Advisor Nolan Dynamite, and founder of Book Mining -- has asked several questions about books. Interesting questions. Nolan's answers are here. [Sorry 'bout Auburn there, Nolan.]

My own reflections:

1. One book that changed your life: (We'll assume the Bible is asssumed) The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis. Not a book, really; it's a collection of essays, but it had a lot to do with my becoming a Christian.

2. One book that you have read more than once: The Lord of the Rings. I've read it once every decade of my life and intend to continue doing so. I find something new every time I read it. I'm a geek about it -- I used to write notes to friends in Sindarin script. I read Dune several times as a kid, but became uncomfortable with its parallels with the story of islam and its "prophet." Today, I keep re-reading Patrick O'Brien's novels. They might be something to take on a desert island, too.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: (Again assuming the Gideons have left a bible in the drawer of my desert island hut; preferably the NIV) Either Chandler's Campaigns of Napoleon or Delbruck's History of Warfare (first of four volumes). They'd keep me occupied for awhile.
4. One book that made you laugh: I loved P.G. Wodehouse as a kid, although it's aged poorly for me. Any H.P. Lovecraft; he tried so hard to be "eldritch," but wrote so badly... Okay that's more than one. I'll stop now.

5. One book that made you cry: The Kite Runner. 'Nuf said.

6. One book you wish had been written: The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. Heck, I just wish I understood it. The nexus of science and God holds great fascniation for me (as it did for many great scientists; not that I'm one...) and Greene has explained the current status of physics and cosmology about as well as it could be, although Lisa Randall comes close in Warped Passages.

7. One book you wish had never been written: I certaily share Guy's dislike of Descarte and the whole "Enlightenment" dichotomy of mind and spirit. The current Pope has had a few good words on this subject. For instance, here. Another I wish hadn't been written: Rousseau's The Social Contract -- or really anything by him. Most modern bad ideas about government derive from Rousseau somehow. It would have been better for millions slaughtered in utpian schemes born of his ideas if he had been drowned at birth.

8. One book you’re currently reading: The Confusion. It's part two of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I love the way he weaves historical figures, scientific theory, the history of economics, word origins, etc., through the imrpbable adventures.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: I have a pile near the entrance to my attic that I've been meaning to get to. A dozen or so books I've left unboxed so I can get to them in the absence of the bookcases I really need.

10. Tag 5 others:
The Grand and Glorious KANH
Chefjef Ware
Audra Mickle
Emily H.
Raymond Thebo

The Real Monk

2006-10-10T16:56:00.000Z

Just a quick post to note the birthday of the man who partially inspired by my nom de blog, Thelonius Monk, who would have been 89. I have been listening to little but Monk today, thanks to XM radio's tribute to the great man's gift for unusually intricate melody and imrpovisation. He closely follows Miles Davis as my favorite musician.

Monk

The Suicide of the West

2006-10-06T16:05:00.000Z

I just caught this. although it came out two weeks ago. Theodore Dalrymple has an outstanding review of three books in the Claremont Institute's online magazine. The books document the decadence, dhimmitude, and coming destruction of Europe at the hands of the muslim barbarians, whom the 20-hour-work-week Euro weenies import to perform their manual labor for them:

That Western Europe suffers from a state of general paralysis is a truth too universally acknowledged to require much reiteration. Slow growth and high unemployment; an aging and shrinking population; scientific and cultural irrelevance to the rest of the world; a large, unassimilated alien population much of which is hostile to the very countries into which it has immigrated—these are just a few of the problems that Western Europe not only fails to solve, but even properly to recognize.

While Europe Slept, Menace in Europe, and Londonistan all deal with the European disease (if such a metaphor may be allowed for shorthand purposes), from slightly different perspectives. Bruce Bawer, an American writer resident in Norway, deals mainly with the threat of Islamism in northwestern Europe; Melanie Phillips, a distinguished British journalist, treats the specific case of Islamism in what might be called its international nerve center, London; and Claire Berlinski, an American writer living in Paris and Istanbul, analyzes the general state of the European psyche. Read in conjunction, they are far from reassuring.

...Modern Europeans believe in very little, except in as comfortable and safe a life as possible. Indeed, health and safety have altogether replaced faith, hope, and charity as the cardinal desiderata. It is scarcely any wonder that, when faced by people who, quite mistakenly and with a combination of staggering ignorance and arrogance, believe themselves to be in possession of a truth that justifies almost any atrocity committed, if not by them, exactly, then by those whom they have indoctrinated, modern Western Europeans do not know how to react. They have either forgotten what it is to believe in anything, to such an extent that they cannot really believe that anyone else believes in anything, either; or their memories of belief are of belief in something so horrible—Communism, for example, or Nazism—that they no longer believe that they have the right to pass judgment on anything. This is not a strong position from which to fight people who, by their own admission, hate you and are bent upon your destruction, brought about preferably at your own expense. First, you can't take them seriously; second, you suspect they might in any case be right. European multiculturalism is self-hatred writ large—and in the meantime is an employment opportunity for cultural bureaucrats.

In short -- at least until some unprecendented catastrophe occurs in Europe that wakes up the population, we cannot rely on the Europeans to provide any relevant help in World War IV, the West's global war on jihad.

Meanwhile, this is the fate that awaits all of us who refuse to surrender to the islamonazis:

'Boy snatched off street, set alight and murdered for being white'

MURDERED schoolboy Kriss Donald pleaded: "I'm only 15. What did I do?" as he was beaten up and dragged into the back of a car by his abductors, a court heard yesterday.

He was forced face down into the back of a silver Mercedes, threatened with a knife and told there was a gun in the car as he was driven off after being snatched from the street "because he was white".

All three are on trial in Edinburgh, accused of abducting and killing Kriss by striking him with a knife or knives, then setting him on fire on 15 March, 2004.

Monk

Our Schools: The Nail, Hit on the Head

2006-10-06T05:46:00.000Z

David Kpopel, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy, hits the nail on the head on the issue of preventing further school shootings:

the only realistic gun control policy which would stop school shootings would be to completely prohibit firearms, and confiscate the entire existing supply of more than 200 million firearms. Lesser policies (e.g., one-gun-a-month, gun registration) would, whatever their other merits, be unlikely to have a significant effect on school shootings. There are no substitutes for firearms (in both offensive and defensive situations), because firearms are fairly easy to use, and can project force at a distance.

Constitutional problems aside, it seems completely implausible to believe the gun prohibition could be successful, given the ability of the black market to supply drugs (which have been illegal for almost a century) to a wide variety of consumers, including high-school students.

Never mind the "conservative penumbra of the Constitution" issue that makes any form of widespread gun control an absolute no-go for me: high-quality weapons in the hands of ordinary, law abiding citizens renders the government more trustworthy.

Kopel goes on to his central point:

The second-best--and much more realistic approach--would be to allow licensed, trained teachers and administrators to possess concealed handguns on school property. I agree that having police officers on school grounds would be very helpful, but it seems that there are not sufficient police resources to cover all schools all the time.

In 2004, I detailed how Israel (which has a well-established Swiss-style [civic duty] gun culture) and Thailand (which has a very strong anti-gun culture) have armed teachers in order to protect schools against terrorists.

This is exactly what is needed. Thugs in schools will contonue to bring guns in through extra-legal means; our teachers need to be at least as well armed as a deterrent. When Klebold and his accomplice entered Columbine armed to the teeth, they could simply have been sliced down by a hail of uzi fire from half a dozen guards and teachers. Good riddance. This will also help break the back of gang influence in inner city schools.

Perhaps America (a country at World War, by the way) needs a bit more, not less, of the old West. For all popular propaganda to he contrary, it was the law that won and the OK Corral and a bunch of stolid citizen "squareheads" who shot up the thug/rebel James-Younger gang in Northfield Minn. Where the law has broken down, it can only be restored with the barrel of a gun, to paraphrase Mao...

Monk

A Quiet Day

2006-10-05T21:15:00.000Z

Well, the rally to RID THE WORLD OF BUSH THE NAZI CHIMPLER- GIBBON AND HIS CABAL OF EVIL OIL MAGNATES AND WALL-MART MANAGERS!!!! fizzled. Organizers probably got buzzed the night before and decided to stay in bed until noonish. By then, they just didn't have the energy to really get worked up.

Besides, Dubya-Macaque's close buddy, Pat Robertson, had probably planned to turn on the wind machines and deploy levy-levelling explosives, and usher in another Katrina. (The KKKristian right controls the weather, you know, through secret CIA programs they stole from the real muslim inventors, leaving no copies behind.) Many causes for the modern left are worthy of costing the lives of others, but few are worth dying for themselves. They stayed home apparently.

Monk

Let's See Now...

2006-10-05T20:59:00.000Z

Let's just examine the machinations on the Hill for a moment, shall we? Creepy IMs to a kid of legal age equals resignation if you're a Republican.

Running a homosexual prorstitution ring out of your Capitol Hill apartment and using your office to fix 33 trafic tickets for your gerbil-pimp equals a letter of reprimand if you're a Democrat.

It's a strange political world we live in. That's all I'm going to say on this subject.

Monk

Curse of the Were Rabbits!

2006-10-05T14:50:00.000Z

Sometimes science and art merge in ways that are just a bit uncomfortable. Just such a juxtaposition is taking place right now as scientists attempt a genetic vivisection of rabbits and humans:

Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.

It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.

The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.

This is a postive development in that human embryos may no longer be needed for stem cell research, but you have to wonder if, in some not so distant future, we won't need the services of AntiPesto. What happens if one of these "99.9% human, 0.1% rabbit" hybrids survives? Brundlebunny?

Monk

Katrina! Theocracy!

2006-10-04T19:43:00.000Z

Yes, folks...the KKKristians run this kkkountry and can control the weather!! IT'S TIME FOR THIS TO END!!!

I love the idea that they'll stay home from work. How many of this group's supporters actually have jobs?

Monk

Torture, then Hell

2006-10-02T18:10:00.000Z

I hope there is an especially nasty level of hell reserved for school shooters and child molesters. I know this is a visceral reaction and not very Christian of me, but I cannot help but think such indiviuals are beyond the Pale and deserve anything particularly nasty that comes their way. Please forgive me, Lord.

First we had the fifty-something with a criminal record as long as an August day in Anchorage, who molested the six girls he took hostage before killing one when the police stormed him. He took his own life, which is probably good from a theological point of view (better chance of ending up in hell), but I would love to have been the SWAT member that got to put a dum-dum through his head and watch it explode.

You can thank liberal judges -- doubtless Carter or Clinton appoitnees -- for this man, who'd spent six years (?!) behind bars for killing his girlfriend, being set free to sexually assault and kill innocent teens. The criminals' rights trump rights to basic public safety in the minds of BlueStaters.

Sorry again....not at all Christian. Perhaps as the cop, I could have said a silent prayer for his forgiveness as I pulled the trigger. You never know...

Then there was the semi-copy-cat killing of a school principal in Wisconsin by a student who complained that school authorities let other kids tease him for being homosexual (which is NOT a mental or emotional disorder, of course...) He just walked into school with handfulls of guns and started shooting. Sounds like he'd have done well in LA schools, whiere such things are the daily norm.

Finally, we have a fatal shooting today at an Amish (!?) school in Lancaster Co. PA. WTF,O? Again, clearly a copy-cat case. The perp killed at least three before turning the gun on himself. What evil would motivate such an act in a pacifist Mennonite community? Against their children?

Okay...let me make something clear: I will pray for the souls of these perpetrators and hope they can find some true reconciliation with God, but I am not averse to hastening or delaying their ultimate fates, by cruel and unusual means if warranted, despite the fact that a ridiculous clause in the Constitution takes away much of the deterrent power of punishment. Torture and brutal coercion work, on several levels, for several reasons, which is why I favor thier use against enemy combatants in our "war on terror." (The idea that humane treatment of jihadis will get us any fewer torturings and beheadings of US troops is the worst sort of errant squishy-pink, fern-bar nonsense. Thank you, John 'pink-panties' McCain) If you don't believe me, ask people in the mob-controlled neighborhoods of North Boston, downtown Atlantic City, and the Shreveport LA waterfront why violent crime rates have gone down so much. The real "authorities" in those neighborhoods (the mob) aren't as scrupulous as the police are and yet they preside over areas with great crime potential. Jane Jacobs talks about this in re North Boston in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Effective enforcement of public decorum, even if potentially brutal, makes for better neighborhoods.

Okay, so I'll pray for the souls of the perps in these cases, but I have no problems hastening those who commit violent acts against children along the paths to meeting their gods. I think the government should bring back a punishment that was popular in 17th and 18th century England and America: It was usually called "half-hanging:" The criminal was strangled on the gallows (vice having his neck broken) until nearly dead. Then he was pulled down and his limbs lashed to four horses, who were spooked into bolting in different directions, dismembering the victim ("drawing and quartering"). (This could best be done with cars today). The head of the hapless criminal was usually stcuk somewhere prominent, pour le encourage le outres."

Kill all such criminals, and may God sort them out.

Monk

Update 03 Oct 06: It appears from TV reports that the Amish murderer tied his victims up and killed them execution style (thankfully, not all died). It all appears to revolve around the fact that he was jilted twenty or so years ago and was left embittered. Two observations:

1) This is the obvious and inevitable result of cultural liberalism -- the "Me and My Hemerrhoids Generation" and the idea that subjective feelings trump public behavior; an idea that pervades everything from liberal radio to the liberal courts. Liberals and Democrats killed those children every bit as much as the lone psycho did.

2) Drawing and quartering is too good for this guy. He should have his skin flayed with a length of razor wire, then be sewn inside a fresh cowhide with a colony of fire ants and left in the West Texas sun to dry.

God please forgive my mean-spiritedness, but some are predestinened to follow God, others to follow their own gods. I think we're fairly safe in classifying this guy.

Monk - Honorary Grand Inquisitor

Update 3 Oct 06: The Duchess of Austin replies:

Wow, you're pretty bloodthirsty for a religious guy....

I totally agree with you on the "cruel and unusual punishment" thing....the more the better, and put it on TV. I think capital punishment would be more of a deterrent if it was used more effectively, i.e., the perp doesn't sit on death row for 15 years while endless appeals for his miserable life play through the courts. One appeal, just to make sure they got the right guy, and then Pfffffft, he's gone.

I also think that caning young criminals instead of locking them up, ala Singapore, is a better means of dealing with teens. A little public humiliation goes a long way toward turning a potential criminal back to the light side.

Somebody should find out if the caning experience did anything to cure that American kid who got caned in Singapore a few years ago. My money says he's a solid citizen these days and his life of crime is behind him....

I wouldn't say so much that I'm bloodthirsty by nature, just that this confluence of evil events has put me in a bloodthirsty mood. This does not reflect good Christian practice, however, so I must try to get myself out of it.

I agree with the points you make in your comment, however. We've proven through a century of using prisons as a social petrie dish that reforming prisoners does not work. Centuries of earlier human experience proved that more "cruel and unusual" measures (by our standards today) do deter. Incidentally, torture is a very effective method of extracting information (as long as the info can be verified and the victim threatened with worse consequences if caught lying), think of it what you will. In fact, the best way of using it is to torture mildly and threaten worse, letting the victim's mind do most of the inquisitor's work for him. Imagined pain is usually worse than the real thing, because the latter can be gotten used to. A declassified Army manual on interrogation techniques of World War II vintage -- from back when we were unapologetic about such things -- makes the point in almost these very words. (Sadly, it's in my private library, not on the internet, so no link.)

Capital punishment is really effective only if it's swift and certain, as you say. Corporal punishment has been an accepted part of many Christian nations' practice for centuries. Why? Because it works.

Welcome, by the way; it's always good to hear from new readers.

Monk

A Good Weekend In Football

2006-10-02T04:56:00.000Z

Yes, this was a very good, albeit not perfect weekend, in football at all levels

On Thusdays night last, Auburn (barely) beat South Carolina. It was too cluse for comfort and make inclide the poll-makers to reconsider Aubrun's place at no. 2 in the national rankings. I hope not. (Update: AP still ranks them second, but it may be too early for new ranking to have come out.)

On Friday night, the Prattville Lions high school team -- the team I follow and support (know many players, cheerleaders, band memebers, etc; eldest daughter plays the mellowphone in the marching band), fought their way past Opelika, the only team that beat them last year prior to the playoffs. It was a near-run thing, but very exciting. Congrats to the Albert brothers, who accounted for two of our scores. To top the evening off, Hoover (richy-rich suburb of Birmingham and rated no. 1 in class 6A high school ball going into the game) lost, so Prattville may wind up no. 1 in their class.

Saturday sadly saw Alabama lose, but they put in a very creditable performace against no. 5-ranked Florida, Sadly, no repeat of last year's result (31-3 'Bama). Nonetheless, Ohio State won (one of my Almas Mater), as did Texas (I support due to family ties). Missou also one (some affection due to friends still in MO, from when I was assigned to Whiteman).

Sunday saw my no. 2 KC Chiefs slaughtered the 49ers. The day was capped off by my no. 1 team, the Redskins (grew up their; a life-long love) winning in a very even and exciting game against Jacksonville. Mark Brunnell was great; Santana Moss was fantastic, especially in the game's last play; and we finally have a running game with Clint Portis, who looked a lot like olde John Riggins yesterday. Jacksonville's front three/four
couldn't contain him. A great game.

Monk

A Near-Run Thing

2006-09-29T05:07:00.000Z

To quote the Duke of Wellington (who was speaking of Waterloo), last night's Auburn game against the South Carolina Gamecocks was "a near-run thing."

It went down to the last play, when the Gamecocks were denied a fourth-down effort to tie the game from the Auburn six yard line.

This should have been a slaughter. As it was, it was far too close for comfort.

Monk

Christian Carnival CXLI and Dissing Reason

2006-09-29T04:57:00.000Z

The latest Christian Carnival is up at A Penitent Blogger. Lots of good stuff this week.

This entry at Pseudo-Polymath caught my attention, becuase I agree with much that Pope Benedict said in his important Regensburg speech, I find some of Pseudo's arguments cogent also:

Why should anyone wish God to be amenable to reason or even reasonable. It flies in the face of experience. Men at science are at their best when reason is set aside. Consider for example the following, Einstein didn’t arrive at GR via reason … but by an intellectual leap. This leap was followed then, by Mathematical aesthetic. It was a beautiful theory. Reason then does the dirty work of validating the theory. Furthermore, consider marriage. Marriage is rarely reasonable and reason certainly is not (or most emphatically should not be the only part of our person employed to validate our choice in seeking matrimony

He's exactly right. Special relativity came to Einstein in an intuitive leap, by the great scientist's own admission, and he stuck to the idea that relativity could yield a unified field theory all his life, even in the face of contrary evidence from quantum mechanics, simply because he thought his construct "beautiful." And it is. The mess that is quantum physics came about purely based on inductive reasoning.

Arthur Koestler explored the origin of ideas and intuition in general very well in The Act of Creation more than a generation ago. I find a lot of reasonable and emotional appeal in these arguments, but do beleive reason plays a vital role in the life of faith, exactly as Benedict posits.

How to reconcile the two? I haven't figured that one out yet; but I don't feel too bad -- no one else has either...

Monk

A Keen Eye for the Weakness of Strangers

2006-09-28T05:42:00.000Z

Fouad Ajami weighs in on the National Intelligence Estimate:

Islamic terror did not wait on the Iraq war. The assertion that Islamic terrorism has "metastasized and spread across the globe" because of Iraq takes at face value what the jihadists themselves proclaim. It would stand to reason that their Web sites, and the audiotapes of their leaders, would trumpet their attachment to the cause of Iraq. It is inevitable that American analysts glued to jihadist cyberspace, and lacking intimate knowledge of Arab ways, would take the jihadists at their word. But Islamic radicals have not lacked for grievances. The anti-Americanism and antimodernism that brought them onto American soil five years ago predated Iraq. For the good part of two decades, jihadist terror blew at will, driven by the conviction in the lands of Islam and its diaspora communities that America was a pampered land with little zeal for bloody struggles.

The declassified portions of the NIE are not particularly profound in the reading of Islamism. Their sociologese is of a piece with a big body of writing on Islamist movements—that the resentments of these movements arise out of "anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness" in the face of the West. I dare guess that were Ayman al-Zawahiri to make his way through this report, he would marvel at the naïveté of those who set out to read him and his fellow warriors of the faith. Ayoob al-Masri (Zarqawi's successor in Iraq) would not find himself and his phobias and his will to power in this "infidel document." …

We needn't give credence to the assertion of President Bush—that the jihadists would turn up in our cities if we pulled up stakes from Baghdad —to recognize that a terrible price would be paid were we to opt for a hasty and unseemly withdrawal from Iraq. This is a region with a keen eye for the weakness of strangers.

Monk

Meanwhile, In the War on Jihad...

2006-09-27T17:37:00.000Z

While Dubya fetes the Presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the anti-jihad cause has suffered a little-heralded, but sweeping defeat on President Musharraf's home turf:

Three weeks ago, Pakistan signed the terms of the Waziristan Accord with the northern region of its country called North Waziristan. It was, effectively, the terms of surrender by Pakistan to the Taliban and al Qaeda, which dominate North Waziristan. Pakistan has negotiated a separate peace -- the eternal danger to any wartime alliance.

According to intelligence sources cited by The Fourth Rail and other sources above, the Accord includes: (1) Pakistan to abandon its garrisons in Waziristan, (2) Pakistan military to not operate in or monitor actions in the region, (3) Pakistan to turn over weapons to Waziris, (4) Taliban and al Qaeda to set up a Mujahideen council to administer the region, (5) region to be called "The Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, (6) unknown but substantial amount of money paid by Pakistan to the Taliban, (7) al Qaeda and other jihadis to be allowed to stay in region, (8) 2,500 foreign fighters linked to al Qaeda and Taliban released by Pakistan from their prisons (this fact also confirmed by London's Daily Telegraph), and (9) Taliban to refrain from violence in Pakistan only; the agreement does not stipulate refraining from violence in Afghanistan.

According to an intelligence source cited in the Weekly Standard, the gains we have made in that part of the world in the past five years were "reversed in mere weeks with the loss of Waziristan and the release of 2,500 fighters."

Every advancement of the enemy's cause moves the world one step closer to a real, all-out world war -- one step closer to one of two outcomes I fear equally: either surrender of the West and all the world ruled by shari'a or hundreds of thousands of Western dead and half a billion smoking meat hunks being picked apart by vultures from Morrocco to Indonesia.

By slow degrees, things are getting worse.

Monk

Update 27 Sep 06: Max Boot has an excellent column, published in the LA Times, in which he comes to the same conclusions I have regarding islam. His words contain a warning, too:

EVER SINCE 9/11, a dark view of Islam has been gaining currency on what might be called the Western street. This view holds that, contrary to the protestations of our political leaders — who claim that acts of terrorism are being carried out by a minority of extremists — the real problem lies with Islam itself. In this interpretation, Islam is not a religion of peace but of war, and its 1.2 billion adherents will never rest until all of humanity is either converted, subjugated or simply annihilated.

Right. Our patience is not infinite and someday islam may provoke the deadly ire of the "Western Street."

Update 27 Sep 06: And then there's this. Another victory for global jihad:

An opera company in Berlin has cancelled a Mozart production of his work Idomeneo fearing a scene in which the prophet Mohammed's decapitated head is rolled on stage could trigger an Islamic backlash.

The decision by the Deutsche Oper, one of the world's most celebrated opera houses, shows how deep-rooted the fears now are in Europe's artistic community about offending Muslim sensibilities.

Western Europe is already cringing in submission, just as they did before Hitler's aggression. Millions will die eventually because of their cowardice now.

Low Intelligence

2006-09-27T05:12:00.000Z

The National Intelligence Estimate -- well, it's key conclusions, actually -- has been released and I have read most of it. Glenn Reynolds sums it up aptly:

While we should fire the leakers on general principles, we should probably also fire whoever wrote this -- for producing a meaningless document full of empty bureaucratic twaddle. If the jihadists win, they'll have more prestige! And they will probably use the internets! Do tell. Jesus Christ, if this is the quality of intelligence we're getting, no wonder we haven't won yet.

I have worked extensively in the past with CIA-based federated intelligence products and this is what I have come to expect. The CIA itself is a haven for leftist dilettantes with too much education in the humanities and not enough field experience. The Operations division despises the Analysis division, and rightly so. OF course today, all the attention (and all the money) goes to Analysis. And this is the kind of krep we get, especially when the analysis seeks to represent a consensus of the intelligence community.

Though far from perfect, military intelligence organizations function far more professionally. Were I king for a day, I would abolish the CIA and start over from scratch, basing the new organization on key cadres from the military.

Monk

Not Much To Report

2006-09-25T05:27:00.000Z

I haven't written a post in over a week....
There just isn't that much to report. The UN again proved itself a useless body that should be disbanded or moved to Zimbabwe, where its concepts of conscience, freedom, and the rule of law might find a more simpatico home than in the United States.
President of the Islamic Republic, Mahmoud Amidinjad (which means Hairy Monkey-Lover in Farsi) appealed to peace, liberty, the girl scouts, little fuzzy bunnies, freedom, and liberty an otherwise unnotable speech before that august body. He's for all those things. George Bush is against them, apparently, and is moving the world further away from realizing a utopia consisting of them by wanting to prevent Iran from building Peaceful Thermonuclear Weapons.

The next day, Hugo Chavez (which means 'portly but discerning scourge of evil' in an obscure Amazonian dialect) pronounced that the devil had been in the UN General Assembly chamber the day before and the he could still discern the smell of sulpher. Contrary to common sense, he was not referring to that billionarire who has scarferred billions from UN coffers and profitted from international slave trade, Kofi Anan. No -- as will come as no surprise to readers of Daily Kos -- he meant George Bush again. Dubya Gibbon wants to rule the world, you see, and that interferes with Chavez' intentions to do the same...thus Dubya is evil incarnate.

Over in Lebanon, Hezbollah (which means "Party of Heavenly but Slightly Hairy Virgins" in ungrammatical Arabic) held a celebration of victory over Israel, in which Chief Speechifier Hasan Nasrallah proclaimed that the peace-loving, girl-scout-supporting, islamic lovers of peace and freedom had no cause to worry because Hezbollah still had twenty thousand missiles with which to rain down peace, security, and liberty on Israeli grocery shoppers and schoolchildren.

Meanwhile, our "spy agencies," which gave us such pertinent warning of 9/11, have said that the invasion of Iraq has increased radical jihadis' level of violence, not diminished it. Yes, I think they're right: only a few million Americans would have died in attacks subsequent to 9/11, versus the thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died in that campaign. A more than equitable exchange from the point of view of the American Left. I'm sure they hope that those Americans killed would have been mostly Republican voters -- you know, the ones with jobs...

Also meanwhile, the Pope surrendered to muslim pressure and recanted his comments concerning islam, inviting muslim clerics to the Vatican so he could show them how much he'd like to kow-tow to their demands for submission. Heaven forfend anyone in the West would actually stand up for the religion and culture that brought mankind up from the slime and degradation of a permanent dark age...

No, the only thing of note in the last week was publication of Christian Carnival CXL, but I'm in no mood to quote from it at present...

Monk

Reason and the Logos

2006-09-15T19:49:00.000Z

I knew I liked this guy.

The Pope delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg (where he used to teach) earlier this week that has done two very good things:

1) It has expressed the necessary union of reason (particularly as what we consider the Greek tradition) and faith as underpinnings of Western Civilization and integral to a mature understanding of faith. He's put this about as well as it's ever been put.

2) He's pissed off every muslim in the world, for buried in the text is a veiled reference to islam as an example of religion devoid of reason. He even quoted medeival Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, who said with "startling brusqueness," "show me just what mohammed brought that was new, and there you find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The full text of Benedict's speech is here.

The islamic world has reacted in the manner we've come to expect: riots, threats, burnings, screaming, denunciations, the pulling of hair and the gnashing of teeth... The usual.

The Vatican has done the PC thing and said His High Magnificent Glorious Holiness didn't intend to offend any muslims. Bullshit. The meaning of the quote, and some of his thinking on the true nature of islam, are clear from the context of the speech. He aligns himself squarely against both islamic fundamentalism and modern secular humanism.

And he's right to do so. Read the whole speech.

Monk

Update 18 Sep 06: I wrote too soon. The Pope is backtracking and apologizing for his remarks as the muslim world responds with riots and nun-murdering:

"I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," the pope said.

"I hope this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address in its totality was and is an invitatino to frank and sincere dialogue," he added.

At least it was, "I'm sorry for the reaction," not, "I'm sorry for my remarks." Still, "appease"-ing is exactly what he is doing, just as Neville Chamberlain sought to appease Hitler.

When is the West going to stop apologizing and get down to the serious and necesary business of ideological war with militant islam?

Five Years On

2006-09-11T05:04:00.000Z

I was certainly cutting a very undignified pose when I first heard of the 9/11 attacks. I was Operations Officer of the Ops Support Squadron at Laughlin AFB, right along the Texas-Mexico border, and the Air Education and Training Command (AETC) Commander was scheduled to fly into Laughlin that morning in a brand-new T-6 Texan II trainer that he was getting a chance to joy-ride for the first time (with the help of a seeing-eye instructor pilot, of course). My Ops Group Commander (OG) -- a good guy, mind; one I'm still in contact with, but a little high-strung that morning due to the visit -- was having me, my Chief of Airfield Manangement (a retired CMSgt with 15 years post-active duty time mananging airfields), and any bodies that could be spared from base ops pulling tiny fragments of weed and grass from cracks in the cement near the "red carpet" painted on the concrete outside base ops, where the AETC/CC would park. The OG was marching about, pointing out where "my" grounds-keepers (Mexican contractors, actually) had failed to make the tarmac sufficiently Ship-Shape and Bristol-Fashion, making us pull the weeds by hand, as a form of punishment I suppose. In other words, just another day of typical Air Force bullshit.

A call from the tower ground controller came over the OG's 'brick:' "Sir, you need to come inside." The OG made certain that we would continue our endeavors and he ducked inside base ops. He talked to the dispatcher, then got on a land-line. He talked for a short time and then came back out to the red carpet: "Forget that shit and come here." We went inside and saw what was happening on the brand-new flat-screen we'd bought to show weather data, now tuned to Fox News. The second plane had just hit the WTC, so we knew it was an attack. That made it a little after 0830 local. The AETC/CC was airborne and due in at 0900. The OG said, "go get Max (my boss, the Ops Support Squadron Commander). This is going to be a cluster-...."

It was. I ran across the street from base ops to the squadron's offices. I started, "Max..." He said, "I know." The squadron's exec, a young lady Captain usually known for her unperturbability, was crying. I said foolishly, "there could be fifty thousand dead! My God!" Max said, "let's get the General on the ground, then we can worry about this." We headed back to base ops.

The CSAF arrived without incident, but air traffic was shut down nation-wide and the borders were put on the highest level of alert. Several airborne military aircraft were diverted into Laughlin. We had to arrange a staff car and drive the AETC/CC back to San Antonio. The latter barely spoke to the Wing and OG/CCs; he was tied up on his cell trying to sort out what was happening command-wide. My wife went to a memorial service in Del Rio and got caught in the traffic jam that followed the order for everyone assigned to the base to report to their work stations (a "full recall"). Another cluster-.... What a target the traffic jam outside the base front gate would have made, had our muslim brothers but known.

Sorting all of this out and getting KAHN and the kids back on base (all the schools let out, too) occupied the better part of the day. The wife/kids situation worried me more than anything else.

Once all the aircraft were parked and the squadron had reported, it got very quiet. We sat and watched the replays. We all had time to reflect. Everyone knew who was behind the attacks. My reaction was anger. I remember saying then, "it's finally happened; the next campaign in the war that started in 632 (or thereabouts). I knew it was only a matter of time before they succeeded." (Everyone had expected The Big One on 31 Dec 99.) I was in a "let no stone remain standing upon another" mood. Most of the rest of the squadron was somber. Many cried. Many began to worry about the fate of friends in the Pentagon, or in the campaigns that we all knew would be coming soon. Several, including me, said, "good; now we finally have an excuse to take out Iraq and the Taliban and get this lobbing cruise missiles at empty camps bullshit over with." No one of our senior officers (myself included) had any doubts as to where this would all lead next for us. Those who'd reflected on the nature of what had happened in the years leading up to 9/11 were not surprised at all. We expected it in some form at some time and it was obvious to us that the unfinished job we left in Iraq in '91 had contributed to the enemy's hubris in making these latest attacks, even if no one could prove material connections, as had our tepid aspirin-factory bombing responses to other provocations in the intervening years.

This didn't make us unusually prescient. The patterns were just obvious to anyone who followed military and foreign policy matters in the previous decade. That is, most of the senior officers at my base, anyway. Me? I would have had the Saudi Royal Family roasted in napalm after the Cole bombing, just to "encourage the others." I even remember quoting Hobbes "war of all against all" comment, as I have many times in the five years since, concerning the The War.

Not all got it, however. Hugh Hewitt relates part of his morning:

AROUND 9:45, MY COLLEAGUE who was scheduled to join me at [a] meeting at the Hancock called and chirped an upbeat sing-songy “Good morning!”

“Hi,” I responded.

Maintaining his annoying good cheer, he inquired, “How ya doin’!”

Slightly annoyed and a little emotional, I said, “You must not know what’s going on today.” He told me he did, but he said it was happening in New York and then immediately asked me where we should meet at the Hancock Tower.

Honestly, I couldn’t believe my ears. This was a highly intelligent man on the other end of the line. I told him, “Don’t you understand – America is under attack.” He responded by condescendingly telling me that two buildings were under attack. I told him I didn’t want to argue with him. Obviously it was an inopportune time to go to a top floor of a major city’s most prominent high rise, but whether or not we agreed wasn’t really material. Every high rise in America would be officially evacuating itself within the hour, I told him. Even if we wanted to attend the meeting, it wouldn’t be an option available to us.

It was the first time I dealt with someone who just didn’t get what 9/11 meant. It wouldn’t be the last.

Yep. I'd guess well over half of America still doesn't get it and about 80% of the rest of Western Civilization not only doens't care or believe it's at war, but is openly hsotile to the only two nations carrying our banners forth into battle: the US and UK.

Another astute observer, daughter of a prominent blogger, was in third grade when the attacks happened and is approaching high school now. Commenting on conclusions she's come to since 9/11, she sums up the first night of the 9/11 docu-drama very well indeed:

"Liberals," she said, presumably referring to her endlessly politically correct private school (the same National Cathedral [School] that hosted ex-president Khatami last week), "always want to tell you what to do and what to think, but then they don't even keep you safe."

Democratic Party politicians might want to reflect on that awhile. They think of themselves as defenders of freedom, protectors of civil liberties. To my daughter, however, they are merely authoritarians who tell you what to think, but then, when push comes to shove, these liberal authoritarians don't even protect you from existential risk. In my thirteen year old child's political imagination, smoke from the burning Pentagon and the wreckage of the plane continues to rise. Does it in yours? Does it in theirs?

It does indeed and it always will.

I'll write at greater length later about how I (truly) fear this will all end. In the meantime, reflect on what 9/11 and our five-year response to it really mean. I'll post any responses as updates.

Monk

Update 11 Sep 06: Karl of Noneya, who corresponded last week, leaves the following comment:

I blogged on a similar topic today, although the military angle of your post was interesting to read. I am glad that some people realize that there's still a war going on out there and we need to finish it from our side. The enemy is certainly willing to finish it from theirs.

Yes. The enemy certainly realizes there's a war on. They have have an overhwleming incentive to continue trying to "impose effects" (as we say in MilSpeak these days) worse than those of 9/11 and their state sponsors (Iran, Syria, et al) have a similar incentive, since a distant, evil foreign foe keeps local minds off of troubles that might mean revolution at home. (Admidhinijad, for all his bluster, has significant prolems at home; not a very stable poltical situation). So...they'll keep trying, and every success, however small, will rally more of the muslim world behind them and further weaken Western resolve.

As a Christian, however, what I most fear is that the enemy will succeed someday beyond their wildest dreams and tens, or hundreds or thousands, or millions will die here. Then we'll get pissed. Then all the academic types, the hug-a-tree ideological squishy-dolls, and the Democratic fops and courtiers will be brushed aside as the West (led by Red America) finally decides to take an Old Testament view of islam. Then tens or hundreds of millions will die, and those who live will rock back and forth on their knees from their caves and hovels, scraping their sores with broken shells as they try to suckle their dying babies, screaming, "NO MORE! NO MORE!"

Let me make this clear: I DON'T want this to happen. This is an outcome almost as bad as our abject surrender to radical islam. But I'm enough of a student of general and military history to realize that this probably is what the future holds. Who knows; maybe it will betoken the final battle and the end of the age. I'm skeptical of all apololyptic talk, however.

Yes; some of us still realize there's a war on. Some of us also think that failure now, in the war we're in, will mean a much worse war later. How many times in human history have we repeated this mistake?

Thanks for writing back!

Monk

(Not So) Rare Good Form

2006-09-08T05:42:00.000Z

James Lileks was even more spot-on than usual this morning, tackling the media-spawned miasma of pessimism and Concerned Long-Facedness as well as several specific late manifestations of same. First, on the Dem's late hair-pulling exercise over the upcoming ABC / Disney Path to 9/11 mini-series:

I probably won't watch the ABC movie, because it's been edited to conform to the complaints of complainers and reflect the fact that the MinProd chocorations were always 15 grams, not 20.

I don't think this is the "veiled threat" some are calling it, because there's no way on earth the Democrats would introduce legislation to strip Disney of its broadcast license. It's like threatening to interrupt the broadcast with winged monkeys. Disney lawyers would say, correctly, well, you and what army of winged monkeys? But I don't recall Congress getting so deeply involved in the content of a specific television show before. Chilling effect? Heck no, not if the result is the truth. And who can possibly be against the truth?

Well, the Clintons, for one, who are behind this blatant attempt at censorship. He's right that it will never fly (so to speak), but just the attempt itself betokens the power of the Clintons. They want the MSM to keep bleating, "Nineeleven was all Chimpler-Macaque's fault. There's no blame to throw around, Mr and Mrs America -- it's landed already." 9/11 had NOTHING to do with the fact that the Previous Administration was busy throwing an eight-year pot-smokey bender, renting out the White House, and getting its collective wick shagged (or carpet chewed, as the case may be) by sorority-aged courtiers, while every maggot-bearded islamo-Rasputin in the world plotted killing Americans with zombie-stare fanaticism. No, sir. Nothing at all...

Lileks goes on to tackle the Establishment Media's attitude in general:

While working and doing various things the other day, I lent an ear to the radio. The morning host was talking about pessimism, and how he's sick of it. Sick! I agreed. It's not just specific pessimism about specific issues, which is sometimes apt and wise, but the overall glumness you get from the news media. Of course, you can find glumness anywhere. Swaths of the right are pessimistic about America because immigration will result in the national anthem sung in Toltec by 2018, and chunks of the left are pessimistic because Chimpy McDiebold may serve out his term without impeachment or interment. Everyone's glum about something. But I listen to the news on the radio every hour on the hour, and it makes me want to saw ditches into my wrists. It's the needling worrisome hectoring tone of the newscasters that annoys me. There's a a woman who handles the morning shift on ABC; she emotes every syllable, infusing them with a sense of impending disaster, and then she hands it off to Vic Ratnor, who likewise leans into every phoneme with worried urgency, regardless of whether it's an oil shortage (which could rekindle inflation!), a discovery of a new oil field (which could cost billions to exploit!) or a study on the effect of global warming on popsicles (which could stain the rug!) The two of them could make a flooded antihill sound like the end of the Republic.

The news is never good. If the economy's up, there's an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you?

TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, we're deeply concerned, and powerless to do anything about it. Although we hope you infer from our brows the need to contact someone, and urge action on this issue. Now here's a baby giraffe.

The formulation seems simple: The continued existence of problems at this late date in human history implies that we're regressing. We're screwing up, we've lost it, and we wander confused amongst the morass of the malaise and vice versa. Hard times, brother. Hard times. I'm not saying they should pretend we live in the Republic of Happy Bunnies Who Pee Champagne, but for God's sake, sometimes you'd think the bread lines snaked from the Hoovervilles to the soup kitchens again. I'm probably confusing the sugar-coated recollections of early youth with actual history, but I grew up with a sense of optimism and confidence in the country. That really makes me sound like Mr. McFartus shakin' a whittlin' stick at the jaunty-hatted younguns, I know. But the icons in my dim early youth, either by absence or presence, were JFK and Humphrey. They weren't defeatists, and they didn't give off that rank stink of anger.

Amen, brother! Of course, I've always been a Mr McFartus (just ask my daughters what my bedroom smells like) and 'm durn proud -- proud, I say -- to admit it. I'm a bit more ideologically jaundiced than Mr Lileks, of course: I grew up in Washington; he only worked there for a couple of years. The political climate in the Imperial Capital has never been any different (at least in my lifetime). It's just that the area's pervasive cynicism and/or New York's hauteur hadn't leached out to the rest of the country (outside a few blue-parenthisis enclaves) until the last few decades. The rest of America was healthy and happy, thank you, even if everyone in the smoke-filled rooms and fern-bar coffee houses was Appropriately Glum and Concerned. This has been building for some time. If you don't believe me, read Tom Wolfe's stuff from the 70's. (Like this.) He said many of the same things. The media's attitide goes a long way toward explaining why I live where I do and Lileks lives where he does (the Midwest).

Here's Lileks' brilliant summing up:

The iPod just kicked on that fine messy song “Tubthumping.” I get knocked down. But I get up again. I get knocked down. But I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down. That's the spirit, ya commie buskers! I don’t listen to that song and wonder “what has he done to get knocked down?” I salute the boozed-up shouting chanty brio of the sentiment, which is the distant cousin of Cagney snapping of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." Really. Chest out, chin high, eyes bright, up yours if you're heart can't find the tinder to shout hoorah. Look: there’s always a place for the bitchers, the carpers, the griefers, the snipers, the angry marginal sorts flinging poo from the cages of their own beliefs. But it’s not the pessimists who will save the West. It’ll be those who believe the West is worth saving, and not because it is the least horrible option whose defense must be prefaced with endless apologies, but because it really is the best hope we have. Would you rather be a libertarian in China? A Christian in Sudan? A Zoroastran in Iran? A lesbian in Saudi Arabia?

But - but we supported the Shah, and -

Yes. Interesting how supporters of the Shah didn't storm our embassies or wage a 30 year Death-to-America campaign after we cut the Shah loose. Reset the hands. We can argue about all manner of strategies now, but there's one division that counts more than any other, and it’s fundamental and pervasive. Pessimism or optimism.One’s very satisfying. The other’s hard. I’d say we don’t have any choice, but we do, and that choice may undo us yet.

May, I said. I’m naturally pessimistic, and I hate it, and fight it. Cautious optimism: methadone for cynics.

"Flinging poo from the cages of their own beliefs." Wonderful. It's why I read him, folks.

Monk

Update 8 Sep 06: On the Clintonista Star Chamber's efforts to repeal freedom of the press through the offices of Harry Reid, et al, centrist pundit Glenn Reynolds has it right:

By making a big noise over this film, the Clinton people are implicitly disavowing the "pass" they've enjoyed, and in the process inviting more, rather than less, scrutiny of that Administration's antiterror record, which strikes me as very unwise, politically.

Update 11 Sep 06: Saw the first night. Why the fuss? The show flings poo around all over the place. No one escapes blame, which seems about right to me...

A REALLY GOOD Christian Carnival!

2006-09-06T18:20:00.000Z

Okay, I'm not late in posting this for once -- mainly because it's a really good one. It's up at From the Anchor Hold, a blog I've begun reading after several good referrals from other blogs.

Okay again, I'm just writing that this CC is special because I have a post in it. Yes, after long hiatus, I am finally submitting to some other venues again.

Those who read this blog regularly (both of you!) will already have seen the conversation between me and correspondent Izmud, but perhaps some other readers will weigh in on this topic now. It's one of great interest to me.

There is more to like than just my sterling prose, however. I would have liked to have read Adam's Blog on the gunpoint conversion of two journalists last week, but Adam has his spam filter set to block any referring links. Umm....kinda defeats the purpose of posting, bro...

Thanks to Diane at Crossroads, I now know what theological niche I fit into: I'm an Arvinianist. That's one who holds to some elements of TULIP Calvinism / Baptism as well as some of the doctrines of Armininius / Methodism. I still heartily believe in the T in TULIP, for example: total depravity. I don't know how anyone can look around the world (or just the morning paper) an not be convinced that mankind is uttterly damned without God's call to grace. On the other hand, I also believe wholeheartedly in conditional election, unlimited atonement, and resistable grace. I believe belief is a constant conversation with God; sometimes He takes a more TULIPish stance toward us, but ultimately I think He allows those who consciously reject Him to go the their fate. Does it really matter? I don't think Jesus checks our doctrine at the gate. His was are inscrutable and we will never know in this life why some called will come and others will not and thus whom He will choose as His own. I do believe He wants us all, however, and is heartbroken over everyone who resists His grace. Anyway, read the whole post for more of the story...

For those who may wind up here due to the CC link, I apologize for the light, sporadic blogging. I am heavily into the editing phase of the latest book I'm working on (Department of Defense Joint Targeting, if you must know) and just haven't had much time for recreational writing. It's good to get back into a CC.

Cheers all,

Monk

CC's Are Up

2006-08-31T05:05:00.000Z

Yet again, I am a week behind on posting Christian Carnivals. This week we have 136 and 137.

CXXXVI is at Jeremy Pierce's excellent site, Parableman. You know, I've long thought that U2 front man Bono has his head on straight in terms of faith, even if his association with the entertainment crowd (or his faith, for that matter) have led him to some freaky liberal political positions I don't agree with. Parableman links to a very good post at Codex. I remember that his number 4 selection was what first gave me a clue to the band's Christian moorings: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For:

This song is at once both a clear affirmation of the band’s faith (at least three of them at that time) as well as an expression of striving for a theological home: “You broke the bonds and you / Loosed the chains / Carried the cross / And my shame / All my shame / You know I believe it / But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

It captured where I was in my much-wandering faith walk back in 1987 and started me listenting to the band. (Incidentally, I've very much found what I was looking for; keeping sight of it is just sometimes a problem...)

One omission though: I would have included Vertigo from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, one of my favorite recent songs. "Your love is teaching me how .... How to kneel."

CXXXVII is at John Howell's great site, Brain Cramps for God, which I have also linked to frequently. Lots of good posts here. One of the better posts I've read on "creation science" and a Christian reconciliation with the concept of evolution, which nature deomonstrates in all its aspects. The author, like me, believes that science and Christianity are reconcilable and that God gave us minds and senses for a reason. We just see now through a glass darkly.

In summary: Christians can and should embrace science, they are not opposing belief structures. Believe the Bible, yes, but don’t reject science out of hand. God has given us glimpses into how the universe was made and what goes on there, embrace those things as gracious gifts from God. Again, I also want to point out that salvation is not dependant on your take on this issue. I just want you to move beyond a rigid understanding of what you think the Bible says, it probably was not intended that way. Exegesis is a good thing.

This summarizes his position (and mine), but read his enitre argument against some of the more science-hostile (and science-illiterate) "creation science" advocates.

Another post from 137 (at Fiedes et Veritas) made my jaw drop:

The Rev. John Stevens says Fellowship Baptist Church in Saltillo voted not to approve blacks as members during a scheduled Sunday night business meeting Aug. 6. Because of the decision, Stevens stepped down from the Baptist Missionary Alliance congregation that has an average Sunday morning attendance of 30 people.

According to Stevens, the church made race an issue after a biracial 12-year-old boy, Joe, began attending Fellowship Baptist with his temporary guardians.

The church was “afraid Joe might come with his people and have blacks in the church,” Stevens said. “I could not go along with that. There would always be a wall between us, so I resigned that night.”

Is this really still a problem in 21st century American churches? Sick and sad, is all I can say. I do agree with Jeremy Pierce in his comment to the post, however:

certainly agree with your criticism of this church, but it strikes me as strange to see it as a sign of how low the church has sunk. Given that this was extremely commonplace 100 years ago and is extremely rare now, I’d say that things have greatly improved. These outliers remind us that we haven’t completely recovered, but the fact that this is so uncommon should say something about how much better things are.

I hope he's right.

Monk

Update 6 Sep 06: A new commenter, Karl at Nonoya, (like that blog name -- pretty good blog, too), sends the following:

found your blog on the Christian Carnival, and I just wanted to say that it's good to see a fellow Alabamian up there. I grew up in Tallassee, and live in Northport now. Check out my blog when you get a chance.

Yep, there's a few of us here. Know your hometown well by site -- we go through it frequently since we like to take 14 to and from Auburn to Prattville and vice versa. Nice town, even if I've only stopped there to eat, to be perfectly frank. AL actually a lot of really nice little towns: Prattville, Tallasee, Alex City, Brewton, that have a lot more Ye Olde American Small Town feel than anything I was used to up in Ynakee lands. The Tuscaloosa area is also very nice, though I don't know it as well. One of my duaghters who swam in competitions at Auburn and Bama, both, so I'm getting to know the college towns a lot better.
Cheers,

Monk

Sad but True

2006-08-30T21:08:00.000Z

"Clausewitz had it backward." So says Ralph Peters, writing in the July 06 Armed Forces Journal, an issue I just got around to reading. I am not generally a fan of Peters, since he is about the most vocally predjudiced anti-airpower zealot the Army has in its camp, but in matters of conflict philosophy in general, he's often right on. He's never been more so than in this article, sadly.

His view of mankind is jaundiced and cynical, appealing deeply to my Calvinist roots -- for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God -- and the world is ruled by the spirits of the flesh, sinful man, and the Deceiver. His view is very Hobbsian, as is mine: man's natural state is war of all against all, even if the forms of conflict we indulge in the world are not always called war. My visceral agreement with Peters accords with, and largely explains why, I have devoted much of my life to the study of history, and particularly human conflict and war.

Peters puts the case more elequently than I can:

Even those who have never read a line written by Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, accept as truth his dictum that "War is simply a continuation of policy with other means." Yet, that statement was only superficially true for the European world in which Clausewitz lived, fought and wrote, and it never applied to the American people, for whom war signified a failure of policy.

To characterize the conduct of other civilizations and states, from the bygone Hittite and Assyrian empires to today's Islamic heartlands, China or Russia, Clausewitz's nouns would have to be reversed: "Policy is simply a continuation of war with other means."

Conflict, not peace, is the natural state of human collectives. We need not celebrate the fact but must recognize it. If peace were the default condition of humankind, wouldn't history look profoundly different? Thousands of years of relentless slaughter cannot be written off as the fault of a few delinquents. Human beings aggregated by affinities of blood, belief or culture are inherently competitive, not cooperative, and the competition is viscerally — and easily — perceived as a matter of life and death. Pious declarations to the contrary do not change the reality.

Our blindness to this fundamental and enduring principle — that all of a state's nonmilitary actions seek to achieve the ends of warfare through alternative means — leaves us strategically crippled, needlessly vulnerable and wastefully ineffective. Only our wealth, size and raw power redeem our strategic incompetence sufficiently to allow us to bumble forward. We continue to regard warfare as something profoundly different from all other official endeavors, as an international breakdown and a last resort (occasional military adventurism notwithstanding), but similar attitudes exist only in a core of other English-speaking countries. Elsewhere, the competition between governments, cultures, civilizations and religions is viewed as comprehensive and unceasing, and it is waged — instinctively or consciously — with all the available elements of power.

We, not our antagonists, are the odd player out.

...

Even in our religious practice, we gloss over the merciless wars of the Old Testament, although Yahweh waged total war against Pharaoh's Egypt with a succession of plagues (including germ warfare, balancing out the proto-nuclear effects achieved against Sodom and Gomorrah).

The message we refuse to learn is that aggression is necessary and ineradicable. The only hope of minimizing military aggression is to channel the impulse into other, less destructive channels. If we routinely fight with other elements of national power, accepting that we are endlessly at war with our competitors, we are apt to face far fewer military contests.

The conundrum is that our military strength makes our policy-makers lazy. Neglectful of other instruments and means of national power, they inevitably find themselves forced to resort to military solutions.

The Islamist threat is even fiercer — far fiercer — than China when it comes to exploiting policy as a continuation of war with other means. Saudi Arabia, for example, has engaged in a merciless religious war against the West for more than three decades, yet it has not only done so while convincing our national leaders, Republican and Democrat, that we're "friends," but has managed to gain the protection of America's military on the cheap, even as it refuses meaningful cooperation with our forces. To preserve the profits of a handful of multinational oil companies, we protect a repellent, throwback regime that willfully created Osama bin Laden and his ilk. In country after country, I personally witnessed how Saudi money is used to spread anti-Western hatred (and to divide local societies), while America's taxpayers fund a military prostituted to the defense of the degenerate House of Saud.

We're not even mercenaries: Mercenaries at least get paid.

As for the Islamist terrorists, they've adopted a nonstate variant of the "total war" concept developed by Chinese military theorists. No front or sphere is off-limits. We are to be attacked wherever and however it is possible to do so. Indeed, a key lesson we should fear that the terrorists took away from 9/11 isn't that Americans can be killed by the thousands, but that killing Americans by the thousands costs our economy trillions.

Please read the whole thing. It's a keeper.

This very Puritan understanding of the human condition, which I share, explains to me why it is not inappropriate for a Christian to study war: it is so much a part of our condition and the parts of the world that embrace or at least tolerate Christianity and are responsible for its expansion to the rest of the world understand these fundamental sad truths about human nature so poorly, as Peters points out. As a Christian warrior, I must choose just conflicts, avoiding them whenever possible, and must be just as well in prosecutingconflict. But these must not mask the fact that war -- by its various names in its various forms -- is a natural part of human nature and must be dealt with just like any other -- sometimes even used as a tool for God's own work (as the OT demonstrated many times). It will not be irradicated until Christ returns to reign over the earth (and even then, the events leading up to this are frought with Christ's coming battles with Satan...)

Food for thought....

Monk

Update 31 Aug 06: Correspondent Izmud comments:

Hi all,
I've been on an extended "Blog Holiday" and it's refreshing to come back to such a lively topic, especially when I agree so wholeheartedly with Ralph Peters and JP. My only real comment is a question for JP: how do you square you Old testament fire & brimstone with the kinder, gentler New Testament? Therein, i believe, lies the rub for Americans and hence our inconsistent and illogical approach to foreign policy and war.

Great question -- and I agree that misinterpretation of this issue has hampered America, at least in the last century or so, both politically and militarily.

This is one that theologians and philosophers have pondered for thousands of years now. I believe the traditional (Catholic and mainline Protestant) teachings concerning bellum iustum (just war) are correct and are consistent with both Testaments of the Bible, as are the more recent terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello, even though none of this tradition is found in the Bible itself. There is overwhelming "circumstantial" evidence for their Biblical justification, shall we say.

This tradition says that there can be just (and unjust) wars and there can be justice (and injustice) in war. At least as far back as Augustine, Christians have believed that bellum iustum was possible and even a necessity as long as the cause fought for was just from a Christian perspective (such as protection of the innocent from destruction or exploitation), was authorized by right authority, open military warfare was the last resort, and was fought to achieve peace and/or prevent a greater evil than the fighting itself entailed.

This led to some pretty ruthless handling of indigenous "Palestinian" peoples at the hands of the Israselites in the OT, by God's direct order, probably becuase God knew (as we Americans seem to have forgotten) that a complete victory today, even if very bloody, is better than an imperfect, partial (if humane-seeming) victory that leads to worse atrocity later. The obvious recent example is the Armistice at the end of WW1 that led directly to WW2. The alternative to "leaving not one stone standing on another" was probably generations of internicine warfare taking many more lives and causing much more destruction (vide the very-"humane" Israel and its neighbors in the years since WW 2.

As to the issue of reconciling the two Testaments, I don't believe that the NT is as "kind and gentle" as you think it is. Nor do I think that the OT Law's requirement for individual gentleness, mercy, compassion, and justice was any less than it is for today's Christians (and Jews). The OT is a story of God's people as a corporate body -- a nation; the NT Gospels, at least, are an account of how our individual salvation and justification are achieved. Nations may do things that individuals may not, however. Waging war as a collective entity is one of them; when done by an individual this is called murder, which the Law specifically prohibits. Besides, there is much imagery of battle and war in Paul's writing and even in Jesus' teachings ("I come to bring a sword" is more than just metaphor). Finally, John's Revelation makes it clear that Christ is the Lamb of God, but is also a general:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns...He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. 'He will rule them with an iron scepter.' He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.

-- Rev 19:11-15 (NIV)

I believe there is an honorable tradition of Christian pacifism and that pacifism can be given to God as a form of worship, but I think the idea that pacifism is a necessary part of Christian teaching is doctrinally wrong and dangerously naive. Perpetual conflict is part of our carnal nature and cannot be avoided. Yes, as Christians we are called to overcome that carnal nature (and thus should not exult in war or killing), but that does not mean it is avoidable. Too many in America today think it is "optional" or avoidable, or fail to see that the "humane"-seeming partial military solutions often lead to more death and destruction in the long run.

Sad, but true.

Monk

The Mideast's Munich

2006-08-16T20:00:00.000Z

Arthur Herman has a brilliant, frightening, and probably correct commentary about the recent fighting in Lebanon in today's New York Post:

For everyone in the Middle East knows Iran is the clear winner. Only the diplomats and politicians, including the Bush administration, will pretend otherwise. Iran has emerged as the clear champion of anti-Israeli feeling and radical Islam. The Iranians have their useful puppet in Syria; they have their proxy armies in place with Hezbollah and Hamas. They have been able to install missiles, even Revolutionary Guards, in Lebanon with impunity. Sunni regimes in the region will move to strike their own deals with Iran, just as Eastern European states did with Germany after Czechoslovakia. That includes Iraq; the lesson will not be lost on Russia and China, either. And all the while, the Iranians proceed with their nuclear plans - with the same impunity.

The war in Iraq has clearly sapped the moral strength of the Bush administration. The men of Munich acquiesced to Hitler because another world war like the first seemed unthinkable. The Bush administration clearly feels it cannot face another major confrontation even with a second-rate power like Iran. Yet by calling off the war on terror, it has only postponed that conflict.

Less than a year after Munich, Nazi panzers rolled into Poland. Instead of fighting a short, limited war over Czechoslovakia, the Western democracies ended up fighting a world war, the most destructive in history. The war with the mullahs of Iran is coming. It is only a question of whether it will be at a time or on a ground of our choosing, or theirs - and whether it is fought within the shadow of a mushroom cloud.

I fear it will be. I've equated the ceasefire to Munich myself (or at least quoted Scott Ott doing so). I think that by losing this battle, we in the West have guaranteed ourselves much larger and more bitter battle later.

Monk

A Trinity of Christian Carnivals

2006-08-16T05:32:00.000Z

I've been terribly remiss in my Christian Carnivaling of late. There are three in the hopper this time.

CC 133 was at From the Anchor Hold. It contained a thoughtful discourse on the absurdity of the law of proportionality in war that I happen to agree with, from the excellent Prof. Bainbridge:

In a post carrying the same headline as mine, Ed Morrissey apparently rejects the notion that proportionality is relevant to evaluating a war:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn't mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars.

It's not just Morrissey, of course. We've seen the same sort of thing from a lot of folks both in the blogosphere and the punditry.

The answer is not what you expect, but I agree with him. I couldn't do what I do and remain a Christian if I didn't.

CC 134 was at Rev Ed's Attention Span. Codex asks, "was Moses high when he talked to God?"

On the subject of cannabis, like the history of the Zoroastrian religion, the Bible may have been influenced by cannabis. . . . remember Moses and the burning bush that talked to him. According to a number of academic sources in the original Hebrew and Aramaic sources for the texts, that bush commanded Moses to make a holy anointing oil that contained cannabis, under the Hebrew name keneh bosem.

Check out the answer. (It's what you expect, but I'm trying to be all Biblical Archeology Review here...)

Finally, this week's CC is up at Dory's tried-and-true Wittenburg Gate. Here, Parableman asks, "was Mohammed in the Bible?"

A friend of mine works as the Baptist Campus Minister at my university. He occasionally takes part in interfaith dialogues, and he tells me about his interactions from time to time. One such instance struck me as being apologetically significant and worth blogging about (with his permission). The conversation started out with what the Qur'an says about Jesus, and it ended up moving to what the Bible says about Muhammad. You might be wondering what the Bible could possibly say about Muhammad, since he was around long afterward, but you can't rule something like that out if you're open to predictive prophecy. Why couldn't a divine revelation have something to say about someone who hasn't come around yet? Christians believe the Hebrews scriptures point to Jesus, after all. It doesn't do to insist on that when you like it and then rule it out when you don't like it.

The answer is interesting...

More next week.

Update, 17 Aug 06:The Parableman, Jeremy Pierce, comments:

Thanks for the link.

By the way, the preferred spelling is 'Muhammad' (with a little dot under the 'h' if possible, but I don't know how to do that). Since I didn't myself spell it that way, I noticed immediately that you put that spelling in quotation marks, which suggests that I spelled it that way. Since Muslims prefer that spelling, I try to go out of my way not to offend by using other spellings.

Thanks - didn't know that, but will observe the convention in the interest of civility. Of course, it takes very little to offend muslims...

Monk

Peace In Our Time

2006-08-15T17:02:00.000Z

Breaking news; Scott Ott had it first: Bush and the UN have declared Peace In Our Time. The details:

(2006-08-15) — Now that President George Bush has declared Hezbollah defeated by its acceptance of the terms of a U.N. cease fire in Lebanon, the United States today will press the Security Council to grant it a similar "victory" over al Qaeda.

U.S. proposal would call for “an end to the violence” between al Qaeda and its enemies around the world, including the U.S., and the creation of a 15-mile buffer zone, manned by U.N. troops, around every nation that al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden wishes to destroy.

Like this week’s agreement that brought “a just and lasting peace” between Israel and Hezbollah, the ‘War on Terror Cease Fire’ proposal will allow al Qaeda to keep its weapons and supply channels intact, and to escape punishment for its previous acts of aggression and murder.

“This will teach the Islamic terrorists a lesson,” according to an unnamed State Department source who worked through the night crafting a resolution acceptable to both al Qaeda and its enemies. “If you attack us, kidnap our soldiers, blow up our towns and murder our people, you will pay a price. These cease fires will cause significant delays in the radical Muslims’ plan to rule the world. It’s a major hassle for them that sends a clear signal.”

Yea us!

Monk

An Interesting Year In Politics

2006-08-11T05:38:00.000Z

I have no idea what November will bring. The Republicans could lose the House; moonbat Democrat activists could alienate the center even wind up losing ground. This year's results are anyone's to guess.

Two very interesting things have happened already. I'm not sure if they portend anything; they seem to be contradictory indicators.

The first is that the fellow in faux-blackface, one of the Senate's most reliable socially liberal voters, lost the Democratic primary to a dillatante leftist because he isn't wobbly in his support for the War on Jihad.

The picture was concocted by another leftist dilletante who came all the way from Hollywood to work for Joe Lieberman's Connecticut opponent. If any Republican used blackface to malign a candidate, heads would explode in the mainstream media and Democrats would call for Senate show trials (followed by public hangings).

Joe vows to run as an independent and may very well win. Regardless, the race (no pun intended) will be entertaining.

The other interesting development is that America's favorite Jew-baiting, muslim-loving, professional race-card player and scourge of the Capitol police, Cynthia McKinney, lost her primary bid. A pitty that. I would love to see more of McKinney, as should any Republican. Does her loss betoken a move back toward the center? Joe L's loss, seemingly the bigger of the two news items, betokens just the opposite.

No telling what any of it means. This is and will remain an interesting year in politics.

Monk

The New Multinational Force

2006-08-11T05:06:00.000Z

Too busy to blog lately, but I've been saving up topics for a couple of weeks. here goes...

Enforcement of a ceasefire in the current Lebanese campaign of the Global War on Jihad may hinge on introduction of a multinational force. This must be an effective fighting force, capable of reigning in Hezbollah and keeping Israel's northern border secure. Unfortunately for the causes of world peace and internationalist progresivism, much of this force, it seems, will have to be French, due to France's historical ties to the Lebanese.

Correspondent Chefjef submitted the picture below, depicting French special forces sniper training. I know I've made the French the butt of jokes in the past, but this puts a whole new face on things. In any case, it reinforces my fundamental reservations about the effectiveness of French troops.

"I fart in your general direction, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper!" says Jaques of the newly-formed French Moon Unit Sniper

Monk

Christian Carnival CCXXXII

2006-07-28T05:27:00.000Z

This week's Christian Carnival is up at Faith at Work Blog.

Among other worthy contents, there's this post at The Common Room, which presents the best one-paragraph summary concerning the historical authenticity of the New Testament that I have read:

The New Testament, miraculously unlike any book of ancient origin, is testified to by the survival of thousands of documents within a few years of the original autographs, and these documents all agree with one another to a remarkable degree. It is remarkable because this level of evidence is unmatched by *any* other ancient document.

The Old Testament, too, has proven a remarkably consistent and reliable document. I have studied this matter at some depth and, as a military historian interested in the dawn of warfare and achievement of the Turney-High's "military horizon" among civilizations (not least among the Hebrews), I have some familiarity with how sparse and unreliable most ancient sources are (up to the Renaissance, in fact). I also know how much anthropological "theory" is based on mere speculation. In the military field, this is often speculation by specialists with little professional knowledge of how and why men fight. Thus, I look with jaundiced eye at all textual criticism, especially the modern variety, and am continually struck by how well-preserved and documented Israel's history and Jesus' life are. Campared with what military historians consider authoritative accounts of battles and campaigns, the Bible provides an overflowing wealth or corroboratable detail. I am constantly amazed at how well its accounts harmonize and agree with what we know from surviving evidence.

Over at Crossroads, we have an excellent small treatise on how the pernicious "philosophy" of the Baby Boom (my) generation continues to pollute society and, in particular, the Visible Body:

Let's take a time travel trip back to the 1960's...............the era of the Baby Boomers coming of age..........

Their Philosophies
*Truth is what we think and say it is.
*Helping people is more important than sitting around talking about and obeying rules and decorum.
*Lots of hypocrisy in the society.
*The environment is what we should be focusing on - in fact let's live in the woods.
*Perhaps the Eastern religions can teach us something we are missing here in Western society.

Somehow, with the exception of the Jesus People, the church missed out. In most cases this was very good because they retained their teaching and morality; but in another sense they never really did engage it.

And so as a result of that.....................

The Emergent church (children of the Boomers for the most part)......
Their Philosophies
*Biblical truth is what we think and say it is.
*Helping people is more important than doctrinal truth.
*Lots of hypocrisy in the church
*The environment is somehting we should be focusing much more on.
*Perhaps the Eastern religions can teach us something we are missing here in the Western church.

Yes, there's little doubt that the Baby Boomers embraced moral relativism as their implicit religion (a thing only intellectual elites had done before them -- the BBs represented a mass popular movement) and we had a chance to see how destructive moral relativism could be when inflated into social policy: 60% divorce rates, a million abortions a year, tens of thousands of indigent dope-heads sleeping on urban heating grates, colleges that teach our young to hate the greatest nation in Earth's history and pander to barbarians who as soon slit our throats as look at us...und so weiter. It seems clear to me that my Worst Generation's legacy continues to damage us spiritually, although I do see within the "emerging church" many positive indicators as well -- trending away from and reacting against "anything goes" and "if it feels good, do it" that betokened my generation. I am a fan of the Catholics' Pope, whose Truth and Tolerance is an excellent answer to relativism in the spirit of Christian tolerance. I recommend it highly -- it strikes a balance well, without compromising first principles.

Finally, the excellent Fallible writes on the beauty of blogging:

Honestly, blogging started (for me) as a way to relieve my poor husband from a small measure of his listening duties.

Monk-mate KANH, I'm sure, can relate. Since I began blogging, I spend much less time yelling at the television or trying to bend her ear on subjects she's heard me spout off on for years. Yes, blogging is a beautiful thing.

Monk

Ayman's Right, You Know...

2006-07-27T05:23:00.000Z

Al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has issued a new videotape. He warns us again of who we are at war with and what's at stake:

The Egyptian-born physician said the Hezbollah and Palestinian battles against Israel would not be ended with "cease-fires or agreements." The fighting began last month following a Palestinian cross-border raid in which an Israeli soldier was captured, then expanded to Lebanon after Hezbollah militants captured two other soldiers in a raid earlier this month.

"The shells and rockets ripping apart Muslim bodies in Gaza and Lebanon are not only Israeli (weapons), but are supplied by all the countries of the crusader coalition. Therefore, every participant in the crime will pay the price," al-Zawahri said.

The war with Israel does not depend on cease-fires. ... It is a Jihad for God's sake and will last until (our) religion prevails," al-Zawahri said. "We will attack everywhere."

He's right, of course, and it's good for us to hear it, just as it was good for the Allies to study Mein Kampf to understand Hitler's mind and motivations. Zawahiri lays it out there for all to see: we are in a world war, in which Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan are just battles or campaigns. We have been in this war since the "Prophet" announced the hijra fifteen hundred years ago. The enemy, islam, has triumphed more than it's failed and Western civilization has been saved several times just by the skin of its teeth (as at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna). Let's see the money quote again:

"It is jihad for God's sake and will last until (our) religion prevails."

That is, until the entire world is clad in burkhas or kafiyahs and the muezzin sing out the call to prayer from Copenhagen to Omaha to Tokyo. Western liberals had better want such a world, becuase that is what their opposition to present American policies is helping to bring about. What I fear most -- more even than the enemy's efforts -- is the coming backlash, precipitated by some hideous muslim atrocity, in which the West will strike back with all it has and people will die not by dozens or hundreds, but by the millions. Let us pray it does not have to come to that. If only liberals and the establishment media would just shut the hell up and let those who are better informed, trained, led, and motivated get on with today's rough business so we do not have to burn mountains of corpses (including those of many traitorous Westerners) later...

One enemy, one war, one victory.

Monk

Dick Gets It Right For a Change

2006-07-25T20:16:00.000Z

After calling the state of Israel a "mistake" last week, Richard Cohen of the WaPo makes good by debunking the "proportional response" criticism that has been levelled against Israel during the coflict in Lebanon.
Says Cohen:

The list of those who have accused Israel of not being in harmony with its enemies is long and, alas, distinguished. It includes, of course, the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, it seems, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.
The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.

Israel has been in dire need of such deterrence ever since it pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and, just recently, the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, it effectively got into a proportional hit-and-respond cycle with Hezbollah. It cost Israel 901 dead and Hezbollah an announced 1,375, too close to parity to make a lasting difference. Whatever the figures, it does not change the fact that Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.

Roger that: You slap me, I punch your lights out. Being a Christian, I am not sanguine about this, but with this enemy, sadly, it is the only rational response. Anything less is suicide. As I've said before, I fear a muslim act or acts in this war that unleash the full fury of the West and make Israel's "disproportionate" response look like a Sunday picnic in comparison. Maybe if Israel succeeds in crippling Hezbollah, worse measures won't be necessary later. (On the other hand, maybe we'll all keep fighting over this region until Christ returns....)

Monk

Victor Davis Hanson: Patience Is Wearing Thin

2006-07-21T04:38:00.000Z

In his RealClearPolitics column today, Victor Davis Hanson says what many (myself included) have been thinking for some time, but have been reluctant to say aloud:

Patience is wearing thin

...Despite...sound conventional wisdom, an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East.

...For all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation -- but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war -- not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well...

Read the whole thing.

As a Christian, this is what I most fear in this war: not that the islamofascists will actually destroy us as a civilization (although I do also fear the possiblity of our surrender), but the likelihood that the Salafis or their nutbag Twelver Shiite equivalents finally succeed in committing some act so horrific that they provoke the full wrath of the United States and other Westerners (most definitely including Israel) and then we stand by and watch while a few hundred million muslim human beings get smeared into gristle-flecked jelly before we're satisfied and let the survivors slip back under their cultural rock. I don't want that, nor should any Christian, however much we abominate the culture that produced islamofacism.

What we (Westerners) are doing in places like Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon had better work and Christians had best pray that it does, becuase the alternatives are much, much worse.

One enemy, one war, one victory. One way the other...

Monk

Alabama Makes the News

2006-07-18T18:29:00.000Z

It's rare that my adopted home state of Alabama makes the news. When it does, you can bet that there's a bizarre Harper Lee or Faulkner vibe, or at least some kind of wierdness, to the story. So it is with this piece out of the local fishwrap that National Review Online picked up:

MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests.

Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.

The picture looks like something out of Alien. The caption reads:

A yellow jacket nest engulfs the inside of a 1955 Chevrolet on Harry Coker's Tallassee property on Thursday. Gigantic yellow jacket nests have been found in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Tallassee?! That's just down the road! The thought of such hives is truly frightening and makes me more than a little nervous. I guess I'll have to alay my nervousness in a time-honored Alabama way: by scarfing down a mess a' Waffle House hash browns. Susanna, I accept your challenge! Scattered all the way for me, please!(I just hope there are no yellow jackets at the WH...)

Monk

The Marines Tell It Like It Is

2006-07-17T05:25:00.000Z

I could say a great deal about what has taken place in the Mideast since my last post, but I couldn't summarize or express things any better than this Marine, who wrote Atlas Shrugs from Iraq:

Dear Atlas,

I am the Marine that wrote to you about the News Media betraying us.
I just wanted to tell you that we, Marines, SUPPORT Israel in their war against Hamas and Hizbullah. I cannot express to you how many Marines I have talked to or have heard say how proud of Israel they are. I cannot tell you how happy I am that Israel is destroying Hamas and Hizullah. We all CHEER when we watch Lebanon being bombed on TV in the Chow Hall. I hope Israel annihilates Hamas, Hizbullah and Syria. Because the way we see it, that is less Jihadists for us to fight. I can't speak for all Marines, but the Marines that I know and talk to stand by Israel 100%. And I am in the infantry, we are front line Marines. Warriors. We support Israel because we have fought the same people they are fighting, Jihadists. This is a world war. It has been a world war since 11 September 2001. Hopefully now people are realizing the true scale of this conflagration. And Israel is fighting the same enemy in Gaza and Lebanon as America is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, just on another front in the same war. And we see the Israeli Soldiers as brothers in arms against a common enemy. Myself and the Marines in my unit, Veterans of 2 tours in Iraq, support Israel all the way to victory. And I THANK the State of Israel for their determination, fortitude and vigilance in the destruction of Evil.
God Bless America.
God Bless Israel.
And God Bless all freedom loving people worldwide.

- US Marine and Veteran of the current world war

He pretty much sums up how I feel about what has happened over the last several days.

One enemy. One war. One victory.

Monk

Christian Carnivals!

2006-07-12T05:27:00.000Z

We have two for your reading pleasure this week.

Carnival CXXX is up at Brain Cramps For God. There's a thoughtful post on why so many Christians in today's hectic world stay away from church. Also, don't miss Brain Cramps' host's revealing confession at the end of the carnival. There was a point in my life wihen I dealt with the problem he faces too.

Carnival CXXIX was at Crossroads. It contained a fascinating little speculation on whether God's creation mandate to be stewards over the Earth extends to other planets as well. Unless and until we find other sentient life out there, I'm inclined to think that it does. This carries with it responsibilities as well as rights, of course.

Enjoy.

Monk

The Third Way Again

2006-07-11T11:38:00.000Z

When things get slow around here, correspondent Izmud can usually be relied upon to get things going again.

This time, he sends an endorsement for a grassroots third party movement that sounds interesting:

Personal Message: Dear family and friends: Unity08 offers the possibility that we can combine the best in the Democratic Party with the best in the Republican Party to organized some kind of decent leadership in this country. If not, we had better be thinking about the 2nd American Revolution. We are drowning in corruption and incompetence. Our republic cannot survive unless we make some drastic changes. Pat I know you're fed up with the partisan bickering and special interests that dominate politics today. So am I. And so are millions of other Americans. That's why I urge you to join me in signing the "Declaration of Independence from Politics without Purpose" at Unity08.com

Unity08 Message: Declare your independence from politics without purpose today and together we will send a message to congressional leaders from both parties that Americans expect -- and deserve -- better than the current political paralysis in Washington, D.C.

It's high time they face the facts. According to a recent Princeton Research survey, only three percent of Americans say they are "very satisfied" with American politics today, compared to a stunning 44 percent who say they are "very dissatisfied." Eighty-two percent said America has become so polarized between Democrats and Republicans that Washington can't seem to make any meaningful progress solving the nation's problems.

Add your "John Hancock" by Friday, July 7 at: http://www.unity08.com/declaration

Okay, so I'm a little late posting it. I'm sure they'd still take your support if offered. I asked Izmud if this was something he thought up. He responded:

No, I did not start it--it was sent to me and I investigated a bit. Being a broken-spirited Republican who feels his party has wandered fromt he True Path, I was intrigued. My concern upon researching the group is that many of the founders have very liberal past associations. Nevertheless, this is a promising start and so I have joined up to particiapte. I figure democracy only works if you participate--maybe I can guide from within?

Good point. I'd have to know more about the group's political platform before endorsing it, especially given Izmud's concerns. Nonetheless, interesting. Certainly, the basic idea of starting a Third Way is something I endorse.

Monk