A strange loop.

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September 24, 2004

A Matter of Time

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As long as the jihadis are adopting the tactic of attacking children by the hundreds (hat tip: Belmont Club), it's only a matter of time before we are fighting not against the jihadis, but against all Muslims. Protection of the children is a fundamental aspect of human behavior, and people will not long abide absolute monsters. Between the slaughter of noncombatant adults and the attacks on children, the jihadis are bringing us closer to genocide.

The only ways to prevent going over that edge are to defeat the jihadis utterly, or to reform their cultures to such a degree that they stop producing jihadis. Faster, please.

UPDATE: Bigwig makes the point better, and in the process says something crucial:

If [sic] fact, when it comes to the capacity for, as well as the sheer enjoyment of, violence and murder, the West is probably the most vicious culture the world has ever produced--a fact that, though fairly clear during the Crusades and in the 1630's, has been repeatedly forgotten in the centuries since--for in the centuries since, the West has repeatedly attempted to restrain itself.

This restraint is habitually misinterpreted as emasculation by the foolish and ignorant of the world. They see only a fear of the night in the mild-mannered stranger sitting in the corner, and fail to perceive that it's because he's a werewolf. The ignorant do their best to push him out of the door, while he, handicapped by the fact that he refuses to give in to his dark animal nature, puts up what resistance he can. The foolish urge the ignorant on, reveling in the incremental progress made. Woe betide them both if the effort succeeds, for what was pushed out into the night returns as a slavering beast, and it will make no distinction between those who pushed it out, those who cheered the effort, and those who merely stood aside.

With every attack they make Islamic Terrorists inch closer to such a conclusion, and they fact that they claim to welcome it is proof only that deep down they don't believe in such a possibility. It is not faith, but madness, and the culture that tolerates such a lunacy risks being devastated by a much more potent insanity at a later date, an insanity that the world might now see sooner rather than later--if the Russians love their children too.

It's a point I've made before, more than once:

For some reason, people around the world (even many in America) fail to understand that our surface civility is a result of our deeper understanding, seldom expressed, that Americans are able and willing to slaughter without mercy or limit when pressed. If they could understand that, they'd be less likely to press us. Because eventually, when the mask of civility falls away (as it did in the Civil War and WWII), there will be hell to pay, and we will be collecting the tab.

I fear we are near that point now. I feel it in my bones. How many more Daniel Pearls, how many more Nick Bergs, before America decides that it is us or them? And when we do, how many will graves will we leave behind when Johnny comes marching home?

Comments

Understanding why the jihadis hate so much would also help. So would honesly asking, "Do they have a reason for this much hate?"

In some cases, the answer is actually "yes".

I don't approve of the methods used, of course, but it's important to understand where the hate comes from and recognize when there's just cause for the hate. When there is, then it's time to do something about it.

Ask yourself -- how extreme would you become if the Russians invaded your town and wouldn't leave? Fight them for 10 or 15 years and see how desparate you become.

Neither you nor I have been there. We don't know what kind of desparation breeds after that long. So I think, "There but for the grace of god go I."

No, I'm not condoning the actions. But it's important to understand them.

Posted by: Joe on September 1, 2004 12:55 PM

Rattlesnakes and black widows have perfectly understandable reasons for being the way they are. They had no choice, it's the product of millions of years of abuse by the natural environment. I can't hold it against them at all.

But I'm still going to kill any of them that get near my kids.

Posted by: Karl Gallagher on September 1, 2004 01:17 PM

With all due respect, motives are irrelevant: only actions matter.

Here's the problem, though: what do you do with them? How do you stop the jihadis from killing? If the Russians were to pull out of Chechnya utterly, the jihadis would not go back to their homes and become peaceful and prosperous. They did not do so in Afghanistan or Algeria, nor anywhere else. In many cases, they come from countries which haven't been attacked from the outside (such as Yemen).

Understanding their motivation is not helpful, because their motivation is less outside factors than it is their radicalized and debased form of Islam, which commands them to kill kufr - that's you and me - anywhere they find them. Most of the jihadi combatants in Chechnya are not Chechens, but Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and so on.

So what do you do? How do you solve the problem of jihadis killing non-combatant men, women and children? You either destroy them, or you change their culture so that they stop killing non-combatants, or you utterly wipe out the population in which they hide. The first two are preferable to the last. The last will come if a certain line is passed, and failure of the first two would make inevitable the eventual crossing of that particular Rubicon.

Posted by: Jeff on September 1, 2004 01:23 PM

Jeff,
I, along with Wretchard and SDB have been making this point to folks for some time: unless the Muslim world wakes up, a vanishingly small percentage of them will force us to wipe the religion and ALL its believers from the face of the earth. My favorite short version of this is what Gold Meir said many years ago about the Palestinians: we will hate them for what they make us do to THEIR children. (wish I had a citation for this, the only one I found was a quote of mine on another blog)

Posted by: Oscar on September 1, 2004 04:40 PM

Found the quote: a 69 press conference in London:
"When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arbs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons." She says it better than I remembered it.

Posted by: Oscar on September 1, 2004 04:46 PM

Joe,

The Chechens and Russians have a long history of warfare together. It took approximately 80 years for the tsars to incorporate the Chechens and they even made trouble under Stalin.

Yet at no time from the Imam Shamyl uprising to the declaration of independence by ex-Soviet general and nationalist thug Zhokar Dudaeyev did the Chechens ever do something like this.

For that you needed Radical Islamism.

Posted by: mark safranski on September 1, 2004 11:22 PM

You said:

"And when we do, how many will graves will we leave behind when Johnny comes marching home?"

Not nearly enough. We never do.

Posted by: Steve Johnson on September 2, 2004 01:56 PM

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Blogs and Scandal

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The CBS presentation of badly-forged memos as evidence to smear President Bush has been pulled in a lot of directions. On the part of the libertarian and Republican-aligned blogs, as well as more than a few sane Democrat-aligned blogs, the issue has been the veracity of the documents: if the documents are unreliable, the charges are unreliable and must be discarded. This is leading many of these blogs to question the reliability of all mainstream media reporting. CBS, and the far-Left bloggers, seem to want to ignore the evidence and get right to the discussion of how much of a liar George Bush is - never mind about "evidence."

I reject (as would any reasonable person) the idea that accusations are sufficient proof of wrongdoing, and evidence is immaterial. Facts are requisite to truth, if not to Truth (which is really just another word for religion). While I have quite a bit of interest in the media reliability angle (indeed, my previous posts on this issue have mostly centered on that), I'm actually more struck by the undiscussed ramification: the effect of blogging on creating and sustaining a scandal.

Blogs are new, coming into their own only after 9/11, and this is the first event with national implications in which blogs have played a key role. But why? After all, the precursors of blogs existed during, say, the Clinton impeachment. USENET, personal web pages and email all fulfilled the functions of collaboration (USENET), communication (email) and rich content provision (personal web pages), and certainly a lot of people were online by the late 1990s. But there are some key differences, some ways in which blogs enhance communications and opinion formation well beyond what earlier technologies could provide.

USENET provides a meeting place, ostensibly divided by topic, for a large number of people. This architecture has two problems (even ignoring the fact that USENET is only text-based) with forming opinion and filtering good information out of the stream, both of which are overcome by blogs: noise levels and specialization. USENET has so many people talking in one place that the useful information (signal) is drowned in useless information (noise). The high volume of useless information hides the useful information one might be trying to find, and filtering and searching mechanisms are not particularly well-developed. In addition, any given newsgroup addresses only a narrow topic, at least in theory, so it is unusual to find a typographic expert, for example, reading a newsgroup dedicated to discussing military memorandum formats, and vice versa.

Blogs are not structured around topics, by and large, but around personalities. The fact that Rand Simberg blogs primarily about space access doesn't mean that he won't indulge his other interests. Because of this, there is an immense cross-disciplinary polinization of ideas on blogs that doesn't occur in other formats. Experts in one field often read blogs written by experts in another, and find items that intrigue them. This sparks off a chain of discovery and allows far more broad and deep information to come together than, say, USENET does.

Further, blogs have both active and passive filtering mechanisms built into them. A blogger who proves untrustworthy loses his audience. A blogger who doesn't provide useful information does not gain, or cannot keep, his audience. InstaPundit and others act as a filter by pointing to interesting information on other blogs. Most blogs maintain blogrolls, directing users to related information. Bloggers link to each other (as well as to non-blog sources), and trackbacks further enhance the connectivity on related topics. The comment mechanisms on many blogs further enhance the discussion. Finally, the use of blogrolls tends to result in the formation of communities with related interests or worldviews, which enhances the information flow. In each of these mechanisms, the key point is that the blogger has to have something useful to say, or he gets filtered out of each of these mechanisms over time.

But USENET has another problem as well: it's text-based. Being unable to easily provide rich content, it is difficult to make a point which has visual elements. Consider trying to do this on USENET. Personal web pages, of course, can and still do provide this kind of rich content, but it is provided in an isolated medium. Yes, Google provides a way of finding this information, but it's not self-selecting in the way that blog links are. So while USENET provides great connectivity of information, but no filtering and no rich content, personal web pages provide very highly-filtered rich content, with no connectivity.

Email provides directed, highly-filtered connectivity, but is non-public, so only the sender and recipients ever see the content. And, again, this content is not easily made rich: it's primarily text-based. Trackbacks and links provide the openly-available two-way discussion path that email lacks. (And mailing lists, while more publically-available, frequently suffer from most of the drawbacks of USENET.)

Blogs, by providing all of these mechanisms, can do something that until now only television, newspapers and magazines could do: blogs provide rich content, publicly available, filtered and analyzed and readily found. It is this that makes blogs such a threat to mainstream media: blogs can do everything journalists can, but generally blogs bring a higher level of subject matter expertise to the topics they cover than can mainstream journalists.

Given this, what impact are blogs having, and will they have in the future, on political scandals and for that matter on campaigns in general? It is pretty clear that blogs are at the forefront of the CBS document forgeries. The history of the beginning of that story is largely told at the New York Post. Basically, after "Buckhead" at Free Republic raised a question, bloggers took off with it, calling in experts and making their own tests. This signals something critical: blogs are capable of killing a scandal if the sources are not absolutely accurate. There is simply too much expertise available when you start playing six degrees of separation for a scandal to get away with unnamed sources and innuendo any more.

This will make negative campaigning much more difficult in the future. The filtering mechanisms on blogs will drive partisans naturally into blogs with similar affinities, and these groups will eagerly pounce on anything provided by the other side. If the negative charges are factually false, they will be disproved in short order. On the other hand, if the charges are true, the scandal could grow more quickly than it has in the past. Remember, it was Matt Drudge who broke the Lewinsky scandal, and that was what amounts to a personal web page at the time, without a network of blogs and the experts they can bring to bear.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted is following another line of reasoning: using blog-like decentralized methods for intelligence analysis. It's certainly worth thinking about.

UPDATE (9/14): Read this post by Bill Quick at Daily Pundit, which has a well-reasoned take on the incentives of the mainstream media and the blogs. (hat tip: Kevin Murphy)

Too Funny not to Link To

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OK, this has to be the best take on the CBS forged documents yet. The mockery is fantastic.

I Feel a Draft

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Politics simultaneously repels and attracts me. On the one hand, there is a truly sordid and destructive aspect to our elections, where the attempts to destroy a candidate's political opponent drown out any kind of attempt to find the right way to move forward on the problems and opportunities that confront us. On the other hand, I love strategy, and there is a huge amount of strategy in campaigns: when and how to make what statements and proposals; which groups can be cleaved to your base or separated from your opponents; how to remove your opponent's ability to act without seeming ridiculous.

Frankly, Bush is a master politician. Where Clinton, also a master politician, used a bludgeon and a smile (Now, I wish I could say that my evil opponent who eats babies in his breakfast cereal agreed with me that motherhood and apple pie are good, but I just can't get over how he always disagrees with me on these fundamental decency issues.), Bush just smiles a lot, makes a few self-deprecating jokes, and then trips his opponents while they are running with knives. It never fails to amaze me when Bush lets his opponents go on for months about his National Guard service, for example, letting them build up an intricate and massive myth and sell, sell, sell it - only to then release all of his records that utterly demolish the myth in a way that wouldn't have happened if the "debate" hadn't moved beyond the purely technical aspects.

There is another opportunity that the Democrats are creating for Bush (besides this one) by pushing the draft idea. Brief recap: Democrats have been sponsoring bills and making statements that the draft will have to come back, then blaming George Bush for secretly planning to reinstate the draft. Dumb, but if you don't pay attention it might score points on the margins. The Democrats are pushing this harder now, with spam mailings to college kids that are frightening them and their parents.

But this is a very dangerous game, because it's pretty apparent that Selective Service will never again be used by the US, at least not in any forseeable future. So all Bush has to do is wait until this screeching becomes really noticable, then call for the abolition of the Selective Service. Something like this should do it:

"Democrats in the House and Senate, such as Charlie Rangel, have been calling for reinstituting the draft. Frankly, this is a dangerous idea. America's armed forces have been fighting our enemies around the world since we were viciously attacked on 9/11, and have done so with an amazingly small number of casualties, both of our forces and of the innocent women and children among which our enemies cower. This unprecedentedly low level of casualties is only possible because of the relentless and realistic training we instill in our long-service volunteers. This cannot be done with draftees, who leave the force just as they begin to become effective.

Really, though, it's worse than this. Since Jimmy Carter and the Democrat Congress started Selective Service registration in 1980, millions of young men have been compelled to register themselves with the Federal government, and the cost has been staggering. It is simply not possible to operate America's armed forces with draftees, and it's not moral to keep up the charade of registering young men for a draft that will never come.

And that is why I am asking the Congress to repeal the Selective Service Act and disband the draft boards forever."

Something like that, after the Democrats are in a frenzy about it, is the kind of thing that kills an opponent. Let their fangs grow long, then chop them off. It's what Bush excels at, and apparently the Democrats excel at falling for it. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted had similar thoughts last night.

UPDATE: John Hawkins succinctly addresses the possibility of a draft: "anyone who tells you there is going to be a draft is dumb as a brick or a liar who's trying to mislead you. In either case, if they tell you there's going to be a draft, you can safely stop paying attention to them."

The Best Laid Plans

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The Glittering Eye has a wonderful post about the salient characteristics of bureaucracy, Gammon's Law, and how that applies to issues like education and health care.

September 23, 2004

Uncommon Tongues

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George Bernard Shaw once famously described America and Britain as being "divided by a common language". When a "country" is united by different languages, it's far, far worse. (Hat tip: Pejmanesque)

New World, New Map, New Strategy

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Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map was the first serious attempt to redefine the world after 9/11, in much the way that "containment" redefined the world in the 1950's. I'm currently about 1/3 of the way through the book form, which is an expanded treatment of the original brief. In summary, Barnett posits that the Cold War rule sets of containment, collective security and mutually assured destruction (particularly once extended to the former USSR and China) ended the threat of great power war, leaving the world divided into two areas: the Core and the Gap. The difference between them is that the Core countries are globalizing, growing and interconnecting and ruled by a Kantian rule set, while the Gap countries are isolated, disconnected and failing.

The implications of this in terms of which rules apply in which places, and how to bring the world together so that everyone is in the core, in the hope of essentially ending poverty and war, are both deep and broad. And this mindset is taking over within the Pentagon, replacing the Cold War mindset. While I quibble somewhat with the PNM framework, it's really not on fundamental points: the PNM framework provides the necessary basis for policy formation in the Core states. (I'll have more on this after I finish PNM.)

It seems to me that the Pentagon has accepted the new world, but the State Department has not yet. In many ways the State Department is still acting like it's 9/10. Part of this has been institutional, and part of it has been a leadership problem from both Secretary Powell and President Bush. I don't know where Powell stands, but Bush by his actions seems to understand the new world that we are in. It remains, though, both to communicate this vision and to bring about consensus. I suspect that the largest block to developing a consensus will not be international, but domestic. At least until after the election, the Democrats are not willing to be serious about these issues.

If we can find a domestic consensus on how the world is working, and how we should approach it, I believe we can sell it abroad. Most of the resistance to the US policies since 9/11 within the Core nations seem to be based on a fear that the actions the US is taking within the Gap may not be limited to the Gap, and on a feeling that the other Core nations will lose access to resources and commercial contracts with Gap nations. Both of these concerns can be addressed, and I hope to see the President doing so soon.

September 22, 2004

Remember

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Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.

But fear naught.

Who Guessed Forgery Was so Funny?

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September 21, 2004

One Way to Tell...

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There's certainly one way to tell if CBS's apparently-forged memos were in fact created on an IBM Composer.

Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.

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It took me a few minutes to calm down enough not to spew a profanity-laden rant. In fact, I'm not there yet. Hold on a sec.

OK, that's better.

I suppose I should have seen this coming: comparing George Bush to Hitler isn't working, but there has to be something that not tortured quite enough tortured artists and Leftist idiots can do. How about this? (hat tip: The Wild Hunt)

I'm slowly coming around to Steph's way of seeing it: this is just so pathetic it's actually funny. I mean, if people don't vote the way you think they should, it can't be that you are off the deep end of moonbattery, and your head is so far up your ass you can see your tonsils, can it? No, no! It must be...Satan:

Now, since I've decided to go for outright mockery, I've called in my lovely wife.

Isn't it funny that it's "a tragedy in two acts"? At least they know they're going to lose, and lose badly, in November. And it's presented by the "Sacred Fools" Theater Company - well, at least they've got one right: they are fools. But they are honest: if you go to their site, they quite openly tell you "you are being lied to".

Oh, and while I'm at it, they need to fire the "artist" who made the poster: the invert pentagram on Bush's forehead doesn't have the proper orientation or aspect ratio to match the head it's purportedly attached to.

Now, if Bush is Satan, does that make Texas Hell? It would explain the summers. And Houston. And Eddie Bernice Johnson. Hey, my cats are cats from Hell! COOL!

They're going to have voter registration forms in the lobby. Now, imagine Steph talking with a really exaggerated East Texas accent:

"I was all set ta vote fer George Bush, but now that I know he's Satan, I guess I'll hafta go an' vote for John Kerry. He ain't Satan; he's just French. Well, mebbe I'll go on an' vote for Bush anyways."

If I lived in LA, it might be fun to go in costume. Nah; I don't want to give them any money, considering how they would use it.

What do you want to bet that if I put on a play with John Kerry dressed as a transvestite and talking with a fake French accent, I'd be the one they call intolerant and hateful? What would be the dialogue though? "I served in ze Viet Nam - but not on ze French side!"

Oh, forget it; they're not worth any more of my time.

Stories, Families and Dreams

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From BlackFive comes this stirring message of patriotism and hope, and most importantly of understanding of this war we are engaged upon, from a Marine helicopter pilot in Iraq.

Debate Summary

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Kerry did a better job than I expected. However, expect the ads within a few days showing him saying "I've never changed position on Iraq" followed by him stating multiple conflicting positions.

Bush did about what I expected. Not great; not terrible. Failed to put in a few zingers he could have. Shame that.

I should have had more to drink. I think I'll go fix that.

Kerry is a smarmy ass. Bush is not as articulate as he should be.

Kerry didn't do well enough, I think, to move the polls in his direction, which is disastrous for his campaign since he's behind. We'll find out in a few days.

September 20, 2004

Backgrounders on the Caucasus Situation

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After the terrible massacre at the school in Breslan, N. Ossetia, more information on the situation in the Caucasus is sorely needed. Fortunately, Dan Darling comes through at Winds of Change. And Rantburg has suggestions on Russia's options for response.

It seems to me that Russia's options are actually pretty limited. They don't have the military to do what we are doing, and neither we nor the Europeans have enough surplus force to fight on Russia's behalf, even though it would help us long-term. Russia doesn't have the economy nor the time to build up a military that could fight cleanly and win as we do. So I'd say the options are these:

• Small Surrender - As Dan Darling points out, the Russians tried to surrender Chechnya and it didn't work.
• Big Surrender - The Russians could give up the whole of the Caucasus (well, that of it that they control), in the hopes that they'll be eaten last. Except that this would result in Putin being eaten first, and he's not going to take that. Too, this would be a massive disaster for the non-jihadi world.
• Occupation - Much of the Caucasus is voluntarily Russian - including N. Ossetia - and what isn't is largely occupied. The Russians could go into the Pankisi Gorge, which would help them short term (at a likely horrible casualty toll) but would lead to real long-term problems, because it's questionable if they could win a war with Georgia, especially if the US backs Georgia.
• Brutality - The Russians could crack down - hard - including not allowing Chechens or Arabs anywhere in Russia except the "traditionally Muslim" areas, including internal isolation, much wanton killing and the like. The problem with this is that it's unlikely to work, unless Russia is willing to depopulate the Muslim areas the way that Stalin solved the internal dissent problem. If they're willing, and unafraid to cross borders to do it, this would likely work in time. At a huge cost, but it would probably work.
• Annihilation - Russia could destroy the Pankisi Gorge and Chechnya, along with any other areas that get rebellious, with nuclear weapons. They could kill any Muslim found in Russia. They could, in short, commit genocide on a mass scale. I don't really like to contemplate this option very much, because genocide is repellant to me.

First, the Russians would be able to get US money and expertise to transform their military into a force capable of waging the kind of war that can actually defeat the insurrection by killing off the enemy combatants without leveling whole towns or otherwise turning the neutral population against them. Second, the Russians would get an inside line on all kinds of US technical, political and economic aid, which would greatly help their economy as well as their war efforts. Third, the Russians would get an in-depth intelligence sharing in both military and law-enforcement arenas, which again would help them immensely. Fourth, almost everything they'd have to give up (except pride) would actually be to their benefit.

Consider: By rotating troops through Iraq (and possibly other countries later, though most emphatically not Afghanistan or Pakistan), they would get experience working with the US in a combat theater that they could take back to their battles in the Caucasus. The capabilities they gain from this experience would be precisely those they now lack: how to fight a pinpoint war, so as to avoid angering the populace into supporting the terrorists.

While the Russians would have to give up lucrative nuclear contracts in Iran, the US could (and I believe would) compensate them for the loss of revenue in exchange for the intelligence value and the setback to Iran's nuclear program, making this a neutral matter from a monetary standpoint. Indeed, canny Russian negotiators would demand the US help to train and largely pay for Russian nuclear scientists and engineers to upgrade Russian plants and secure Russian nuclear materials. The US would likely consider this a bargain!

The Russians would lose diplomatic influence in the EU core states of France and Germany, but would gain influence with Britain, Poland, Italy and the US (among others) which would be more directly to Russia in any case.

The Russians would likely be required to wage a less brutal war in the Caucasus (to the extent that they can), but this is to their benefit in that it alienates the local population less than a savage war in any case.

It goes without saying that this would be a big win for the US as well, so I won't say it in any more detail.

Time to Say It

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With the available evidence - of which a small fraction is here, here, and here - it is now beyond reasonable doubt that Dan Rather and CBS are peddling forged documents as a key element of libelous charges against a sitting President; and I suspect that they not only know that these documents are fake, but that their refusal to provide indications of their sources and the provenance of the memos shows that the true source is either not credible as a witness to their authenticity, or is in fact a Kerry campaign or DNC operative or a CBS employee. Of the first part, that the documents are false, I am certain. Of the second, that CBS knows they are false, the only alternative is that CBS is complete unable to determine the credibility of information that comes to them (which makes them useless as an information source in and of itself). Of the third, that the documents' source would discredit the documents' authenticity, I am reasonably certain. Otherwise, CBS would have produced the source (given that there is no harm to the source if the documents are genuine).

Had CBS admitted the possibility of error, and made a forthright attempt to investigate (including the identification of the provenance of the memos), they might have been able to come out of this looking silly but not complicit. As it is, they've attempted to bury the charges under misdirection they would never stand for had it come from any elected official.

Dan Rather is either lying or a fool. CBS has no further credibility as a news organization, and any information whose only source is CBS must henceforth be assumed true until and unless another source confirms it from a separate line of evidence.

Wait a Minute!

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LGF did a Photoshop experiment: take one of the CBS memos, and change the levels. The crumples used as part of the aging process in the forgery show up. But, if this was photocopied as part of the aging process, wouldn't the crumples not show up on the photocopy? It seems to me that just the distortion would show up. (I don't have a photocopier and scanner near to hand, so I cannot check directly.)

If photocopying gets rid of the direct evidence of crumpling, then this was the original document presented by the forger to CBS, which means that whomever was the source for CBS (or at CBS; I don't think we can rule that out) was almost certainly the originator of the document as well.

September 19, 2004

Look at the Map, People!

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You want to know why we're going to be in Iraq for decades, regardless of who wins the Presidential election? Look at a map! (It was Iraq or Egypt, and besides not being nearly as immediate of a threat, try occupying 80 million people (vice 25 million) - and trying getting international support!) Gerard Van der Leun lays it out in words in an excellent post taking a clear-eyed look at the strategic importance of our presence in Iraq.

Morality and Mind

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There's an interesting discussion on morality at Steph's place, and an interesting trio of posts at the Glittering Eye, Brad DeLong's site and Matthew Yglesias's site. They aren't really closely related, but they are interesting when taken together.

September 18, 2004

The Buck Stops Over There Somewhere

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John Kerry's campaign is in enough trouble that they are already looking for scapegoats. Kerry, rather than uniting his staff around a common mission, is blaming them for the problems. Now, that's leadership.

Or something.

(hat tip to InstaPundit, who has much more)

Corporate Liability

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Due Diligence has an exceptional post on why corporations have limited liability for their shareholders. This is the kind of issue that is too-frequently neglected by citizens in capitalist countries, and the neglect of these issues is what creates the kind of environment where communism can gain support. Well, well worth reading.