Willie Nile -- New York singer

Radio blogging...On 'The Streets of New York' with Willie Nile

This morning's Weekend Edition Sunday features acoustic guitar player and singer Willie Nile whom I have never heard of, but who deserves to be known by everybody. Anyone who has ever been to New York, even for a day or two, will instantly recognize the style and relate to this guy. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thirteen minutes, just listen to the first three minutes to hear his song The Streets of New York. Great stuff. And if you aren't hooked yet, before you leave, drag the control button to 18:14 and listen to a really great tune, never before broadcast, The Day I Saw Bo-Diddley in Washington Square.

More talent is poured out weekly in New York City than most people ever get to experience in a lifetime. Go get a taste.

[Think Loudon Wainwright III -- link here to an interview with him last August. Three songs here...Nanny (3:00)...Half Fist ( 8:45)...Hank and Fred (17:50)]

Purim -- Get ready, already

For some reason I am running into more Purim hype this year than in years past. Back in college days I was an honorary Jew, having discovered complimentary lox, bagels and danish at Hillel meetings. After falling out with the Southern Baptists over their resistance to the civil rights movement, I was lost in a spiritual desert where I wandered for a few years. My Jewish friends were among those able to respect my taking part in what was at the time fairly unacceptable social behavior, picketing a segregated restaurant.

Anyway, here are a couple of Purim links that even a goy can enjoy.

From the ABC's of Purim... in 10 words or less: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat.

Purim is Judaism's most dramatic, fun-filled holiday. When else can you dress up like a bunny rabbit and eat doughy triangles filled with prunes and poppy seeds?
Purim occurs on the 14th of Adar. (In certain walled cities like Jerusalem, "Shushan Purim" is celebrated on the 15th of Adar.)

The main event is reading the Book of Esther. Set in Persia 2,300 years ago, the "Megillah" (as it is commonly called) recounts how a seemingly unrelated series of events spun together to save the Jewish people from annihilation. The quickie version is as follows:

When King Achashverosh throws a huge six-month party and the queen refuses to follow orders, she is replaced by a new queen - Esther the Jewess. Esther's uncle Mordechai, the leader of the Jews, uncovers a plot to assassinate the king -- putting him also in a favorable position with the king. All this comes in handy when Haman, the king's top advisor, obtains a decree to have all the Jews destroyed.

In the end, through a complex twist of events, Esther gets the decree reversed, Haman is hanged on the gallows, and Mordechai becomes prime minister.

The name Megillat Esther (Scroll of Esther) actually mean "revealing the hidden." Unlike every other book in the Bible, Megillat Esther never mentions God's name even once. The hidden hand of God is revealed through the maze of events. There are no coincidences.

Megillat Esther teaches us that life challenges work out for the best, because what appears as obstacles are really opportunities to develop ourselves for the better. And it all comes from God's invisible hand that guides our fate, every step of the way.

Not to miss one minute video: What if These Famous People Had Jewish Mothers?

And from An Unsealed Room, Israeli blog... Jewish Girls Gone Wild!

Okay, then. Not exactly related, but whadda I know from Purim? I also came across another piece describing how Mary Beth Crain's eighty-five-year-old Mama, profoundly Jewish all her life, took Holy Communion in the retirement home where she lives! Maybe my day job in a retirement community made it funny to me. But again, there is something liberating about Jewish humor in every situation...

Now Hazel had always expected that sooner or later she would go to the Jewish Home, where her parents and aunts and uncles all lived out their last years among old friends and enemies. Every Jew in Rochester knows every other Jew, after all, and their relatives too, from Moses on down, and sooner or later they all tend to wind up in the same place, playing Bingo and Jewish Geography to the end.

But this was not to be Hazel’s fate. Since neither my brother nor I live in Rochester, we’ll be moving her to Michigan in April, where we’ll both be able to take care of her. For now, however, she’s quite happy at The Brightonian, even though it’s a distinctly non-Jewish residence that offers, among other Goyische amenities, Sunday church worship.

That's the set-up. Now go read and enjoy An Accident of Mirth.

WSJ opinion pieces this weekend

It's tempting to connect two dots here really not meant to be connected. But with two opinion pieces coming up back to back in one of America's preeminent joournals it is hard not to couple them in an artificial construct, looking for some ulterior motive.

Yesterday's piece is a suave look at Tom Wolfe, a well-crafted look at a well-crafted subject, with both writers remaining inscrutable. I liked reading it because of how well it resisted a hundred opportunities for cheap shots. And because he used the word atavistic. Twice.

Today's piece is an equally suave recapitualation (and betrayal of) of a T.E. Lawrence theme intended to underscore in a most civil and oblique manner a current political theme, the dangers of sleeping with Arabs.

For years the Wall Street Journal stuck to the knitting, banging out the world's most important paper about business, seasoning it with just enough contemporary awareness of art, culture, pop enterainment and science to give well-connected leaders in high places enough to talk about at social events, but knowing all the while that the real business of the country is business. In recent years, though, there is a keen interest in themes that seem to have no easy connection with business. The paradigm seems to have shifted. In the old day the markets closed for the weekend, nuclear families convened for various bonding activities and other newspapers took over, heavy with coupons, reviews, ads for clothes, cars and real estate, and all the stuff that make consumers salivate.

Imagine a Wall Street Journal the Friday after Thanksgiving, fat with color ads kicking off the holiday retail season and too heavy to tote. The image doesn't work. That's not what they do, is it? Not really.

But the Journal does aim to shape public opinion in a manner keeping American business -- and yes, politics -- on the rails. Here is the part that set me to thinking. This is where the dots are not supposed to come together. A requisite glance at our own situation, seen through the smart, observant, ultimately forgiving eyes of Tom Wolf, is followed by a tart assessment of those sneaky magnates over there in the Middle East, awash with petro-dollars, keeping them all the themselves in a hedonistic and speculative economic bubble that will ultimately burst. Bang! Tulip bulbs all over the place!

The piece opens and ends with the same dark omen, stated twice lest the reader miss the point...

Are today's Arab day-traders tomorrow's al Qaeda terrorists? [The sub-title...]

and...

It's not hard to imagine Islamists capitalizing on a future bust with denunciations of stock-market gambling. Some of today's young Arab day-traders could well turn into tomorrow's al Qaeda recruits. [The last two lines.]

What we have here is spin. Political and social spin. To coin a phrase, some of us know who T.E.Lawrence was, sir, and what he stood for. And you are no T.E.Lawrence.

Any questions?

Tom Fox -- Christian martyr

News came today that Tom Fox is dead, killed after being held hostage in Iraq.

Fox was found near a west Baghdad railway line with gunshot wounds to his head and chest, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said Saturday. A U.S. military official in Baghdad confirmed that American forces picked up Fox's remains Thursday evening. Falah al-Mohammedawi, an official with the Interior Ministry, which oversees police, said Fox was found with his hands tied and gunshots to his head and chest.

He is now among that great cloud of witnesses whom Christians know as those who have preceded them into the next world, whose witness is a vital part of the foundation of our faith.

Tom Fox kept a blog, Waiting in the Light. His last post, There Are No Words, dated November 8 last year, is a testimony to his faith. He was among a group of Quakers working in the least protected population in Iraq, the people of Falujah.

There are no words. A city that has been demonized by Americans and many Iraqis, using the words “the city of terrorists.” A city that its residents call “the city of mosques.” A city that even its residents have to enter at checkpoints, often taking up to an hour to traverse. A city that is being choked to death economically by those same checkpoints.

CPTers and a member of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams came to Fallujah to meet with friends and contacts to ask them if the city was planning on doing something in remembrance of the tragic events of last November when U.S. forces attacked their city of 300,000 to root out, by U.S. estimates, 1,500 terrorists.

What we heard in response were words of remembrance, resistance and resilience. The cleric said that a number of civic leaders had come to him with a proposal for an action in remembrance of the anniversary. Their proposal was to raise funds to contribute to relief efforts for the victims of the earthquake in Pakistan. He said that a teaching of Islam is to always look to aid others in need before asking for aid yourself.

This last post is part of his memorial. The comments thread has become a visitation place for those who want to pay their last respects. Go look. And offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the peacemakers of the world. Those who die as martyrs are no less valuable than those who die as military heroes.

Link to CPT website. H/T Helena Cobban

Tom Fox reflection: "Why are we here?" written the day before the abduction.

**

*****

**

In response to Tom’s passing, we ask that everyone set aside inclinations to vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done. In Tom’s own words: "We reject violence to punish anyone. We ask that there be no retaliation on relatives or property. We forgive those who consider us their enemies. We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening nonviolently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation.”
.

Even as we grieve the loss of our beloved colleague, we stand in the light of his strong witness to the power of love and the courage of nonviolence. That light reveals the way out of fear and grief and war.

.

From the CPT release, March 10

Keith Windschuttle comment

Keith Windschuttle is a new name for me. As best I can figure he is a former Continental Leftist turned latter-day revisionist historian writing out of New Zealand or Australia. Clearly very bright and well-read, he has a way with the Mother Tongue that only a favorite son of the Empire can boast. His name and the following quote came up in a comment thread I was reading yesterday. I'm not sure I like what he says, but I have to admit he says it awfully well. Get this...

The logic of relativism is taking Western academics into dark waters. They are now prepared to countenance practices that are obviously cruel, unnatural and life-denying, that is, practices that offend against all they claim to stand for.

To see how decadent these assumptions have become, compare today's relativism to the attitude that prevailed when the culture of the British people was in its ascendancy. Sir Charles Napier, the British Commander-in-chief in India from 1849 to 1851, signed an agreement with local Hindu leaders that he would respect all their customs, except for the practice of suttee. The Hindu leaders protested but Napier was unmoved:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures, no matter how uncomfortable we might be with their beliefs and practices. However, there is one culture conspicuous by its absence from all this. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.

This is taken from a longish piece from his website. Good read, entertaining writing style and yes, I recommend a critical reading. It is the text of a presentation he made at a symposium last month. I was tempted to blog about it but forgot about it until this morning. The same snip popped up at The Is-Ought Problem, a Kurdish blog I came across a few days ago. He beat me to it.

Wikipedia link to Windschuttle.

Cutting off your nose to spite your allies

I have not the time, patience or expertise to blog about an army of Davids uniting to participate in the stoning of those whose leadership in a representative democracy fell short of expectations in today's rising tide of neo-populism.

(Got that? Read it through a time or two more if you didn't because it has more than one thought. Such prose is out of fashion these days because it is written with both nuance and complexity in order to express more than one level of thinking. In other words, it's more than a soundbite.)

Our representatives have spoken, responding to a rising chorus of constituents whipped into a frenzy by a gale of xenophobia, isolationism and shrill patriotism (but not racism, mind you).
Words fail me. So go read....

THIS..............THIS..........THIS..............THIS..............and finally, THIS.


President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us. (From that first link,)

Weekend reading: William Saletan

Start off with this...

Politically, legally and technologically the 33-year-old court decision is increasingly obsolete as a framework for managing decisions about reproduction. But only the abortion rights movement can lead the way beyond it. The anti-abortion groups can't launch the post-Roe era, because they are determined to abolish its guarantee of individual autonomy, and the public won't stand for that. It must be up to reproductive rights supporters to give the public what it wants: abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy.

Three political asteroids are heading toward us that make the latest round of the abortion confrontation inevitable. The first is the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban. Second is the South Dakota law. The third is the potential retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The order in which they hit will determine how close Roe comes to being overturned. But one way or another, they'll reignite the cycle of victory, backlash and defeat.

The rest is an uncomfortable but essential reality check for those who would advance the case for fewer abortions.

Next, read this by the same writer a few days later. He took his contrary self to an assembley of smart people not smart enough to appreciate his nuances on the issue...

...The most recent comparative numbers, detailed in an article I brought to the meeting, indicated that our abortion rate exceeds that of every Western European nation. "Raise your hand if you think that number is too high," the conference moderator told the 50 people in the room.

I saw one hand go up. The woman next to me said she saw another. The two hand-raisers used to work for pro-choice groups but no longer do.

This is the predicament facing the abortion-rights movement. It's led by three kinds of people: Those who see no problem, those who are afraid to speak up, and those who think it's futile. I'm betting that the denial, fear, and futility will give way. But it'll take time.

I should mention that I didn't raise my hand. I was invited to the meeting, along with my friend Katha Pollitt, to debate the wisdom of declaring a pro-choice war on the abortion rate. Katha and I are on the record on this question. I'm for it; she's against it. Although I'm pro-choice, I can't claim to be part of the movement. I haven't earned it, and as a professional critic, I can't make such a commitment. So I came, I made my case, and then I shut up and listened. It was like preaching to the choir, except that my preaching was Sunni, and the choir was Shiite.

A pro-choice war on the abortion rate.

Now that's an idea that I can grab, a notion whose time may soon come, and one that I have been imagining for a long, long time. My spark may be different from that of the writer, but we can definitely stand shoulder to shoulder on the same side of the discussion if the end is to reduce the number of abortions.

And finally, read the words of Fr. Neuhaus, commenting on the WaPo column and adding his own comments.

...the goal is not to find means less repugnant than the butchery of medieval barbers for the killing of unborn babies. Not just five hundred years from now, but in the foreseeable future, it is hoped that people will look back and recognize the moral absurdity of “trying to help people” by helping them destroy their offspring.

Youch!
That stings, doesn't it?

Lots to read and think about this weekend, this Lent. If the South Dakota statute did nothing else, it renewed the public debate about how best to come to terms with the abortion issue. Maybe, just maybe, the extremists on both sides of the argument can begin hearing one another. I realize we are a very long way from my own obscure position, the one articulated so clearly above ("a pro-choice war on the abortion rate") but perhaps a renewed discusson can make a few more converts.

**

****

**

And if that's not enough to get your engine running, check out the comments thread from the Slate article. I haven't done that myself, but I did check out the snips at the end of the published piece.

I'm pro-choice but not pro-abortion. [...] I have a friend who had a late-term abortion when she discovered her fetus had Downs. I had zero problem with that until they named the baby and had a memorial service for it. Now, I never said anything to her and I remain committed to the idea that it was her right to make that choice and that never having faced that dilemma I wasn't in a position to disapprove. But if she considered it a human baby enough to name it and have a memorial service, it bugged me that she could then kill it because it wasn't perfect.

So, I'm not welcome in the pro-choice crowd or the anti-choice crowd. I'm just representative of the majority of Americans who are told they have to choose sides based on absolutes. It makes it tough to get excited and involved. So it's up to the extremists on both sides and unfortunately, the right has more extremists than the left so abortion rights are themselves going to be aborted.

[...] I have never heard anyone--even the most ardent pro-choice activist--ask a woman when her fetus will become a human being. Instead, they ask: when is your BABY due? [...] If you listen to the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, a two-month-old embryo has the same moral status as a two-year-old child. However, if the South Dakota legislature truly believed that, it would have made the women who have abortions subject to prosecution for premeditated murder. They did not do so, which suggests to me that most pro-life people don't really believe that early-stage embryos and fetuses are morally equivalent to born human beings. They simply believe that the choice belongs with the State.

My questions from the other day don't seem so ridiculous, it seems.

"Waiter! There's a Hashemite in My Port!"

Love that post title!
That's why I stole it.

Nur al-Cubicle treats us to another delightful translation from Le Monde, a slide show in words of the Kingdom (Sheikdom? Emirate? whatever...) of Dubai by Marc Roche. If democracy can't fly in that part of the world, the next best thing must be an enlightened despot who loves to make money and promote lavish lifestyles among his wealthy peers. Go read this wonderfully descriptive piece. There may be an axe on the grindstone, but it isn't from the Washington toolshed.

The 10th in succession of the Bedouin Maktoum dynasty, traditional friends of the United States in the region, the new emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, hasn’t recovered after being labeled by some in Washington as a sort of “public enemy No. 1”. At 56 years of age, the Emir, who succeeded his deceased brother, Sheik Maktoum, on January 4, 2006, is the proponent of a tolerant and modernized Islam.

He cultivates a demeanor acquired at Britain’s Mons Officer Cadet School and sports Ray-Ban sunglasses MacArthur-style. An experienced equestrian who enjoys endurance races in the desert, the man has been the de facto head of the country since the death of his father, Rashid, in 1990. With a keen anthracite gaze, his dry lips seldom part to reveal a smile. When I met him at the Nad al-Sheba Racetrack, his princely handshake was glacial.

I ask you: What's not to love about a man like that? Strikes me as a Donald Trump in a dis-dasha. Could this be (dare I say it?) micromanagement?

Although the prince gladly wears the local jellaba, the dis dasha – his collaborators cultivate US managerial style. The sheikh listens to their advice. But this omnipotent monarch with overwhelming authority carefully monitors the smallest details and decides alone and quickly behind his desk, stacked high with architectural drawings. Distrustful and secretive, Mohammed often gives ambiguous directives. He does not care for those who succeed too obviously. His liegemen compete like horses at the track where the only the best are victorious, jokes an Emirate habitué, alluding to the celebrated Godolphin Stables, housing 3,000 thoroughbreds owned by the ruling family.

"Dubai" is Arabic for "Harriet Miers"

Robert A. George called it.

But hey!
I got snookered, too.
Matter of fact, I mentioned the Miers nomination at the time...

And this Chris Muir cartoon is priceless. (H/T Anchoress)

"...they said they're sorry.. They always are."

I saw somewhere that Mosul is one of several locations where neither US nor Iraqi forces prevail. Probably one of Iraq'a more dangerous and insecure places, but I am only guessing. In any case, Najma has been posting less and less lately, with most of her posts being about school, travel to Baghdad and such. She has carefully avoided too much political commentary, even when conflicts hit right at her door.

Tocay's post is a dramatic account of the death of an uncle. It strikes me as remarkably restrained, making the impact even more moving.

Uncle S was dad's only uncle from his mother's side. A man in his late seventies, peaceful and young in the heart. Last time I saw him was after Eid, I gave him a kiss on his cheek when I greeted him, and he kissed me on my forehead before we left. There's nothing that would make me happier than a kiss on the forehead, especially from a man like him. (He was happy with his new mobile then, and he really knew how to use it unlike many, and I was impressed that a man his age, could understand such up-to-date thing. )

Najma's Dad is a physician. You can read his account of the incident here. The comments thread is instructive.

About that South Dakota abortion law

"When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again. ... I don't think we're so far beyond that, that we can't go back to that."

That's the way State Sen. Bill Napoli from Rapid City sees things, according to Molly Ivins' piece. She has a few choice words for the new statute signed into law in South Dakota criminalizing abortion.

I have a few questions myself.

What are the criminal penalties provided for violating the new law? What is a "Class Five Felony"?

How many perpetrators are to be indicted? The doctor, of course, but what about the nurse? The receptionist? The appointments secretary? Sounds a lot like a conspiracy to me.

Yes, and what about the pregnant woman? Is she victim or perpetrator? And if she is a perpetrator, what are her penalties? After all, if she never became pregnant the whole matter would never come to pass. Seems to me that her "decision" is prima facie intent to kill. Absent that, there is no crime.

Actually, pregnancy is not the crime. The crime arises from the decision to end the pregnancy. So does the person making such a decision not have some consequences? Or perhaps being forced to rear and care for the outcome of an unwanted pregnancy becomes penalty enough?

And Dad? Sperm-donor, if you prefer...
How about him? Any penalties for him?

If the new-citizen-to-be is gonna be born instead of aborted, won't the father at least be liable for some kind of child support for a few years?

Come to think of it, if the embryo is a person, and somebody conspires to kill him or her, doesn't that qualify for a charge of manslaughter at least?
Obviously I'm not a lawyer, but as a layman I want to know at what point under this most recent law is there a distinction between abortion and infanticide?

So at what point does a fertilized egg qualify as an infant?

I can see how this is really gonna advance family values and a more refined moral high ground, can't you? Lots of repentance is just around the corner, right?
Onward, Christian soldiers! The Faith is on the move!

C'mon, folks. Where is this headed?
Nathaniel Hawthorn would be having a ball today.

I will be waiting with interest to see where this goes in the courts.

Gerard Vanderleun -- morning reading

Short and sweet. Go read it. Mini-adventure with a Divine twist.

When people run serious power boats from the Keys up to Lauderdale, it's a full day on the ocean and things can sometimes go wrong, very wrong. His boat seems big at the dock, but take it off shore and towards the Gulf Stream and it quickly becomes very small. The Atlantic is a great reducer.

Will Franklin on racism

The very gifted Will Franklin who I think is the "Will" in "Willisms" dot com, speaks candidly about how he as an under-thirty white guy is getting tired of hearing about racism. He does not remember a time when talk about the disadvantages of black people in America was not part of the sub-text of every conversation and article making even indirect references to race. He knows abut history. He is well-informed about the world around him, and he is tired, really tired, of being beat up with stuff that he does not feel has any meaningful connection with him.

As an under-30 white guy, I never lived through segregation or systematic discrimination against African-Americans. I never saw Martin Luther King, Jr. in person or live on television. Lynchings, not really part of my lifetime. Back of the bus type stuff, might as well be ancient history. Color-barriers being broken (sports, politics, etc.) mostly happened before my time. I never lived through any of that. It's all distant history to my generation.

That is pretty straightforward and I can appreciate it. My own kids don't want to hear about it either. Interestingly enough, neither do many of the black kids that I meet today. Since I am an old white guy they presume immediately that I am just another relic of past generations with all the prejudice and lack of understanding that went along with that crowd. Unless and until I make it a point to say otherwise, to tell them personal stories about what I was doing when I was their age, they only see me as a two-dimensional white closet racist.

Will's post was inspired by a snip from a tirade by a Holltywood actor I have never heard of...

“If I hear one more person tell me how this man is a man of faith, I think I'll lose my mother-f*ck*ng mind [audience applause]. Let me tell you why. I'll tell you why. He left his ranch in Crawford to see about one woman, Terry Schiavo, he left his ranch early. But when thousands and thousands of people were being, dying in New Orleans, this son of a b*tch didn't do sh*t, and that's very un-Christlike to me.”

He links to the source which fames the quote in a way calculated to illustrate the bias and ignorance of liberals in general and black people in particular (Uh, think about that for a moment...), doing so in a very workmanlike manner if the comments that followed are any measure of success. But Will himself is more circumspect. He also links to a less inflammatory and more intellectually challenging interview with Shelby Steele.

Sixty years ago, Shelby Steele was born to a black truck driver and a white social worker in Chicago. His parents were active in the struggle for civil rights, and encouraged him to make the most of his personal opportunities.

After completing a doctorate in English, Steele taught literature at San Jose State University. In 1990, he received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for his book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.

Today, Steele is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he focuses on race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. His next book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, will be released in May.

Whaddya know! Another old guy like me. And not too dumb, it seems.
Steele drives home some great points that young Will is eager to hear, I'm sure, because it underscores the overall point he is trying to make, that the tired old relics of the American Civil Rights Movement are obsolete. In his interview, Shelby Steele says as much.

TAE: Let’s talk more about George Bush and the Republican Party. Bush has promoted the concept of the ownership society, and has helped black homeownership, for instance, reach an all-time high. People who own things tend to be more conservative. And Bush has courted the black vote more aggressively than any other Republican President. Yet he’s still not getting it—why?

STEELE: It’s just amazing to me—he keeps getting slapped.
I don’t think I’ll live to see it, but I don’t expect anything to change until the current civil rights leadership just dies off. They’re really past their usefulness at this point, and they’ve become part of the problem. They’re concerned with nothing except keeping their people in the Democratic Party.

He goes on to talk about how issues of race interesect with party politics, which is, I suppose, an appropriate concern for a successful, well-educated erudite black professional. Like all successful, erudite people the rational place to find a home is in the Republican Party, repository of success and erudition in America. Ain't no gangstas gonna go there. You bet.

Important points are made in the Steele interview. Especially points about how family support and education are connected. I recommend reading it completely. But my plea this morning, to Will Franklin and all the smart young people he represents, is to be patient and cut a little more slack to our black American cousins. I am as disgusted as he and everybody else is with crime, the gimme-mind-set, crass rudeness and profanity of street talk, proliferation of children born out of wedlock, and all the rest. But I also know that we are witnessing first hand what happens after four of five generations when family bonds and mother tongues were systematically and deliberately destroyed by force.

And yes, I am talking about slavery and it's aftermath. Those bright, achievement-oriented Asian kids that Steele talks about in the San Jose city schools have something that their peers likely do not have. Despite their immigrant status and material handicaps, those kids have been nurtured by the same kind of family stability, balance and appreciation for learning that were also part of Steele's birthright. He describes it quite well.

My father was a poor black from the South, born in 1900, with a third-grade education. My mother was raised in Ohio with a decent amount of money, and earned her master’s degree. I suppose my father was the more intellectual of the two—he certainly read more books—but I only knew them as my mother and my father. I didn’t know them as emblems or representatives of a race.

So being raised by them gave me a profound secret that other people who have dealt with race don’t have: I knew that behind the race, there’s nothing other than human beings; that’s why whenever I write about race, my point of departure has always been human nature.
I understand race, but I better understand the basics of humanity—human motivations, human incentives. No matter what the question is, if you look for answers in someone’s race, you’ll never get anywhere. That’s one of the real advantages that my background has given me.

Interesting, isn't it, that his father, the formally less-educated of his parents, is described as "the much more intellectual of the two"? This is not a mystery for me. I imagine that any poor black from the South born in 1900 would not have had the advantages of formal education. But that doesn't mean that he was also missing, as the Asian immigrants are also not missing, the advantages of a loving home and parental support. As Steele says, his background has enabled him to understand better the basics of humanity.

There is much to reflect upon in this morning's readings.

Afterthought from here...I don't know which I wish for more: traffic to my blog, or better insights for those who read it. Most of my traffic is coming from Google hits. It seems the average time for a visit, according to the Site Meter data, is about two and a half minutes on a good day. I guess I'm a slow reader or something. Sometimes it takes me a day or two to figure something out. And two minutes isn't time enough for me to get to the end of most sentences.

Robot mule

Via Rocketboom, video of a headless robotic mule that can navigate all kinds of rough terrain.
Kinda reminds me of a few politicos I have heard about.

This imaginative invention, like so many, derives from research to come up with a method to help soldiers carry materiel over rough terrain.

The project is sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who want the robotic pack mule to assist soldiers in terrain too tough for vehicles. Ground-based soldiers often need to carry 40 kilograms of equipment.

Raibert says the latest version of BigDog can handle slopes of 35° – a steeper gradient than one in two. The hydraulics are driven by a two-stroke single-cylinder petrol engine, and it can carry over 40 kg, about 30% of its bodyweight. The robot can follow a simple path on its own, or can be remotely controlled.

LINK to New Scientist article.

It's a wonderful thing, this robot mule. Wonderful illustration of how the inventive mind of man can invent just about anything...given enough money.

This is undoubtedly what happens when you have an administration that considers the Pentagon the answer to all our problems and gives it a $439.3 billion budget to play with -- and that's exclusive of actual war-fighting money (which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated $120 billion for the year, will come in supplemental requests to Congress). And remember as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does not include the $9.3 billion the Department of Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the budget at least close to the $600 billion range. Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs estimated that all military-related outlays -- that is, the real Pentagon budget -- totaled closer to $840 billion dollars.

LINK to Shark and Awe, an update on how your tax dollars are being spent.

Makes the federal response to a hurricane even more curious than it was.

Yo, Dubai bashers -- Read this and shut up...

I'm just a plain old blogger but I'm not altogether stupid. Somebody either show me how this is a bunch of made-up hype or quit painting everybody in the Arab world with the same broad brush. I'm so tired of reading about "them" and "they" I want to throw up.

If you were to arrive in Dubai and look at all the glass and concrete buildings, you might easily believe yourself at first to be in a medium-to-large American city. This is not true – the city runs along rather different lines from any in the West, and similarities are often only superficial. However, there is one important way in which Dubai resembles the United States: the business of Dubai is business.
[...]
A hundred years ago, Dubai grew as a trading center, drawing traders from ports like Linjah in Iran, then in decline due to government intervention there. As a stable, well-run city surrounded by chaotic neighbors, Dubai continues to benefit from turmoil and inefficiency in neighboring countries. Terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia? Get American expatriates to Dubai, where they are safe. Concerned about the security of your investments in America after 9/11? Put the funds in Dubai. Afraid the Iranian government won’t last too long? Put the money in Dubai’s property sector. Have trouble conducting direct trade between India and Pakistan because of red tape? Ship the goods through Dubai’s port.

Andrew Sullivan: What I Got Wrong About the War

Three mistakes, clearly stated and understood, are worth reading. Another former supporter of the war looks back and wishes things might have been different. He has my respect for speaking out. And I agree that even out of the smoke there is reason to hope.

What we do know is that for all our mistakes, free elections have been held in a largely Arab Muslim country. We know that the Kurds in the north enjoy freedoms and a nascent civil society that is a huge improvement on the past. We know that the culture of the marsh Arabs in the south is beginning to revive. We know that we have given Iraqis a chance to decide their own destiny through politics rather than murder and that civil war is still avoidable...

But the certainty of some today that we have failed is as dubious as the callow triumphalism of yesterday. War is always, in the end, a matter of flexibility and will. And sometimes the darkest days are inevitable--even necessary--before the sky ultimately clears.

Time Magazine link.

The magnitude of the tragedy is measured by a heavy toll of suffering and loss, both there and at home. Those of us who were against the war are glad in retrospect that an evil system was destroyed, but one wonders if it was worth the price. The weed has been pulled, but the seeds are still in the ground.

MMORPGs -- the New Substance Abuse

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games...
Check out various links at the end of the Wikipedia article.

3Quarks contributor Ker Than takes a look at a potentially deadly online pastime in Poison in the Ink: How Virtual Worlds Mirror Our Own. The seeds of addictive behavior are in everyone, but for some the results are toxic.

Check this out:

A young girl nicknamed "Snowly" died last month after playing the online game "World of Warcraft" for several continuous days during the national day holiday. Snowly's friends, who share the same game community, say that Snowly was a very diligent member and a key official of their community, who was always connected to the Internet.

Several days before Snowly's death, the girl was said to be preparing for a relatively difficult part of the game and had very little rest. She told her friends that she felt very tired.

A big online funeral was held for Snowly one week after her death. But the event was sadly overshadowed by the death of another game enthusiast nicknamed "Nan Ren Gu Shi".

Thereafter, several online game communities have posted announcements to urge their members to pay attention to their health.

Adonal Foyle on C-SPAN

This is why I am a Brian Lamb fan. He has a gift for knowing where life and politics intersect. This week's Q&A is an hour with Adonal Foyle, basketball star with a forty-million dollar contract who is plowing his money into making young people aware of politcs via an organization he sponsors called Democracy Matters. Five minutes watching and anyone will become an Adonal Foyle fan, too. One of the most upbeat, inspiring young people I have come across -- and articulate, bright and well-educated as well.

Do yourself a favor. Either catch a rerun on C-SPAN or take time to watch at least fifteen minutes or so of the archived program. This kid is irresistable.

....my first year in Union Island, which is where I went to meet my mom because that’s the only way I could afford to go to high school was to go stay with her.
So my first day there, my first day of school, I was like, I was going to school. I had long black pants and blue shirt on. And I was tall, skinny, but tall. And I remember my first day of school I was walking up to the school and this kid just out of nowhere just starts screaming, you have got to play basketball! You have got to play basketball! You have got to be on our team!
And I’m like, I don’t even know what basketball is. And it’s my first day of school. It’s hard enough, and you know, he’s screaming that, you know, and bringing attention to me. I’m already like, you know, six-three, six-four and now he is bringing all this attention to me.
And I remember he pestered me to go onto the basketball court for the whole first week. And I said, all right, fine. I will just go try this stupid thing and then you will just leave me alone after that.
And I went out to the court and he explained all the rules to me. And, you know, this is how you play. Pass me the ball. And I make lay-ups and other stuff. So I was, you know, doing it for a while.
And then I decided to, you know, do a little bit of my own. So I grab a rebound and I run down the whole length of the court and I lay it up. And I was looking back – and I thought I did very well, I was looking back to get some – you know, some respect. And what I got was just laughter of all the kids on the playing field.
Apparently I had forgotten to dribble the ball the court. So that was like my entry into basketball. And I was like, I have had enough of this stuff, you know.

(LAUGHTER)

LAMB: And how old were you right there?

FOYLE: I was about 15 then. That was – my first basketball was at the end of my 14th year right into my 15th.

Lobbying for port control

Or porting for lobby control, or controlling for port lobbying, or porting lobbyists to control politics, or something....

Wanna sell a bridge? Here are a couple of experienced teams that can help: Clinton & Clinton, and Dole & Dole. Read this wonderful political romp.

Although both Hillary and Bill Clinton say he stands behind her on the issue and there is no direct conflict, his relationship to the UAE has complicated her political stance on the transaction. Not really. You see. Hillary is posing as a security hawk and an Arab basher. Voters like that and she gets political brownie points. But then after a "decent interval" she'll start retreating from her initial stance. She has received more information on the deal...blah.. blah.. blah.. She has now a greater comfort level over it... blah..blah.. blah.. She would even support a "compromise" -- meaning that we'll going ahead with the deal -- while ensuring U.S. security...blah...blah...blah... So everyone is happy: Bill got paid. Hillary won more votes. The masses had a chance to get out their anger. And you guys have your deal.

Bonus Link here.

Where's the civil war in Iraq?

The New York Times is high-brow.
The New York Post is low-brow.
At least that has been my impression. Anyway, a reporter writing in the Post says he is having a hard time finding the civil war in Baghdad.

Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.

All day - and it was a long day - we drove through Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Everywhere, the reception was warm. No violence. None.

And no hostility toward our troops. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome.
Instead of a civil war, something very different happened because of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The fanatic attempt to stir up Sunni-vs.-Shia strife, and the subsequent spate of violent attacks, caused popular support for the U.S. presence to spike upward.
Think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi intended that?

In place of the civil war that elements in our media declared, I saw full streets, open shops, traffic jams, donkey carts, Muslim holiday flags - and children everywhere, waving as our Humvees passed. Even the clouds of dust we stirred up didn't deter them. And the presence of children in the streets is the best possible indicator of a low threat level.

Southeast Baghdad, at least, was happy to see our troops.

I have an idea that if he ventures into what they call the "triangle of death" further to the South he will be less cavalier in his writing. But in the meantime the article makes interesting reading.
(Ya think this is part of the reason for the low/high-brow distinction?)

Obligatory reading for our time

Britain's librarians have come up with a list of must-read books with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird at the top of the list.

She may be the most famous person alive that most people either don't know or think that she is dead. Never let it be said that one person writing one book won't make a difference. Her life and that book are testimony to that.

I'm glad to see that The Life of Pi and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch made the list. See how many you recognize and how many you have read.

Chuck Norris Facts

*Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

*There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

*Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris.

*Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

*Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his
left and right legs.

*Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.

*When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.

*Chuck Norris is so fast, he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.

*Chuck Norris’ hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush.

*There is no such thing as global warming. Chuck Norris was cold, so he turned the sun up.

*Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.

*Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is.

*Chuck Norris gave Mona Lisa that smile.

*Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

*Chuck Norris does not get frostbite. Chuck Norris bites frost

Just a few little lines out of many at Chuck Norris Facts dot com, via Secret Arabian Journal.

This same journal also had this acerbic take on the Dubai ports flap a few days ago.

What the question really is here if there is disagreement on this deal then should Arabs not make deals of such tremendous value and allow the West to come into power over the Middle East and not vice versa? Do we not live, after all in a free economic era that allows free flow of income worldwide? And if not, then should the Middle East take the same steps in moving against such deals here in the Middle East against Western corporates?

If anything that this issue has raised is the mere fact that American Congress-men play a very dirty political game of 'if you scratch my back I'll do the same for you - if you live long enough to see me do it'.

Two statements from Mulsim moderates--a critique

Last week two different sources published "statements" from "moderate Muslims"in an apparent effort to calm passions getting out of control. Whose passions? Westerners, it seems, who need stroking as much as their fundamentalist Muslim counterparts need "respect." The Global War on Terrorism echoes an emptiness of reason in public debate as inane as that of the ID/Evolution debate in Dayton, Ten...., er, excuse me, the world press.

The first source, a paragon of tolerance and liberal thought, is National Review Online.
Their trophy: "A Muslim Manifesto - Rejecting the bad"

The second source is a pamphlet, Writers' statement on cartoons, released by a coalition of high-profile Muslims who pay the rent mostly by catering to the Western market.

One of the Aqoul writers takes a close look at both of these pieces and comes away with something less than enthusiastic approval. Remember, now, the people at this site have no more patience with one side than the other. But they do seem to have their heads screwed on without cross-threading. They take everything with a grain or two of salt.

Tragedy in Samara

Asharq Alawsat relates a gripping account of the loss of one of its journalists in Iraq.

Despite the curfew in the Iraqi capital, colleagues decided to give their dead colleague a proper funeral. She had voluntarily agreed to there, thinking that, the fact that she was originally from Samarra would provide her immunity, contrary to the rest of her colleagues who declined to travel to the central Iraqi city. News coverage operates according to a set of rules whereby no journalist goes to an area/location where his/her life would be in danger. Despite the obvious danger, sometimes/in certain instances, it is difficult to explain the lure/temptation of journalistic work; it is similar to the moths’ attraction to light/fire.

Despite the curfew, family friends and colleagues gathered and decided to walk behind the funeral procession, as a last goodbye in one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhood, Abu Ghraib, to the al Kirkh cemetery, because the departed requested to be buried there. The mourners proceeded slowly along a road that usually does not need more than an hour.

Fate willed that the coverage of the funeral procession would make surreal television. It drew people together around the television screen. They watched as her colleagues cried out for help, in the name of security, defense, Iraqi tribes, religion and Arab values, in the hope the gunfire would not strike at the convoy, as they paid their last respect to the dead. Despite his pleas, the shooting continued and the funeral was transformed into a confrontation between pleas and guns live on air.

More at the link.
Thanks John Burgess for noticing.

Cherchez un homme

I haven't thought about Walt Kelly for years, but I just came across a piece in Foreign Affairs, can you believe, that made my mercurial imagination remember that great old comic strip from childhood. Howcome? Well here is the sequence...

Article about a shortage of women in Asia >>> look for post title >>> look or "search"= cherchez>> cherchez la femme >>> "look for the woman" >>> Churchy LaFemme...

Anyway, you get the idea.
Walt Kelly, father of Pogo, was one of the most gifted cartoonists who ever worked. Along with Pogo, the star of the strip, he also created Churchy LeFemme, a turtle wise beyond even a turtle's years. Unlike other famous strips that took on a life of their own after he died or retired, the Pogo strip came to an end when he did. And with it came to an end one of the richest repositories of cartoon wisdom ever penned. Most of us who can remember Pogo probably didn't have any idea at the time he was working how multi-layered Kelly's humor really was. Wikipedia, I see, has an interesting tribute for the trivia-minded. But as usual, I digress.

The purpose of this post is to point to a more serious subject, a demographic trend that has been going on (this time) for a generation or two, especially in Asia. That trend is called by several names, but it comes down to a gender imbalance in the population in which a lot more males than females reach adulthood. The ratio mentioned in the article is 120:100, with the greater number representing boys and the other number girls. This, against "Nature's" preferred number of 105:100.

I direct the reader's attention to this article (H/T Pejman's group blog) with a couple of caveats. It is tempting to imagine that modern medical technology making the abortion of unwanted fetuses (I hate that word. Fetus. Or for the more pretentious, foetus. Somehow the plural makes it even more despicable.) more readily available is the root of the trend. Wrong. It is not. The root of the trend lies buried in the savagery of the human condition, running all the way back to prehistory. How do you spell atavistic?

My friend Bill DeArteaga, who is a bible scholar and church historian, once pointed out that even in early times the Romans valued boys over girls, so much so that infanticide of female babies was a practice that led to a shortage of available wives. He says that one of the less-well-known reasons for the spread of the faith was that Christians did not do that. As a result early Christian communities usually had a balance of available wives, enough that even young courting pagans would be attracted to them. Little did they suspect that the law of unintended consequencs (That's what we call it when man sometimes fails to understand divine principles. Gravity comes to mind from the early days of aviation. Or the ill effects of radiation from the early days of ex-rays.) would lead to a propogation of the faith.

The article mentions a couple of other historical precursors.

In 19th-century northern China, drought, famine, and locust invasions apparently provoked a rash of female infanticide. According to Hudson, the region reached a ratio of 129 men to every 100 women.

Go ahead now and read. [ed: subscription/fee link -- here is another link translated from Chinese] But as you do, try to look through a Christian lens. Even if you are a non-believer, try to imagine what you might be thinking pretending to be a Christian. Don't feel bad about doing that. Most Christians I know don't do it either. It is just an exercise I go through from time to time when I dont feel like doing something. It's a good way to overcome the hedonism of our time. If it doesn't feel right -- like being opposed to capital punishment when we know the animal has it coming, or reaching out to certified enemies in love instead of retaliation -- then we shouldn't do it. Just something to think about.

Now here is the part that will make most readers shake their heads and roll their eyes. This article and the reaction that most people will have illustrate to me the reason that I am opposed to legal remedies for the practice of abortion. This is why I am pro-choice. There are not enough laws in the world to turn the tide of abortions that is going on in the world, not in this country or any other. Not in all of history. If the false thinking of the Taliban, Sharia law and the rest of fundamentalist thinking is not evidence enough, I have no other place to point.

The only way to turn sinners into saints is to lead them, not force them, into a transformation of the heart. And that is the real mission and challenge of the Great Commission.

Trite but true - Words to live by

(Uh, my post title, that is. Not the link.) Sullivan points to what could be the best post I have ever read. Don't miss it. And don't rush, either. Take a moment to think about it. It's all great, but this one I like because it echoes my tagline:

***If all you look for is the bad and ugly, you'll never see the good***

If you search for The Stupid, you'll find The Stupid. If you search for The Worthwhile, you'll find The Worthwhile. If you don't get that, then it means that I've found The Stupid while looking for The Worthwhile. But you're The Exception, Bucko.

Looks like everybody knows by now but that's okay. Everybody needs to know.

Worried about in-law meddling? I'm an orphan!

Wonderful gallery of Jewish humor!
Lookit:

A German man comes to London and stays with Maurice Cohen and his family.
The first morning they all have breakfast together and have bagels.
The German says "Wow we don't have bagels like this in Germany."
To which Maurice stands up and says "And whose fault is that?"

(I'd tell you the source, but you wouldn't believe it. Keep drilling. You'll find it.)

Mystery-lanche

Woo-hoo! Traffic spiked today!
My Sitemeter average has been running about sixty. Tonight with over three hours to go I already have more than a hundred hits. This is the interesting part: I have no idea where they are coming form. For some reason yesterday's Iraq post is attracting the swarm. Somebody linked it and a bunch of people are checking it out.

Except for the forty-three hits at the top, this looks about normal for my little blog. Recently most-visited posts...

43 http://hootsbuddy.blogspot.com/2006/03/iraq-future-looks-fragile-and.html
19 http://hootsbuddy.blogspot.com/
3 http://hootsbuddy.blogspot.com...rstein-on-us-role-in-iraq.html
2 http://hootsbuddy.blogspot.com...nihilism-and-certain-kind.html

I dunno.

This link seems to be of military origin...
http://www4.army.mil/news/standto.php?printable&dte=2006-03-02

It has stuff like this:

EXPEDITIONARY CAPABILITIESWhat is it? Expeditionary Capabilities provide the Army with the ability to rapidly deploy anywhere, at any time, in any environment, against any adversary, to accomplish the assigned mission. The new strategic context of continuous operations renders obsolete the old Army readiness paradigm of “all ready, all the time.” Continuous, full-spectrum expeditionary operations are the new reality. The Army is developing a process of force generation to provide Combatant Commanders and civil authorities with rapidly deployable, employable and sustainable force capabilities packages tailored to specific mission requirements.What has the Army done? The Army, in conjunction with the other services, must continue to seek improved airlift and sealift capabilities that will enable insertion of Brigade Combat Teams in austere settings (not relying on Air and Sea Ports of Debarkation), with minimal requirement for Reception, Staging, Onward movement and Integration. Strategic responsiveness is enhanced through improving the ability to deploy rapidly to austere fighting environments, fight on arrival throughout the battlespace and sustain operations until victorious. These initiatives include:• Establishing a comprehensive Army Force Generation process to provide Combatant Commanders and civil authorities with rapidly deployable and employable Army forces.• Resetting Army prepositioned equipment sets into modular configurations.• Building modular capabilities that improve theater force reception and logistics connectivity and distribution capability in the Brigade Combat Teams.• Identifying and improving infrastructure at critical power projection installations to support mobilization, demobilization and rapid deployment.• Updating institutional processes to prepare forces for rapid deployments and to support forces in sustained expeditionary operations.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. I know milspeak when I see it. I had forgotten how many words can be invoked at the command and control level without getting anywhere. I shouldn't have been so hard on the chikblog the other day for having so many words. At least she is identifiable and seems to have a willing and equally voluble cadre of readers.

This part looks interesting, though:

WHAT'S BEING SAID IN BLOGS
Iraqi Mayor Thanks US Army (GP)
Iraq - Future looks fragile and uncertain (BS)
The Vision Thing (BS)

I guess I must have made the list today. That second link, the first "BS" is to my post. I see Mudville Gazette rates a GP.
BS. Wonder if it's short for....surely not. And GP must stand for Good Post.
I just love it.
Hi, Guys! Welcome to Hoots' Place!

Lindsay Beyerstein on the U.S. role in Iraq

She's as much a red-diaper baby as you can find these days.

My parents met in Berkeley in the 1960s while my dad was doing his PhD. Being raised by academic hippies is like being raised by wolves--you can rejoin human society, but you can never integrate seamlessly.

In my family, even pets and infants are addressed in complete sentences. There are no taboo subjects, except when the conservative relatives visit from the interior. Then we can't talk about religion.

I remember the day in kindergarden when one little boy announced that he had a baby brother. How did that happen, someone asked. The kid said something about God. Other kids were floating theories about angel-storks. I felt I had to set the record straight. Many children cried.

My mom was called in for a parent-teacher conference. The teacher was very upset.
"Did she tell the truth?" Mom asked."Oh, yes," the teacher said, "In great detail.""I don't think we have a problem, then," Mom said.

This post and its foil, another post by Jeff Goldstein, are required reading today. No one reading both of these pieces will come away from them unaltered unless they have the mindset of Don't confuse me with facts because my mind is already made up. Admitedly, since it is her post she has the last word, but I come away from it pursuaded that she is on target.

It should have been clear from the beginning that our job wasn't just to free Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, but to impose a system of government on them. Forcing democracy on people who don't want it is an infintely harder task than facilitating democracy for those who do. It was obvious from the outset that if we unseated Saddam, the United States would either have to force democracy on a substantial segment of the Iraqi population, or accept an undemocratic successor.

There was simply no evidence that the US effort to democratize Iraq was likely to succeed. Obviously, a large absolute number of Iraqis do want democracy, at least as measured by voter turnout. However, it was crazy to ingore the forseeable fact that a subtantial minority of the population would stop at nothing to derail our efforts.

It's ironic that the same thumbsucking bedwetters who fear that Islamic immigration is undermining democracy in the West were so confident that the Iraqi people would readily embrace democracy at home. In one breath they say that Islam and democracy can't coexist, in the next they insist that a democratic Iraq is just around the corner. Critics of the war don't have to show that a democratic Iraq was absolute impossible from the outset, merely that it was so unlikely that the admistration was negligent to invade Iraq given the evidence at hand. In any sane moral calcuculs, you need an overwhelming probabitity of success before you start killing people for the sake of some principle, however important.
[...]
At this point the right wing will trot out arguments about how we simply can't give up the struggle because the insurgents are so evil. What started out as a rational calculus has become a crusade for them. The democratization of Iraq was desirable in the abstract becaue it would have improved the lives of the Iraqi people and perhaps improved our security situation. It's now abundantly clear that persuing this failed project is not futhering anyone's welfare or security. We lost and we spread terror in the proccess. If we stay in Iraq, we're just killing our own people to cover for our mistakes.

The Goldsteinn post has an addendum responding to some of his critics, but I don't find anything to refute the basic argument, that

...showing a united front against the terrorists ... would weaken the insurgency and show solidarity with a fledgling democracy. Doing so at a time when civil war is possible thanks to the provocations of terrorists is particularly important if our goal is to win the war in Iraq ...

Agreed, in principle, but in the end the tipping point will be determined in Iraq, not in the pages of U.S. opinion makers. Besides, as in the case of a lot of other wars, when the word win is used, the meaning is not as clear as either the speaker or the listener imagine it to be. It is a word that Lindsay seems carefully to have avoided. I appreciate that.

"a kind of chic nihilism and a certain kind of pretentious discourse..."

Camille Paglia on Open Source Radio (H/T Althouse)...

The humanities have destroyed themselves over the past 30 years…Through an obsession with European jargon and a shallow politicization of discourse, the humanities have imploded…There’s hardly a campus you can name where the most exciting things that are happening on campus are coming from the humanities departments…I think the entire profession is in withdrawal at the moment. This is a national problem. It’s not just a Harvard problem.

The humanities have imploded, she says. And I agree. Too many parents have turned the character development and education of their children over to others at a time when parents as influential role models are at a competetive disadvantage for our children's attention and affections. Paglia complains that "there is a passivity on the part of parents...and the entire educational system of America is deranged..." She refers to the "hamster wheel" aproach to what passes for learning and has harsh words for all levels of academia. And I do not think, incidentally, that good private schools are necessarily a proper remedy to ameliorate the problem. Home schooling, perhaps, because it is a more wholesome method to bond education and character development with the family. The problem with home-schooling is the proliferation of disfunctional families and the notion that single parent "families" snapped off from an extended family tree are the qualitative equal of traditional two-parent, multi-generational models. Moreover, I have the impression - and this may well be an uninformed bias on my part - that parents who home school are more apt to produce children whose academic gifts may be impressive but with a view of the world that is too narrow.

(Long listen, by the way, with little content. She seems to be illustrating the good point she made. Skip this one if you are pressed for time.)

Cicada, the famous Seventeen-Year Locust

This wonderful six-minute video tells the life cycle of these remarkable insects. Watching it may calm your frayed nerves. Take a moment to relax and enjoy. I remember as a child in Kentucky finding and collecting the little brown shells of these creatures and hearing stories about them. It was an exciting event finally to see one emerge from that little hull in real life. The adult creature is three times as big as it should be compared to the shell from which it came. At first the wings are soft and worthless, the body is too tender to do anything but dry out and form a carapace. But after a while the work is done and the adult takes flight for the first time with no practice, zipping off into the sky with the speed of a bee. Sometimes we caught them to be held captive for a while. They made the most incredible noise in a mason jar. We called them jar-flies.

Thanks again to Abbas Raza and the other folks at 3Quarks for their wonderful way of keeping up with the world in all its wonder. Theirs is one of the richest repositories of variable information that I have seen since Arts and Letters Daily. They make me want to quit work and just read and study all day long. Here is the link to this morning's post that led me to this video.

Iraq - Future looks fragile and uncertain

People who whould know, those whom I consider smart, informed and objective, are not speakng words of reassurance about what is now unfolding in Iraq. At this writing words of hope sound like whistling past the graveyard. Max Boot writes in the LA Times...

ARE WE WINNING or losing in Iraq? Liberals and conservatives safe at home have no trouble formulating glib answers to that fundamental question. The former can always point to setbacks, the latter to successes. The picture becomes blurrier, the future murkier when you spend time in Iraq, as I did last week.
[...]
Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher, who commands the Army battalion stationed in Baqubah, a city of 450,000, was forced to deal with the fallout. I spent a day riding in his armored Humvee as he moved around town trying to figure out what was going on (Why were the 47 men killed?) and how he should respond (Should he step up his raids or let Iraqi security forces step forward?).

Trying to calm things, Fisher sought to dispel bizarre rumors that a U.S. bomb, not explosives planted by terrorists, had blown up the Samarra mosque. He told his soldiers not to get in the way of demonstrations but to stand by in case they turned violent. (They didn't.) Then he drove to the heavily barricaded government center to confer with the mayor about what he could do as a "good neighbor" to assist the Iraqis. The answer was that the locals had everything under control.

Given the growing competence of Iraqi security forces, this may not have been sheer bravado. As we drove through town, I saw Iraqi army and police checkpoints everywhere. Not only are more security personnel in the field, but they are also not running away from a fight, as they did in 2004. Fisher told me that when insurgents recently attacked a police checkpoint, the cops chased them down and arrested them. This combination of toughness (withstanding attack) and restraint (bringing back the attackers alive) augurs well for the future of Iraq.
[...]
Worst of all, just when the situation seems to be improving, a spectacular act of violence such as the mosque bombing will bring the country to the edge of the abyss. As Jones noted ruefully during a 30-minute ride between his base and the giant U.S. logistics hub near Balad, "You can go days without anything bad happening, and then you find 47 dead bodies." Which is more important — the signs of progress that mostly pass unheralded, or the continuing woes splashed across newspaper front pages? I left Iraq more uncertain than when I arrived.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a summary of opinion pieces worth reading. This is but one paragraph out of several with a long list of references.

Iraqis have suffered through days of reprisal killings and strikes against Sunni mosques after last week’s bombing of the revered Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra. U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, in February 28 testimony before the Senate, warned of the "possibility" of a civil war drawing in Saudi Arabia and Iran into the conflict (BaltSun). President Bush decried the latest round of violence and said the perpetrators wanted to “destroy in order to create chaos” and that Iraqis must choose between “chaos or unity.” The attack on the Golden Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, has “pushed Iraq to the brink of war,” writes the Heritage Foundation's James Phillips, and damaged efforts to build a stable democracy. A new report by the International Crisis Group says this past year was the year “Iraq’s latent sectarianism took wings” and concludes a fully inclusive process is the “sine qua non for stabilization.” Four experts shed light on sectarian violence in TIME, including CFR's Noah Feldman and Vali Nasr. This CFR transcript and this GlobalSecurity.org backgrounder explain the history of Shiite-Sunni relations in Iraq.

Fayrouz Hancock's most recent situation-in-Iraq post is being updated regularly and is also worth reading. As an Iraqi she has contacts in the country that have no reason to prevaricate about what is going on. This is from a recent correspondence she received.

Life here is becoming so unbearable. At least in Basra we had some security. Now there is none of this. I have a lot of negative feelings, anger and hate. all the good we do and hope for Iraq is not strong enough because the real and active players on the scene and behind the scene are aiming against that. Whether it is his own benefit or someone else's; but sure it is not our own, the "Iraqi people."

I am so frustrated by all what is happening. and I know it will not stop soon.

As Lent begins we have much to pray about, much to reflect upon, and a long way to travel before we can rest.

Jim Gilbert on Georges Sada

Jim Gilbert is a global missionary now living and working out of Gainsville, Florida.
Georges Sada is a former staff member of Saddam Hussein whose just-published book, Saddam's Secrets, is an account of his experiences in that capacity.

The reader needs to scan the rest of this post, then go to Jim Gilbert's blog straightaway and read what he has written. Jim has become part of Sada's circle of Christian friends and has been let in on what he expects will soon become a big news story. Very big.

Saddam, who was constantly on guard against coup attempts, was known to murder people in plain sight if their deaths would keep onlookers in line. He might pull out a pistol from under the conference table and shoot them during a cabinet meeting, or nudge them into a swimming pool full of acid at one of his palaces, and then stand there watching them burn to death and dissolve.

Yet Georges remains tender, and in fact is downright forgiving of offenses against himself. Last week he invited my family and a few others to his cousin's home for Sunday afternoon dinner. We ate Assyrian food (one of the best meals I've ever had), and enjoyed Middle Eastern hospitality. Georges was especially taken with my four-year old daughter, scooping her up and holding her. Lexi so relished his hugs that when it came time to leave, she headed back into the General's arms. "Ah, children. They know who loves them," he said to me with a broad grin.

Georges also told a group of us about an assassination attempt against him last year. His assailants were caught setting up the bomb, and brought to him before being taken to jail. They were young men, unemployed, and should have been in college by now. They were terrified of course, and assumed their lives were over. But Sada spent time telling his young captives about his faith, and wound up releasing them with the promise that they would indeed enroll in school.

Later all three sets of parents came to him, thanking him profusely, saying also that their forever grateful sons now wanted to become the General's bodyguards. He refused, and today those young men, all three of them, are indeed in college.

Link to The Softer Side of General Sada

dooce: World's best chickblog

So. Many. Words.

I thought my wife could talk but I didn't have a clue.
This is like the WE Channel. They don't call it Womens' Entertainment for nothing.
I have to admit, though, if I had time to read it all I could fall in love all over again. This is the gold standard for feminine blogging.

A couple days ago I got an email from a reader named Sara (hi Sara!) who asked if I’d comment on what law professor Linda Hirshman recently said on “Good Morning America” about how it’s a mistake for educated women to stay at home with their kids. It’s not a new argument, and my first reaction is: she’s trying to sell something. I understand the basis of her argument, that by choosing to stay at home with our kids instead of using our education in a professional environment we are waving our middle fingers at the work feminists have been doing over the last century. But I don’t agree with it.

So I went and read some of her work online, and she’s always careful to point out that by claiming that we’re making a choice to stay at home we are only copping out, that somehow the choice to stay at home is invalid. Wow! As a mother I’ve never heard that before! My choices are wrong! She should write a book about how she knows which choice is the best one. Oh wait! SHE HAS!

My reaction then, I guess, is that here is my middle finger and here is me waving it at Linda Hirshman. This IS my choice. It is mine. I want to be at home with my child, not because my husband said I had to want it, or because my mom said that I had to want it, or because I am blinded by society’s bias toward women and their role in the family. I had the option of going to work outside the home or staying at home with my kid and I made a choice. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything more fundamentally feminist than exercising that choice.

Today is Wednesday. This post is dated Monday. Two days ago.
Can you believe FOURTEEN HUNDRED COMMENTS plus, and counting?
Before you click the link go get a cuppa. Takes a while to load.
Comments from where? Glad you asked. OTHER chicks it looks like, long enough comments that you can't fit more than one or two comments on the screen!

Did I mention words? Many words? Lots and lots of WORDS?

Condi working out

No, really.
Exercises in a morning workout.
Something to watch for.

"Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11"

The depth of ignorance revealed by this Zogby poll is frightening but not surprising.

Lots of people are commenting. Lindsay put her finger on it when she said, "So much for the right wing myth..."

Me? I'm just reading, rolling my eyes and shaking my head. All I know to do is watch the sea and enjoy the sound and spray of the waves. If I see the ocean pull away in an unnatural way, I know now to turn toward land and start running like hell.

There is so much to talk about in this poll I don't know where to start. I'm looking at the Huffpost column by Zogby himself.

Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%)....77% said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."

Hmm. Saddam protecting al-Qaeda. Riight.

...a majority of respondents (53%) said the U.S. should double both the number of troops and bombing missions...

Quelle surprise! Warriors want more warriors. Bombs, too.

The Financial Times piece remarked that although Mr Bush has acknowledged that Iraq played no role in September 11, 85 per cent of the troops said the US mission was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks”. Of course every speech about the war has opened with references to the September 11 attack and cited it repeatedly. There is nothing like a bloody shirt to keep patriots pumped and kids willing to die.

I gotta move on to something else. This is making me sick.