perfidy

Rocket Jones links to Rocketman, who has a reader's guest post on how to get into space for cheap. It's a long one, but very informative and chock full of space goodness.

I've talked about the DCX here before - it was the one moment in my life when I thought real space travel was around the corner. Then NASA killed it and I went back to my normal, existential despair. Kelly does an excellent job of putting it all in perspective, and gives us his own ideas on getting to orbit. 
 

Or maybe not: 112,000 new jobs added to the economy, and the unemployment rate is down to 5.6 % - lowest in over two years.

[wik] A later version of the AP story adds this tidbit:

Some economists think hiring really is occurring in the economy, but it is not being reflected in the Labor Department's monthly survey of business payrolls. In the separate survey of households, employment jumped by 496,000 last month.

The household survey counts self-employed workers and contract workers, which are increasing. The survey of businesses does not.

Space.com is reporting that NASA plans to give $227.4 million to Kistler Aerospace for a test launch of the company's K-1 reusable launch vehicle. NASA is looking (finally) to the private sector to provide launch services for support of the ISS. Given that the Shuttle is out of service, they really don't have much choice - but this is still a positive development. Kistler originally began development of the K-1 to meet an anticipated large demand for satellite launches to low Earth Orbit. When that never quite happened, the company hit a bad stretch, and filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last summer. So, their lobbying efforts have probably paid off just in the nick of time.

The K-1 is designed to be a fully reusable, two-stage liquid-fueled rocket.
NASA expects to get flight data from the test launch for its money, and expects that if the K-1 pans out, it could have applications beyond Space Station resupply missions.

I'm not sure how much a vehicle like this will actually lower launch costs - much will depend on how expensive and difficult it is to prepare the vehicle for subsequant launches. (That's a major problem for the "reusable" shuttle orbiter, which costs millions of dollars to recondition after every flight.) There are two very good things about this news - it may set a precedent for going to private space companies for launch services; and it will give us good feedback for developing new launch vehicles. The United States has not introduced a new launch vehicle since the Shuttle, and we need to get moving.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club draws an interesting analogy between the hunt for Columbian druglord Pablo Escobar and the hunt for Saddam and (hopefully) bin Laden. Our efforts to nab Escobar through traditional law enforcement methods were stymied by the thoroughly whipped Columbian government. Using Columbian intermediaries was equally futile. Then:

the Americans had a flash of inspiration. Since they could not get to Escobar because he stood atop a "mountain" of corrupt retainers, including many in the Colombian military, they would "tear down the mountain".

They retasked intelligence to build up a map of Escobar's empire: the lawyers he used, the identities of his key lieutenants, the location of his family, the names of his key enforcers. Armed with this information it is suggested, but it was never proved, that the US facilitated the formation of a paramilitary group called "Los Pepes" (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar) which embarked on a program of tearing down the mountain. Escobar's retainers were killed at the clip of a half a dozen a day. His palatial villas were torched. His lawyers were liquidated until in desperation, some not only publicly resigned but took to living the life of beachcombers in isolated areas, the better to stay out of the line of fire. Burned out of every home, Escobar's family eventually sought quarters under Colombian government protection. Their phones were tapped. They attempted to flee to Germany, only to be turned back due to US diplomatic pressure, upon landing, and returned to their wired guesthouse in Colombia, spending nearly three days in an airplane. Eventually, Escobar, who once lived in villas with artificial lakes, serviced by harems of prostitutes and surrounded by hundreds of bodyguards, was reduced to camping out in mountain cabins with a village laundress for company. He was shuttled around, towards the end by a loyal bodyguard in a taxicab (presaging Saddam's fate), cornered at last in a small townhouse and summarily executed on its roof.

These methods worked again with Saddam, and administration officials seem ever more confident that the net is closing on bin Laden as well. For those who still think that traditional law enforcement methods are sufficient to fight the war on terror, this is one more slap to the head.

Four years after being kicked to the curb by the label he founded-- Arista Records, superstud Clive Davis finds himself back in the saddle as head of the North American music operation of BMG, owner of Arista. His erstwhile successor, L.A. Reid, has been ousted by the accountants due to an inability to make money off multiplatinum acts such as Pink.

(How do you not make money off of Pink's second album? That shit was everywhere, and I guarantee you her contract is not that favorable to her own interests. L.A. screwed up bad.)

Look at my last post about Tower Records, then read the story about Davis and see if you can spot the trouble. Back? Ok.

What seems like good news for Clive now could turn out to be not so good for anyone else. The major labels are in the same trouble the major retailers are, which is why BMG and Sony are in talks to merge their music operations. Obviously Davis has been brought on board to guide the music unit through the merger, and about the time the whole thing comes crashing down he'll semi-retire with millions of dollars and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

"What", you say? I say this: Sony and BMG are merging their music wings out of desperation because recorded music has ended its fifty-year run of profitability. Sooner or later there will be one or two major labels releasing 90% of the high-charting albums in the US and all the interesting stuff will happen around the giants' feet. The majors will still put out Britney and No Doubt and P.Diddy, but the interesting stuff, the good music for music's sake will happen even more exclusively in basements and garages, shabby offices, and out of the trunks of cars. Music will become local, and scenes will communicate via the inter-web. The transition will be ugly: radio will suck worse, the RIAA will kick like a mule with the DT's, mainstream distribution channels will become closed to smaller-name labels and bands, and great artists will be dropped like a sack of hammers. But the outcome will be great: awesome music, there for the taking for cheap or free, if only you know where to find it.

GeekLethal has tipped me off that Tower Records will finally seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having run out of time, credit, and willing buyers.

Tower is the victim of several forces: the overall decline in recorded-music sales over the past five years; an ill-timed expansion just as sales peaked; rumors of poor financial management; and an inability of management to respond to the changing marketplace. The sow is smaller, and Tower is now sucking hind teat. So to speak.

Some of you may remember that Tower faced bankruptcy a couple years ago and had to close a few of its trademark superstores. By selling off their Japanese division and closing some US branches, they managed to stay alive, but at a cost. I personally felt the loss acutely, because the Tower Records on the corner of Newbury and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston was my dealer of choice of deep-catalog jazz and world music.

And that's the crying shame. Alone among the big stores, Tower was dedicated to carrying extensive back catalogs and relatively obscure artists along with the Top-40 glitz. They always had a wide selection of Jimmy Smith recordings produced by Rudy van Gelder, for example, and usually had a number of Sun Ra's less orthodox offerings as well. Unglamorous music, but wonderful stuff I was happy to buy. Unfortunately for Tower, these days such diversity on the retail side simply means tying up more capital in slowly-moving stock and eventually it killed them. Nowadays it just doesn't pay to carry the weird stuff.

Paradoxically, the opposite may hold for record labels. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolutions points to the bloodbath currently happening in the classical-recording world. All the big labels are shuttering their classical units because the cost of producing yet another recording of Mahler only to sell four thousand copies has now become outrageous. And yet the small labels offering weird music (Boulez, Xenakis, Scriabin) thrive.

What does this all mean? As Cowen says, "Let's not confuse 'good for the suits' with 'good for the consumer.' Big chains like Tower may go the way of the dodo, but that just means the model is dying, not the business underneath.

Six day old blog Siberian Light lets us know what those wacky Japanese are up to. Apparently, turning entire Chinese luxury hotels into giant orgies is not enough. The kinky Japs have taken this show on the road. (The soundtrack for the video would have to be Soul Coughing's Bus to Beelzebub.)

One would think that the police crackdown would have forced other orgy organizers in the metropolitan area to go underground, but that's apparently not the case. ...one organizer decided to go public, so to speak, by offering a completely new thrill: He chartered a bus, staffed it with hookers from the pink trade, solicited male participants, and then proceeded to run two-hour circuits of the city's while the male and female passengers emulated the same rush-hour crush they undergo on the morning commuter trains --- while completely naked and horizontal.

For his 30,000 yen [ $284.38 ] tour fee, the reporter claims he exhausted his supply of condoms, having made it with four different females during the two-hour tour. "A bargain," he remarks with a grin.

Indeed.

Abdul Khan, who just the other day confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, has been pardoned by President Musharraf. (hat tip: National Security Blog.)

Needless to say, many people will be a little miffed that Khan is getting off so lightly. Khan is a national hero, the father of the Islamic bomb. Musharraf was likely in a tight spot with this one, but I can only hope we get some useful intelligence out of this.

Over here, you can get your very own Hoser ID Card. Just like mine: 

Be afraid, be very afraid:

Li'l G n'R

I could list out the specific policy tests I'm referencing and not go down the "incompetent" route. I guess I should do that; it's only fair that I do that. Conclusions need to be held.

But:

1. You are giving the politicians credit for winning a war. The military did that; the politicians don't do anything more than point the direction. This is a wash. We don't judge on the success of the war. We judge on the underlying reasoning.

2. You characterize the economy as "improving". Well, for who?

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots

Apparently not for anybody who isn't a major-league investor. The scariest thing about the chart is that is does NOT reflect the jobs that were lost DURING the recession...so we are way behind where we were.

Why is this recession not generating any jobs or increases in wages for average americans? That is the big question.

The GOP answer is: Just wait -- you'll see. It'll work.

I think we just handed a huge chunk of social security money to the investment class in this country so we could create jobs for regular people. They took the money, and there's nothing to show for it. What is the time frame on tax stimulus, anyway? We certainly can't go by the estimates given by the GOP on when we'd see jobs created. _Every_ one of those estimates has turned out to be pie in the sky. Every Bush budget, for that matter, has been pie in the sky.

Given the failure (or at a minimum, dramatic underperformance) of the supply-side tax approach, what is an appropriate response?

I read somewhere today that the very richest amongst us have more or less convinced themselves that tax cuts for the wealthy really are the best way to gernerate growth.

How should we test whether or not this is true?

I'll write a little more in the next day or two, describing specific points of evaluation. I find this process interesting; I wrote a while back on the "Concerned Citizens Primer". It's time for Buckethead to make his case, and me to make mine.

I must confess that I don't like 9/11 being used as a catch-all excuse for every mis-step.

Ross and others might be interested in this.

James at Outside the Beltway has a comprehensive roundup of commentary about yesterday's primaries and caucuses. Lots of good "what does it all mean" to chew on.

The same two Cubans who tried to reach America with a floating Chevy flatbed truck are trying again with a 1959 Buick.

Marciel Basanta Lopez and Luis Gras Rodriguez, who were sent back to Cuba in July after they failed to reach Florida in a converted 1951 Chevy pickup, were allegedly at the helm of the newest vehicle-boat conversion... Relatives in Cuba told Basanta's cousin, Kiriat Lopez, who lives in Lake Worth, that they knew the men were planning a second escape attempt. "My cousin isn't crazy. He wants to be free," Lopez told the newspaper. "That's how crazy he is."

The more astute and alert amongst our legions of loyal readers will have noticed that the link to Phil Dennison's blog Catch Me If You Can has moved to the "cronies" category of our blogroll. If you didn't notice, shame on you. Phil and his wife came to the Superbowl Chili Party we threw last weekend, and as soon as we met, became eligible for the "cronies" appellation. Phil's a cool guy, even if he is a vegetarian, and you should go read his blog.

I have some comments on Ross’ last post.

Foreign Policy:

Why, then, has Bush's response been so different to the same intelligence reports? Clinton, viewing, the exact same information, chooses to remain at arm's length from Iraq. Bush sets off to war. Bush has 9/11 looming large...but that's what Afghanistan was about.

Bush’s response has been different because every previous president found it politically expedient to ignore the threat. 9/11 makes that more difficult, though you seem up to the challenge. Afghanistan was about 9/11, but it didn’t end there. We still need to hunt al Qaida everywhere else (including Iraq) and then hunt down those who make terror possible – the state sponsors (including Iraq.) It is a war on terror, not on al Qaida. Hunting for bin Laden isn't enough - he is only one instance of the class of terrorism. We need to do everything in our power to eliminate that threat. We've been hit by terrorism incrementally over the last thirty years. 9/11 was only the worst. Letting the problem grow (as five presidents in a row did) only makes it worse. Terrorism is immoral, unethical, antithetical to everything good about civilization, and frankly evil. Hunting bin Laden is merely expedient. We need to stamp out terrorism, and that's a hard enough road without apologists for terror getting in the way.

A necessary war in Afghanistan, and a stupid, wasteful one in Iraq. The entire world holds Bush (and to an extent America), in very low esteem at the moment. Nobody was fooled by the pre-war WMD crap, and it turns out that there was good reason not to be fooled. His current attempts to run away from the considered opinions of his own administration is embarrassing for the country.

Everyone in the world, including the French, was convinced that Iraq had WMD. It is disingenuous for you to suggest that all those farseeing anti-Americans had it right all along. And I’m sure the people of Iraq thank you for calling their liberation wasteful. WMD was never the only reason we invaded Iraq. Humanitarian reasons, violations of the cease fire agreement, threat to other nations, etc. ad nauseum. That the rest of the world thinks ill of us reflects badly on them, not us. We liberated a nation from a brutal tyrant; they opposed it. Which side do you want to be on? And now we have evidence that the French were opposing the war for oil money. Screw them. Saddam killed on average 12,000 people a year. We saved 9,000 so far by invading, and could have saved 9,000 more if we’d invaded the summer before instead of tap dancing with the UN. And why are you embarrassed? You’re Canadian.

Bush is blaming the CIA for feeding him bad information about Iraq. He's also saying that those intelligence reports have been around for a long time, and they've stayed consistent. Fine -- let's assume that's true. Bush gets his information from an inner circle of advisors. He doesn't read the reports directly; he doesn't know what they say. It's highly probably that there was quite a bit of spin put on the information Bush got. The simplest explanation for the whole situation is that some of his closest advisors _didn't_ see justification in the intelligence reports, but were willing to bet that when we got there, we'd find the evidence. The bet didn't pay off. Bush was betrayed by his advisors; they made a decision that's supposed to be made by a President, in full view of the facts. They made the decision because they screwed around with the facts they presented Bush.

I refer you to the Keegan article I linked earlier for some info on how intelligence works. Kay insists that no one was pressuring anyone to color their reports. Ever since the Church commission back in the seventies, our intelligence capabilities have been gutted. We have had to rely on sigint almost entirely. Now, we are supremely good at signals intelligence, satellite reconnaissance and the like. But good intelligence requires human spies, on the ground where we need to know things. We haven’t had that in over a quarter century. So the fact that the intelligence estimates were off is no surprise. But we were also getting information from France, Britain and other sources that all pointed in the same direction. That was what we based our conclusions on. Further, capability is not the only factor in weighing a threat. The other half is intentions – and we know that the Iraqis had that.

But this is all bullshit, because you’re arguing over why we went to war; or more specifically, was this one reason enough to go to war? There were other reasons, and in the end are you pissed that we got rid of Saddam, just because you weren’t satisfied with the decision making process? It was entirely legal – there was a congressional authorization, and then Bush sent in the troops. What did the war achieve – is that a good thing? If you think that leaving Saddam in power would have been a good thing, then maybe your arguments about WMD would make sense.
Environment:

Disagrees with conclusions on global warming, climate change, and so forth. His response? Cut the funding for research. Chewed up and spit out Christie Todd Whitman, who went into the job as EPA administrator thinking that she'd have some impact on policy. All decisions were made before Bush even took office. Maybe God'll sort us all out in the Rapture.

Is everything that much more polluted since Bush took office? Have you noticed the thicker smog, and Bush’s little minions spraying CFC’s on your lawn? The same environmental laws are still there. We are still far less polluted than we were ten, twenty, or forty years ago. Disagreeing with global warming is a cardinal sin, apparently. Oh, and he’s a fundamentalist so he must be wrong. That’s rank bigotry.

Economy:

Has attempted "stimulation" with tax cuts. Negligible effects on the economy, and massive destruction to the federal budget. The long term prospects for the federal government are so bad, it will inhibit the us economy, particularly by scaring off foreign investors, who prop up the government's borrowing habits.

The economy went south before he took office. The stimulus package has had results – the economy is doing better than when he took office. It takes time for the economy to recover from a recession. It doesn’t happen overnight. Deficits are not as bad as you suggest, though I agree that they should be lower. The best way to lower deficits is to lower spending. And that means that you can’t have all your liberal programs.

Here's the biggest mistake you make. You presume that the tax cuts mean that people have "money in their pockets". That's just plain wrong. The tax cuts didn't go to you and me, my friend. They didn't go to the regular people in this country. The vast majority of those dollars went back into the pockets of people who don't need them. People who are already vigorously trying to get around the tax code, to avoid paying _any_ share, let alone a fair share. People who have armies of lawyers devoted to keeping everything they can.

Well, I got to keep more of my money thanks to the tax cuts. I am regular people. Or at least my wife is. You can send your money in, but I’d like to keep mine. We certainly need fundamental tax reform, and I’ve talked about that before.

Bush's casual destruction of the finances of the federal government is truly the greatest security threat facing this country. It turns out that the $200 Billion is doing this war on the cheap; there are serious problems with supplies. In other words, it's gonna cost more in the future. The American government needs to be in a fiscal position to finance necessary actions around the world. Bush is screwing that up, massively. Of course, we could just print more money, right? That'll fix it.

You are complaining that we won’t have enough money to finance a war you oppose? You should be happy. Deficits in 1943 were a third of GDP. Now they are well under 5%. It’s not that big a problem. The government is not going to have its credit rating reduced. We will have the money we need, if for no other reason than the economy will improve and provide more revenue. Greatest security threat? We’re running up the credit card a little, and you think that’s a bigger problem than someone trying to kill us? Terrorism is a reality we have to deal with.

Political Climate

More partisan and divisive and STUPID than it has ever been. The reason? This white house is not interested in discussions. The "smart guys" have already made the decisions. Having international embarrassments like Tom Delay in power doesn't help, either.

I didn’t notice Bush getting up on a stage and insulting the Democratic candidates. I don’t see young republicans waving signs saying Kerry=Hitler. And btw, you think Tom Delay is worse than Chappaquiddick Ted? And you say that Republicans are making the political climate worse when you say this:

Every action Bush has taken has been rooted in one of the following: Making his rich buddies vastly richer with tax cuts, engaging in experimentation with neoconservative foreign policy, pandering to the (relatively) conservative base with wedge issues, and selling access to the donor class. Virtually every domestic policy initiative he has engaged in has been a failure… Most GOP attacks on the Democrats this fall will center on their "hate" for Bush. Whatever...it's not exactly misplaced, to the extent that it exists. The GOP will tell its base that Democrats therefore hate them, as well. The dirty secret is that there are Republicans out there who are honorable, who are fiscally conservative, and who adhere to principle. The crooks in the white house won't have anything to do with those guys.

Well, as I mentioned in my last post, that kind of thing doesn’t exactly contribute to reasoned discourse. It’s not a dirty secret that there are honorable Republicans, they’re half the fucking population.

Ross, I have no problem with the fact that you disagree with me, or with the administration on any number of policy issues. I will try to convince you (and vice versa) of the proper course to be taken.

What bothers me is the presumption - which you share with a wide swath of the liberal side of the political spectrum - that Republicans and conservatives are acting with malicious intent. Your admission that, "of course there are a couple honorable Republicans" is a cover for your blanket condemnation of the rest of them. Is it too much for you to believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and the others are acting in what they conceive to be the best interests of the nation? And that your disagreement with them doesn't make them crooks, liars, betrayers, and generally consumed with greed and a desire to blow up the little brown people?

While you talk in your subtext post about issues, you fail to do any kind of convincing when your premise for every policy argument is that Bush and his advisors (and, by extension, everyone who agrees with them) are stupid, venal or malicious. Even when backing off of one Bush insult, you lay on two more. You're not going to convince me of anything when you're calling me a mendacious greedy idiot between the lines. So, no, I wasn't protesting too much.

The Financial Times is reporting on expected American troop withdrawals from Europe. Washington is planning to cut the European presence by one-third, or about 30,000 people, the bulk of them from der Vaterland.

Earlier reportage predicted a redeployment eastward, building huge new facilities in Poland and other Warsaw Pact survivor states. The plan now seems to be to establish a series of small, spartan bases there, but with a tiny permanent presence and designed to expand rapidly if necessary.

The funny thing is that no one at all will be happy with this decision. The obvious casualties of a dramatic troop withdrawal from Germany would be the local economies associated with providing goods and services to soldiers. But it's not just bars and bordellos that would feel the pinch: every restaurant, cab driver and liquor store within 5 kilometers of an American kaserne is going to get hurt. Some businesses never recovered after the drawdowns in the '90s.

So small local merchants will be unhappy at a reduction in the American presence. But the Green/Commie/Left/Pacifists will be overjoyed, right? Wrong. Euro-hippies will exult at first without GIs running about, sweeping away their women or causing the odd fracas. They will soon find, however, that without soldiers to beat up the Poizei will be able to focus their considerable ass-kicking energies back onto the frenzied Left.

What to do with those 30,000 withdrawn soldiers is a question mark for the time being. But ultimately the United States cannot make strategic decisions like where to station an Army division based on the needs of foreign whores and barkeeps. The US need only consider the needs of good ol' American whores and barkeeps.

Tacitus is writing about his trip to Rwanda last year and in the process reenforcing my belief that, if there is a God, he's a real son of a bitch.

The little parenthetical that followed "can't read" was intended to alter the meaning of that, to "doesn't read anything that's given to him". Of course Bush can read; you can't barely graduate from Yale without being able to read something. Unless it's a complicated something.

I get to be much more ridiculous in comment threads, don't I?

Methinks Steve doth protest too much.

Ask yourselves this: Bush is blaming the CIA for feeding him bad information about Iraq. He's also saying that those intelligence reports have been around for a long time, and they've stayed consistent. Fine -- let's assume that's true. Why, then, has Bush's response been so different to the same intelligence reports? Clinton, viewing, the exact same information, chooses to remain at arm's length from Iraq. Bush sets off to war. Bush has 9/11 looming large...but that's what Afghanistan was about.

Bush gets his information from an inner circle of advisors. He doesn't read the reports directly; he doesn't know what they say. It's highly probably that there was quite a bit of spin put on the information Bush got. The simplest explanation for the whole situation is that some of his closest advisors _didn't_ see justification in the intelligence reports, but were willing to bet that when we got there, we'd find the evidence.

The bet didn't pay off. Bush was betrayed by his advisors; they made a decision that's supposed to be made by a President, in full view of the facts. They made the decision because they screwed around with the facts they presented Bush.

Similarly, on the economy, Bush has been screwed by his advisors again. Three budget years in a row they've predicated rosiness, as far as the rosy eye could see. None of it has come to pass.

While economists agree that there is _some_ stimulus provided by tax cuts, the real question is, how much? On that question, there is massive disagreement. The vast majority of economists don't think there's all that much, and judging by the state of the economy, they're right.

The Bushies predicted invading Iraq would cost around $50 Billion, back before it happened. Looks like it's going to be north of $200 Billion at this point, when all is said and done. This leaves you with two choices. Either they are completely freakin' incompetent at estimates, or they were deliberately lowballing their estimate (otherwise known as telling lies to get what you want).

Bush's casual destruction of the finances of the federal government is truly the greatest security threat facing this country. It turns out that the $200 Billion is doing this war on the cheap; there are serious problems with supplies. In other words, it's gonna cost more in the future. The American government needs to be in a fiscal position to finance necessary actions around the world. Bush is screwing that up, massively. Of course, we could just print more money, right? That'll fix it.

Here's the biggest mistake you make. You presume that the tax cuts mean that people have "money in their pockets". That's just plain wrong. The tax cuts didn't go to you and me, my friend. They didn't go to the regular people in this country. The vast majority of those dollars went back into the pockets of people who don't need them. People who are already vigorously trying to get around the tax code, to avoid paying _any_ share, let alone a fair share. People who have armies of lawyers devoted to keeping everything they can.

Let's stop talking about taxpayers as if we're all in the same class, the same boat. We aren't. I won't say much more this point, except the following: When you look at the IRS statistics that show the rise in average constant dollars income over the past twenty years, they are highly deceptive. They're deceptive because they show the average, not the median. Everyone who knows anything about math knows that the very first thing you do when you want to lie with statistics or hide something is use averages instead of means. I won't say the IRS is deliberately doing this; they're not. Bush, on the other hand, has happily pushed "averages" at the American public, who presume that they can rely on it as a guide.

Every action Bush has taken has been rooted in one of the following: Making his rich buddies vastly richer with tax cuts, engaging in experimentation with neoconservative foreign policy, pandering to the (relatively) conservative base with wedge issues, and selling access to the donor class. Virtually every domestic policy initiative he has engaged in has been a failure.

Environment: Terrible. Disagrees with conclusions on global warming, climate change, and so forth. His response? Cut the funding for research. Chewed up and spit out Christie Todd Whitman, who went into the job as EPA administrator thinking that she'd have some impact on policy. All decisions were made before Bush even took office. Maybe God'll sort us all out in the Rapture.

Economy: Terrible. Has attempted "stimulation" with tax cuts. Negligible effects on the economy, and massive destruction to the federal budget. The long term prospects for the federal government are so bad, it will inhibit the us economy, particularly by scaring off foreign investors, who prop up the government's borrowing habits.

Foreign Policy: A necessary war in Afghanistan, and a stupid, wasteful one in Iraq. The entire world holds Bush (and to an extent America), in very low esteem at the moment. Nobody was fooled by the pre-war WMD crap, and it turns out that there was good reason not to be fooled. His current attempts to run away from the considered opinions of his own administration is embarrassing for the country.

Political Climate: More partisan and divisive and STUPID than it has ever been. The reason? This white house is not interested in discussions. The "smart guys" have already made the decisions. Having international embarrassments like Tom Delay in power doesn't help, either.

Most GOP attacks on the Democrats this fall will center on their "hate" for Bush. Whatever...it's not exactly misplaced, to the extent that it exists. The GOP will tell its base that Democrats therefore hate them, as well. The dirty secret is that there are Republicans out there who are honorable, who are fiscally conservative, and who adhere to principle. The crooks in the white house won't have anything to do with those guys.

This morning on the way to work, I saw a funeral procession. It was composed of:

1. The Hearse
2. A Limousine
3. A Ford Taurus

A very good article from a very smart guy. I'm reading his history of the First World War, and it's cracking good history.

Loyal reader #0009 Mapgirl has pointed us at a Guardian article on the horrors contained within the borders of North Korea:

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonizing death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

There can be little argument that the nightmare masquerading as a sovereign government in North Korea is the most hellish, brutal and perverse on Earth. The obscenely surreal rhetoric that issues forth from Pyongyang only gives us the tiniest glimpse into what life is like in that benighted country. This picture is from a composite satellite image of the earth at night: 

You can see where light and prosperity end at the northern border of South Korea. Political, moral and literal darkness. The North Koreans are devoting much of their energy to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and delivery systems for same. They already have missiles capable of hitting Japan, and soon they may have missiles that could deliver a nuclear warhead to the west coast of the United States. (No thanks to Pakistan) The consensus is that North Korea may already have two or more bombs.

That nuclear capability makes the problem of North Korea much more complicated than that we faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, or than we might face in Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia. As well, even though in a conventional fight the North is no match for the South, let alone the US and the South together - a surprise attack combined with the use of nuclear or chemical weapons could wreak enormous destruction before the eventual defeat of the North. Seoul, the capitol of South Korea, is within artillery range of the North.

Perhaps the best hope we have is that the system will collapse under the weight of its own delusions and there will be a peaceful anschluss with the south. American strategy has been to angle for the isolation of the North, possibly in the hopes of accelerating this process. But there are several complicating factors even with this slim hope. First, the government in the North is by any metric we could use completely insane. Desperation on top of insanity might provoke an attack if the regime and its Dear Leader felt there was nothing to lose. Second, China's strategic considerations make all outcomes doubtful. China's desire to be a regional hegemon and not have a close US ally on their border will be a big factor however it plays out - in the event of a Northern collapse and especially if there is fighting. Third, the completely understandable (meaning four, for those who followed the Winds of Change debate) reluctance of the South Koreans to do anything to provoke the raving lunatics next door.

North Korea is an integral part of the world market in WMD, and American stands to suffer should these weapons get into the hands of some well heeled 'splodeydopes in the Middle East. The brutality of the regime, and the suffering of the North Koreans should put Kim on everyone's better dead list. That doesn't stop Jimmy Carter from hanging out with the Dear Leader, of course. They all have free health care, you know. It's hard to see what anyone can do to solve the problem without massive 'collateral damage' - to the South, to Japan, or even to the US. Yet to leave it alone is unacceptable for both moral and national security reasons. I think the only practical course is to wait - but it is a galling choice.

Over in the comments to my recent post of exit poll results, Ross had this to say:

So we can have more Bush? Give me a break. The man can't add (budgeting), can't spell (never written a damn thing), and can't read (intelligence or treasury reports).

Three straight years of being dead wrong on budgets. Three years of being dead wrong on the economy. Federal revenue is down by 25%, and spending is up by more than 25%. You can bitch about 9/11 all you want to, but that fact is that the GDP hasn't shifted around all that much. What's changed is the massive tax breaks given out, in the name of vote buying.

He's not exactly a "buck stops here" kind of President, either. You can be honestly wrong about something, but you're still wrong. Bush's style is to blame everyone else; the GOP's style is to eat that crap up.

There is no question that John Kerry would make a significantly better President than Bush. So would Edwards, and so would Clark or Dean, for that matter.

Really Ross? No question? I think there are many here who would question that. As I've said before, questioning his policies is one thing - and I do that myself. But making ridiculous accusations of illiteracy is, well, ridiculous. This is the same kind of rhetoric that got you involved in that frank exchange of views over at Winds of Change.

I'll give you wrong on budgets - he has spent far too much on programs that you advocate. He's half wrong on the economy - he increased farm subsidies, steel tariffs and other departures from free trade thinking are all very bad - though not disastrous. Clinton doesn't get the credit for the good economy in the late nineties, and Bush shouldn't get the blame for a cyclical downturn in the economy that started before he entered office. Tax cuts are recognized by nearly all non-Marxist economists as an economic stimulus. They may argue about their efficacy related to other measures, but there is little argument that they are a stimulus. And they are cuts, which help people because their money is in their pockets and isn't feeding the beast in Washington. That revenue is down is not a bad thing, and in any event will go back up with the economy. We do need to control spending.

And I won't stop "bitching" about 9/11 - because it is *the* issue confronting us right now. How do we protect ourselves from ruthless individuals that have declared us their enemy? How do we stop them, and how do we promote peace and freedom in a region that is violent, poor, and halfway to insanity?

9/11 trumps every other issue facing this nation. We can muddle through with our mostly ineffective educational system. The old can get their kids to buy them drugs. We can put off the reckoning with social security. But we can't sit back and do nothing while people with a proven capacity and intention to commit massive violence against American citizens plot their evil. Not being serious about the defense of our nation is unacceptable. Bush will continue to prosecute the war on terror. He will work against terror groups and the states that sponsor them. There is an international network of terror - as the recent revelations that Pakistan's premier bomb designer sold the technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The terror groups shared training facilities throughout the Middle East for the last several decades. Al Qaida connected group Ansar al-Islam just hit two of the Kurdish political parties - the groups that are working to make Iraq into a sane and liberal society.

We leave this alone, and go back to launching random cruise missiles and trying to arrest terrorists, and we'll lose a city.

Kerry seems to think that the terror threat is overrated, and that civilian police methods are adequate. Well that kind of thinking led to the death of 3000 of my countrymen. That, and John Kerry, are unacceptable. Clark is a micromanaging general officer who is roundly disliked by everyone he served with. Carter on steroids, and also not good enough. Dean's national security credibility is fractionally better than Kucinich's - he thinks that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam. Personally, I think freedom from arbitrary murder and torture is better. But remember, just like in Cuba, everyone had free health care. Edwards has yet to say anything substantial about national security beyond bland platitudes, and that is hardly encouraging.

Snake Plisskin in . . . Escape from Baghdad.

In a world gone mad, one man gets even! Snake Plisskin must survive one deadly night in Baghdad, and then... survive getting out of town!

What, you say? The US is cutting back the number of troops in Baghdad, withdrawing to a Cordon Sanitaire around the city and leaving the policing to the Iraqis, is what I say!

On question. Do Iraqi policemen count as casualties of war?

The National Review has posted early exit poll results in five of the seven primary elections happening today:

According to sources, the early exit polls in most of the states are in, and they look like:

AZ Kerry 46, Clark 24, Dean 13.
MO Kerry 52, Edwards 23, Dean 10
SC Edwards 44, Kerry 30, Sharpton 10
OK Edwards 31, Kerry 29, Clark 28
DE Kerry 47, Dean 14, Lieberman 11, Edwards 11

Edwards lead in SC is bigger than I had thought it would be - and I'm surprised that he's in the lead in Oklahoma. If Clark doesn't win there, he's toast. Still, that's a very close race with hours of voting still left. Dean doesn't appear to be making the 15% cut off to get delegates in states where they divide them up. That bodes ill for his campaign. Kerry is scoring big in the two biggest states, Arizona and Missouri.

This feels like the last World Series. I want them all to lose.

[wik] Lieberman and Clark might be preparing to bail.

You know what really frosts my muffins? The use of the vocabulary of [ed: moral] transgression in reference to food, especially conjugations of "to indulge." Food is just food, and like most other things its consumption is value-neutral even as its advertising pretends otherwise.

For example, chocoholic.com urges us to "indulge that chocolate passion." Not only do they resort to right/wrong comparisons (where being wrong feels oh, so good!!), but the whole "-holic" thing is just a silly cliche that trivializes addiction while allowing people with poor willpower to claim that they have no self-control when it comes to chocolate.

Or check out Guiltless Gourmet. I enjoy their snacks very much, but I don't see what is so "Sinfully Delicious" about them. As an agnostic who believes in living ethically in the absence of an absolute moral compass, I don't even have a clear idea of what "sinfully delicious" might be. Will Jesus weep if I eat the cookie? Will orphans suffer? Will my immortal soul step closer to perishing in the withering fires of Hell with every bite of salsa (naturally low-fat!)? I haven't heard this much talk about denying the pleasures of the flesh since Jonathan Winthrop. Does Weight Watchers send its members a hair shirt and a scourge for the days when they eat a second helping of lasagna?

"Indulge in our new low-fat yogurt." "Go ahead... be bad." "Guiltless Gourmet." "Try our sinfully decadent low-fat chocolate cake." What does all this mean, anyway? What's a guilty gourmet? And what is so decadent and sinful about cake? Will your pasty-textured, chemically-flavored, wooden, cake-shaped food item be served to you on the backs of two human sex slaves buggering each other with the corpses of endangered birds flown by FedEx from a remote Tropical cloud forest? Is that sinfully decadent, or am I missing the point entirely?

Julia Child always said that she'd rather have a tiny slice of something real than a giant slice of a pretender, and I am 100% with her. Life's too short to compromise-- like Warren Zevon said: "enjoy every sandwich." If actually enjoying your food is important to you (like it is to me!), why putz around with eating half a tray of ostensibly "guiltless" and demonstrably average nonfat brownies (total Kcal intake: 1200)-- it's ok, they're low-fat!-- when you can have one goddamn great brownie (total Kcal intake: more like 200) and then go for a walk?

And what the hell is it with every vegetable in the supermarket being labelled "Low fat!" "Zero Cholesterol." I know it's fat-free... it's a zucchini.

End transmission.

Without further comment, I direct you to this series of short films featuring dour Swedish playwright and author August Strindberg ("Miss Julie," "Inferno") and his wacky cartoon sidekick, Helium ("Periodic Table of Elements").

I've blogged before about what scumbags Wal-Mart can be, but these allegations, if true, take the cake.

Remember the illegal immigrants that Wal-Mart was subcontracting to clean its stores? Well, it seems that Wal-Mart was locking them in the building until the end of their shift.

Wal-Mart of course says both that the allegations are "absolutely incorrect" but also "that doors were kept locked, but insisted that a manager with a key was always present." Someone should notify Wal-Mart that issuing two contradictory statements is commonly known as 'lying ineptly'.

The article linked above also clarifies the details of the lawsuit brought by the illegal immigrants back in November: "the original suit claimed some workers were forced to work seven-day, 70-hour weeks, for $1,500 a month." Although back in November I wondered how illegal immigrants could possibly sue anyone, now I say more power to 'em. Their suit still doesn't have much merit, the plaintiffs being illegal aliens and all, but 70 hours for $300 and change is tantamount to wage slavery-- strike that-- wage pecuiliar institution-ry.

I mean, Christ. Locked doors and corporate hijinks... shades of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. This kind of insanity is exactly what the American labor movement was founded to combat-- too bad they're too busy off defending entitlements and whacking opponents to notice that they're losing ground where it matters.

I'm not kidding-- Wal-Mart employees need to unionize now, or the local management will keep taking advantage of the economically marginal status of many workers. I mean, I'm no true-blue (Red?) Marxist by a loooong shot, but this crap went out of style with handlebar mustaches, giant-wheel bicycles, and buggy whips.

[wik] Ezra at Pandagon asks, "Is Wal-Mart Good For Us?" exploring the ins and outs of wage arbitrage and the actual effects of Wal-Mart's pricing strategies on its suppliers and customers. Since this is weblogs and not movies, I'll give away the ending: not good.

The Paratrooper of Love gives us this lovely story from the Borowitz Report:

The French space program took a significant step backward today as the European Space Agency announced that a much-heralded French Mars probe surrendered just moments after landing on the red planet.

The probe, which had been expected to travel extensively across the surface of Mars to collect and analyze rock samples, stunned the French nation by surrendering only eight seconds into its mission.

As millions of astonished Frenchmen watched on national TV, the probe extended a robotic arm -- designed to scoop up rocks from the surface of Mars – and raised a white flag aloft, waving it back and forth.

The probe then used a robotic shovel to dig a hole in the Martian surface before disappearing into the hole, apparently hiding.

At a press conference in Paris, French President Jacques Chirac denied that the probe had surrendered, arguing, “This mission was always intended to be eight seconds long. The probe has performed courageously and superbly.”

Despite earlier announced plans for the French Mars probe to exchange information about the surface of Mars with the American Mars probes, Mr. Chirac said, “The Americans will have to go it alone.”

Please permit me to don my fanboy beanie and Spock ears and announce the imminent departure of hack and subhuman dirtbag Rick Berman from the helm of the Star Trek franchise.

A Perfectly Cromulent Blog embiggens our minds with much, much more on this topic.

The best thing for Trek would be a total shake-up-- I agree with Perfectly Cromulent on this one. I dig Enterprise ok, when my wife lets me watch it, but it suffers from the Berman disease. What they need is for Joss Whedon to come on and start writing for them, and inject some Firefly-esque humor, raggedness, and heart into the series. Then a ten-year moratorium. Then a totally fresh start, with a new writing and producing team. The Trek Universe is still not completely fleshed out: there's a lot that could be done, but only if formula and hackishness are dispensed with. If I see one more ion capacitor flux polarity reversal, I'm going to explode.

Calpundit reads a David Frum column so as to conclude that the presumed rightward drift of the US's political landscape is largely an illusion.

Huh. Interesting take on things. I think I agree with Frum and Drum (rhyming pundits:w00t!) that the bedrock principles of liberalism-- that is, public schooling and all that jazz-- are pretty deeply ingrained in the American way of thinking. But that doesn't mean that Conservatism isn't insurgent. It's kind of like a bastardized version of geology. Liberalism is like tectonic plates, see, and conservatism is volcanoes. Sure, at the moment the bedrock is liberal, but in a million years or so liberalism will have been drawn back down into the mantle and Conservative values will be bedrock. And so on and so on.

I apologize. That was the single most tortured and inapt analogy I have ever committed to type, and that's saying a lot.

But what more can I do? I was educated in a poorly-funded public school.

If Janet Jackson's boob-shot at the Stupor Bowl was, as Justin Timberlake insists, a "wardrobe malfunction," I ask you: why did Janet think to wear a strange sol-shaped metallic pastie/nipple ring/clamp device visible from half a mile away?

I think it's cute that MTV still thinks boobies are funny, and even cuter that the NFL finds them outrageous.

[wik] More boobie, much more boobie, at co-perfidions blogcritics, your clearinghouse for football/boobie synergy.

[alsø wik] For those of you who watched the Stupor Bowl on Sunday: did you like the "Rocket Sled" commercial, you know, the one where the guy is giving his girl a sleighride and they have an open flame and the horse farts? I personally hated it. There are standards for fart jokes-- matters of timing, taste, syntax-- and this particular 'mercial missed on all of them. I'm sitting here giggling at the punchline now "wow... they have a rocket sled!" but I found the ad itself totally unfunny at the time.

Now, the Teutel family jumping a bunch of dump trucks... that's comedy gold.

[alsø alsø wik] I'm told there was some sort of sporting event on Sunday as well that I would probably remember were it not for my five-martini dinner.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] My congratulations to the New England Patriots for a great game and a second win. Only in Boston do people die during victory celebrations. We also eat our dead up here. With beans. (Check out the link... the columnist even takes a swipe at Detroit.)

Congratulations also to the Carolina Panthers, a class act, a great team, and co-architects of one of the most exciting Stupor Bowls, indeed one of the most exciting games, I have ever seen.

[see the løveli lakes...] Kudos also to Aerosmith. As it turns out, they're giant space buffs, and it was partly their doing that there was such a tribute to NASA, space exploration, and the astronauts of the Columbia before the game. They are the greatest band in the world, or at least used to be.

I guess I'll just keep trying. More comments have shown up on Winds of Change; the thread's disappeared into the past, so I think I'll just respond here.

Paul Stinchfield:

You say the phrase "elimination of the other" didn't come out of a book, but "just came out that way." Well, I never said it came out of a book. After all, leftists not only write that way, they also talk that way, and that particular rhetorical trope has been around long enough to thoroughly pervade the discourse of the left from professors of "cultural studies" to, I suppose, people who just like "Rage Against the Machine." And that phrase means genocide. Genocide motivated by racism, intolerance, bigotry and paranoia. That's what it means now, and that's what it meant when it was coined. However you picked it up, you surely knew its meaning and nonetheless used it to mischaracterize Trent's opinions. You cannot use such language and then credibly claim lack of responsibility for such libel. I gave you an opportunity to apologize and repudiate your inexcusable language, but you instead chose to weasel out.

Whatever. I'm 36 years old. I've spent pretty much every one of my adult years either building software companies or reading technical material that supported the building of software companies. Recently I've taken an interest in politics, and I take roughly the same approach. Unlike you, I have not had time to take classes, go to marches, attend seminars, subscribe to journals, and correspond. So when I tell you I haven't heard the phrase before, believe it. When I tell you I just wrote it that way, believe it. If you want to continue to make things up and accuse me of them, be my guest.

If I intend to say that Trent is pro-genocide, I'll just say it, exactly like that.

I simply observe the following: People will generally tell each other what they all want to hear. You see it on the left, and you see it on the right. The comfort level at Winds of Change is pretty high for hardliners on the right. You get to say what you like, there's plenty of comfortable agreement to go around. Sorry for disrupting the mutual back-slapping.

Trent writes:

Why should *ANYONE* take you seriously?

From the top:

1) Chemicals are not a threat to prepared troops in the field or emergency responders in hazmat moon suits. Unprepared civilians and emergency first responders are as vulnerable as the Kurds were to Saddam's genocidal gas attacks.

There have been a number of terrorist attack plans broken up in Europe that involved Muslim terrorist using lethal chemicals in enclosed spaces like the European parliment.

2) Libya's "turning states evidence" -- after we caught them red handed with the goods -- showed we have a world wide illict nuclear weapons component bazaar. One that would never have come to light without both 9/11/2001 and the war in Iraq.

3) As for biological weapons being "theoretical," tell that to Washington D.C. postal workers and the mail staffers at the networks and Senator Daschle's office.

Or in the first case, the relatives of dead postal workers.

The anthrax that hit Daschle's office was the product of an industrial weapons laboritory, not some "lone gunman" mad scientist. However much the FBI chants that to a gullible press corps.

4) David Kay was on today's Fox News Sunday speaking today of the breakdown of Iraq's internal order, via corruption, that was turning it into a "WMD market phenomina" where buyers and sellers were meeting. That exact thing is my leading theory for the fall 2001 anthrax mailing attack. What we are seeing of the Pakistani connection to Libya's nukes may already be just that.

5) It does not matter what you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. What matters is the Palestinians won't settle for less than a total victory which involves genocide of the male Jews of Israel and Dhimminitude for the women and children survivors.

That you are chanting about a "reasonably honorable solution" doesn't adress the facts on the ground. It shows you are operating from religious conviction and not reality.

The Palestinians have chosen evil of their own free will. Deal with it or be damned for it.

I thought we were talking about a survival war here. I am trying to qualify this clash of civilizations as a survival war.

1. Yes, it sucks to be on the receiving end of a chemical attack. Barring the secret construction of a massive Islamic air force, exactly how are these chemicals going to be delivered to US cities in quantities that justify the term survival war? Ground-based delivery won't do much; the stuff dissippates too quickly. Ricin attacks don't qualify for survival warfare.

2. You don't actually believe that only religious nutcases are trying to get access to nuclear materials, do you? Criminal elements will want them, as will purely political movements. There are quite a few states who want them as well. In other words, eliminating the threat from Islam doesn't begin to cover the bad guys. That means your definition of bad guys has to expand, and it has to include words like "criminals".

3. When I say theoretical, I mean this in the scientific sense: Accepted theory is that they are very dangerous, and I agree. I do not mean this in the sense that the dangers are not real. The anthrax letters are a ludicrous point on which to suspend the notion of a necessary clash between cultures that could kill millions. I feel bad that a nut job with lab access (or maybe a rogue operative somewhere) got access to some of this stuff. He killed several people, none of whom were his intended target. Meanwhile, four thousand people that month died in car accidents. Hundreds were killed in criminal acts all across the country. The anthrax letters were clearly a failure, succeeding only to the extent they were referred to as a true threat.

4. Basic science is what it is, and Iraq is not the only rogue state in the world. There is a great deal of nuclear expertise all around the world. What, exactly, was being bought and sold? Knowledge is a slippery thing; there was nothing special about Iraq in that regard. I expect that similar knowledge sales have been occurring around the world. For all the characterization as a "marketplace", it must have been a marketplace without any physical presence. Weapons were not being manufactured in Iraq and sold around the world.

5. It's nice that you think all Palestinians think this way. Let's say they do...my reaction is, so what. They can't achieve the goal, and sooner or later, they'll simply give up. Fix the economic circumstances and you'll watch support dry up for the Islamists very quickly. I do not believe that an insane variant of any religion can take complete hold when communications are relatively free. I am a rationalist; I believe that ultimately human beings will select that which leads to gain. Palestinian leaders have controlled too much of the agenda, and have maximized their own gain at the expense of the population, who have been forcefed propaganda for far too long.

If, on the other hand, all Palestinians do not think this way, we must support those who counter the radical threat. There are limits to this, of course -- if we are supporting a vanishingly small segment of the population, there's no point.

Signs are that Arafat's means of control (financial) are coming apart. Into this gap will come other leaders; Palestinian society will fracture. This is a good thing. With any luck we'll see the emergence of a counter-Islamic segment of the population. The problem with the Islamists is that they're organized and armed. Like a drug gang in Rio, they can terrorize the population to get their way. Of course I view all of radical Islam pretty much the same way; Palestine is not the only population subject to this cancer.

As far as religious conviction goes, I have none. I believe simply in an unknowable God, which makes all this religious fighting and horror seem completely ridiculous.

The Ministry is experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. I seem to be the only person who can use the site at the moment. There is no chance that I will abuse this power. None, I tell myself. None.

Commenting on Winds of Change, I was unnecessarily opaque with the "argues inductively" statement. I wrote:

Telenko argues inductively for the elimination of the other, where the permissible degree of otherness is inversely proportional to the capability of weapons.

Let me supply the underlying thinking. I'd like to note that I do not imply that Trent is directly arguing that we should commit genocide; this is why I use the term inductive.

An inductive proof is a weak form of mathematical proof. You prove a base case, then prove that it holds true for a successor to the base. You might then conclude that it holds true for _all_ cases (a bit more definition can be had at http://scom.hud.ac.uk/scomtlm/book/node125.html).

It is imperative that I note I am not well-read in military science. My co-blogger Buckethead is; with any luck he'll chime in at some point. I just work with the facts I have.

We are discussing the notion of a _survival_ war with Islamic radicals and their support network. There are two avenues by which danger can arrive on our shores: First, by the projection of conventional force. Second, by the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Conventional force is a conceivable survival threat, but only in the very long term. Radical islamic economies would have to develop to the point where they could compete with western economies, if conventional war is to be attempted. Certain tenets of radical islam make its competitiveness in this area highly unlikely (anti-woman, dictatorial, corrupt). It is possible that a huge _decline_ in western capabilities coupled with best-case rise in Islamic cultures might one day yield conventional military capabilities that could harm us, but I find it pretty unlikely.

WMD: Chemical won't do any significant damage. Nuclear is bad, but localized. Biological is the scariest, theoretically.

An isolated nuclear attack (a bomb in a city) is not a survival-level problem. If such an attack is committed the retribution will be terrible. The US will not allow a radical islamic state to achieve substantial missile capability; a MAD rerun is not likely to occur.

Biological weapons are quite terrifying. I really don't know what the state of the art is; I will simply assume that it's bad, and it's going to get a lot worse.

Trent believes (or I perceive him to believe) that deliberate action now is necessary to assure or increase the safety level of our culture. Both the urgency of that action and the severity of its effects are coupled to the nature of WMD -- because WMD can cause so much damage, there are certain forms of freedom of thought and action that we have greatly reduced tolerance for. I do not use the word "freedom" here in anything other than its strictest literal sense; freedom here is referring to activites that are more or less psychotic and evil.

The inductive part of this comes together as weapon power increases. The imminence and capability of the WMD threat to our culture increases over time. In order to maintain some perceived level of safety, we must engage tighter and tighter control over the freedoms of other cultures, and over individuals. As WMD technology improves, the resources required to marshal and deliver such an attack become within the capabilities of smaller and smaller groups.

Thus, the use of oppressive force to counter technology-driven WMD is, over the long run, likely to fail unless increasingly rigid control and suppression of opposition is executed.

Circling back around to the beginning, what this means is that using force to counter hate and prevent hate's access to WMD will require ever more effort and severity over time. We will place those resources efficiently, which means focusing on those cultures that are most different (least understandable, least trustworthy). The farthest extents of those target cultures will be eliminated over time; they will be evolved, via forceful methods to be closer to our own. Simultaneously, as reduction of the overt cultural enemy is performed, two things happen. First, the targets become progressive more difficult to identify (smaller clusters, too similar to "us"). Second, repressive forces will necessarily produce some level of backlash. These "internal" forces can become exceedingly dangerous.

At some point it gets hard to tell the difference between friend and foe.

I hope that's shed a little light on my thinking. It's not that I disagree, necessarily, with Trent's position that a hard pre-emptive strike can "teach a lesson". It can, and it will probably succeed on some levels. I remain more concerned over the long run with the evolution of technology.

I also remain convinced that a maximally successful, peaceful, and reasonably honorable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis will substantially reduce tensions and hatred in the Islamic world, thereby reducing danger to us. I hope I'm not wrong about this; otherwise, the problem is going to be very tough.

As far as the phrase "elimination of the other" goes, it didn't come from a book -- it just came out that way when I wrote that comment. I hope my use of the phrase is clearer, now.

On a related topic: If Israel were directly attacked by conventional military force today, wouldn't the US step in and defend her? I am quite sure we would, as would a good chunk of the rest of the world.

As far as I know, in the six day war, the US did _not_ intervene. US forces were repositioned to express neutrality. The Liberty incident may have clouded the situation. Why, during this engagement, was US support of Israel not a _given_?