SavannahNOW | Hunting amendment introduced at Capitol - 02/01/2005

Georgia Hunting Amendment:

Via the NRA's ILA news service, I see this article from the Savannah Morning News:

Senate Republicans on Tuesday introduced a proposed change to the Georgia Constitution that would protect hunting and fishing from being outlawed, a move some Democrats say is a political ploy to win the GOP votes in the 2006 elections.

Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, said the constitutional amendment is needed to prevent Georgians from losing a way of life that is essential to those who hail from outside urban areas.

"As Georgia gets more and more urbanized and Atlanta gets bigger and bigger, I think you've got more and more people that don't understand hunting and don't understand the birthright that Georgians feel about it," Johnson said. "We want to make sure that animal-rights activists or liberals in the General Assembly can never take away Georgians' rights to hunting and fishing."

Back when I lived in Savannah, Eric Johnson was my Senator (or maybe he was a representative in those days -- it's been a little while). I worked on a campaign for an opponent of his -- longtime readers of the Hall will remember that Grim is a Southern Democrat of the Zell Miller school -- but I always respected the man.

His opponents point out that there's no danger of hunting being outlawed in Georgia just at the moment:

Sen. Regina Thomas, D-Savannah, on Tuesday called the amendment unneeded and suggested Republicans are angling to give a boost to GOP candidates in 2006, when voters will cast ballots for all statewide officers including governor, lieutenant governor and the commissioners of agriculture, insurance and labor.

"They are determined they are going to take every constitutional officer in the state," Thomas said of the GOP. "I don't think we need a constitutional amendment on (hunting). I think there are more important things that affect and adversely impact the lives of the people of this state."

Johnson rejected such criticism, saying his resolution isn't about winning votes.

Beth Brown, spokeswoman for the Wildlife Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said she was not aware of any existing state proposal to outlaw hunting or fishing in Georgia. And while the department supports the amendment, it doesn't intend to lobby for its passage.

It may very well be true that this is, in part, a ploy to win votes. Certainly it is likely to win them.

But I don't think it's only that. Even in Savannah -- almost perfectly isolated from Atlanta's growth spurts -- the effect of this increased urbanization/suburbanization has been felt. The only public shooting range within an easy drive of the city closed five years ago. Run by a former Marine, it had been operating on land just across the Savannah river for decades. It had an excellent setup and safety record. Land speculators bought land surrounding it -- knowing perfectly well there was a firing range there -- then proceeded to build subdivisions, and sue to close the range down. Since there was no grounds for a safety complaint given its fine record, they sued instead on the grounds that it was too noisy.

The same is true across Georgia. My father recently sent me a videotape of giant bulldozers plowing down the forest where my dogs and I used to go hiking as a boy. He sent it because my son, his grandson, loves construction machinery. Indeed, the boy loved watching it, but I did not.

This kind of thing is a direct result of the changes Johnson mentions. This isn't really a party issue -- Johnson is a Republican, but in Forsyth County, it's the Republicans on the county commission who are the miscreants. They rushed this project through because the state had passed legislation making it illegal to do what they were setting out to do, so it had to be done before the new year. That county commission was elected by the kind of immigrants Johnson means, people new to the state, without understanding of local issues, who vote Republican in local elections simply because that's how they intend to vote in the national elections.

All of this is driven by the city of Atlanta, whose booming economy has steadily expanded its suburbs, satellite cities, and their suburbs. Over the last two decades, they've advanced outward along every major highway, expanding past the "perimeter" of I-285 through traditional satellites, over and past farmland, past cattle country, and are now cutting down the timberland to make more room for suburbs.

So no -- it's not "just" a plot to get votes. It's a necessary first step toward protecting the heritage of the state. In fact, I suggest that it's a wise model for amendments in similar places across the country: the first of many, perhaps, to protect traditional ways of life against urban sprawl.

"Urban sprawl..." Now, what does that remind me of? Seems like here's an issue for those of you hoping to move a certain national party back to the center, and make inroads into exurbs and rural areas where the party is weak.

Google Search: Shushupe

Peruvian Blue:

Here's a story hot off the wires. No link yet.

LIMA, Peru (AP) A key witness against a man U.S. drug authorities say is Peru's most notorious drug trafficker was shot to death in prison, officials said Wednesday.

Jose Maria Aguilar, known as "Shushupe'' a type of deadly snake in Peru was shot to death Tuesday in his prison cell in the jungle city of Pucallapa, 305 miles (490 kilometers) northeast of Lima.

Aguilar had told authorities that Fernando Zevallos, the founder of the country's now defunct national airline, Aero Continente, used his company's planes to smuggle drugs into Colombia, El Comercio newspaper reported.

Aguilar was shot twice in the face allegedly by a prisoner already serving time for murder, said officials with the National Institute of Prisons. The inmate was not identified.

Peru's director of prisons, Wilfredo Pedraza, said Wednesday investigators do not believe this was simply a fight between inmates.

"This was a planned act, organized from outside, premeditated and executed by a person who already had a record of committing murder for hire,'' Pedraza told reporters in Pucallapa. "Aguilar's murder was planned by a third party ... (whose identity) the police investigation will have to determine.''

In a television interview on Peru's Canal 2, Zevallos denied any involvement in Aguilar's death.
"It would be very stupid to do that,'' said Zevallos.
Zevallos, 47, is currently on trial for drug trafficking. In his interview, he again denied the charges against him.

"I'm a businessman,'' he said. ``I'm not a criminal. I'm not a drug trafficker.''
Zevallos has been the subject of more than 30 investigations by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and has been tried in Peru on charges of murder-for-hire, trafficking in cocaine and money laundering. But he has never been convicted of a crime.

The Bush Administration added Zevallos to Washington's international "drug kingpin'' list in June, freezing his U.S. assets and prohibiting U.S. citizens from commercial dealing with him or any of his businesses.

There are a lot of questions about this story. The answer to all of them is, "Because it's South America."

So just what was this supposed to mean?

I came across this wierdness today via instapundit. I'm still trying to figure out if the original website was a joke or what.

But if it was not, and if the whole incident can be turned into a running joke, (just follow the links), what does that say about the terrorists now?

Economist.com | Nepal�s emergency threatens South Asia

It's Important, But Nobody Cares:

Nepal's government is dissovled by its king, who cuts off the nation's communications with the rest of the world. The Economist explains why this could sow chaos throughout South Asia.

But it is bigger even than that. The Maoist rebels in Nepal have expanded their operations across China's borders. A collapse of order in Nepal could bring two nuclear powers -- India and China -- into conflict at the roof of the world.

Keep watch.

TSUNAMI IMPACT: Ethiopia's Rastas See the 'End Times'

We're In Trouble Now:

As foretold:

When news of the Indian Ocean tsunami filtered through to Africa the day after Christmas, Gladstone Robinson was playing Bob Marley's 'Natural Mystic'.

''It's the prophecy!'' shouted the 75-year-old Rastafarian, shaking his knotted stringy beard and grey dreadlocks, over the din of the CD player.

''Marley's song says it all: 'Many people would die, many would have to suffer and many more would have to cry','' said Robinson in his husky voice. 'Brother, I'll tell you Babylon is going to fall.''

Uh-oh. All that Rapture talk was one thing, but when Bob Marley turns on you...

FoD

Friends of Democracy on C-SPAN:

Those of you with access to such things can see Friends of Democracy on C-SPAN from 2-4 PM, EST. Grim's Hall is not wired for television, so if any of you do watch, let me know how it goes.

The Adventures of Chester

Honor:

The Adventures of Chester has a roundup of some Iraqi responses to the vote.

Ali's thoughts at Free Iraqi:

This was my way to stand against those who humiliated me, my family and my friends. It was my way of saying," You're history and you don't scare me anymore". It was my way to scream in the face of all tyrants, not just Saddam and his Ba'athists and tell them, "I don't want to be your, or anyone's slave. You have kept me in your jail all my life but you never owned my soul". It was my way of finally facing my fears and finding my courage and my humanity again.

...

Iraqi blogger Hammorabi has this to say:

Today is the day in which the souls of our martyrs comforted!

Today those who were killed in Iraq or wounded among our friends from the USA and other allies, who helped us to reach this day, are with us again to inscribe their names with Gold for ever!

From Friends of Democracy:

Q: Ms. Alaa Rabih, what is your feeling on elections?

A: My feeling is a feeling of nationalism and revolution. For the first time, we feel secure and stable, we will have a new constitution and live in a peaceful Iraq.

Q: Mr. Ahmad Salman, what is your feeling on Election Day?

A: A good feeling, a feeling of a revolution happening.

Not for the first time, the "Friends of Democracy" remind me of another band, with a similar name. But they are not the only revolutionaries in Iraq. "The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution," once feared as a link to Iranian militancy, also has a statement:

Mr. Sadr Ad din al Qabanji... said, "The elections are the battle for freedom against despotism and independence against occupation,” and on those viewing the Iraqi scene as being a secular-Islamic, Shiite-Sunni, Arab-Kurdish competition, well their reading is marginal and imprecise. As Al Qabaji says, “The real competition is that between peace and terrorism. All the Iraqis are in the peace and law trench."

Today's Washington Post has an article which asks, "Is Democracy Un-Islamic?" They might have simply waited a day.

Grim's Hall

Cultural Illiteracy:

Reports on negativity about the Iraq elections appear at Belmont Club and a blog called "Think Things Through" (I often use a variant of that phrase when speaking to my son). The usual suspects are involved. There is an irony here.

Both Robert Fisk and Juan Cole are regular participants in the "Americans are culturally illiterate about Arabs" school of foreign policy studies. Among other places, Cole has lamented alleged American illiteracy here and here. Fisk needs no introduction to any reader of blogs.

The irony is that both of these writers, and all of their ilk, have completely misunderstood the Iraqi cultural reaction to the elections. American soldiers and Marines, whose warrior culture is far closer to the Arabs' than is any academic or journalistic one, understood the truth from the beginning. The problem for soldiers has only been learning to think about how they would feel if the circumstances were reversed. The problem for these proud intellectuals has been something more arcane, like demonology, trying to grasp drives whose rules they have written down, but which remain totally alien and finally not understood.

In the debate -- I have had it a dozen times in as many places, and read variants of it in far more -- this school has held that the threat of violence over the elections would make them illegitimate because it would depress turnout, and even among those who came to vote, would through intimidation influence them to make false choices. Until security was certain, there could be no free election.

The thing these debaters never understood was this: in an "honor and shame society" (to use the intellectual term for it), there is great honor to be gained when there is a threat hanging over your actions. It is the same power which drove warriors of the Algonquin Nations to count coup on the enemy.

Far from depressing turnout, the insurgents inspired it.

Wretchard wrote:

[Cole]'s appreciation was totally wrong. Think of what it means for anyone to dare vote in Fallujah at all, despite the penalties prescribed by terrorists, some of whom are certain to be kinsmen. And when was the time, at any Faculty meeting, that the halt and the blind tramped in to vote (cars are banned from approaching the polling precincts for security reasons) at the risk of death?

This is correct. And if it is to be understood in its cultural context, one must recognize what a personal act of heroism means in a warrior culture. These people -- including the young and the old, the men and the women, "the halt and the blind" -- have counted coup, to bring honor to themselves and to their project. Anyone who speaks of that project, or writes about it, must show it the honor that the Iraqi people have won for it.

To do otherwise -- to try and dismiss the results or the government that forms from them -- is to fail to understand the culture and its conception of honor. It is to put personal preference above reality, to do just the thing that the Coles and Fisks of the world accuse the American warfighter of doing. Thinking Things Through has a good laugh on the point: "[Fisk] might as well be claiming dragons are flying over the southern marshes."

Wretchard asks, "Did we win?" and answers, "Who knows? But many Iraqis think they did." Indeed, they did. Remember what they won, which by their lights as by mine is honor and glory. Remember how they will expect you to treat a people who have risen from despair to do honorable and glorious things.

* I end with an aside. If this was the maximal effort of the insurgents, the assault on Fallujah was a pure success. The insurgency remains capable of brutal and murderous attacks, but not many at once. This demonstrates clearly The Myth of the Guerrilla. I wrote about this at length in "Clausewitz & The Triangle", which looked at the Iraqi insurgency from the perspective of military science.

One of the primary tools of the guerrilla is the ruse of appearing more dangerous than he really is.

Hit and run attacks, sniper attacks, bombings and the like give the appearance of a foe who is everywhere, when in fact his numbers are limited.

The guerrilla, because he chooses the place and time of combat, can appear to be everywhere at once -- and therefore a universal feature of the landscape, even when his numbers are limited. But the election, if you know what to look for, showed that tactic for what it is: an illusion.

Today, the insurgent couldn't control the battlefield. In order to remain credible, he had to create not just one ugly incident, but widespread disruption across the country.

If the insurgents had the capability, they would have hit every polling station in the country, and they would have hit hard. At many of these stations, it would have been easy to create carnage because of the massive turnout.

In fact, they managed only about two dozen deaths nationwide. Time was -- when Fallujah was in their control, and there were safe havens for planning these things and building multiple car bombs -- that they managed to kill more than twice that many at a blow. Remember the forty children blown apart at a sewage treatment plant's opening ceremony? Terrorist attacks are down 40% since Fallujah was taken by the Marines, and that's just measuring the numbers of attacks. As you can see from today's maximal effort, the power of the attacks has also weakened.

As mentioned above, the fact is that the insugency wasn't able to put an end to voting even in Fallujah itself, where there remain sufficient numbers of closet guerrillas to kill people who voted in coming days. Last April, there was much fretting that Iraq was being lost as a surge of guerrillas and Mahdi army fighters claimed sections of nine cities across the nation. Now, the elections took place in every last city, even in the teeth of the enemy heartland.

Have we won? Not yet; there is still the hard business of setting up a government, and making it run. We will be needed for some time yet to help out in that regard. That will allow the guerrilla to rebuild his illusion; once again, he can choose one target every day or few days, and appear to be everywhere and all powerful.

But remember what it looked like when the curtain was pulled away for a moment. We are winning. We will have the victory. Time and leverage are all we need. We have plenty of the latter.

Iraqi elections

The Election:

There are several things I might blog about today. All of them pale in comparison to the importance of the Iraqi election.

I therefore request you take whatever time you might have spent here, and visit the Friends of Democracy. They are the only group covering the elections from the Iraqi grassroots.

I hope for all the best for Iraq.

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate

The Rise, or The Decline

Arts & Letters Daily links to a feud between Matthew Parris of London and Victor Hanson of California. The topic? Whether America is about to collapse, or whether she's just getting started.

I won't try to summarize the arguments, which are well constructed and worth hearing. I do have some context to provide, however. I would like to point out that the feud takes precisely the form of the claims of Marx and Joseph Schumpeter. Marx outlined what he saw as structural problems with capitalism, and projected its inevitable demise. Schumpeter, while agreeing that capitalism was doomed in the long term, explained that Marx failed to grasp the robust nature of the beast.

Marx thought that the trends of capitalism he observed in his day were not reversable. The trend toward monopolization, for example: the growing powers in each industry would continue to eat up smaller businesses until they had swallowed them all, and then the giants would clash. Projecting from that clash of giants, he saw the ruin of titans of industry, cast down into the proleteriat, where they would become disaffected leaders of rebellion...

Schumpeter explained that the situation was more complex. There are external factors that prevent the Gotterdammerung that Marx believed he foresaw. The main one, Schumpeter explained, was new ideas. Big corporations have trouble enacting them, as they are tied to existing products and ways of doing things. In the largest, there are whole wings staffed by people whose continued success depends on doing things just as they are now done. The institutional resistance to change makes them vunerable to smaller, faster, young companies, who can -- in the fashion of a barracuda -- strip chunks of the flesh off the giants, perhaps until there is nothing left. It is this ability to assimilate change that is the deciding factor.

Parris and Hanson occupy the same positions. Parris is attempting to demonstrate that American power can grow no further, and that rising powers are approaching the ability to strike at the United States' economic structure. Hanson points out that there are external factors Parris fails to consider:

China and India are the new tigers, but their rapid industrialization and urbanization have created enormous social and civic problems long ago dealt with by the United States. Each must soon confront environmentalism, unionism, minority rights, free expression, community activism, and social entitlements that are the wages of any citizenry that begins to taste leisure and affluence. China is fueled by industrious laborers who toil at cut-rate wages for 14 hours per day, but that will begin to moderate once an empowered citizenry worries about dirty air, back backs, inadequate housing, and poor health care. The infrastructure of generations–bridges, roads, airports, universities, power grids–are well established and being constantly improved in the United States, and so there is a reason why a European would prefer to drink the water, get his appendix out, or drive in San Francisco rather than in Bombay, Beijing, Istanbul–or Paris or Rome.

America, like capitalism, is more robust than the straight-line projections would suggest. It is robust because it has a system unusually well develpoed for absorbing and reacting to change in the world. The statist EU, China, and the rest are tied into formal decision making processes that, like the corporations of Marx's day, place decision making power in the hands of vested bureaucracies. Not so in America.

I suspect that Hanson has the better of this argument, as Schumpeter did with Marx. However, I would caution Hanson to beware the doom that Schumpeter foresaw for capitalism, which may yet befall America.

Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes. Capitalism would spawn, he believed, a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class's existence.

These people are the enemy of us all. Literally enough: they not only work against the underpinnings of the world, as Schumpeter warned, but they even wish us ill.

Winds of Change has more on the "large intellectual class," which is not quite as intellectual as it might seem. And the Belmont Club has more as well.

Testosterhome

On Boys:

An interesting blog called Testosterhome, run by a mother of four sons, was brought to my attention by The Corner. I enjoyed this story, which I think conveys a useful lesson society would do well to learn:

The thing about boys, I'm discovering, is that the fight is usually over by the time I hear about it. Our home is more or less tattle-free, but the lack of narking is compensated by random moans and wails off in the distance.

When someone fills me in on 'what is this all about?,' the affected parties are generally back to work building their lego ship, or amassing an arsenal of tinker-toy weapons.

I told my mom the other day that I sometimes feel obligated to make a random comment, force an apology, because that's my job. But it seems that more often than not, the boys seem to handle it in the age-old spirit of hand-to-hand combat. I'd like to train them to quietly shake hands or hug, but am realizing that would just be dragging something out that they already take care of quickly and with no strings attached.

Trial by combat: an idea whose time has come again.

The Jakarta Post - U.S. Navy to stay in Indonesia as long as needed: Captain

One Could Almost Cry:

It's so touching. A genuine, good and kind article about the United States military, from the French news service AFP.

"U.S. forces will be here through the relief effort and as long as the Indonesian government needs us to stay," USS Abraham Lincoln skipper Captain Kendall Card told reporters late Wednesday.

Skipper! They've even learned a bit of the lingo. But it gets better.

He did not say when the mission would now end, adding the U.S. forces would be ready to help Indonesia even after the emergency phase was over.

"I think the relief effort is coming to a close and now we're going towards the reconstruction phase. Our helicopters will be here to help the Indonesian government in the reconstruction phase (if asked)," he said.

Catch that? The AFP added two words, to make clear that the US' intentions were honorable.

Not, "'...our helicopters will be here to help,' the military officer said, raising fears of permanent hegemony or the establishment of unwanted US military bases." That's what I usually expect from AFP.

I once heard someone say, "In this world, justice is too much to ask for. The best you can ask is the occasional lapse in injustice." Well, if that's the best we can ask, let's make sure and mark it when we see it. Thanks, AFP, for a kind word.

Telegraph | Arts | What are we thinking of?

The Great Cold:

A book review in today's Telegraph asks "What are we thinking of?" It concerns a new book warning of environmental collapse based on historic models:

Some of the case-histories make this point convincingly. The early Norse settlers in Iceland, for example, came close to rendering the island uninhabitable, but veered from the brink just in time. (It took them a while to discover that although the green and wooded landscape resembled that of Scandinavia, the soil on which it was based was something quite unlike their native earth: a layer of fine volcanic ash, held in place only by a thin web of vegetation, and easily blown away once that vegetation was cleared.)

Their counterparts in Greenland, on the other hand, never learned from their mistakes: they cut down whatever they could burn, dug up huge areas of turf to make insulating walls, over-grazed the scanty grassland, and fought against the local Eskimos (whose ingenious methods for surviving in this environment they never bothered to copy). After several hundred years of frost-bitten subsistence, the two Norse colonies on Greenland succumbed to fighting and starvation.

How seriously should we take the idea that the failures of Norse Greenland, Easter Island and other such societies constitute warnings for our societies today?

The facts about Norse Greenland are a bit different than the book presents. The environmental change that mattered most had nothing to do with human activity, but a mini Ice-Age:

Sea ice off the coast of Iceland nearly vanished for three centuries. The effects seem to have spread to North America, where in AD 900 Eskimos settled Ellesmere Island at the usually frigid northwest corner of Greenland....

Then a chill set in. Slowly at first. People didn't want to believe it. Farmers were reluctant to give up their new fields. Settlers on Greenland held on for as long as possible. But the steadily expanding cold was irresistible by the 1200s. Unspeakable hardships began to take hold in much of the world. In Iceland, extensive grasslands that had supported sheep, goats, and cattle from AD 874 had receded by 1200. Farming became so difficult that Icelanders turned to fishing and the hunting of seals to support themselves. The population fell sharply....

By 1700, Iceland was surrounded with sea ice that made commerce with the rest of the world hazardous. And in faraway China, citrus groves that had survived for centuries froze in Jiangxi province.

There's a lesson here, yes. Just not the one the author intended.

Mudville Gazette

The Business of Iraq:

Over at the Mudville Gazette, Mrs. Greyhawk -- whose continued hard work and devotion to her soldier husband are inspirational to observe -- has a couple of important roundups today. The first is on the upcoming elections. I would like to remind you also of the Friends of Democracy project, which is collecting grassroots-level news from the Iraqi provinces. Because FoD is staffed by Iraqis, the whole of the country is open to them: election-hating thugs may not like them any better than us, but they're harder to identify.

The other article at Mudville concerns the HEROS Act, which concerns aid for widows and orphans of servicemen. The bill is sponsored by Joe Lieberman and Jeff Sessions, making it a bipartisan effort to care for the families of the fallen. Should it pass, it will be retroactive to October 2001, so that all the families of men killed fighting in the terror war will be supported.

ARMOR GEDDON

Milblogger News:

Via BlackFive, I see that Eric's favorite Milblogger, RedSix of ArmorGeddon, has been awarded the Silver Star.

Naturally, RedSix didn't mention it.

Read more here.

Jihad Watch

...And Another Bawdy House!

Jihad Watch has the latest statement from our self-described "virtuous" opponents in Iraq. This is from a leader of the Ansar al-Sunnah group, the ones who recently set off a suicide bomb inside a mess hall tent, coupled with a mortar attack from a civilian area that was timed to kill rescue and aid workers responding to the blast.

Along the way, he offers a description of how he sees us:

Cowboys, drowning in sin, corruption and pornography.

This, naturally enough, put me in the mind of the famous (and probably, the only) musical starring Clint Eastwood, Paint Your Wagon. It details the rise and fall of a frontier settlement among gold miners. It's a rollicking and tongue-in-cheek portrayal, but it actually has a number of the details right: for example, women being so rare on the frontier. In one scene, men rush in droves to see one, and one of the miners offers fifty dollars in gold dust to hold her baby for a few minutes. In fact, I've seen an illustration from a newspaper of the day, which accompanied a story describing how men would offer gifts of up to a hundred dollars' worth of gold dust just out of gratitude for the sight of a woman.

The movie examines the life of "cowboys, drowning in sin, corruption, and pornography." A review of some quotes from the movie will give you the notion: everything from drunkeness, prostitution, gambling and thievery, to the corruption of family values. Indeed, one of the main plot lines is about a pair of partners, played by Eastwood and Lee Marvin, who both marry the same woman, at the same time. "You show me in them commandments where it says a woman cain't have two husbands," Marvin says. (Actually, there proves to be a real theological question here, as a Googling of "polygamy" and "Bible" will demonstrate. People come down solidly on both sides of the matter, those opposed citing the fact that the singular tense is used in certain relevant passages, while those in favor point to the rules for taking a second wife in Exodus, and the parable of the five virgins).

It is a comedy, not intended to be a source of serious conclusions about life or anything else. The movie, made in 1969, still takes pains to wind up all of its threads in a way that confirm traditional morality. Not so the extras who made it: "Hippies were big on authentic Western costume and could supply their own wardrobe right down to the guns (yes, these hippies were armed to the teeth). They came with wives, kids, big dogs and bigger trucks and settled in for the summer, fall, winter, spring, and...I believe...a second summer. Everything you see in this movie is REAL...the poker game in the background, the French whores (imported from Paris, and yes, they plied their trade on the set and in hotels in Baker), the antiques, the long hair and handlebar moustaches. The opium den and bootleg liquor. All real and functioning."

Where did they go, these extras of 1969? American society, though condemned by Ansar al-Sunnah, has not become awash in such things as compared to the late Sixties. If anything, the opposite has occurred: the hippies got old, most of them took what used to be called "straight jobs," and they raised "straight" children. The price of human freedom has not been high: in return for not suppressing the radicals of 1969 with the religious violence favored by the Islamist, what have we suffered?

Something, surely; I expect readers will provide answers, and indeed I can think of a few myself, though also some benefits. On balance, I think we are to the good for this transaction. Human liberty has costs, but they are not so very high when you consider the alternatives. It also has benefits, which prove to be pure profit.

That train of thought proves to be a call for genuine tolerance. That call puts me diametrically opposed to Ansar al-Sunnah: and using that as my landmark, the principles of land navigation suggest to me that I'm right where I should be.

UPDATE: Given the snow, I've had a little time to think quietly while I clear the road and drive with shovel and broom. The metaphor of land navigation is good, but not complete. You really need two navigational points to be sure of your location, and this is only one.

The other navigational point has to be excessive secularization. If complete intolerance of religious variance is one point, the other has to be complete intolerance of religious expression. If one point is a demand for conformity to one view of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or the like, the other must be a demand for a rejection of all such things.

The middle ground -- a tolerant, but vibrant and religious, society -- is surely the right place to be. It's a happy thing that America's traditions reach their best expressions in just that place.

And in taking those navigational measurements, I find a third beacon unsuspected, right in the center of the place I seek to inhabit. It is joy. The movie I started with is an expression of glee almost from beginning to end. There is nothing of joy in the scorn of Ansar al-Sunnah, nor in the raving of atheists who list the Vatican as a 'hate site.' This is the ground on which we can be happiest. Happy, all of us, even the psychotic and the radical atheist, who find their highest joy in railing against the rest of us.

The Sun News | 01/20/2005 | Gear gathered for Iraq horses

Tack for Iraq:

You may have seen the 1st Cavalry, Horse Detachment in coverage of yesterday's military festivities honoring the inauguration. This is the last horse-mounted unit in the Army, still wearing uniforms dating to the glory days of "yellowlegs" riding across the West. (Those of you in the MILSCI project may enjoy this short but interesting overview of the uses of cavalry in combat.)

In any event, you might have gotten the idea that this 1st Cavalry, Horse was a purely ceremonial unit. Not so! Part of the unit is deployed in Iraq, caring for the remains of the Iraqi National Herd of Arabians. Sadly, more than eighty percent of the herd -- and all of their tack -- was destroyed by a Tomahawk missile during the air raids on Baghdad.

The Soquili Equine Center is taking up tack to send to 1st Cavalry, in order to help repair some of the damage done. The Iraqi people, as is often the case in an Arab nation, revere their national herd. The loss of those horses was a heavy blow to them, but the work done by American soldiers, and especially the attention of private American horsemen, have overwhelmed their expectations and made some real friendships across the oceans.

If you're interested in helping out -- whether you have old tack, or wish to make donations of other sorts -- you can contact "Tack for Iraq" here.

DoD News: Statement from Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence DiRita on Latest Seymour Hersh Article

Hold those Horses!

It isn't all that often that the Pentagon goes after a journalist. Probably it should happen more often than it does. But it's satisfying to see.

By his own admission, Mr. Hersh evidently is working on an “alternative history” novel. He is well along in that work, given the high quality of “alternative present” that he has developed in several recent articles.

This is an official statement of the Department of Defense, remember.

Notes

Changes & Projects:

Please note that The Adventures of Chester, a blog by a fairly insightful Reserve officer of Marines, has moved to a new location. I've adjusted the links accordingly. If you're not familiar with Chester, you might enjoy his writings.

Grim's relative slowdown in blogging may or may not end soon. My current contract is keeping me very busy, and I've had less time to think lately -- and therefore, less to talk about.

However, blogging done well is a conversation, not a lecture. It's good to have friends and companions who drop by to comment, or send emails. I got a couple of those from our friends at Spirit of America. They're gearing up on several projects, and asked me to help let you know about them.

One is Friends of Democracy, which describes itself as "ground-level election news from the Iraqi people." They're putting together a grassroots correspondents' network in Iraq's 18 provinces, and also networking with Iraqi bloggers and via email with Iraqis who are online. The hope is to provide more of an unfiltered look at what the Iraqi people themselves think and say about the process.

SoA is also still working on the Arabic-language blogging tool, Viral Freedom.

Finally, they're planning to do some coverage of the Iraqi elections themselves. They wanted me to help them find some folks with skills they need. Here's what they want:

We need an site editor/producer for the English language Web site.
That position is described here.

And, we are looking for people who can develop election coverage
graphics for the FoD website and Jan 30th event. People with
experience developing graphics for the web and for broadcast would be
especially helpful.

I think that some of you may fit that bill, if you're interested. As you can see from the site design here, Grim is not an expert at such things.

Grim's Hall

On the Boxer Story:

Jeff Jarvis administers a beating to the New York Times. Grim is one of those bloggers who met the brothers, and blogged about it. If the Times is properly humiliated by the poverty of their reporting and wants to do a follow-up, I'll be glad to receive questions.