"So are they all, all honorable men"

This is sort of thing that will turn you into a bolshevik. My contempt knows no bounds at this point.

(via Instapundit)

Anbar Awakens Part II: Hell is Over

Mike Totten should get the Pulitzer.

"Every couple of days now people come home,” Captain Messer, referring to the small part of the city he’s responsible for. “They swing by the station and tell us they’re moving back and ask if it’s okay if they return to their houses. Of course it’s okay. They don’t have to ask that. But they don’t know. We tell them welcome home, welcome back to the neighborhood. And they always invite us over for dinner.”

Things are looking up.

Crab boil, Russian style.

I like the bucket of beer.

By the Numbers.

Good job, Soldier. Have a safe trip home.

Go ahead and stammer, you old, fat, turdbag.

It was supposed to be a joke.

Craiglist is a sort of combination of want ads, employment ads, personal ads and so forth, started by this guy named Craig, and has ballooned into a thing covering a whole lot of cities across the planet.

Gerard Vanderleun, over at American Digest, observed a particularly striking personal ad, and decided to parody it. It seems many people in Seattle don't get the joke.

As he says:

"The French have a saying -- Les chiens n'obtiennent pas des plaisanteries.-- which translates to "Dogs don't get jokes." Neither, it would seem, do lonely hearts. I think I'll just print my "ad" out and file it in the back pages of my copy of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Come Out From Under The Covers

Why do I get the impression this guy fell asleep watching a John Basedow video? You have to admit, it's pretty catchy. Anti-Terrorism, Made Simple:

Nebraska Democratic State Senator Ernie Chambers has decided to go straight to the top in an effort to stop natural disasters from befalling the world.

Chambers filed a lawsuit against God in Douglas County Court Friday afternoon, KPTM Fox 42 reported.

The suit asks for a "permanent injunction ordering Defendant to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats."

The lawsuit identifies the plaintiff as, "the duly elected and serving State Senator from the 11th Legislative District in Omaha, Nebraska."

Chambers also cites that the, "defendant directly and proximately has caused, inter alia, fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados, pestilential plagues..."

"The Constitution requires that the courthouse doors be open, so you cannot prohibit the filing of suits," Chambers says. "Anyone can sue anyone they choose, even God."

Chambers bases his ability to sue God, as, "that defendant, being omnipresent, is personally present in Douglas County."

Well there you have it. Kerry must be feeling vindicated about now. And the Jersey Grrrls will certainly be glad to see someone finally listening to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Pile On was unavailable for comment.

A Failure of Imagination

The ethnic origins of General David Petraeus are apparently Dutch, which is a shame because there’s something sonorously classical about the family name of the commander of the US forces in Iraq. When you discover that his father was christened Sixtus, the fantasy really takes flight. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain, where memory mingles hazily with imagination, I fancy I can recall toiling through a schoolboy Latin textbook that documented the progress of one Petraeus Sixtus as he triumphantly extended the imperium romanum across some dusty plain in Asia Minor.

The fantasy is not wholly inapt, of course. General Petraeus was the star turn in Washington this week, testifying before Congress about the progress of the surge by US forces in Iraq. Some evidently see America’s wearying detention in the quagmire of Mesopotamia as a classic example of imperial overreach of the kind that is thought to have doomed Rome. Who knows? Perhaps 1,500 years ago one of the forebears of General Petraeus was hauled before the Senate to explain the progress of some surge of Roman forces to defeat the insurgents in Germania.

The US is indeed in the middle of another gloomy ride around the “America as Rome” theme park of half-understood history lessons. The pessimists, equipped with their Fodor’s guidebooks, their summer school diplomas, and their DVD collection of Cecil B. DeMille movies, are convinced it’s all up for the people who march today under the standard of the eagle, just as it was for their predecessors. They see military defeat abroad and political decay at home; they watch as far-flung peoples chafe at the dictates of imperial rule and as the plebs at home grow metaphorically hungry from misgovernment. The only real uncertainty in their minds is who will play the Vandals and lay waste to Washington?

Oh come now. Surely this can't be so difficult. Historical analogies are rarely exact. America doesn't have to be a physical empire. Radical Islamists, at least, see us as dangerous cultural imperialists, our invasive brand of hedonism as something to be severely curtailed if not eradicated outright.

Must it be Vandals who sack Washington? Why shouldn't America decline and fall from within, victim to her own fecklessness and complacency? While we busily export pop culture and crass consumerism, in our schools the teaching of our own history and the Enlightenment values that gave rise to our Constitution and Declaration of Independence are under attack:

The Robert Weissberg article to which George called our attention, "The Hidden Impact of Political Correctness," is very disturbing. It says that professors, even tenured professors, have decided to stay away from facts that may annoy black students who are quick to report "racism" to the authorties. And it's not just negative things about blacks as a group that might set off these easily offended students. Anything that might mitigate the vision of America as pure evil is also offensive. So even to point out that counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of the census was something actually aimed at diminishing the power of the slaveholders is dangerous. As is pointing out that the Constitution outlawed the slave trade after 1808, making slaves so valuable that they could not be put at risk at dangerous jobs, which instead evidently went to the Irish! In other words, historical truth has to be sacrificed to an unnuanced black/white vision of history.

This means that young blacks are being cultivated to an inauthentic relationship to truth, facts, and history, reminiscent of Hegel's master/slave analysis, in which the slave can know the truth, but the master must be flattered and gratified with lies. Either that, or they are learning to use their power to keep down the truth.

Gerard Baker thinks America invincible because she has few external foes? More likely, an increasingly divided nation that neither understands nor is willing to defend its cultural heritage will be pulled down from within by fractious special interest groups egged on by the culture of entitlement.

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!

Pretty much has to be seen to be believed. I think its a joke, but YMMV.

(via Classical Values.)

UPDATE:

So, it appears that video was not a joke, but is a guy. A guy named Chris Cocker. I am not making this up. These are the sorts of things you simply can't make up.

Anyway, Seth Green says to LEAVE CHRIS COCKER ALONE!! That definitely is a joke. Heh. Points for the product placement.

Is there anything good about men?

I think so, but I'm probably biased. Still, it's an interesting essay, and I note for the record, that my Grandfather had two wives, both of which he had children with. Which means some other schmoe didn't get a chance with one of my grandmothers. And, of my brothers and sisters that have managed to procreate, there is a 3 to 1 disparity in the number of children produced by my sisters and brothers. Hmmm...

(via Bill's Notes.)

You know, I think the world can't get anymore insane that it is, and then I go and have to stumble across stuff like this.

Where Is Zbigniew Brzezinski When We Need Him?

Where Is Zbigniew Brzezinski When We Need Him?

Sometimes the comedy just writes itself:

In her September 8 article ...New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin quoted the parody Web site of a Dartmouth secret society (the Phrygians) discussing possible actions against the college administration. The New York Times reporter apparently thought that the Phrygian Society -- a secret society -- maintains a website to apprise the public of its latest conspiracies.

It only took the Times a week to research and correct its error. Yesterday the Times published this correction:

Correction

Published: September 15, 2007

An article last Saturday about Dartmouth College’s governance structure incorrectly described a Web site congratulating Todd J. Zywicki, a trustee, for meeting with members of the Phrygians, a secret society, and discussing possible actions against the college administration. It was a hoax site, not an official Phrygian site.

Like MSNBC in its treatment of the online version of Johnson's story, the Times has airbrushed Lewin's fake Phrygians' quote from the online version of the September 8 story.

Now *that's* spooky.... Todd Zywicki adds:

It appears that the reporter let her political biases (which are strongly reflected in the original story) get out in front of her reportorial good judgment.

Those horrid neocons! Always with the fear mongering! Will no one save us from this Culture of Fear?

Mascot Fight

Even though I'm a Cougar... I found this great.



Although it could have been much worse...

Oppressors!!!

I knew it!!! This is why Grim is on the lam:

Men are worse for the environment than women, spending more on petrol and eating more meat, both of which create greenhouse gas emissions. These are the conclusions of a new report by the Swedish Foreign Ministry.

"Three out of four cars in Sweden are today driven by men. Around ten percent of all drivers, mainly men, account for 60 percent of car journeys," report author Gerd Johnsson-Latham told Svenska Dagbladet.

And isn't that just like a man? Running off and leaving us all to face the music?

Not so big and brave are we NOW, Big Guy...

Uh-huh. Yeah, well don't let the screen door hit you on the way out. And take your big carbon footprint with you!

/flouncing away

Crocodile Tears and Conspiracies.

So. Two of the soldiers that co-wrote a New York Times editorial basically saying the war in Iraq was lost, were killed Monday in Iraq in what is described as a vehicle accident.

It was the top item for a while over at memeorandum today.

What I find curious however is that all of the various blogs commenting (at the time--it may have since changed) are all liberal/left wing/progressive/whatever sorts of blogs.

I guess they only really notice when soldiers die when it is those that they agree with.

Further, I took a look at what a couple were saying, and in and among the 'ultimate sacrifice' and 'wives and children left behind' comments, lo and behold, I find that the dead soldiers must have been 'fragged'.

I don't think that anything could more demonstrate the wretched world those people inhabit.

Vacation

Vacation Time:

I'm going to try that vacation again, since it fell apart last month. I'll be gone for a bit. Here's a picture from my last vacation, by the way.

Government Sucks

The Decline of Government:

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, E. J. Dionne Jr. has a piece that proclaims a new 'liberal moment' in American politics. It wants to be a serious piece, and I want to treat it seriously. Before I can begin to do so, however, I have to deal with a deep-seated infection that poisons the whole body of work: a hysteria against the Bush administration that prevents real insights in many places.

Dionne views the Bush administration as a "catastrophe" that has destroyed conservatism in American minds, and made ready the way for a new liberal rise. You have to read the whole piece to understand the real flavor here. Nearly everything tracks to Bush and the Bush administration. Even the larger problems facing liberals profiting from Bush, are also Bush's fault: for example, the fact that Americans now distrust government remedies to problems (because, Dionne says, of Bush "incompetence" at running the government re: Katrina and so forth).

This page has often defended Bush, and often clashed with him and his administration on specific issues. As a veteran of the Clinton administration clashes, however, I would warn those on the left to rethink their certainties about Bush. Unless they can do that, they will not understand the seriousness of the problems facing the American government. "Bush" is not even the tip of the iceberg.

Even at this short remove in time, when one thinks of the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, one rarely remembers the figure of Bill Clinton at all. At the time he seemed to loom large to those of us alarmed by his penchant for gun control, cronyism, and right-wingers; but in retrospect, he was really not terribly important. He was a better man than he seemed to be, that is, he had good qualities as well as the faults that focused out attentions.

Since 2001, this page has praised Bill Clinton's manners; also, we have defended Clinton from outrageous attacks; and wished him good health. As hard as it may be to conceive, writers from the left may find themselves doing the same thing for Bush in the near future.

The truth about Clinton and also Bush is that the office of the Presidency envelops them in an illusion of power, as well as with some actual power. Nevertheless, they have nothing like the capacities we imagine for them. Men are only men, and our system of government is most greatly hampered by its bureaucracies, which are incompetent in the way that large organizations always are and cannot but be; and by its design, which hampers the power of the branches on purpose, in order that liberty may exist in the tension between the various powers.

The vision of what "a good President would have done" instead of what Bush/Clinton actually did only rarely conforms to the reality of what a president can do. I was deeply embittered by Clinton's return of Elian Gonzales to the Cuban state, for example. The boy's mother had died getting him to a land of freedom; and now he would be sent back to tyranny. The Communists in Cuba would subject him to all sorts of brainwashing to make him a model spokesman for their state; and in order to do so, would have to demonize his mother in his mind. The seizure of a young boy from his family at gunpoint was an awful image, and one that ought still to haunt us.



There was probably never a moment at which I was angrier at the government of the United States. I still feel it was the wrong decision, badly wrong; but at this remove, I can see by what forces Clinton was being driven. For one thing, there were interest group politics at work, and he needed their support. For another, the Elian matter required making an exception to the usual processes of law; and while I think an exception was justified, and the role of the President includes making exceptions when necessary, it is always a difficult thing for a President to advocate.

Meanwhile, an idle comment he had made about refugees from Haiti had started a deluge on his assumption of office; how much more would his actual granting of asylum drive refugees to swarm Florida? How many of them might drown in the perilous crossing? Clinton partisans have also suggested he had a more noble consideration: if all the democratic-minded Haitians or Cubans fled the island, how much harder would the processes of democratization be when the current governments fell? That was an ongoing process in Haiti during Clinton's tenure, and could have happened with Castro's death at any time in Cuba.

So it is with Bush and many of the things that it is currently popular to lay at his feet. Dionne makes much of Katrina, for example. Without defending the Bush administration at all, it does not take much to see that the disaster in New Orleans was caused by forces far greater than any President or his administration.

For one thing, FEMA is not the chief agency for disaster relief; it intends to supplement and reinforce state and local efforts. The state and local efforts in NOLA were simply not there. JHD can tell you about how he hotshotted a truckload of relief supplies in right after the hurricane, and was supposed to hook up with state/local government to see where they were needed. When he got there, the radio was dead silent. It wasn't until the Federal government showed up -- the Coast Guard, as I recall -- that there was anyone to contact him.

Which brings us to the second matter: the Coast Guard and US military efforts in NOLA -- also directed by the Bush administration, at least in theory -- were far better than is generally recognized. People have a lot to say about FEMA, but little about the Navy SEALs.

For a third, the awareness of the problems with the levees had extended back through the Clinton administration. The problem is mirrored in the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota -- and in the thousands of similar bridges around the country, which are already overdue for repair.

For a fourth, problems such as the 10% "matching" requirement of the Stafford act required Congressional action, not just Administration action -- and Congress took its time.

It is possibly correct to say, "Bush should have done more," or that his priorities should have been more on Katrina and less on Iraq; however, with the benefit of time, it will become clear that even if he had done all he could do, and even if it had been his chief priority, the state and local failures and the inattention of a previous decade would have made the results more similar than not to what we've actually gotten.

The conceptual project of "rebuilding New Orleans" is one that has gotten a lot of attention on the left, because it's the sort of project that excites them -- the idea of using government to effect major changes for the better in people's lives. It's nobly intentioned, but it isn't about FEMA incompetence. It's about the failures of government and government bureaucracy, at every level.

It's not that the system didn't work as it should. It's that a system this large and complex can't be expected to work any better. There are too many rules and too many agencies and parties involved. There are so very many rules, in fact, that it takes all a man's mind to understand the ones pertaining to his own agency and those directly interacting with it. When he hits a roadblock two agencies out -- say, he needs money from FEMA, but FEMA has to get approval from someone in his state government -- it's like trying to understand a chess problem when you can't see the board.

Worse, the problem can be more than two agencies out. It can be more than one problem at once. The problems can be self-reinforcing, as either laws or bureaucratic interests force two agencies into competition for who can have control, or who has to pay.

Until you are willing to come to grips with that basic reality, you can't do more than say, "We'd do it better." That's fine; but it's an article of faith. There's no reason to believe that, even if you were perfect, the results on the ground would be substantially better.

We've talked recently about the Social Security / Medicare / Federal pension debacle that is impending. It is an example of a problem that is distributed across society: caring for the "Baby Boom"-now-"Aged Boom" will affect every family in America, at the same time that government is having to pay out benefits that are currently not figured into our budget forecasts. It cannot meet its existing promises. American families will be left holding the bag, caring for their own as well as they can with what they have, but remembering that government promised to do more.

This basic distrust of government is not Bush's fault. It will not be repaired by some future administration, no matter how wonderfully "competent" it may be.

The truth is that the system itself has exceeded its capacity. New government-based programs are doomed before being written; they may be enacted by some Congress of 2009, but they will fail. Our system is already too big and too complex to function coherently. It may stagger on, until the financial crises posed by the pensions and Social Security force a scaling back of Federal activity. Once that happens, no one will trust government with anything on which they might actually depend for survival. They will remember how it handled the last things they entrusted to it.

For the future, we will be looking more and more to private actors. This is good, in the sense that it means an end to the system that produces Americans accustomed to being treated like children instead of responsible adults. It is bad, in that it means serious challenges for our society in the medium and long term.

"Bush" is currently serving as a magic talisman for those on the left who don't want to face this reality about government, about its destructive size and complexity. That talisman protects them from thinking deeply about the issue: they can pick out two or ten things they think he should have done differently, and say that would have made all the difference.

The real problems are far starker, and far larger, than any man or his administration.

UPDATE: I'd like to point out that the Katrina example is only an example. The problems extend to all areas of government operation. Consider Iraq, which Dionne also does.

It is normal to blame Bush here as well, and Dionne follows the usual script. We've all heard how there was no "Phase IV" planning, etc. And in fact, Bush is really responsible, but not (or not only) for the reasons normally cited. The problem appears to be that State and DOD had competing visions for postwar Iraq, and their attempts to plan and devise were derailed mostly by competition between different branches and factions within the government. As a result, we got a cobbled-together CPA in which it wasn't terribly clear -- even while it was running -- who was really in charge.

It has taken years for this to improve, and only through painful experience has it done so. Major General Cone in Afganistan says that things are finally ironed out there, through the building over years of personal relationships that allowed them to establish memoranda of understanding between the agencies.

Bush is personally responsible for not forcing an interagency settlement before the Iraq war; but we see it was also a problem in Afghanistan. It is also a problem in the Katrina case. It's a problem everywhere the government tries to do anything -- or rather, it's two problems, the ones described above. It's the problem of agencies that are either in bureaucratic competition, or are legally forced to insist on requirements before they can consider cooperation; and, it's the "chess-problem without the board" problem. You find yourself blocked at several points, and you can't quite see what the problems are, or talk to exactly the right person who can straighten it out.

This is not a function of incompetence, or of bad behavior as such -- it exists even when everyone is trying their best to work together. It exists even when citizens, who aren't necessarily bound by the tangle of regulations, are trying to help the government do its job.

In the linked article on Katrina, above, there is this line:

"We're working ourselves close to death," says Scott Darrah, a New Orleans civic activist. "But we can't move it past further than what we have today. The government needs to step up."

I can sympathize with that position. One of the most promising examples of interagency cooperation in both Iraq and Afghanistan is the State-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams. As someone who cares about American success in these endeavors, I've been doing my best to help them help them find the people they need. On 13 August, I had an interview with Philip Reeker, of State, who talked about some recruiting problems for the PRTs. (It's an interesting subject for those interested in the question of how and whether State may need internal reforms, in order to address nation building problems like Iraq.)

From the beginning, I wanted to find out how the PRTs were reaching out to Americans, and to help them do so. It took weeks to get an answer to a pair of questions that any corporation could answer in minutes: How do you do your recruitment? Where are jobs posted?

I don't mention that to criticize State, which is standing up a PRT program highly praised by our military commanders, in spite of the serious difficulties facing that program. There was and is no hostility involved. Everyone wants the program to work; we're all trying our best to make it happen. I only mention it to explore the problems facing government. This is the nature of the beast. Government is too complex, with too many rules and regulations, too many agencies, and too many jobs to handle.

Even with a facilitator -- me, in this case -- who is outside the regulations and can simply "make things happen" if he can get the information, it still takes weeks. When the facilitator has authority within the bureaucracy, he can demand answers faster -- but he also then adds to the complexity of the problem. There is another layer of authority pushing and pulling; in addition to your direct boss, you now have a "dotted line" boss who can give orders.

That creates another set of competitions internally, between your "real" and your "dotted line" bosses. It may help one problem, but it creates new problems -- problems that echo throughout the system. Consider the question of the guy two agencies away who needs a ruling or an action from you, so a second agency can take an action, which will free his agency to move forward. Does he try to contact your real boss, or your dotted-line boss? Both? What does the competition between them do to the request? Does he instead just ask the guy the next level up -- the boss of both of them -- for an answer? What will going over their heads do to the request?

Americans are coming to understand that there are strict limits on what government can accomplish. We are scaling back our expectations and hopes for government in light of those problems. Some of the problems may be susceptible to computer and processing based solutions, so that real improvements can be made in efficiency. Others may be "competence" based, and better leadership might help. Many or most, however, are hard limits.

The government has overreached. It isn't capable of doing what it has set out to do. This just isn't the time for a new, expanded role for government: it's a time to scale it back, and pass off some of these problems to smaller, private entities that can actually maneuver well enough to solve those problems. These may be families; they may be churches; they may be corporations. They have the freedom to do what government simply cannot.

Ladybug

Miss Ladybug and the Draft:

Texas Blogger Miss Ladybug has a post up on a Marine lamenting the absence of a draft. She says she'd like to hear your opinions on the subject, if you please.

ChinaRant

Signs You've Been in China Too Long:

I happened across this list today while doing some other internet research; but I couldn't resist it. It will probably only be funny to people who have actually spent some time in China, but if you have, it's hilarious.

Several of the items I found funniest deal with the propensity in Chinese culture for people to absolutely refuse to give you a straight answer about anything -- especially if they have any sort of authority.

112. You accept without question the mechanic's analysis that the car is "Broken" and that it will cost you a lot of money to get it "Fixed".

146. In a meeting you say everything will be 'wonderful' and give no details.

219. You think "white pills, blue pills, and pink powder" is an adequate answer to the question "What are you giving me, doctor?"

I think I've related my story about trying to get paid in China. "When will I be paid?" "Maybe today!" Three months later...

Ahem.

Australian Women:

One of the best friends I've ever had was a fellow from Freemantle, Australia. The wife and I met him in China when we were living there. He was an outright scoundrel, who had scammed the Australian welfare state into believing he was so crazy that he deserved a lifelong full pension, as he was incapable of working even eight hours a week; which pension was to be mailed to him in China, in US dollars, to enable him to pursue full-time studies in a foreign language.

I think he probably worked as hard getting and keeping that pension -- the not-totally-insensible Australian bureaucracy was forever trying to summon him for a review of the thing, since it was self-evidently suspicious -- as he would have done at a job of any kind. He had understood the key thing about psychology, though, which is that it is only masquerading as a science -- it really has no capacity either to prove or disprove any of its claims. As a result of that, and his knowledge of the arrangement of the bureaucracy, he was invincible.

That description can hardly recommend him to you, so let me add that he was a genuine philosopher on top of these less desirable qualities; a poet, and a man who could recite poetry at the drop of a hat; and as insightful and clever a man, and as good a conversationalist, as I've ever known. Between his capacity to provoke new thoughts and to explore them with you, and his ability to make even the dreariest winter evening (with no heat, again) into a delight, I wouldn't have held the pension against him if I had been paying it myself.

One of the things I remember him telling me was that he never dated Australian women -- that is, his own countrywomen. "They're not like other women," he said. "They're castrators."

I've known very few Australian women myself, so I can't inform the debate on the question as to whether or not he was being fair. I might suggest, however, that insofar as he was correct, it is not without some cause.

Search on for 'sexiest feminist'

THE men's magazine which sparked outrage when it offered a $10,000 boob job as a competition prize has responded to its critics by launching a search for Australia's sexiest feminist.

Zoo Weekly magazine angered health and women's groups when it urged men to "win" their girlfriend a boob job by sending in shots of her cleavage.

The lad's mag today revealed its new competition - a search "for the hottest girl in sensible shoes" - promising the winner a year's supply of deodorant and a sexy photo shoot.

"If you hate men, we want to see photos of you in sexy lingerie," the ad reads.

Magazine editor Paul Merrill said the new competition was the magazine's way of offering its critics an olive branch.

No doubt that's just how it will be received.