perfidy

Why else are we doing what we do here? 

A Canadian commentator, David Warren, makes a valid point here. Especially this:

It is the American way to stress optimism, and to be extremely empirical. They learn by doing, and did not have much experience governing demolished Arab countries. They make ghastly mistakes, and as often as not, turn around and fix them. They have, if I may make one of those generalizations about national character that aren't all the rage, a national disinclination to panic. The media are delegated to do the panicking on their behalf, the American people are fairly hard to scare.

While carping about mistakes is valuable, in that it calls attention to them; the real important thing is that they get fixed. We are making the attempt to fix things, and the constant whining of "blood for oil" and other canards is truly off base. If you judge a nation by its enemies, we are doing pretty well. 
 

Burt Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites and designer of many a cool aircraft, has made the first test flight of the SpaceShipOne, their entry into the X-Prize Contest. Apparently, they are shooting for a suborbital flight by Dec 17, the centenary of the Wright Brother's first powered flight. That would be very, very cool.
 

Useless movie quotes, from all your favorite movies. While the selection of quotes is not as thorough as I would like for some of the movies, it is a fun little website. For instance, I found this quote:

I would like to direct this to the distinguished members of the panel. You lousy cork-suckers. You have violated my fargin' rights. This suminonbatching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens, like me, could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin' ice holes, like yourselves.

He basically fisks the movie, though I think he is a little tooo critical. Of course, he is characteristically witty as he goes about his business. I grant a lot of his points, especially about Zion, but hey, I dug the movie. 
 

And I hope Johno feels better soon. Though likely, he will pretend to be ill for longer than strictly necessary, if only to get more attention from Goody Two-Cents.

Mike, you raised an interesting point - it is really the elephant in the refrigerator of this whole issue. Oil is why we are interested in the Middle East, but not, say, Burkina Faso. Oil is the corrupting influence throughout the region. We, and some other parts of the world, are wealthy. We got this way not because we were sitting on enormous goldmines of strategic and valuable resources. We got wealthy through industry, trade, and work. These nations fell into staggering amounts of cash through no effort of their own, and like the white trash lottery winner, it has done nothing to improve their lives beyond making possible a lenghty drunken bender. When the cash runs out, they will be worse off than before. The presence of billions of dollars in easy money is a vast temptation, especially in areas that don't have our traditions of rule of law and so on.

If it is the case that representative government is impossible in the corrupting presence of oil wealth, then the Middle East is screwed for the foreseeable future. Hybrid cars reduce the need for oil, but do not eliminate it. Electric or fuel cell vehicles only change the way oil is used - instead of burning it in your car directly, oil is burned in power plants. Germany used synthetic fuels in the second world war, but only because they had no other choice. They are, and are likely to remain very expensive. Also, oil is used for plastics and many other things besides fuel. Unless fusion power becomes magically available, or the left stops opposing fission power, oil and coal remain the only viable sources of energy.

But Arab totalitarianism is not co-extensive with oil wealth. Egypt has no appreciable oil reserves, nor does Syria. Libya has some, but Algeria doesn't. Lebanon, Tunisia and Jordan seem somewhat freer and to our eyes better. While forming a republican government in Iraq may be difficult, it is worth the effort.

To move on to Johno's question, the only way to foster republican ideals is to begin at the lowest level. Touqueville observed that the root of the American experience with democracy was that we practiced it at every level, both by electing city councils, mayors, sherriffs, and dogcatchers; and by participating in civic organizations that elect leadership. These everyday experiences give us the confidence to believe that when we vote for and elect leaders on the national level, the system is working the same way that we experience it on the local level. Totalitarian regimes try to extinguish all relationships except that between the individual and the state. Iraq has little in the way of civic life. The only way to start the process is to - before allowing any national elections - give the Iraqis control over their local affairs. Set up a system of munipal government where the people elect their city councils, mayors, sherriffs and dog catchers. Then, when they have some experience, move on to regional and then national elections. This could work.

And as for Mike's comment on end results of democracy - we can interfere if they don't get it right. Do you think we wouldn't have intervened in Germany if there had been a communist takeover from within, in 1950? We will not allow a fundamentalist theocracy to take power, and hopefully not another authoritarian state either. We have a responsibility, now that we have libervated Iraq, to give them a responsible government. They don't have experience with that, so we can provide training wheels for the early stages, until they have more skill and confidence.

Crackheads

Kaus says:

It turns out we weren't reading the reporting of the famous, cream-of-the-profession Times employees, but the reporting of unidentified "stringers" we've never heard of. ... Conventional journalists sometimes sneer at blogs because there's no way for a reader to know whether what a random, unknown person says on his Web site is true. But it sounds as if the Times is not so different from a blog after all--what you are reading is really the work of random, unknown "legs" and stringers. ... 

Of course, in other ways the Times and the typical blog are very different forms of journalism. One obsessively reflects the personal biases, enthusiasms and grudges of a single individual. The other is just an online diary! ...

I don't quite understand his motivation - working at the Times in his twenties, great job prestige, etc. And he goes and makes shit up. Journalism is not hard. I am doing something like journalism right now, in my underwear. It would really be journalism if I called someone and interviewed them. But he was getting paid real money to write for a living. Didn't he realize that when you plagiarize, and put the results in the most important and widely read paper in the country, someone will notice? Holy Jeebus, what dimwitted jackassery. 

Blair is pathetic. The real shame falls on the editorial staff and their meese stuffed animals, who should have applied some standards and integrity to the "Paper of Record." 
 

10. War and Peace and Steve
9. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Steves
8. The Grapes of Steve
7. The Steves of Wrath
6. Steve Grapes Steve Wrath Steve Steve
5. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, Steve is From Cleveland
4. Where's Waldo? Is He With Steve?
3. Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume VIII: "Mysterious Guys Named Steve"
2. The Joy of Sex with Steve
1. The Bible (King Steve Version)

From David Letterman, by way of the dusty corners of my hard drive. I think this is from the last millenium. The Cleveland bit was actually in the original. Go figure.

High speed internet at last, High speed internet at last, thank God Almighty, High speed internet at last.

[Update] Now I can download artistic photographs (of a completely morally uplifting and non-prurient nature, of course) 50 times faster!

And get drunk on Marion Barry's. Then I'm going to send Cox Communication an invoice for the hours I spent on the phone getting them to do the obvious. ("hmmn. the work order says 'cable modem,' maybe we should leave one for the nice customer.") I bill at $120/hour. They wasted two and one quarter hours of my precious time. That's four months free cable. 

What is a Marion Berry you ask? This drink, invented by the estimable Jonah Goldberg and his cohorts, is "a concoction of Jagermeister, Kahlua, bourbon and Coke. Why this collection? Because we wanted a drink "so black not even the man could keep it down." 

[Update] And, yes, I do have the necessary ingredients. Getting the wife's permission is a different matter. 
 

And hopefully the fucktards at Cox Communications will actually have made the leap to competence and delivered the cable modem they should have left in my office when they ran the cable. "We can't promise to have it there by this evening. But we have scheduled a service call for tomorrow between 8:00 and 1:00. You'll definitely have it by tomorrow." Jeebus. I should have had it Wednesday, jackass. Three years of excellent service from DirecTV made me forget the thumb-fingered, stumbling fuckwittery of the cable industry.

I meant that in the sense that those who freak over nukes have a problem with nukes over and above any real concern about the destructive power or utility of explosives of a given size. This is sentimentality, rather than a rational appraisal of the utility of a given weapon. Fallout is bad, but very limited. A 1/100 Hiroshima nuke (150 tons, far bigger than any practical conventional explosive, and twenty times more powerful than the Daisy Cutter.) would probably release less radioactivity than a coal fired powerplant. And radioactivity, while sometimes dangerous, has no supernatural power to harm, especially when compared to the chemical by-products of a conventional explosive.

In any event, we would almost certainly never use them. The threat would probably be sufficient for most purposes.

That some government entities are using their police powers in ways not envisioned by the authors of the Patriot act. Of course they are using that authority against non terrorists. Just as the RICO statutes were used to persecute people who weren't racketeers. And a thousand other examples. There is a certain set of activities that are obviously criminal. Killing, stealing, etc. There is some value in breaking down a category of crime - fraud, counterfeiting, false advertising, insider trading, etc. But there is no sense in making terrorism a crime. I apply the same logic that I apply to hate crimes. Did you kill someone? Well, that's murder. Intent is necessary to prove murder - but what kind of intent shouldn't matter. We already have crimes for these things. Leave it be. Our police agencies are more than capable of tracking down criminals inside the United States, and they don't need new powers to do so. 

The Supreme court has ruled that the police have no obligation to protect us. They investigate, and prosecute after the fact. They also serve a deterrent function. They do, and certainly should, try to foil criminal plots. They should share information with the public (the general militia) so that we can more capably provide for our own defense, which is our responsibility as free citizens. 

The only changes I would have made in the wake of 9/11 would have been to take the leash off our foreign intelligence apparatus. The homeland security department is ridiculous. Restrictions on our freedoms to protect our freedom is ridiculous. Taking out terrorists overseas with hellfire missiles before they can do us harm is logical. Homeland security starts with putting the fear of god into those who would harm us, not by giving the FBI and the entire alphabet soup of federal agencies the power to violate my privacy and civil liberties. 
 

No president has recieved a majority of the popular vote in the last three elections. Percentage of registered voters actually voting is low. Registered voters are an ever smaller fraction of eligible voters. There are two sides to this comparison that you make. On the one hand, you can say that you are shocked, shocked to find that more Americans are interested in the vapid American Idol competition than in who will head up the executive branch of our government. And in many senses this is disturbing. The peeple, the unwashed masses, have no conception of civic duty, of the intelligent exercise of the right of franchise, or the like. They are more concerned with which bubble-head, asshatted, no talent publicity seeker wins a contest. Holy jeebus. I do wish more of my fellow citizens took their responsibilities more seriously. On the other hand, it is simply miraculous and largely unprecedented in history that so large a population is so insulated from the often pernicious consequences of politics that they can safely ignore them. Throughout the world and throughout history, choosing sides in politics is a life and death decision. 

I often weep or gnash my teeth at the most recent outrage. Some of them are the same things that outrage Johno. Less frequently, they are the things that exercise Mike. I think these things are important. I think about them, discuss them, and write about them on this blog. I am a (very small) part of the national discourse on the crucial issues facing our nation. But I could tune out the whole thing, and lead my life without any great fear that the fortunes of my family would be direly affected. Affected, yes, but not in the same sense as choosing the wrong side, or staying neutral too long in France in 1790, Germany in 1848, Russia in 1920, or China in 1950, or Iraq just recently. 

Some people seem to think that American Exceptionalism means that we are better than anyone else at everything. This is not true. (Lots of things, not everything.) The reason that the United States is exceptional is not that our government is so capable, often it is the exact opposite. But our system allows all quarter+ billion of us to use (or not use) our abilities to the fullest. However we choose. The governent, by and large, stays out of the way. We panic whenever it encroaches on some aspect of our life. But we choose our jobs, where to live, how to live. We don't need passports to leave the state. We don't need a governent permit to set up a seditios weblog. We don't need a bureaucrat's blessing to try and build a working space ship in our garage as a hobby. (Which thousands of people do.) That is exceptional. Regardless of the fact that 58 million found time to vote for Kelly Clarkson, you can't compete with a nation whose populace builds spaceships for fun. Or invents whole new industries that change the way the entire world operates out of a garage, for fun. (Personal computers.) To paraphrase Bill Clinton, "It's the Liberty, stupid." 

And liberty means that people can vote for Kelly Clarkson, and not for president. 
 

Bumfights.com is either the worst thing, or the greatest thing I have seen this week. Everytime I get revved on American exceptionalism, something like this comes along to remind me of the parallels between us and the Roman Republic in the first century BC.

Just look at this.

I get high speed IN-TER-NET. Yeeeeehaaaa.

If you find yourself completely in agreement with Chappaquiddick Ted, its time to worry. There is no military difference between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, except for explosive yield. People freak out over nukes, both the explosive and power generating kind. It is not a matter of reason, it is sentimentality. Of course, there are larger concerns over using nukes - but only because others react irrationally. If the military really has a need to develop weapons like this, then fine - there has long been a gap between the largest conventional explosives and the smallest nuclear explosives. The trend for the last two decades has been toward generally smaller explosives, if only because of greater precision. But the interplay between offensive and defensive technology means that people realize that we can drop a bomb exactly where we want, and will redouble their efforts to armor stuff they don't want blown up. Eventually, they will reach a point where an armored bunker target is largely immune to any conventional explosive device, no matter how accurately delivered. (Flip side of that is that armoring is very expensive.) A small nuclear device in a penetrating casing is the perfect bunker buster. The fact that there will be some radiation is not the horrifying spectre that some make it out to be. Chemical explosives have toxic residues. So does rocket exhaust. And car exhaust for that matter.

The daisy cutter of Afghanistan fame was 7.5 tons yield. Hiroshima was 2000 times larger, at 15 Kt. In all likelihood, 1/100 of Hiroshima would be more than adequate.

Generated this poem, an ode to this webpage:

Johnny Good idea... Warren Buffett!!
To Johnny I’
already be alien or
more
wrong. No longer be European
and c look hard bitter core
of my fist in
memory to eat a year from
the stinky ones will complete
if it is accounting, and over at the burning
that money gained. Enact a Cleveland
Indians, the war;
people died. no Good idea...

For your information, as of about five minutes ago we moved to code orange. I discovered this when I found that one of the exits from my building was blocked, forcing me (and any terrorists) to walk an extra 20 yards to get a soda from the nice Eretrian vendor lady on the corner.

Of the two matrices, the first was clearly the better. Nevertheless, the second installment was well worth the $18.50 ticket price. My only real quibbles, aside from having to wait half a year before seeing the next one, is that the art direction for the zion city scenes was a little, well, over the top; and that at a couple points the change between live action Neo and cgi Neo was too obvious. (And even so, the cgi human characters in Matrix were much better than last year's spiderman.)

The real surprise in the movie is the sense of humor that Agent Smith has developed. In many respects, the new Agent Smith is the most engaging character in the movie. As our cast of heroes soldier through with grim seriousness, the formerly dour Smith is almost whimsical. A+ on that.

But the thing that was most intriguing was the new philosophical underpinning of the movie. This is what kept my friends and I in the parking lot for an hour after the movie talking. The first Matrix had, at its center, the question of reality and perception. At the time, I found the idea of an action adventure movie centered on a question of rather abtruse phenomenology to be delicious. But now, we have an action adventure movie centered on serious questions of free will and predestination. Imagine a Hong Kong style sf action flic starring Cotton Mather and Erasmus, Abelard and Heloise, with a supporting cast of hundreds of genetically engineered Ignatius Loyola/Steven Wright hybrids. This movie is as close as you'll get to that ideal.