It's okay with me if you get serious . . .

Care to get serious, Senator?

Senator Reid said of President Bush, while the President was out of the country, "The man's father is a wonderful human being," Reid said in response to a question about President Bush's policies. "I think this guy is a loser.

Mr. Bush won the last two presidential elections.

I don't think I'm alone in kind of expecting the Democrats to do a lot better in elections. But I don't see how saying silly things can help their chances.

I'm also probably not alone in thinking that the Democrats could do better if they were to propose one new idea. Just one idea that hasn't ceased being fresh and current since 1965.

President Bush and his party are carrying a lot of unpleasant baggage with them, but there was that one new idea in the strategy in the war against terror. That is, that while we try to kill terrorists, we also try to democratize the territories where the terrorists live and receive support, using military force to accomplish it. It was a new notion, quite contrary to the accepted wisdom that Islamic societies just aren't suited to democracy and will always go for the ruthless strong man type of government.

What's the result of the President's new notion? Pakistan, home to the Taliban and other assorted nastiness, is more helpful than France. (spit) Pakistan and India are exploring the possiblity of peace between them. The Afgans and Iraqis voted. They voted in Palestine. Egypt is about to have an election that looks a little more like an election than the elections they are used to. Syria has withdrawn from Lebanon, where the burkas are being discarded to reveal hot protest babes. Kaddafi has started to play nice, including giving up his program for atomics.

And the mighty holy warriors of the jihad are hopping around in front of video cameras praising Allah and beheading the odd unfortunate infidel that they happened to snatch, but mostly they are now concentrating on blowing up fellow Muslims. I suppose the thinking is that vulnerable infidels are getting harder to come by, and there's all those Muslims running around not actually killing infidels at the moment, and well, close enough. But I'm sure this pastime of blowing up cars to kill and maim Muslims standing in a line to get a job in the new police force is the kind of thing that makes a feller (fellahin?) look all desperate and pathetic. Dangerous, but pathetic. Definitely not charismatic.

So I say, give President Bush credit for having and implementing a great idea. Kick out some middle eastern repressive regimes and stuff democracy down their throats. It is working.

But there is still all that Conservative/NeoCon/Evangelical baggage. On the strength of the one good idea, I fear a whole lot of unpleasant ideas are going to be implemented. (Actually, one and a half good ideas. It turns out the tax cuts may have kicked the economy into some improvement such that recent tax revenues were much higher than expected and the deficit is being reduced much more quickly.)

I look to the Democrats to come up with better ideas. I think they should give President Bush credit for one good idea -- give him credit and support the war on terror They are looking like weenies denying what is increasingly obvious -- that Iraq and Afganistan are triumphs of American values. But then, and this is the important part, the Democrats should find some other serious ideas to run with. Name-calling just isn't serious.

It isn't as if there is a shortage of ideas that the Republicans aren't using. Here's some for free:

• Atomic energy. The Japanese do it, and they should know about atomic energy. Even the French do it. (spit) We had just the one accident with atomic energy in this country, and it proved that the safeguards work. It's time to build some modern reactors in this country -- we are building them for other countries. Luddites be damned, even if some of 'em are my friends.
• Prescription medicine. The single greatest cost of prescription medicine is the cost of compliance with government regulations. Of course, drug companies are cold and greedy and would mark up a beaker of talcum before they sold it to their thirsty mother. But the problem is government. If the Democrats worked up some kind of plan other than socialized medicine, they could run on it and win.
  
• Conservation. Once one comes to recognize that environmental activists usually have no real involvement with land and resources, but are merely acting out some "noble savage" sophomoric idealism, one can then see that those most affected by and sensitive to environmental matters are farmers and ranchers. Land and resources in the hands of private enterprise probably does a better job than statist or socialist solutions, like zoning and punitive regulation or allotments. When a farmer has a reasonable expectation that he can pass on the family farm to his children and eventually to his grandchildren, he will damn sure take care of the land.
• Money and banking: C'mon, don't get me started. Big banks are buying up little banks that maybe don't charge their customers all that the traffic will bear, just to get the little bank's credit card business to raise the interest rates to make more money, which is used to buy more little banks. Using our money. Feh. If it keeps going this way, pretty soon we won't be able to spend cash because there won't be any. There will just be a credit card with the bank. Just, The Bank. Only one.
• Education. If "we're number one" in sports, why, with a population just under 300 million, do we have to import scientists and mathematicians? Oh, I know. We mostly teach values and self-esteem. These subjects are now being taught by people who, in their turn, weren't required to do much math and science, but were themselves nevertheless blessed with values and self-esteem. These are the ones who are squawking the loudest about the viciousness of competency tests for the students, as they occupy their allotted class time supervising their students in cutting out pictures from magazines to paste up collages about world peace or global warming. Well, those teachers and the parents of the students who can't pass the competency tests because their parents pulled them out of school for three weeks every year to go on a family vacation. The system is broken. The Democratic party has been supported by those who broke the system, the educationists. Education can be fixed and there are plenty of teachers who could tell you how to do it.
• Local government. Democrats could build an unbeatable base on local government reform. Hell, they did it for years and they weren't even any good at it. And they are still doing it in a lot of cities despite being not very good at it. And I don't mean reform of corruption. I mean reform of incompetence. What would happen if the party dedicated itself to the proposition that government fundamentals are fundamental? That is, no funds should be spent to beautify the city by planting petunias and posies, until every damn pothole was first filled. No money should be spent trying to lure or keep major league sports franchises until there's enough emergency people available so a 911 call will have emergency people on the scene within three minutes of the call. A lot of Republicans would vote for them, I betcha.

Okay. Don't like all these ideas? Well, I wasn't really trying very hard. I was trying to show that it isn't all that hard to generate ideas that might make a positive difference. Pick one, or come up with one of your own. It would only take one!

But get serious. That means, stop saying silly things that appeal only to the marginal base, and start saying serious things about how to actually do things to make a positive difference for most Americans. The radical extremes of both the right and the left, no matter how highly energized they ever may be, are not enough to win a presidential election. A party has to appeal to the middle with a proposal of action, if it is to be taken seriously.

Scientific journal articles . . . or folktales?

I'm no scientist. As a civilian, I need to rely on the the scientific opinions of those better educated than I. But to me, this (in Pejmanesque)(tip: Amy Ridenour) doesn't sound scientific at all. Some scientist guy is accusing professional journals of refusing to print articles that appear contrary to the scientific notion that there is a process of global warming going on, attributable to human activity.

You might say, they won't print something you wrote? Poor baby. The magazine probably disappoints most of the people who submit stuff for publication.

Here's what bothers me. Whenever somebody publishes something in the popular press based on anecdotal events that seems counter to the current conventional science, you get the scientist types sniffing about the absence of peer review and rigid experimental controls. To be reliable information, it must have been published in professional journals. Therefore the inference is inescapable that if it isn't published in a professional journal, it is somehow not reliable information.

But scientists aren't immune when it comes to error or fraud (cold fusion).

Here's why it sounds suspicious to me. A magazine prints a study where the author says he reviewed a thousand scientific articles and X% directly support the proposition that A is A, and Y% indirectly support the proposition that A is A. This isn't science. This is sorting and counting. Of 1000 samples, how many fit into which categories? Sorting and counting, right? Then another guy looks at the very same 1000 articles and he sorts them very differently. It appears the journal prefers one result to the other, because it won't report the second "test." It sounds as if the editors either (a) have picked sides before the contest began, or (b) don't want to admit that their own editorial review of the first article was defective -- they screwed up. So much for effective peer review based on publication. C'mon. How tough is it to sort and count?

So, if us non-scientific types are told that publication in a reputable professional journal is a test for reliability, what are we to make of this? Particularly when other scientists in the field say things like this:

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

I know this. When the D.A. presents a case to the grand jury, no defense attorneys are allowed and no defense is presented. And the grand jury decides to indict damn near every time.

Commitment . . .

We've had about 100 year's worth of attempted implementation of Marxist nonsense at various places in the world, and either socialism never amounted to much or it amounted to lots of repression in an attempt to make the unworkable work. Historically and up to the present, implementation of various brands and flavors of socialism has been the cause of lots of deaths in many regimes.

It's like this. When you are pounding on a canary with a ball pein hammer to make it sing, and it doesn't sing, don't try harder with the hammer. The problem isn't your lack of commitment to the process.

On the other hand, democracy and capitalism tend to work a whole lot better. Not perfect. Just lots better.

But do socialists quit? Not a chance. They are in love with the socialist ideal (and the money and power for the top socialist is pretty good, too.) They are committed to the process. They are so committed to the process that they must enlist others in support --with or without their consent. Why, they're committed to plotting mischief in the southern hemisphere right now.

Of course, our esteemed press corps evidently finds the socialism in the southern hemisphere yet another excellent reason for their commitment to detailed coverage of Michael Jackson's trial.

Thanks for keeping us informed, guys.

Campaign finance scandal . . .

Ooooh, a scandal. We love scandals, don't we? What was that old song by, I think, the Eagles? "Dirty laundry," right?

I wonder when print news and TV news is going to pick this up and run with this? Trial starts May 3.

Of course, I don't mean the whole press will deal with this.

I mean only those worthy members of the press whose entire limited attention isn't fully occupied by Michael Jackson. If there are any.

What other explanation could there be for the sparse coverage so far?

At first, I thought it was a sick joke . . .

Ziimbabwe was just this Wednesday elected to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

That's just great.

I think we should have a United Nations.

I think the U.S. should be a member.

I think it is urgently needed that some other country host the U.N. for a while. Effective immediately.

Security clearance, and other bothers . . .

Well, here we are in Portland, and I was thinking about the fall of Saigon. Lots of people back then, a minority but lot of them, wanted us out of Viet Nam without regard for whatever it might cost in human lives as a consequence. They got their way and people in Viet Nam died. But the self-styled peace protesters got their way and that was the important thing. Consequences no matter how grim and bloody may be ignored if the consequences don't happen to you, personally.

Some of those who got their way and got us out of Viet Nam are still around, and one of them ran for President recently. Here in Portland, he did well.

Also, here in Portland, the city was part of a federal arrangement to investigate possible threats from terrorists. The city contributes two cops to the effort. Those two cops are supervised by the chief of police of course. The cops and the chief, all have security clearances appropriate to their assignments. And this is serious. There may be some reason to think that Oregon, for some unimaginable reason, could be an attractive place for would-be terrorists or jihadists to assemble. They've done it before and some of them pleaded guilty and were convicted.

Ah, Portland.

Our mayor wants us out of that federal task force, altogether. Oh, the authorities hasten to assure us, we will still get the full benefit of federal protective efforts. We just won't contribute anything. It's free. And the feds will still keep the chief of police advised of any possible threats they may come across. After all, the chief has the appropriate security clearance to receive the information and is unlikely to blow any investigation, as some politicians have been known to do to polish their own images in their own psychic mirrors. So, it's gonna be okay for us.

But you might ask, why would the mayor do such a thing? Well, what he says is that he needs to personally supervise the two police officers, just to make sure that they don't stomp on anybody's rights in the process of investigation. (Isn't that what the police chief is for?) And the mayor just cannot do his job of supervising these two lonely police officers because the feds won't tell him things. And they reason they won't tell him things is because he doesn't have the security clearance necessary to receive the information. And they won't give him one!

In my mind, I wonder why not? The cops have the security clearance. Why, it's as if the feds made a judgment that the mayor couldn't be trusted to know what to do with sensitive security information. And in my mind, the mayor's conduct with reference to this issue would confirm such a judgment.

Basically, those mean federales hurt our mayor's feelings by declining to treat him with the same high regard he accords himself.

What does the mayor want? He wants what he wants, which is to insert himself into matters where he has no legal right to be. Legally, he doesn't have the clearance. But he wants what he wants, so if he can't have his way, he wants the whole city out of the task force, without concern for the consequences.

And this, as I mentioned, is Portland. He is going to get his way, I betcha, and oodles and piles of Portland's politically astute citizens are going to line up to congratulate him all over the place for taking a principled stand in favor of, I mean, against, or is it . . . well, anyway, there's some kind of principle involved and we approve ot it.

Still Think We Aren't At War? . . .

Iran says, and at this point there's no good reason to disbelieve them, that they don't want to give up their program to develop nuclear power, including enrichment of uranium. Iran is willing to fight, rather than give up their nuclear plans.

You have to ask yourself, why would a country need to develop nuclear power when it has so much oil? Google around. You'll find that Iran has 9% or 10%, at least, of the world's proven oil reserves, and is OPEC's second largest producer of crude.

And how will Iran fight to save its nuclear program? Wretchard at The Belmont Club has published a link to the American Thinker, which translated and republished Iran's bellicose response. Here.

The threat is to detonate a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere above us, to completely disrupt all electro-magnetic activity. That, folks, is a big deal.

Well, let's see now. What have we done to make the mad mullahs of Iran mad at us? Have we attacked Iran? No, actually I think we got along just fine with Iran, until they trashed our embassy and held a bunch of American hostages through the balance of President Carter's stewardship of United States national security. (I think he was of the opinion that war was not the answer.) Even then, we've pretty much left the mad mullahs alone, except to say bad things about them.

I'd say we are at war, and I think they'd say we are at war. Not that war is the answer, mind you.

The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century . . .

This is from USA Today

In his annual state of the nation address to parliament and the country's top political leaders, Putin said the Soviet collapse was "a genuine tragedy" for Russians.

"First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Putin said. "As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.

"The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself," he said, referring to separatist movements such as those in Chechnya.

Sounds like this guy would like to bring back the KGB. I think he plans on staying in charge for a long time to come, one way or another.

But look on the bright side. When we and the U.S.S.R. were locked in the cold war, Hollywood had some great stuff for thriller movies and even comedies. What do we have now? Well, we can't make movies about the bad guys now because to do so would tend to make Pres. Bush look like a leader, and Hollywood is unwilling to concede the point. But Hollywood knows that if they make movies glorifying the other side, you know, the terrorists, people would pay to see the movie only on the east and west coasts. That's why Hollywood keeps remaking old movies. They don't have to be responsible for the content, and they don't have to figure out if there's a story they can tell that we will buy.

So, maybe, just maybe, Mr. Putin might be helping us out a little by becoming a much needed Iconic Implacable Foe. Doing so would let Hollywood start writing spy thrillers again.

Or maybe I'm just trying way too hard to find a bright side to Mr. Putin's statement.

An Iraqi blog . . .

Interesting perspective here on the goings-on in Iraq, by a real Iraqi, not by somebody reading a script on televised news originating in New York.

One interesting point is that some of the Iraqis are disappointed with the United States because we did not take over and supply a sane power in charge, replacing the insane power in charge.

Our decision not to replace an old despot with us as a new despot, means that the Iraqi people have to ask questions to learn more, to find out things, in order to make the decisions about their own destiny. And finding out things is not a Muslim value, seeing as how everything is already known. It's not that long and you could read it all.

But who will reform the reformers . . .

Well, President Bush has signed the bankruptcy reform legislation that imposes a means test for Chapter 7, mandatory credit counseling at the debtor's expense, caps on state laws about homestead exemptions, and a whole bunch more paperwork, all of which will push up the cost of bankruptcy.


I expect that bankruptcy attorneys might experience a rush of new business in the next few months, as people decide to file for Chapter 7 now, while they still can.


Of course, even without the reform, the judges presently have the power to dismiss a Chapter 7 filing for substantial abuse. But what do they know; they just have been seeing all the actual bankrupty filings and don't have access to the zeal and lore of the credit card companies.


I'm not actually against the stricter procedures for the debtors. I just would like to see the credit card companies' excessive interest and penalty charges, and targeting of desperate and unsophisticated debtors, brought under a little control so that they look a little more like the other lenders, credit-wise. I figure that all the add-ons to credit card accounts, and the excessive interest charged in the months just before the bankruptcy filing, to the degree that any payments on the account were actually made by the debtor, are preferences to the credit card companies as compared to the other creditors. At least they should be. I'd like to see some reform in that area.


And if people are looking for a playground for debtors abusing the system, take a look at Chapter 11 filings. Recognize that nobody ever files for bankruptcy unless they have something to protect. But individual debtors don't usually have the sophistication to "game" the system, and lots of bankruptcy attorneys representing individuals actually walk on the path of righteousness themselves. The "gaming" of the system, I suspect, occurs much more frequently and effectively in the case the large corporations that have the sophistication to see all the possibilities in debtor-in-possession status.


And when it comes to "gaming" the system, I also suspect the lobbying effort to get this issue before Congress, and passed into law, is a lesson on how to get your way by working the United States Congress. After all. It took years. The fact that it took years tells me that Congress was not all that eager to pass this legislation and has only done so when the pressure to pass became irresistable. And the fact the credit industry lobbyists spent all those years and created this much pressure over the years, doesn't exactly say much good about the credit industry's zeal to protect what is a pretty sad and snarky business, at depth.


Finally, I suspect that the number of Chapter 13 filings is not going to increase all that much and except for the expense of bankruptcy on the debtors, and on the public purse that has to support the increased workload on the bankruptcy courts, I don't think in the long run that the reform is going to enrich the credit card companies all that much.


But there is still such a strong odor about this whole thing.

What rules of war . . .

Yeah. I agree with this.

More corruption in Canada? Who knew? . . .

Well, Instapundit found this report. Did anybody ever wonder why Canada wouldn't support us in the war in Iraq. I'm sure that Saddam's investment of $1,000,000 in the P.M.'s company should have been a consideration.

The expression, "axis of weasels" once again comes to mind.

Investing in the future, or something similar . . .

When you save, you park some of your unneeded money somewhere -- bank, bond, stock, mattress -- in hopes that when you want to turn that money into something needed, like food or rent, it will be there. If you put the money into a bank you are thought to be prudent. If you put the money into the stock market you are thought to be a genius when the market rises, and an unfortunate victim when the market falls, as it inevitably but unpredictably does.

When you put your money into any financial institution, bank or corporation, wonder of wonders, they don't actually keep it for you. The institution either spends it frivolously or loans it to some moron who can dress well enough to impress a lending officer. The institution frequently makes some money in spite of itself and sometimes distributes some of the money to you in the form of dividends or interest -- always first assuring that its officers get big bonuses at year end. You, of course, would frequently not approve of how your money gets spent. And when you invest, you are betting that both the money and the institution you put it into will be there when you need it to be, despite observing one institution after another bite the big one over your lifetime. It requires a great deal of blind, unreasoning faith to make this bet. I think this faith used to be called patriotism.

Nowadays, we have a new economic system. It seems mere handsful of shamelessly exploited foreigners can manufacture all the products that are actually needed, and a very great deal more besides. So in response we've turned ourselves into developers and marketers of unneeded goods and services -- just kinda to keep our hand in. Many of us basically get paid for peddling something unnecessary, but if it doesn't sell, we don't eat, so we keep at it anyway. Many more of us, not wishing to peddle garbage, have become what is called -- with a straight face, mind you -- knowledge workers. We collect data and reassemble bits and pieces of it into new and exciting configurations so as to support the making of predominately inconsequential decisions, which in turn mostly have to do with how to sell more shoddy goods and unneeded services. Finally, if we are good at peddling garbage or mining data we get to supervise others in the same sad trades, whether or not we are good at supervising.

But each and every worthless trinket that gets manufactured, bought and soon thereafter pitched into a landfill ( a whole 'nother issue ) contributes, even if only slightly, to keeping some poor desperate drone alive and secure in the knowledge that somehow he matters.

That drone may be you or it may be me. So spend while you can and don't be stingy. It all counts.

Writings from antiquity . . .

Here's something that looks like it could make a difference -- to scholars. We think we know a lot about early Greek culture, based on, really, a small sample of writing that has survived. (I had to read some of and maybe you did, too. Euripides, that lot.) But now, we've got a a whole lot more material to review.

Of course, I'm still waiting for the promise of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be fulfilled. You know. The part where they find the lost or suppressed Eleventh Commandment. The one that said, "Thou shalt not tithe; neither shall thou suffer thy purse to be lightened by taxes."

Another thought on holy war . . .

I just found a new - for me - blog dealing with the rise of rabid Islam. The writer took a historic point of view, that our recent history is but a piece of a whole that goes back a long way. The blog is currently here. I think this might be worth a look.

The United Nations? Wait, it gets better . . .

Kofi says that the United States and Britain were the cause of the Iraqi oil scandal.

What a silly man.

Why we will win the holy war . . .

If you look at the history of our western culture, at its heart is Christianity. And if you look at the history of Christianity in western culture, you have to see that over the many centuries, uncounted thousands after thousands have died for their religion or have killed others for their religion. We have a bloody past. But what has grown out of this bloody history is a culture, driven by need and greed and acceptance of technology, in which people can live relatively comfortably and safely, and relatively luxuriously. How can this be?

I think that maybe we grew to see that just because someone does not believe as we believe, we are not obliged to do anything of a drastic nature to them. If I find that you are a member of some filthy, profane cult that believes in secretly transporting a potato around in your underwear (in the back, not the front), I am not compelled to torch you and your house by the light of the moon. I am willing to leave you to fester in your ignorant state, provided you will do me the courtesy of not interrupting while I worship the great and merciful Chlorox. (And if I should happen to say that you could use a little more Chlorox in your gene pool, think of it as mere words of blessing. Okay?)

We have developed cultural tolerance.

Of course, tolerance in our culture is not not practiced perfectly. Just recently I got stuck playing golf with a couple of -- well, they called themselves pastors -- who felt obliged to encourage me repeatedly to repent and be reborn in the blood of the Lamb. This is something I might even have been willing to do as a seven foot putt for a birdie was at risk, but I felt it might be wrong somehow to bargain with the almighty over the matter. I didn't want to think as they did, and they certainly thought I was a sinner. They told me so. Nevertheless, none of us felt obliged to take a divot out of anybody's forehead with a pitching wedge. We were tolerant. Nobody came to harm. (And I made the putt.)

And if you think about it, much of our world is like that. We constantly find ourselves confronted with others whose notions of proper conduct are just wrong -- like wearing a baseball hat backwards for example, or voting stupidly, or having loud children, or driving like a maniac. Or cursing in public. Or being fat. Or smoking. Or tatoos. Or protesting -- well, anything. We don't approve. We are annoyed, offended, and we don't approve. We wish they would stop doing what they shouldn't be doing, or start doing what they aren't. But we don't, by and large, start blowing things up. Well, nearly all of us don't. Some do. But we have a cultural and legal bias forbidding such conduct, and so Eric Rudolph, our most recent example of a home-grown terrorist, is going to spend the rest of his days sitting alone for about 23 hours a day, thinking thoughts about how great a hero he is for fighting for the unborn by killing somebody, anybody, just killing it doesn't matter who.

Our cultural and legal bias against the agressively narrow-minded comes from experience. We've figured out that it's dangerous being around such people. For the safety of all, we encourage and enforce a social contract that says, I get to putt my putts in safety, and you get to watch naked ladies dancing in bars, if you want to. I get to drive a sedan, and you can continue to drive a slow, loud, and above-all stinky diesel truck (invariably referred to as a "rig" by its owner, a mighty hairdresser or social worker by trade.) And you can drive it in front of me and I won't shoot at you.

See how this works? Western culture has gone beyond the narrow strictures of its religious cultural inheritance. Tolerance.

And that's where the problem with Islamic terrorism is rooted. What I would call intolerance, is idealized as a virtue. What do you get? You get places where, if anything identifiable as female about a person shows in public, the female person showing it must be punished -- and so the only safe public female posture is to do one's best to look like a shapeless black shadow. You get, rape is invariably the woman's fault and she must die for having caused a man to rape her. You get, sexual conduct not approved by the mullah must be punished, and the punishment amounts to being tied in a sack which will be turned into an unhuman-shaped bloody mass after a frenzied mob throws fist sized stones at it until -- too long later -- the sack stops moving. You get, leaving Islam is apostasy, punishable by death. You get jihad.

I know there's a question about whether jihad is an intellectual matter, or if it really requires actual subjugation of the world. I know there's a question of whether Islam means peace, or submission. I know there's a question about whether the sword of Islam is metaphoric or literal. But I don't see, on either end of the spectrum, where tolerance is much valued. Sure, I know that many Muslims all over the world are not blowing people up, and don't much want to. But my understanding is that Islam is all about becoming universal. To the faithful in Islam, it isn't a matter of whether we will convert to Islam, it's a matter of when. Or if we will live that long. There remains, even if un-bloody, the jihad.

So, I think we are involved in a holy war. I don't think we want it, and we certainly don't want it to be a religious war. But I think we are in it and it is a religious war, at least on their side. And I think much of the 21st century is going to be taken up in fighting this war. One part of the reason the war will take up so much time is that we haven't committed ourselves to winning the war. A war is not won after a certain percentage of people die. A war is won when one side is beaten, conquered, vanquished. Just killing a bunch of people isn't the same thing. And until we have won this war, the radical Islamists are going to keep blowing us up.

I also think we will win the war, for two reasons.

First, all the effective weaponry comes from the west. That's not a matter of luck. Our culture is such that innovation is encouraged by wide adoption and proliferation and financial reward, and the complete infrastructure is in place to support innovation. For example, it took just about twenty-five years for personal computers to go from idea to what we have now. It wasn't a fluke; the idealists at the beginning envisioned and intended the wide-spread distribution of personal computers - and I'll bet even they are astonished at how rapidly the idea was deployed. More importantly, we haven't yet even mobilized for war. The vast majority of us westerners, American and European, are contentedly going about our happy civilian chores, entertaining ourselves and our friends by sticking superfically clever bumble (like this) stickers on our vehicles.

We could be much more lethal. In WWII, we stopped producing civilian automobiles and tires, altogether, just so we could build tanks. We rationed food, so that more labor efforts could be spent winning a war. We fire-bombed whole civilian cities to eliminate the enemies' ability to manufacture weaponry. We drafted an entire generation. We dropped a couple atomic bombs. We, today, are nowhere near as pi--ed-off as they were back then. Think what could happen if we were.

Second, I think that in the long run, "regular" Muslims are going to marginalize the radical Islamists. I think that Muslims are coming to recognize, as most westerners do, that it is just dangerous being around the radical, aggressive, militantly narrow-minded killers. (I suspect that, in the last thirty years, the radicals have killed more Muslims than westerners, anyhow.) I think that there will be a growing awareness that us "regular people," both westerners and Muslims, have need to join in common cause to protect one another from terrorists, some few of whom are western, and a whole bunch are, at least for now, Islamic.

I think that the notion of tolerance is already infecting the Muslim world. Why? Take a look at Iraqi blogging. Iraq the Model is one of the old blogs in English - which has improved over the months. But notice what he is saying -- there's a lot of blogging going on, and exchanges of views. Blogging is crossing the borders and people are communicating with one another as neighbors, without regard to the borders or the authorities.

I think it is a matter of patience, persistence, and time.

Thus it begins . . .

Indictments have come down for Kofi's United Nations Oil for Food scandal. My bet would be these are easy cases to prove, with defendants who are likely to co-operate in giving additional inside information to the investigators. I would also bet that some additional deal-making will soon ensue, involving those who have not yet been indicted.

Now would be a good time for Kofi to receive the congratulations of all of his sticky-fingered peers, and retire to write his autobiography.

Breathe easy, America . . .

The United Nations has now adopted a resolution against terrorists using atomic weapons.

And I'm sure it will make a real difference, too, because of Kofi's bold leadership and the moral authority of the international community.

Culture wars . . .

For those few who know what this is about, the operation went just fine today.

For everybody else, here's something that is worth reading. Sometimes we speak of the culture war, meaning the nasty food fight between the hooligans of the left and the mouth-breathers of the right. But that's just part of it. I think there's some insight here. And be sure to check out the commentary.

Still not dead yet . . .

Busy. Taxes. I mean, T A X E S ! ! !

I know. Government needs the money. That's because politicians, most of whom are otherwise unemployable, need jobs and have to get re-elected to keep their jobs. So, they buy their jobs by supporting programs to buy votes.

With my money.

But I look on the bright side. There aren't that many years left before I can get social security. That's when I officially become a socialist. And I might even have to stop saying bad things about the A.A.R.P, as well. And I'm going to get a little change purse, and count out nickles and dimes to pay for things in the check out lane. Things are going to be just fine for us socialists as long as the worker bees keep buzzing around in the field.

Yea, worker bees.

Not dead yet . . .

Busy. Must hit golf balls. More accurately, must pound the earth with a golf club, at a spot very near to where a golf ball is unwittingly resting.

Also, whomping* up new set of class notes for bankruptcy class to start next term, to stick up on the site. Not to name names, but somebody sure outsmarted himself when he got the notion to break things up into many pages with lots of links instead of a few long pages. Got so many links that I now can see the back of my head without the use of a mirror and have to put one foot up on a chair to tie a necktie.

*to whomp, whomping, whomping up: Doing any job in a sloppy fashion based on insufficient or ineffective planning, all while assuring oneself that speed of completion trumps accuracy any day, and is a more manly quality besides.

Racketeering and usury . . .

About a couple of weeks ago I got another splendid offer from a credit card company. Terms?

• 23.99 APR for purchases.
  
• same interest for cash advances
• 29.99 APR for late pay
• Grace period? NONE
• variable rate: may go up, depending on prime rate, but will never be lower than the above!
  
• one time fee: $50.00
• every month fee in addition to anything else: $10.00
• "This Offer to establish a credit card account is made by XXXX of Wilmington, DE("we", "us", "our")." . . .[Name withheld to protect Those Who Should Feel Ashamed. But I could supply the name if I had to. I kept the offer.]

Is there any doubt in anybody's mind as to who is the marketing target for these offers? Only people who are desperate for credit cards. You know. People who are looking for another month or two of barely getting by, making minimum payments on credit cards and hoping for a miracle to come up at the last minute to save them from having to file for bankruptcy and screw their creditors. Of course, the miracles don't happen but the bankruptcies do. And so, people such as this bank want to be protected from bankruptcy discharge by means testing - putting more debtors into Chapter 13 where they will have to make payments to a trustee for distribution to creditors.

Understand. I'm not against means testing. I'm against credit card companies with terms such as these. In my opinion - not the bakruptcy code's opinion but my opinion - if a creditor with credit terms such as these gets one crusty dime out of a Chapter 13 administration, that dime is fraudulent as to "straight" creditors, like unpaid doctors' bills, the landlord, the cable bill, and the paperboy.

There are usury laws, of course. Just you try, as a citizen who isn't a bank, to loan money to your neighbor for a new business start-up on terms such as the above, and then sue in court to collect. Why, it would be against the law.

But not for credit card companies.

The old mob, you know, the stereotypes with the bent noses, used to charge 6 for 5. That is, pay back $6 for a $5 loan. Work it out and figure it out. But for heavens sake don't mention the word, "racketeering." This isn't crime; it's business. I mean, bidness.

And now, this. I instantly thought of the credit card offer I'd recently received. (I had kept the offer, thinking I might write to my congress critters about it.) The credit card companies want protection from even the possibility of class action suits, for when they improperly charge extra charges. Understand, contrary to impressions left by carefully planted press releases, it isn't easy to get a class certified. I'm not in love with class actions; they should be hard to certify. And judges should look carefully at class attorney fees - maybe even submit the question of plaintiff class attorney fees to the jury. But, for heavens sake, keep the possibility of a class action in place because there is no other practical means of protecting a consumer who feels he got screwed - once again - out of thirty bucks. (But, hey, thirty bucks, each, against all the customers, starts looking like real money, right?)

The problem isn't, of course, the banks. It's the politicians of both parties, state and federal, who have rolled over with their paws in the air, hoping to have their bellies scratched.

Our forefathers wouldn't have stood for this. Neither would our foremothers, our forebrothers and foresisters. And if there were forepets, them, too. They'd all be getting together to dump tea into the harbor, or to organize a million foreperson march, or something.

So, how about a change in the usury laws? No court judgment to any creditors on any obligations of any kind that include any amount more than 12% a year over the principal. Oh, hell, even 15% interest would be okay.

And, as you probably figured, I didn't accept the credit card offer.

Like teaching cats to march in columns . . .

The government of Canada is doing the best it can to keep the details of an investigation into a scandal involving high level Liberal party members from getting out to the public. It isn't working. But I notice that I can't seem to connect with the captain this morning. Has he been taken down, or just jammed with Canadians trying to find out what is going on?

Update: Nevermind, the captain is in. He was just jammed with an Instalanche.

Update #2: Michelle Malkin has a roundup of sources on muzzling the Canadians

Update #3: San Francisco is similarly inclined.

Kofi's retirement

Kofi says he's been exonerated. A U.S. Senator says otherwise. In this instance, although I'm frequently skeptical about politicians' credibility, I go with the Senator. I don't myself think the U.N. should be much more than a debating society. As such, it could be a useful institution, if it doesn't get too uppity. In my opinion. But I recognize that there are reasonable people who think that the U.N. should be more than a place for debate. For them, this situation must be horrible. The longer it lasts with Kofi still in office, (Hell, no, I won't go.) the greater the damage to the institution altogether.

Kofi may survive the U.N. Who thinks that would be a good thing?

I don't intend to be serious, but somebody should be . . .

You really need to add this guy to your bookmarks. If you haven't.

Sometimes, things work out . . .

I've been noticing a number of reports, editorials, alerts, etc., all about the present American epidemic of obesity. People are eating so well that they are eating themselves into an early grave. (Me, too.) Food is cheap for Americans in the post 20th century, whereas all through the history of mankind, food has been expensive in terms of the number of calories that had to be burned to get more food.

But look. It's like magic. Cheap and abundant food equals no more Social Security problem!

Lots of fat people are going to die off before they claim their social security, thus spreading the finite fund among a smaller number of (thin) people. Maybe we actually have plenty of money-- if we can just get all our fat people to make a couple three kids before they die of heart failure.

(And in case anybody can't tell, I'm kidding.)

(At least I think I'm kidding.)

Ready to rock, takes on a new meaning . . .

I don't think anybody is clicking on the adds that Google puts at the side of this blog. I know I wouldn't.

Just about all the adds look like issue stuff, and most of us have no need of any more issue stuff. We all get way too many invitations to join one side or the other in the culture war between the leftist moonbats and the righty mouth-breathers.

Nah, I think most of us want ads for products.

Right about now, I'd be interested in an add for a senior-citizen type lounge chair. Shoot, maybe I'll start up a recliner blog, like Manolo does for shoes.

Sometimes, love isn't all you need. . . .

Two people who live in Connecticut drive into Massachusetts to get married. They don't live or work in Massachusetts; they just want to get married in Massachusetts.

Most states usually want to marry pretty much their own citizens and aren't generally about trying to get others to come there just to get married. There even used to be residency requirements. (Back in the olden days, Reno, Nevada, used to offer a several week residency period to claim residency status to get a divorce, when many other states wanted you to live in the state for six months or so before you could get a divorce. So, Reno got to be known as the quickie divorce capitol of the nation. I'm told.)

Anyhow, these two people want to get married in Massachusetts. It probably had something to do with Massachusetts starting to allow same sex marriages. So, now that they are married, they decide that the weekend wasn't all that great after all, so they apply to Connecticut to annul their marriage.

Connecticutt says, no. Why? Because the marriage didn't count in the first place, so there is nothing to annul.

I have two questions. First, are they still married in Massachusetts? And second, do they get to keep the wedding gifts?

He said what?

Pat Sajak! Pat Sajak? Pat Sajak. Doesn't fit your preconceptions, does it?

Zealous representation. Or something . . .

Remember the woman here in Portland who drove her SUV off the bridge and into the Willamette river this weekend? She had to go over and through a fairly substantial looking guard railing to do it. Supposedly, the fact that the bridge deck is made of metal grating had something to do with it. But still, she had to hit the sidewalk curb, go up and over, then hit the guard rail which wasn't chopped liver itself, and then smash through. In other words, she hit the side of the bridge pretty forcefully.

I'm glad for her that she survived the crash through the guard rail, the nose first impact with the water and the swim to the surface. It was probably horrible for her. But . . .

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it looks to me as if she had to be doing something really, really wrong to put herself in that position. I mean, all sorts of vehicles cross that bridge every day and have been doing so for years. And hardly any of them go over the side of the bridge into the water below. And this isn't the only bridge in the U.S. with a metal grating deck. They are all over the place. With all the sympathy in the world, I figure she screwed up.

But bless her heart, even though she screwed up, she went through a horrible experience. So I have a hunch there's probably at least one attorney in town who can't wait to represent her and sue the manufacturer of the SUV, the steel in the bridge, the rigging company that installed the steel, the architect, the bridge painters, the city, the county, the state, you, me, and heaven everlasting. To some attorneys, this poor woman could be the perfect representative of a class, for a class action seeking, among other things, attorney fees for the plaintiff's attorney.

What class? Why, all of us who are screw-ups, have been screw-ups, or ever will be screw-ups.

Does it show, from this post, how much I miss practicing law?

Osama's still on the loose. But . . .

Damn. Just damn. I know we have a state department. But just what kind of state are they in? Can you possibly read this and come to any other conclusion but that our ambassador was a pure bonehead?

The Next Secretary General . . .

I notice that Austin Bay is taking nominations for somebody to take over for Kofi in the United Nations. What do I think? First, except for that Austrian ex-Nazi, they seem to pick an undistinguished person most people never heard of. Second, while I'm certainly sufficiently undistinguished, I just can't accept the job myself because I don't think they play golf at the U.N. and I think I have to teach that week.

However.

I said years ago, before Bill Clinton's second term, that we ought to do the exact same thing the voters in Arkansas did. Get rid of him by kicking his butt upstairs, this time, to New Yawk City and the United Nations. But no, nobody would listen to me. So we all had to spend his entire second term choosing sides and insulting one another over his messing around with Monica. For whatever good it did anybody.

Yeah, I know. It wasn't about the b.j. in the oval office; it was about the lying under oath. C'mon, we all knew about his proclivities and failings before his first election, and people voted him into office anyway.

Anyway, I was just joking at the time about getting rid of him by kicking him upstairs. But now that I come to think of it, it just might be an inspired choice.

If it were Slick heading the U.N., that would pretty much ice the possibility that President Hillary would want to internationalize the U.S. and hand over any U.S. sovereignty to the U.N., wouldn't it? I think Hillary's strategy is and has been for a long time to give her husband nothing. Not even a divorce. (That's probably why Monica got in there in the first place.)

So. How can we get Clinton into the U.N.?

Easy. But we all have to work together. Everybody start talking it up and spreading the word on the internet and in letters to the editors that if Bill Clinton isn't in charge of the U.N. by the time of the next election, we all will simply have no choice but to vote for Condi. But if Clinton is in charge of the U. N. . . (pause meaningfully.)

That should should do it.

The Guard returns . . .

The Second Batallion, 162nd Infantry of the Oregon Army National Guard is coming home today after a year in Iraq.

Welcome home; good job; we all should be grateful. And best wishes to all who've been waiting so long for this day to finally come.

My Social Security, and Yours . . .

The Heritage Foundation has a summary of the Social Security Trust Fund report, here,
(Thanks to Amy Ridenour's blog. which you should be reading from time to time.)

As near as I can tell, I'm going to be okay. But you young-uns out there . . . better be pushing for big-time social security reform, AND, your private social security accounts, AND be tucking money away in your own accounts. Oh, and also you should be making lots of babies who will grow up and earn money and contribute to the system.

That's because, did you notice that Alan Greenspan is once again on the lookout for inflation? Inflation is how government pays for stuff when it doesn't want you to think your taxes are being increased by governmental confiscation of a greater proportion of the country's productivity. Inflation is how we pay for wars, so we can have, in the estimable words of L.B.Johnson, "guns and butter." For many people, inflation means -- better spend your money on stuff right now, because your money will be worth less next year -- except you don't have any extra money to spend right now and next year is kind of iffy, altogether.

Damn.

I just scared myself. This coming late in life to see the practical benefits of socialism, and getting comfortable with the idea of a big government caring for me just isn't as great a deal as I'd lately come to think.

I think I'll go buy something.

New Infantilism, indeed . . .

. . . Chirac of France, described by the "real" Times. (Not the New York Times). Aw, shucks. A person would probably have to go to school to be able to learn how to use the language with venom and style such as this.

Beats flipping burgers . . .

Instapundit provided this link which can confirm my suspicions. Protesting can be a job! It doesn't always represent a heartfelt concern for issues of the day rising out of the grassroots. Imagine that.

So on reflection, I think I owe some of those folks an apology. Here I thought protesters were protesting just to get a little something from all those loose lefty chicks. But they were in fact engaged in a noble quest for a W-2.

I applaud that. I applaud that so much that I call upon all right leaning political types to come together and vote for more stuff to give the protesters things to protest about. Like maybe drilling for oil in Alaska (oops.) 'Cause our protesters are coming up a little dry of late. Not too long ago they had to protest the draft when we don't even have a draft, so then they had to protest not having a draft. This just illustrates what a poverty of material protesters have to work with, currently.

So come on, all you legislators. Let's have a bill to install at least one working atomic powerplant in every state. That will give the protesters something to talk about. And when the protesting starts and the national debate on atomic energy begins, I bet just talking about it will drive the international price of oil way down.

Lets' get together on this and give our noble protesters something more to protest about.

We're all in this together and we all need to work together.

Who owns your e-mail?

Here's the deal. I have a g-mail address. I made a "drive" out of the g-mail address, so now if I want data storage to be duplicated somewhere other than my hard drive or standard removable medium, I store it in g-mail. Google people are real nice about the free storage. And since I never actually learn anything of much importance, I don't use up much of Google's memory. Couple drops, is all.

Here's the question. Assume for a moment that I know something valuable. (If I did, do you think I'd be wasting my time on silly questions like this?) I store my valuable information, say, a treasure map, on my g-mail account and then promptly die leaving no other copies of the information around. Who owns the information?

If you e-mail from work, I guess your workplace owns the e-mail files, right? And Yahoo says it owns the e-mail of a fallen soldier in Iraq because it owns the medium it was stored on. (His parents want to see what he may have written.)

I predict interesting legal questions to come. And I predict I will be outraged. (I pretty much always am outraged.)

Congress to the rescue . . .

I've been thinking about Teri Schaivo today, because starving to death is a tough way to go. I know she is in a "vegetative" state (there's a repulsive metaphor). But even so, she is a human being in such a state, and as such, she is still an extremely complex individual, and probably feels things. It's not as if she is some simple organism without much of a nervous system. (Go ahead. Squish it, man. Bugs don't feel nuthin'.) For heavens sake, if you want her to die, find some vet to calculate the juice to inject to just put her down without the possibility of pain.

If you have the nerve.

But mostly I'm thinking that I don't know what to think about the Teri Schaivo matter. It's possible that her husband is fighting a desperate and noble battle to give his wife the one thing left he can give her -- her wish not to live this way. It's also just as possible that her husband is using the law to kill his wife legally after having scored a big judgment based on the necessity of caring for her economically for the rest of her life. And it's possible that her parents are tirelessly trying to preserve for their daughter the possiblity that with care and time, she can return to a full life. And it is just as possible that they are sentimentally and foolishly preserving the husk of their dead daughter long beyond the point at which it would have spoiled but for medical science. Any of those could be true, or false. So I don't know what to think about her family and husband.

But I know exactly what to think about the United States Congress. Those bozos jumped on a current issue that did not concern them under the U.S. Constitution and created a federal court jurisdictional basis for the parents to bring their case to federal court, where there wasn't one before. And they did it, as far as I can tell, without providing a clear cause of action on which to base the case.

Did you ever notice how, whenever a television camera is set up on the street to video a scene or an interview, some juvenile or some adult with a case of arrested maturity will come into view and stick his goofy face sideways into the camera's field of vision? And grin and say woo? Just to interrupt and call the attention to himself? And pretty much to annoy the real adults? Well, my question is, why do we elect clowns such as these to Congress?

War is not the answer . . .

For all my lefty friends and relatives, hey, take a look at this blog. I figure this guy is probably in a better position to express an opinion about the last two years of combat than almost anybody you see reading the news on the tube, or writing for most of the newspapers and newsmagazines. (Horsefeathers gets a tip.)

Yeah, I know, war is not the answer. I read that on bumper stickers all the time. And we all know that bumper stickers are the source of all wisdom, all condensed and packaged for easy comprehension by even the simple-minded.

Oh, waitaminit. I forgot. It's all about the oil! ($2.18 a gallon, regular unleaded.)

Make that phrase, "easy comprehension by the especially simple-minded."

Update: And in that connection, take a look at what Hanson says.

Campaign finance reform . . . .

To follow up yesterday's post on campaign finance reform, "Day by day" is on the case.

Campaign Finance Reform, or something like it . . .

This is big. The current campaign finance reform law, which as we've recently seen did nothing to improve the perception of trustworthiness of politics and just maybe made things worse, was all a structured, intentional exercise in pulling the wool over the eyes of Congress. (Apparently not very tough to do if you have the money to do it.)

Take a look at this report. You can follow the path to get a full transcript if you don't want to believe the report. In fact, on the web you can find partial videos of the insider explaining exactly how they did it.

The result? Sens. McCain and Feingold, who had been jes' itchin' to look like leaders, got in front of what they thought was parade of interested constituents coming up from the grass roots. They sponsored and got passed some legislation to provide campaing finance reform, in accord with what they thought a whole lot of of citizens wanted. But there was no actual big parade. The wide-spread support was faked. Notice that it worked in Congress, and then again, it worked in the Supreme Court.

Okay, we have to live with the unintended and unexpected consequences of McCain's grandiosity.

But notice this. First, the mainstream press had in their hands all the information necessary to break this story at the time the legislation was being considered. It didn't either because the reporters weren't smart enough to see the significance of what they knew, or else they flat didn't care. But second, the mainstream press, for all its self-congratulatory fist-pumping about its investigatory abilities, still hasn't reported this story, much, even after it's been handed to them. (The story is contrary to the mythology currently adopted by the press.)

Morons.

Another bright idea emerges from the shallow end of the gene pool.

I heard right. Rachel Corey's family is sueing Caterpillar for making and selling the 'dozer that killed her. (See my earlier post below.)

I think there's something in the law about keeping a dangerous 'dozer. Yeah. It's coming to me now. But I'm pretty sure I learned this in lawschool, umphfty years ago.

I think there's something in the law about how every 'dozer gets the first bite free, based on the theory that you don't know your 'dozer is a dangerous 'dozer until it attacks and harms somebody. After that, if anybody is injured, it's because the owner is harboring a known dangerous 'dozer and the owner will be strictly liable for any injuries caused by the permitting the dangerous'dozer to run free.

Okay, I know. It's not much of a defense. But I bet it's as good as the theory undeneath the Corey lawsuit against Caterpillar.

And not that anybody asked me or is likely to, but if I were asked to represent somebody, I'd prefer to defend the manufacturer using this silly argument, rather than represent the the plaintiff, using whatever the hell they must be using for a theory of recovery, sight unseen.

World Banking - The Way It Could Have Been . . .

The President has nominated Wolfowitz as President of the World Bank. 'Course I never expected Bono to get it. But I did have my heart set on Cher, because now she is going to have to schedule the "Absolutely this is Really the Last Time , No I Really Mean it This Time, This Is the Last One" world tour.

Sometimes lawyer jokes aren't funny ,. . .

I thought I heard on the televised local news this morning that the family of Rachel Corey - the young woman who perished under a bulldozer while protesting in favor of Palestinians - is going to sue the 'dozer manufacturer for its part in her death. I'm not 100% sure I heard it, as I'd stepped into the kitchen to pour a cuppa. And I did a quick search of local news on-line with no mention. Anyhow, if it turns out I'm mistaken, well, I'm sorry.

But if it is true, I gotta say -- this kind of lawsuit is tinted with the same kind of stupidity that tells a person they should try to stop a bulldozer by getting in front of it. It's kind of like the guy in front of the tank in Tiennamen Square. It makes for a nice iconic news image if it works. But if it doesn't work, well . . . all your friends get to shake their heads and say, "What a waste." And not even the main stream news will show pictures of the results of a miscalculation of such sort.

But if what I heard is true, I would not criticise the family for this suit. Despite how one may feel about the circumstances of Rachel Corey's death, it was nevertheless a death of a loved one and her family would quite naturally feel great grief and loss, and maybe even attempt to "balance the books" to deal with the loss.

But a lawyer representing them in a suit against the manufacturer of the bulldozer being used to increase security in the midst of constant conflict in Israel?

I'm sure there's some good explanation about why a lawyer would agree to represent a party in such a lawsuit. I just can't think of it right now. But I'm really sure there's a reason. There has to be a good reason, right?

Finally . . . . .

Miriam Rachel was born this morning at 11:25 a.m., weighing 7'13" and stretching out 21". It made her very tired. It made her mother very tired. Her father and her grandparents, however, are jazzed!

An Indecent Proposal . . .

The news is reporting beheaded corpses in Iraq. Just another new horror. It seems to me that beheading a person, while an effective means of killing them, is not particularly efficient, particularly where one has a number of people, as above, to kill. It sounds like work. Too much effort for the result.

That tells me that the beheading part of the murder has ritual significance beyond the mere killing of another human being with malice. And as the killers are most likely motivated by some sort of religious zeal -- jihad -- it is a nearly unavoidable conclusion that the ritual beheadings are a religious ritual that finds a comfortable home in their religious heritage.

In other words, religion of peace, my perfect, aging ass. You can't see these people as criminals to be handled in a justice system that aspires to notions of due process. They aren't criminals in their own mind; they are behaving with religious purity. And you can't see these people as simple soldiers in a war of opposing uniformed armies sharing cultural notions of military fair play, holding prisoners of war for the duration and for eventual repatriation. Their religion apparently rejects those cultural notions both for themselves and for their captives.

It occurs to me that we should not long adhere to our own cultural notions of decency in this regard. The conflict is something more primal, more "red of tooth and claw." I think once we got beyond the problem of distinguishing between ordinary Muslims and the spooky, dangerous jihadists who conceal themselves among them, it's time to set aside decency to look to efficiency in our treatment of jihadists. No jail. No imprisonment. No internment. Just kill them.

They'd do it to you.

I Think There Just Might Be a Message to the U.N. in here . . . . .

Oh, this is good! Our new ambassador to the United Nations is going to be Bolton, a diplomat who doesn't hesitate to criticise the United Nations administration for lack of effectiveness. Bluntly and repeatedly.

Like his boss, there seems to be nary a "nuance" in him. (That means he says what he means, not pleasant sounding murmurs that don't actually mean anything or expect anything from anybody.)

Of course, the Senate democrats will line up to criticise him at the confirmation hearing. I can predict their line -- "how can we have somebody representing us who is so abrasive and critical of diplomatic dithering, corruption, and betrayal of principle, when what we need is somebody who won't point out to the spineless ditherers that they are spineless ditherers, and won't blow the whistle on corruption. That's no way to get along, when we need our international (French) friends now, more than ever."

For myself, I'm going to entertain myself by forming images of Kofi, Kim, and Assad hearing the news with mouthfuls of their favorite beverages, doing classic Hollywood spit-takes.

Yeah, this is good. This is a whole lot more fun than thinking about Bono in the World Bank. It's starting to be fun to follow the news again.

Rather reflects on being a big game hunter . . . .

Ol' Dan never got shot in the back 'cause he always attacked head on. He's a rhino but once in a while a spear hurts even him -- but only for a little bit. He's a big game hunter and always will be.

Yeah, those guys driving humvees around in Iraq are real pussies. Those firefighters never have to take that much heat. Cops are all well-known pansy sniffers.

Real men like Danno just eat up brutal risks that would make all lesser men whimper, by stubbornly sitting behind desks and reading out loud.

The man's a cartoon.

Televised interviews with terrorists. . . .

Iraq the model is posting about Iraqi television broadcasting interviews with terrorists. What's coming out is that these are not insurgents seeking to overthrow an invading force (us) or religious monomaniacs furthering jihad. Contemptible.

Need a little help on this First Amendment thingy . . .

So, when I complain in this blog about how Sen. McCain's finance reform dealio really sucks if it is interpreted to cover blogs, and when I suggest we should keep that in mind when McCain and all his like-minded political masters of unintended consequences and brandishers of well-named legislation come up for election, am I breaking the law?

Oh, good.

And Out With the New (notice uppercase) . . . .

Finally. Finally got the personal website, www.junewick.com up, with the real estate stuff on it that I've been hinting about to my students. Finally. Only had to go in and patch and redo bunchteen twenny links. Who would ever suspect that upper and lower case names would make a difference? I know I'd heard rumors, but you don't pay attention.

Now if we can just get the first grandchild born, an event which has been predicted to take place since Friday, February 25, but which like the upper-case rule, is also merely a matter of rumors. The daughter tells us that doc says little kid is doing fine in there so there's nothing to be concerned about. That's the problem, I'm sure. Way too comfortable.

I know the daughter has spoken at the baby, at least once, attempting to encourage her to make a run for it, but, well, kids. you know. It isn't that they don't understand.

Kids have bad ears. They don't hear well. Sometimes you have to shout before they can hear you. Sometimes you actually have to stand on a chair and jump up and down, wave your arms, and shout before you can get them to hear you.

I'll suggest that approach to the daughter. In my usual helpful way of course.

Liberal entitlement . . . . .

The Supreme Court has apparently come around to the notion that we need a world view to determine what the Constititution means. This has some truly dangerous possibilities. Sisyphus has done a terrific job outlining the intellectual and political antecedents, here. Wish I could take credit but I can't, so just go read it. But just considering how helpful the world view is, consider Hanson's latest take on the message out of Europe.

Then, take a look at the consequences of McCain-Feingold. Lots of blogging going on about this, but take a look at the Captain's spot.

They do take liberties, don't they?

Jumping off buildings . . . .

For thrills, teenagers are reported to be jumping from one building to another -- six stories up. One didn't make it and fell. What to do? Why, sue the building owners for failure to anticipate that people would jump off a perfectly good building to the adjoining building, and failing to erect a fence to prevent such leaps.

Hey, if you jump off a building that isn't on fire or anything, just for the thrill of it, well, I think evolution should be permitted to take its course. But that's just me. The law doesn't consider the beauties of evolutionary processes. Just foreseeable risk of harm. And imaginary duties.

Well, okay then. It's foreseeable that maybe some day somebody might toss somebody else out a window. It's happened before. I guess we need to block all windows.

But it's also foreseeable that maybe someday somebody might want to exit a building rapidly so as to escape fire. That fence up there on the sixth floor to block recreational leapers will be a death trap. Somebody will have to be sued. Again.

I guess the only caring thing to do is to eliminate all tall buildings altogether because there are foreseeable risks involved. Yeah, that will do it. And make the sidewalks around the low buildings out of nerf, like the footballs. And post signs, like, "Don't jump off buildings," which, in my mind, is always good advice. And while it probably isn't needed by most of us, it's good to publish a reminder from time to time. Just in case.

Don't jump off buildings.

And you have a nice day.

Lebanon's turn . . . . . .

The government of Lebanon just walked off the job, encouraged to do so mostly by huge protests in the street, contrary to the direct instructions from the government not to demonstrate. It seems that the Lebanese themselves would prefer a more representative government than that which has been ruling them from Syria for some years.

What's going on? Why is the established order falling apart everywhere? First Afgans reject Talibanism, then Iraqis and Ukrainians don't want to be governed by the their former acknowledged legitimate rulers. Next thing you know, Syrians and Iranians will want to vote, if you can imagine such a thing. I don't think there's been this much uncertainty in world politics since the U.S.S.R. evaporated and the Berlin wall fell. And you may remember what a mess that turned out to be. We had to print new maps!

All this change is, well, upsetting. Used to be, a person felt secure that they knew things about how the world worked, like, for example, all Muslims only respect, want and need strong autocratic rulers, and the "Arab street" would rise up in righteous fury if one of their own despots were to be humiliated and dumped by western infidels. All the nightly news guys told us how that worked. Now, apparently, all that's changed and a bunch the little buggers want to vote!

Way too much change. Pretty soon, they might all want to vote. In that regard, President Bush has a lot to answer for.

Moron Factories . . . . . .

The governors are getting together to shake their wise, governmental heads over the sad state of affairs of American high schools, which need major repair. Bill Gates, the drop-out, showed up and opined that high schools are "obsolete."

In my opinion, not much of any worth is going to come out of this unless the political
establishment intends to take on the educationist establishment. And that isn't going to happen, as each pack feels it is beholden to the other. From top to bottom, the educationists need a serious smack-down, to eliminate people teaching out of their specialty, or teaching without a specialty, or teaching nonsense using untested faddish methodologies proposed by morons with degrees and adopted on faith by aspiring morons.

The sad spectacle of the current Ward Churchill blogging frenzy fits right in here. The shame of it isn't Ward Churchill. He's just another unprincipled opportunist and if it wasn't this, it would be some other scam probably involving making money at home by stuffing envelopes. No, the shame of it is that U.C. hired him and gave him tenure in the first place. Higher education. Right.

People don't recognize that America has a product that is in demand world wide -- higher education. Students come from all over the world to go to our graduate schools. I bet that many of our own college graduates can't compete effectively in those same graduate schools. (Maybe because their undergraduate degrees are in gender studies or protest literature, and not calculus. Lord knows, we've had at least 40 years of higher education where it wasn't necessary to have any math or foreign languages. I know; I did it.) Nevertheless, the achievement requirements necessary to get into college keep dropping as the educationist establishment needs to fill up classroom seats. So, colleges offer remedial courses to incoming freshmen. You can call it serving those who are "under-advantaged" all you want, but it amounts to filling up college classroom seats that can't be sold otherwise than by lowering admission standards. And it shows the problem. Keep it up, and our graduate schools will lose their effectiveness and appeal, with the possible exception of medical schools. (To date, medical schools still worry about brain surgeons having learned their basic science from people who idealize the earth as a living, concious, single organizm. )

Until the political will develops to get in there and flush the problems away, we are going to continue down the same sad path. People must be fired and expelled from the system. Start with any instructor who has ever, in a high school class, spread a lot of poster paper, paste, markers, and picture magazines on the floor and instructed the students to make collages about world hunger, or discrimination, or homelessness, or global warming, or, well, anything! And if it turns out that the students truly weren't capable to doing anything more challenging than making collages, then fire every instructor they had in the lower classes.

To be fair, lots of dedicated, intelligent people go into education to become teachers. They mostly leave teaching after a few years to go to law school, or sell real estate or insurance, or sign up for military service.

Maybe Mr. Gates is right. Don't fix high schools. Call them obsolete and install replacements.

A long time ago, a wealthy man saw a problem and used his personal wealth to support literacy. You know. Carnegie libraries. Maybe . . . . . . . Microsoft Academies?

Get over yourself, Mr. Williams . . . . .

It looks like the Gang of Oscar is stifling art once again. Poor Robin Williams. He had a little bit all prepared and they went and told him he couldn't do it.

Bet they would have let him do it if it was funny.

Celebrities receive so much reinforcement that they start believing pretty much anything they are doing is funny, entertaining, or interesting, just because they are the ones doing it. When that happens, we are only a few years away from that bittersweet moment when we hear a nostalgically familiar voice doing voiceovers for bank and insurance commercials.

Good luck with that new career there, Mr. Williams.

Urban sprawl. . . . . .

Well, it looks like people who are either (probably) smarter than I, or (certainly) work harder than I do on their blog, have come up with something I've long suspected. The Portland urban growth limits are not as wonderful as all the local mandarins would like us to think.

Take a look at Amy Ridenour's blog which argues that the effect of limiting sprawl with the growth limit is to drive up home prices. Who'da thunk it? If you reduce the supply of something, the demand will drive prices up. I can't imagine who might benefit from such a thing. Can you?

Oh, nevermind. It's probably all about sprawl, 'cause if we didn't have wise laws like the urban growth limit, why in no time all of Los Angeles would move here and clog the place up. Three and a half million people in a little confined area like Oregon is already claustraphobic. So, the only solution is to pack us all closer together.

Eminent domain, a scoundrel's playground . . . . .

For several years, now, when dealing with the matter of eminent domain and condemnation of private property in my real estate class, I've been making up a hypothetical where local politicians go in cahoots with sticky-fingered land developers, and condemn a bunch of homes. The developer plans to raze the homes and build a shopping center in their place. But the developer wants property at a "fair" price -- not the price that would be necessary to buy out all the homes from a bunch of people who have no desire, need, or incentive to sell, other than getting "too much" cash. The politicians, equally as sticky-fingered, would find nice campaign contributions to assure their continued ability to lap at the public trough.

My hypothetical government justification for favoring the land developer? Nothing is wrong with the homes; they're aren't blighted, or anything. But people will work at the shopping center, representing more jobs.

More jobs is the number-one campaign promise of all politicians. 'Cause more jobs sounds good to voters. But to politicians, more jobs means more both business income and more personal income to tax, thus raising $ for elected nannies to fritter away on all sorts of bone-headed projects other than boring things such as keeping the peace and repairing the roads. Plus, more government interaction in normal commercial affairs, leads to citizens increasing their $$$ partipation in local politics, to see to it their their needs $$$$ are adequately $$$ represented in the $$ councils and $$$$ legislatures where $$ law is made.

Well, now. Somebody told me the Supreme Court is looking at a case like my hypo. The gummint's justification for condemning the land is that the new use, whatever it is, will generate more taxes.

So let's see if the Court does what I cynically suspect it will do - that is, support government. After all. The homeowners are going to get paid, and the fact that they didn't want to sell in the first damn place shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of progress. And taxes.

Bumper sticker wisdom . . .

Wisdom doesn't fit on bumper stickers. Clever statements, on the other hand, can frequently be found on bumper stickers. But a clever bumper sticker will not necessarily indicate that the driver of the vehicle is himself clever. Just pleased with himself.

Perturbations . . . .

Okay, folks. If you can't drive as fast as a city bus moves out, and if you can't put your nice, safe SUV through traffic openings that a city bus goes through without encroaching on somebody else's lane of travel, well, I don't think the problem is actually that you bought yourself an SUV.

Kyoto Weather Control

I understand that the Kyoto Treaty goes into effect this week. Without the United States. So, I guess now every right thinking greenie will feel justified in blaming the United States of America for every bit of bad weather that comes our way anywhere for the foreseeable future. 'Cause responsibility just isn't important when determining who gets the blame.

Nevertheless. In not signing on to Kyoto we may have dodged a political and economic bullet.

Green Weenies . . . .

Here in Portland, we love the environment. We care about the environment and we care for the environment. We like to do things for the environment. Well, mostly, what we like best to do for the environment is tell other people what they should not be doing. There's no end to the solutions we have, all of which have several features in common: (1) All technology must be older technology, (2) people must stop doing whatever makes them happy and start being happy little collectivists, (3) guilt, (4) junk science.

You know. Self-righteously dull.

Two thirds of all the chatter from the green weenies is envy and the other two-thirds is posturing in an attempt to get some notice from other green weenies. (I know the arithmetic doesn't work out, but you know what I mean.)

Portland's environmental sophisticates will smugly ride a bike eight miles to work and back, and then drive a flaming huge 4wd SUV fourteen miles worth of trips to various specialty markets to fix dinner each night. The SUV is necessary because on weekends they must drive said FH 4wd SUV up Mt. Hood so as to slide repeatedly down the mountain with implements (of which a large component part came from oil wells) strapped to their feet. This past winter about the best thing that happened to the environment around here, when it comes to air pollution and energy and resource depletion, was that it hasn't snowed much on the mountain.

It isn't that being concerned about the environment is a bad thing. Quite the contrary. It's that so many of those who constantly just go on about it, are so parochial and -- fundamentally unserious.

We are not going to solve environmental problems by going back to a simpler, less technologically- demanding life. Life was never simpler. Just shorter. We need to look at where we are -- right now -- and look at the resources we have -- right now. There are rational approaches to the problem, as here, by Varifrank. And then there are the green weenies all around me.

Finally, the truth about CNN's Eason Jordan erupts . . .

Of course, there's no way we can know for sure what is happening but this sure has the smell of truth about it. Iowahawk nails it.

It is at least as probable as the official CNN self-serving pronouncements on the subject, now that we know that there will be no video of the conference published. There's probably no good reason to publish the tape, anyhow, because doing so would probably just resolve the confusion about what Jordan actually said when he said the United States military is targeting news guys. Publishing the tape would spoil everything. Everyone knows it's a whole lot more fun to just make up the truth as you go along -- particularly if the real truth were to be, well, truthful about the sympathies of the head of an alleged news outfit that was attempting to sell itself as the most trusted source of information since the New Testament.

This little man would never dare to speak of it in public if the military was actually shooting journalists. But lefty chicks probably like it when he talks this way.

Good Reads. . . .

Just finished Morality for Beautiful Girls, by Alexander McCall Smith., after reading his The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, both of which chronicle Precious Ramotswe of Botswana. I've enjoyed these books even though these are not the sort of reading I've ordinarily done. Both are, for lack of a better word, very sweet stories, without much sentimentality.

Thanks to No. 1 Daughter for giving them to me.

State of the Infidels

I mean, State of the Union.

Yeah, I know. It was all about Social Security.

But did you hear the part where the President sent a little message to the Iranian people?

Iran is run by the mullahs who, basically, took the place over by stomping on civilized values and taking U.S. citizens hostage, and holding them hostage for days and weeks and months, while a United States President fussed and dithered and considered and presented a noble profile for view.

("Ah have lusted in mah heart." "Ah will never lie to yew." Energy crisis? We will all shiver togethah.)

The mullahs saw another American president respond to another atrocity by sending over a couple missles that didn't strike much of anything of value, and then move on. (Move-on. Yeah, that would be a good name for an organization or something.)

The Iranian so-called theocracy never was a legitimate government in the sense that it was historically established or widely accepted by its people. It is and has always been a rule by religious thugs who systematically choose and use over-the-top violence above all other strategems. (I once interviewed an Iranian nurse seeking asylum who said that she had been beaten by the religious thugs - because her socks were too thick.) The mullahs may be savagely ignorant but they know that they still stay in power because they keep a population that outnumbers them, too scared to do much about them. They terrorise their own people; they rule by terror.

Well, now the Iranian people have heard a president of the United States say that we are on their side against the mullahs. Should the mullahs be worried?

After all, they have similar previous United States rhetoric to consider. But they also have the history of this president to consider, too. He said he was going to shut down the Taliban in Afganistan. He did it in a matter of months. He did it with both with new weaponry, and with some of our guys riding around on horseback like warriors in the movies, and with organization. But mostly it took determination. Remember the U.S.S.R.? The Soviet broke its teeth in Afganistan. The Afgans, residing to the east of Iran, now have a government run by its people, not by its religious nuts. A democracy is in place on Iran's eastern borders, because a United States president did what he said he was going to do. And if that isn't sufficiently instructive, there is the matter of Iraq, on the western border of Iran. This president said that Iraq was next, and, despite all the predictions to the contrary, it was. And in the case of Iraq, Saddam had a modern army, rather than some raggedy-assed tribal hill fighters armed only with 20 year old weapons and fanatism. And Saddam had time - time provided by all the useless negotiations in the U.N. that smart people said were necessary - to prepare a main plan to stay in power in the capital, and a back-up plan to go underground, literally, while an insurgency armed with piles of hidden materials pounded away at United States's determination. The key element was the determination of the United States, and its leader. Most recently, we've had United States marines fighting face-to-face where necessary in Falujah. The determination is there and the capability is there.

So, hell yeah. The mullahs should be worried. The Iranians have seen a country to the right of the them, and a country to the left of them, go from oppression to democracy, each in a matter of a months, and this president and the United States made it happen. So the mullahs should most definitely be worried.

Are they worried enough? Probably not. They have a view of history, and they are determined, too. The dream is of the caliphate. The dream is of when shariah is the law everywhere, and apostates everywhere are killed with the blessings of the law, and adulteresses everywhere are tied in sacks and struck with fist-sized stones repeatedly for as long as it takes - and it takes way too long - until they are a dead, misshapen mass of bloody pain. The mullahs know that there have been crusades before and they call us crusaders, now. They have never been beaten; they've only been discouraged and required to lie low for a generation or two or three. The dream of the caliphate remains.

The dream is of when the people of the book have been subjugated to dhimmi status, paying taxes and causing no interruption to the Islamic peace that will finally come to pass when each and every person is terrified stupid of the arbitrary authority of a mullah. It is, for them, a powerful dream.

In addition to determination, the mullahs in Iran and everywhere, have resources. All through the lands where mullahs predominate, there are young men who have no prospect of satisfaction in their lives, except to die. They have nothing to do on the weekends, because they have no weekends. No movies, no art, no girlfriends, no women. No books to read, exept the one. No employment. Nothing, except to sit in dust and talk to other hopeless young men such as themselves, and to listen to the mullahs. And they know there's damn little chance of them ever improving their lot in life, given the social and economic circumstances of their parts of the world. These are the tools of the mullahs. These can be shaped and sent to die when necessary. These will never ask the question that should occur to them -- hey, when was the last time we saw a mullah go give his own life fo the furtherance of Islam?

So, even if we should see the mullahs dumped in Iran, and then Syria, it won't be over. This is a world-wide event. Even in the U.S. there are mosques where the faithful are taught to hate the infidels - us. There are such mosques in Britain and Europe, Indonesia, the Phillipines, hell, all over. So, this isn't going to be over soon.

I suspect the next few years may be even more dramatic than the last few have been, and the next few years will demonstrate that we are merely at the beginning of a long struggle of questionable outcome. And I say, maybe the crusades were abandoned too soon. And I say, the mullahs have declared themselves our sworn and everlasting enemy and mean to conquer us, and we have their own words and terrorist deeds as proof. And I say, the sooner we realize that we are in a battle for survival, the sooner we can get on with acting to assure we survive. And I say, as would that great American pundit, Al Bundy, "Let's rock."

Morons-in-Control Department

I don't want to subscribe to your news service. I just don't. And I won't.

Evidently, I'm not the only person who feels this way.

[ sarcasm.] It would be different if subscriber- only news sites could explain to what use the information is put. You know. Something helpful and information-packed, like, "We are gathering this information about you in order to serve you better." That would do it, right? [/ sarcasm.]

UPDATE!!! That link above should be to bugmenot.