quote of the day

"Before we examine Conor’s response to Charen’s excellent and persuasive column, let’s state the obvious: there is no conservative case to be made for gay marriage. Gay marriage is one of the most radical changes to a social institution in the history of the world. Whether that is good or bad is debatable. What it is not, by any meaningful definition of the term, is conservative."

~Joe Carter

Well that sort of limits the terms of the debate, doesn't it? More on this later. For now I'm planning on enjoying my New Year.

more W.H. Auden - "stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone"

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

more thoughts on public schools

As a followup to my earlier "engine" post...

There are two huge problems with public schools that must somehow be remedied:

1) Lack of funding. The way we fund our schools, through property taxes, is wrong-headed to begin with. Then we under-fund them and complain when programs are cut, and students under-perform. With competition from Charters, etc. the funding issue becomes even more difficult. This has to be addressed.

2) Waste. Part and parcel with the funding issue is the amount of waste in many of our school districts. I was speaking recently with a life-long teacher from Oregon. In her neck of the woods there are several very small towns up and down the central coast of Oregon. They are within a handful of miles of one another. Once upon a time, one Superintendent managed all these little towns and villages, under one School District. Somehow, over the years, though population didn't increase much, they broke this one district up into several districts, and hired 6-figure income Supers for each one. So now you've got several districts, all paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in administrative costs--one must figure in all the other assistants and bureaucrats that go into running each of those districts.

Then they complain about funding problems--can't pay their teachers well, have to cut programs, etc. etc.

Now, this is not always the case. In my home town we do not have the same problems with waste, but we do with funding and competition. Charter schools have so bloodied the public schools that we are in fact shutting down an entire high school and moving its remaining population to the other two in town.

Still, from my days in high school to now, we've seen most art, theatre, and music programs cut completely. Even some history classes have been shut down. Athletic programs have grown smaller. I substitute taught at my old high school a while back, and the entire place had just changed--I'm not sure how to describe it. It hadn't been terribly long since I was there, but the atmosphere was different.

A new ubiquitous sort of apathy hung in the air. I think to myself--what would my high school experience have been like without the "unnecessary" programs? Without the theatre--yes, I was an actor then, and did my time on the stage--without the art classes? The extra stuff for bright or creative kids, or the technical stuff for the technically minded, etc. etc. etc.

I didn't need to go to private school then to get an amazing education--though I was a self-starter, and was quite good at occupying any down time with some activity or other. I know some kids need more direction than that, but surely an efficient, well-funded public school could achieve this...they have in the past.

Waste not, want not. First step seems to be, cut back waste--not art and theatre programs, but unnecessary administrators. Teacher pay isn't so huge an issue as some would think--but it is time we started, as a society, to start paying the respect teachers deserve. Finland is a good example of this, where teachers are paid a little better, but are considered professionals just like doctors or lawyers and so forth.

Then we need to do away with inequitable funding of public schools. If property taxes are the best way to fund, we should at least pool and evenly distribute those funds. And there should be transparency. The public should know if the bulk of their tax-dollars is going to pay some overpaid administrator, and that's why their little Picasso can't take art class anymore.

It's time for the system to be held accountable, for its own sake...

the engine of the republic

The American tradition of public school is almost as old as the Union itself. The first major proponent of a strong public school system was Thomas Jefferson, who believed that in order for a Republic to function its populace must have at least a rudimentary education. The effect of a poorly educated populace would be poor choices at the voting booth—a fear of Jefferson's that, many would argue, despite our efforts at universal education, has already come to pass.

Over the years the public school system has changed and evolved with advances in science, politics, population and demographics. Basic subjects such as arithmetic and reading skills have broadened to include philosophy, art, theatre, and myriad different languages. One-room school houses have fallen by the wayside, replaced by gargantuan structures housing sometimes thousands of students.

Yet, for all the change, one thing has remained constant, and that is the public nature of the system itself. Private schools have existed alongside this system, and many have argued that these schools have done a better job educating their students, though this is debatable and difficult to prove. One thing is certain—as funding for public schools decreases, and waste in the system grows, students pay the price. Subject after subject is deemed “unnecessary” and classrooms become overcrowded.

The landscape of the American public school is changing once again, and this is probably for the best. Charter schools, magnet schools, and other innovations that seek to improve education and address the needs of individual students are becoming commonplace. The tradition of public schools in America has been one of continuous improvement. It has been a struggle, and yet modern public opinion has shifted to such a degree that many people no longer believe the outcome is worth the effort.

A debate has re-emerged recently over the notion of how to best resolve what is increasingly seen as the dilapidation of the American public education effort. The debate has been parceled in terms of school choice. Proponents of school choice argue that the public system is failing in so many ways that the only way to fix it is to replace it altogether, or to force the system to reinvent itself through competition. Opponents of this view believe the problems identified with public schools are exaggerated, and that competition is exactly the wrong approach to take. Rather, the continued lack of funding has lead to any decline in the system.

Indeed, the controversy over public schools is as old as the tradition of public school itself. Adam Smith was the first to argue in favor of school vouchers, a cause taken up later by Milton Friedman, and many of Friedman's students and successors. It has now become a mainstay of the modern conservative movement, with little room for debate.

Smith and Friedman argued that the public school system should follow the rules of the free market, and that the best way to do this would be to put the public schools in direct competition with their private counterparts. Conservative theorists today argue that taxpayers who choose not to send their children to public school ought to receive a tax subsidy, or voucher, to help pay for the private school of their choice. The voucher would be paid to the school of the taxpayer's choice, rather than directly into the public school system. This creates a very immediate competitive dynamic between the public and private spheres, as the funding of one is entirely dependent upon the funding of the other.

This competition, in theory, should lead to more efficient public schools, forced by the market to make the necessary hard decisions that will lead to better schools fought with less waste and flush with innovation and common sense—an outcome obviously preferable for taxpayer and student alike.

Still, such an argument does not take into account many of the obvious repercussions of a competitive landscape in which the public school system rather than improving vis a vis increased competition, is actually outperformed to such a degree that it is no longer a viable option. In other words, what if the end result of school choice is not better public schools, but no public schools at all?

When discussing competition in education, it is important to note the many inherent disadvantages the public school system faces in a leveled playing field with private industry. Public schools are forced to accept any and all who come knocking. This is their greatest disadvantage, and their most important function. Public schools accept students based not at all on merit, but on the very basic fact that they are citizens of this country, and in need of an education.

This also means public schools must accept all special-needs students, and find a way to pay for their very specialized education. One child with cerebral palsy costs a great deal more than an unimpaired child. Whereas a private school simply need not accept such disabled students, a public school must—and while there are, indeed, private schools that specialize in treating these special needs students, still there is no evidence that they have anywhere near the capacity to treat all of them, nor that vouchers would in any way cover those costs.

Merit-based admissions put the public school at a basic disadvantage as well. Public schools do not admit students based on test scores or admittance exams, and so they are left to the mercy of chance—and often chance is little more than the immutable circumstance of neighborhood. Due to the inequitable nature of school-funding, wherein the vast majority of a school's budget is made up of property taxes, this simply compounds the fact that in poorer neighborhoods where tax revenues are lower, test scores and student performance is also inevitably low.

Proponents of school choice argue that this is exactly the reason why vouchers are needed—that students in these poorer neighborhoods would no longer face the misfortune of attending their neighborhood's public school. Then again, perhaps a rethinking of the way in which these schools are funded would do a great deal more to help a great many more students attain a proper education. After all, if the disadvantage of poverty is crippling even before a child enters the school system, how can these disadvantaged children be expected to compete in a merit-based private school system? Can we truly expect these students to test competitively against a far more affluent demographic?

If this is hard to imagine, than it is even harder to presume that somehow the best private schools will suddenly begin accepting students the public school system can barely manage. Such acceptance and socialization of private schools would devalue them to unacceptable levels. The only alternative would be private schools that accepted the bottom of the barrel, as it were. Such schools, it can be imagined, paid for almost wholly by vouchers, and lacking any of the essential oversight present in the public school system, would hardly be the paragons of success that school choice proponents would have us believe.

With these inherent disadvantages, throwing the public schools into the arena of the free market would have many unintended, but disastrous, consequences.

For instance, let us imagine a town somewhere in America, which we shall call Town A. Imagine there are one hundred children enrolled in Town A's private school this year, out of one thousand total, and next year school vouchers will go into effect for $3000 a head. This means, that all at once, with no change whatsoever in school enrollment, $300,000 will be drained from Town A's public school budget.

There remain only one hundred students attending the private school. Likewise, the same number of children remain enrolled in public schools. Only now there is substantially less money for the remaining public school students, and substantially more for the private school students.

In the end the effect of this will be manifold.

First, public schools will face budget cuts, layoffs, and decreased enrollment. Students will have a harder time taking "unnecessary" subjects like history, art, theater, music, and so forth. This will have the long-term effect of “dumbing down” future generations of Americans, making it more difficult for Americans to compete in the global economy.

Second, vouchers will likely lead the better private schools, and perhaps many of the mediocre ones, to raise their tuition. There will be more money in the hands of people who can already afford a private education, so these schools will have no reason not to raise their rates, as well as admittance standards. This is why a need-based "grant" system, similar to the Pell Grant, might work better, though even that could cause the price of education to increase.

Third, it is true that vouchers would eventually lead to the opening of new private schools. Town A might have a second private school open and another one hundred students admitted (draining another $300,000 from the public schools). This still leaves the remaining eight hundred students without school choice; with further budget cuts; a higher ratio of problem students; and an even more burgeoning degree of special needs costs. Class disparity simply widens further under this outcome, especially if the private schools continue to admit students based on merit—arguably the very point of private school—vs. lottery or location-based admissions.

School voucher proponents believe that ideally, somehow all one thousand of Town A's students will be able to go to private schools paid for with government vouchers. This may very well be the outcome of the collapse of the public schools, as such a collapse, however gradual, would lead to market solutions for education.

This begs the question, however: if everyone attends private school, will we not see the very same decline in the private sector that we've seen in public schools? After all, the low end of the scale will be the least funded--perhaps solely paid for by vouchers, and populated largely by the lowest achievers and the poorest student demographic. The better schools will also be paid for by vouchers, but their tuition will be higher and thus inundated with a great deal more private money. The gap will be similar to what it is today, and likely much worse, only now students will not have the safety net of the public school system, or the guarantee of a free education. Nor will they have the democratic protection of elected officials taking stewardship of their children's education. Accountability will be all in capital, as accountability always is in the free market.

So the question inevitably comes down to our vision of what education should amount to for our children. Do we envision a robust American public school system—the sort imagined long ago by Thomas Jefferson and others of our Founding Fathers, to be the engine of our Republic? Or have we decided to give up on that institution? There is little doubt that improvements can, and should, be made in our public schools, but there seems also to be great potential for a system of public education that is at once efficient, free, and competitive not only with America's private schools, but with schools the world over, private and public alike.

Vouchers do not represent the whole of the school choice debate any more than Milton Friedman represents the whole of our economic debate. Michael Oakeshott famously wrote that conservatism is a disposition, not an ideology. The conservative approach to any problem is to favor tradition over reaction, the wisdom of generations over the singularity of isolated and abstract reason. In other words, to favor what has been proven to work over what simply might work in theory.

This seems to cut to the heart of the issue of school choice. The ideology of privatization over public administration has become such a driving force in conservative debate that we have forgotten that there are things, even in the public sphere, that deserve preservation — that “complete the circle” as Jefferson once remarked. Oakeshott wrote that conservatism is “a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for.” Perhaps the loss of our public schools, a tradition as old as this nation itself, is something of which we ought to be acutely aware.

There is room in this debate to consider innovations, improvements, and necessary and long overdue changes to the way in which our schools are operated and administered. Merit pay, charter schools, and trade schools for those students the least likely to attend college, but who could benefit enormously from practical skill training or apprenticeships, are all ideas that deserve careful consideration. There is certainly a case to be made for poor kids to receive grants to attend private schools—though this really isn’t a “school choice” matter so much as a question of welfare.

Indeed, this entire debate deserves as much careful consideration as possible. Rather than latching on to a talking point or an ideology, or turning this into a political gambit—essentially, rather than couching this debate in terms of economics or politics at all—we should view this instead as a matter of tradition and civilization, of preservation of that which has worked for generations, and can be made to work again for generations to come. Sadly, this has become a debate in which the only acceptable conservative stance on the issue is that of school choice, quite frankly, is not always a liberating thing.

I find myself wondering how this can be, how an entire discussion of such a delicate matter can be confined so utterly to one dogmatic response. On this matter I call to mind another great conservative thinker, and in doing so find that I, too, am standing “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Our public schools are a great American tradition, and they are worth preserving. They are worth the struggle. Let us not be too hasty in our attempt to dismantle them, lest we lose them altogether. Such a loss would be a historical one. On this matter especially, let us be conservative in our disposition, not merely conservative in what has become the generally accepted talking points and political strategy. Such a debate transcends politics, after all, and rightly so.

painting of the day "bacchanal"

~Fransesco Zuccarelli

poem of the day

Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

in the comments

Commenter Wellsy writes:

I think in this situation you have 2 worlds: the world outside the conflict, where people debate statistics, records, and events, maybe from the comfort of their homes on the internet, and the world inside the conflict, where people are trying to live their lives and survive. Their homes might be in ruins.

The reality is that any good idea that may be hatched in the first world will probably wither and die when it makes the transition to the second world. Peace has to arise naturally in the region or else it won't hold. And it's not going to arise naturally unless Israel, obviously in better shape than the ragged "Palestine," decides to take the lives of Palestinians seriously. Israel's not exactly trying to win over Palestinian moderates here.

Anyway, ideas from the first world might not fare well when the rubber hits the road, but international support for peace, especially from America, is a step in the right direction. This means sometimes rapping Israel's knuckles and treating the Palestinian government as if it is completely sovereign even though, in reality, it may not be.

I can understand why objectivity may be hard for those that are directly involved, but for many in the blogosphere, I just don't understand why its lacking.

It is interesting how these two tumultuous worlds mirror one another--or rather how the "world of ideas" mirrors the conflict on the ground--becomes so divided and bitter and polarized. One thing is that in an online or television or even print format there is this dissociation from those with whom you conflict. It's pretty easy to get riled up and call names on an internet forum, or shout on some television pundit's show, or write something scathing about somebody else when you know, in this day and age, nobody will call you out on it and demand pistols at dawn.

Thankfully, I do see some true bi-partisan efforts emerging. I'm not too hopeful, as this conflict is older than any member of the commentariat, but I like to be the eternal optimist...

Three for the price of one

More proof that Iraq was not a war that benefited Israel.

More proof that Iraq was not a war that benefited the United States.

More proof that democracy in and of itself is dangerous and combustible, and should not be "spread" without a good deal of contemplation--or by organic means...

Settlements, continued...

Matthew Yglesias is among the many calling for US pressure on Israel to halt settlements:

Under the circumstances, throwing up our hands and saying “it’s too hard!” isn’t an option. We can decide we don’t want to be involved, which would mean unwinding the ties of collaboration and assistance between the US and Israel, or we can try to play a constructive role in bringing an end to the conflict. I’m not personally sure of how you do that. But I’m quite certain that the first step would be pressing Israel — hard — to stop expanding settlements in the West Bank and start dismantling them. To show to Palestinians interested in a two-state solution (perhaps including some Hamas people or perhaps not) that there’s credibility on the other side. I think Israelis wouldn’t welcome such action by us, but ultimately it would be in their own best interests. On the other hand, those who really do think the best thing for the United States is to just wash our hands of the whole mess have an obligation to really stand behind that belief and urge us to wash our hands of the situation. But just proclaiming a pox on both houses while in practice heavily subsidizing one side isn’t a viable option.

That's the first step we can make, but the Arab states in the region can make a step also, and that is to denounce terrorism and stop funding Hamas and Hezbollah. So yes, there's things people can and should do, and a role to play in the East and the West to come to a solution. Also, I think Yglesias is partially wrong about Israelis welcoming the US pressure. I think some would actually agree pretty strongly, but feel their own voices drowned out by the settlers...

It's not as though all Israelis are happy to have their military bombing Gaza, but many of them I think are confused, feel helpless, and are confounded by a mix of feelings on the issue. Just like a lot of Americans--and probably a lot more Arabs than we would imagine.

Eunomia?

A while back Scott Payne asked "Whither Daniel Larison?"

To my knowledge, the question remains unanswered.

More on settlements

I think John Marshall is exactly right about the settlement issue:

But no settlement of the West Bank issue is possible with continued expansion of settlements. Indeed, I would say no settlement is possible without uprooting almost all the current West Bank settlements, with the possible exception of some in the girdle around Jerusalem. That's the core issue. And what's happening right now in Gaza does not change any of that. Of course, Hamas makes no distinction of the Green Line. That's a given. But I don't think that's the point. Israel desperately needs the West Bank issue settled. Everything that makes that more difficult endangers the state.

My support of dismantling settlements is as much because of my admiration of Israel as anything else. I'd like to see Israel continue to exist, prosperous and safe, alongside their neighbors. That's not going to happen unless something is done about the settlements.

That said, this post by Dylan Waco, I disagree with on a number of levels,

As someone generally predisposed to the notion that states don't have any rights and international institutions are criminal cartels, it is especially annoying to me to see a country of sixty years, that owes its existence to the UN, constantly invoking its "right to exist" as a welfare dependent of American taxpayers. The unwillingness of America's political class to cut off the spigots is partially related to campaign contributions, partially related to our hyper-PC culture of victimization, and partially related to cultural and religious identity politics. Still, regardless of why it happens, this endless flow of weapons and money is the reason Israel survives.

First of all, Israel survived prior to America's "endless flow of weapons and money" and did so rather well. Israel's economy is quite a lot more than a subsidized American welfare state. I wish we would reduce or eliminate aid to Israel (not alliance, just aid) so that critics like Waco would see that they can be self-sufficient.

Then again, I'm all for pulling out all military aid and financial support to Europe as well, but that isn't in the cards, I fear...

the question of asymmetrical warfare

In the comments on his blog, Freddie writes:

Should a 5 year old Palestinian girl be responsible for that? And does that responsibility, forced on her, carry a death sentence? That's what you're arguing, if you are indeed justifying these attacks. To be clear, that's the mainstream position; most people believe collateral damage is a sad but necessary aspect of war. And, indeed, the same argument cuts against the Palestinians-- even if I thought military aggression against Israel by the Palestinians was wise, beneficial or justified (and I think none of these things), I wouldn't allow it to justify killing innocent Israelis. That's, I know, an idealists take. But I can't stomach the moral consequences of collateral damage otherwise; I think it's as stark a question as I put it above.

Not to bandy about this Israel question too much with Freddie--not every question needs answering, nor will every question ever be answered in this debate--but the topic of asymmetrical warfare is one so close to the issue at hand that I have to make at least an attempt at a response.

First of all, I don't like it any more than the next guy. Civilian casualties should be avoided at all costs--and does Israel make every attempt to do so? I doubt it. Does Hamas make it quite difficult for Israel to avoid said casualties? Of course. It's part of the guerrilla/terrorist strategy. It's been used before in other arenas--Vietnam comes to mind. Beirut.

But what's to be done? I ask this in the comment section:

I'm not sure how one responds at all to terrorist attacks... There isn't really symmetry in combating such tactics (I suppose firing back rockets quid pro quo into Gaza might be, but that's just silly) which is why the entire notion of a "war on terror" is such utter, inexcusable nonsense, and why this debate is so difficult.

So perhaps the entire question of asymmetrical response is the wrong one--perhaps we'd be better off asking "What is symmetrical warfare when one side is using terrorism and the other is using a conventional military?"

How ought Israel respond to the rocket attacks? It's not quite the same as the Irish terror assault on the UK. After all, the IRA wasn't out to totally annihilate Great Britain, whereas the Hamas Charter states quite clearly that they will accept nothing less than Israel's complete destruction. Either this is rhetoric (with evidence to the contrary) or this is a real problem in negotiating peace.

I'm not saying I agree completely with Israel's response. I think they continue down this drunken path of half-measures followed by massive assaults followed by half-measures followed by shock and awe followed by....well, you get the picture. There is very little consistency in their approach, and then they lay into Gaza with this monstrous assault. It's confusing. It's hard for the rest of us to understand or follow--and it may very well be politically driven, as Freddie suggests. Politics are so often interfering with any coherent response, as Israel replaces government after government after government...

But Israel has to do something...and I'm at a loss to what that may be. What is the proper, or symmetrical, response to these terrorist attacks? I fear that Democracy has made it more difficult for Israel to deal with her neighbors. The new Democracy in Palestine (and the newly elected Hamas government) will only make things more difficult there...

extremism online

Freddie has responded to a comment I made in this post which essentially speaks to Freddie's generalization of pro and anti Israel arguments. And it may be an exercise in futility, this whole definition of the argument and those who make it, but let me expand a little. Freddie writes:

I have a tendency to rhetorical maximalism that is nothing else than a character flaw. I'm working on it. I am perhaps overzealous in the prosecution of my arguments. But I don't back down from anything I said in that post, and this is why I think that examining the context in which those who oppose the hardline regarding Israel operate is so important: while I may be extreme in my language, I think my side's ideas, what we advocate (rather than how I express it) is remarkably moderate in comparison to the consensus position of Israel hawks. (As opposed to Israeli hawks.)

Ultimately, this is an impossible conversation to have in some ways, because you can never really pin down who, exactly, is an extremist in any given debate. Extremism is a relative quality. It seems to me, though, that the side that is consider extreme and the side that is considered mainstream are exactly opposite. As ED points out, there are not actual holistic camps on either side that have signed any affinity statements or endorsed any particular set of beliefs, so this is necessarily general. But I find that there are no real anti-Israel extremists in what I would consider the mainstream, national conversation.

I think the important thing here is the definition of mainstream vs. non-mainstream. I think that what a lot of pro-Israel people don't ever forget, and what a lot of critics of Israel simply don't notice, is that outside the mainstream there is actually an awful lot of really vapid, hateful, over-the-top criticism of Israel that is way beyond anything reasonable critics of Israel ever suggest. There are those who spend all their time and energy criticizing Israel's human rights record, ignoring utterly the track records of any other nation, turning a blind eye to Iran, China, etc. out of some strange, obsessive need to bash Israel.

What this creates online at least is a disproportionate debate--one in which the extremists have a much louder megaphone than anyone else. You get these hard-liner Zionists on the one hand, advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, and on the other you get these hard-line anti-Zionists who want to expel the Jews and give the land back to the Palestinians (an argument I, as a North American, find difficult to espouse, since it is just a tiny bit hypocritical unless we, too, give back our land to its original inhabitants...)

Of course, Freddie is right about the mainstream discussion, and certainly there is a lot less constructive criticism of Israel in the mainstream dialogue than there ought to be--and perhaps this is a reactionary trend. Perhaps things like the UN declaring Zionism was racist have had a backlash effect. Extremes beget extremes, after all.

This is a shame, because we do need legitimate criticism of Israel. I, for one, think the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank needs to stop, and that the extremists behind the settlements are not only harming the Palestinians, they are also bringing about indirect harm to their fellow Israelis. But it's hard to say that in the current climate, and that's simply not conducive to a healthy debate.

There's a lot to admire about Israel, and hopefully someday we'll be able to say the same thing about Palestine. Two states living peacefully side-by-side is a good dream to have, and I think a lot of people in the middle feel that way. Does the mainstream conversation need to change to reflect this? Yes, it does. And we'd all do well to remember that the conversation online is usually a lot more virulent, heated, and outrageous than the conversation in the real world. So maybe a little less "rhetorical maximalism" would do us all good, though in Freddie's case at least his rhetoric, however maximalist, is at least coherent and sensible. Take a trip around the Israel/Pali blogosphere sometime. It's illuminating, to say the least...partisan to the point of inanity...

Bring out your dead...

There is something terrible about these photos of Israel's attack on Gaza, and not just in the destruction. Quite frankly, Gaza had it coming. Hamas is just asking to be bombed, civilians be damned.

No, what's troubling to me is that at this point I don't know which of these photos represents actual casualties. After all, the Palestinians have made such an art out of fake-casualty photos that it's rather like the Boy Who Cried Wolf at this point.

Then, too, where is the honor in parading your dead about like this? Is international sympathy worth the shame of using one's dead to gain it? How about STOP lobbing rockets into Israel in order to gain international sympathy. That might work a tiny bit better.

Just a thought...

Reading List addition...

Just added a fantastic new blog "The Left Conservative" to the sidebar... Dylan Waco and Daniel Bein are contributors, and just browsing for a few minutes convinced me that this was a top notch site.

Check it out.

Merry Christmas

Scroll through the blogroll. All my faves have Merry Christmas posts, and they're all great. Go read them, and have a lovely Christmas with your families and loved ones!

How do you feel about Felt?

Patrick J Buchanan has little sympathy and much disgust:

Indeed, if what Felt did was honorable, why did he lie and deny it repeatedly when asked if he was leaking to the Post? Why did he lie in his memoir in 1979, when, well into retirement, he emphatically denied he was Deep Throat? Was Felt so noble he could save our republic, yet refuse, to the point of lying in his memoirs, to take any credit?

Answer: Felt knew what he did was dishonorable, corrupt — and unnecessary. For honest FBI agents were steadily making progress toward proving that higher-ups at CREEP were involved in aiding those caught in the Watergate break-in.

Felt had another reason for lying about his role as snitch for the Post. Former colleagues would be disgusted, for his was not only a breach of law, but of faith and trust, a dishonoring of his oath as an FBI agent.

Read the rest. There's always more to the story.

Merry Christmas Mr. Potter

Saturday Night Live - Its a Wonderful Life Lost Ending

Google link alerts

Has anyone else noticed that Google link alerts has become totally worthless, reporting every comment, every blogroll link...dozens and dozens of posts with only a sidebar link to your site?

And then actual links don't show up?

One would think a company such as Google would be able to get this right. They have the funds...

Quote of the day

I shopped today. Not for gifts, but for fruit and vegetables and Obama-esque arugula. There were 500 zillion people in every single store. There is no bloody way we are staring a Great Depression in the face, no way at all.

I’m going to take a Xanax now.

~Wendy Sullivan

I've braved a few visits to Target, the grocery store, the gas station...and I concur. It's bloody madness out there. The piles of snow don't help, but they don't seem to hinder shoppers any more than the recession has--at least here. Lines are long, people are typically hurried, harried, and rude, and maneuvering parking lots is an exercise in patience.

Fortunately, other than printing a few photos, I think we're about done with the gifting aspect of Christmas.

The irony here, of course, is that the more people who give up on this hyper-Dickensian consumerist version of Christmas, the more economically ugly the season will become. In other words, the closer we get to actually celebrating the True meaning of Christmas (even the secular true-meaning, i.e. love, family, lots of little glittering lights) the worse it is for our economy.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Do we shop like mad and spend outrageously for the collective well-being? or do we cut back, live more simply, give the gift of our time rather than go in to debt, and let the retailers wail? Or, do we as a nation and a people reevaluate the definition of "collective well-being"?

Twas the Monday before Christmas...

Well I've been honored with a mention at the fantastic Ladyblog, where Elizabeth Nolan Brown drudges up my rather ambiguous post on social vs cultural conservatism and asks:

I’ve always thought "social conservative" and "cultural conservative" meant the same thing....So I thought I’d bring the discussion to Ladyblog. Do any of you make a distinction between ’social’ and ‘cultural’ conservatism? Or have you heard people make it? And, if so, what’s the distinction?

My response on her thread is rather messy and floundering, so if anyone has a better answer stop by Ladyblog (a Culture11 location) and air your thoughts...I admit this is one of my most difficult struggles. I view conservatism as a disposition, and a cultural disposition at that, not a set of ideologies, whereas today's social-cons tend toward a pretty defined set of ideologies. Maybe that's all the distinction I can muster...

It's a struggle because I am drawn most toward a brand of Christianity that is quite conservative--classic Roman Catholocism or Orthodox (I am still digging about the bones of my spiritual self to find what it is that Faith and God mean to me, and it is an endless struggle) and yet I'm drawn also toward political positions that generally reflect a much more liberal standpoint on such issues as gay marriage (well that's the big one, I admit.)

In other pre-Christmas happenings, John Schwenkler has moved his blog to Culture11... so go change your bookmarks and let the fact that all best blogs are moving to the same neck of the woods sink in for a while. (H/T Publius Endures)

Speaking of Publius, Mark and I (and others) have been engaging in a very healthy debate over school vouchers, though it has for the moment come to a close. In any case that has led to an exchange of blogroll additions, and exposure for yours truly to some really excellent commentary. Go check it out....

Elsewhere, please go read Jack Gillis's take on the Caroline Kennedy potential appointment and join him in his quest to repeal the 17th amendment! Probably the best commentary on the Kennedy mess I've read so far...

In any case, Merry Christmas everybody! Stay warm...

Pardonable Offenses - From Whiskey Rebels to Jihad Johnny: The Legacy of Presidential pardons

In 1795 President George Washington pardoned members of what came to be known as the Whiskey Rebellion, exercising his right as President to pardon Federal offenders. The Whiskey Rebels took arms against what they believed were unreasonably high taxes on alcohol, and perhaps Washington, who had so recently helped orchestrate the American rebellion against the British, largely under the auspices of unfair taxation, felt sympathy for these men.

Since then countless criminals of all-stripes have applied for Presidential pardons. For the past few years John Walker Lindh and his family have appealed for just such a pardon.

Such a notion has dismayed conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, who is livid at the notion and the audacity of "Jihad Johnny" and his family, and somehow the entirety of the "Left", that an American member of the Taliban would expect such a favor.

If it’s December, it’s time for the Left to throw another shameless pity party for convicted American jihadist John Walker Lindh (aka Suleyman al-Faris, aka Abdul Hamid). Every Christmas season for the last four years, the Taliban accomplice and his parents have asked President Bush to pardon him. This country should save its tears and mercy for the defenders of freedom....

...In Afghanistan, I remind you, Jihad Johnny took up arms with the terrorists. His purpose was to kill Americans and his “reserve of will” accomplished the goal....and upon being captured [he] deliberately and defiantly chose not to tell American CIA officer and former Marine Corps artillery specialist Mike Spann about a planned Taliban prison revolt. Spann was killed in the riot.

It is, without doubt, a tragic story, and Malkin is right to be infuriated. Indeed, the very notion that this man even has the ability to be pardoned is extremely disconcerting. And yet, the best she can muster is a flimsy, "may American traitor John Walker Lindh rot in hell."

Well, okay, that's certainly the "Op" part of an Op-Ed. Nobody could say with a straight face that Malkin's opinions are in any sense of the word diluted. On the other hand, perhaps it would be more interesting to hear some analysis of the risk involved here--in other words, a little less opinion, and a little more dissection of the underlying problem, which isn't Lindh sadly, at least not directly.

Certainly Lindh represents a problem with this nation's disillusioned youth. He is a potential case-study in all sorts of misguided delinquent behavior, from gang activity, to school shootings, to membership in suicide-bombing clubs like Al-Qaeda, or misogynistic theocrats like the Taliban. But he's been captured, and those studies are ongoing sociological quagmires without any likely positive or definitive outcome. Boys will be boys, as the old adage goes.

More to the point is the question of Presidential pardons. The idea that President Bush would even consider pardoning a terrorist is absurd, of course, but then again, he pardoned a cocaine dealer the other day. Anything's possible when a man has the power to sidestep the law so utterly. Clinton pardoned all sorts of crooks and scumbags, including yet more cocaine dealers, embezzlers, and con-men. Potential campaign donors, I suppose, and future political allies.

Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution states that the President "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." An official Pardon Attorney assists the President in the legality of his pardons, though the framework for such acts of clemency and reprieve seems woefully lax. After all, Nixon had no trouble pardoning that crook Jimmy Hoffa. It wasn't because he was innocent, either. And then, of course, Ford didn't bat an eye when he pardoned that crook Nixon.

At times the pardons do seem just. There are men wrongly accused, or whose sentences were too stringent, or perhaps faced sentences that were largely political. Andrew Johnson pardoned the entire South after the death of Lincoln. This was an important step toward healing the nation, and a just and noble thing to do. It should be noted that nobody pardoned the North, though arguably their crimes against the Constitution were as bad or worse than anything the secessionists did in exercising their right to secede. A pardon for the South's crime of slavery would have been more apt, in a way, though I fear no President can absolve men of such barbarism.

Still, the extraordinary power of Presidential pardons raises countless questions. A whole litany of potential abuses seems to crop up at the end of any Administrations term. So are Presidential pardons necessary? Do they circumvent our legal system too much? Do they undermine justice in this country, or do they provide a necessary safeguard against injustice that only a man as powerful as the President can exercise? Or do they place too much power in the Executive branch?

It's true that only a relatively few people are pardoned by the President. The most frivolous pardoner, FDR, was also the longest serving. He pardoned 3,687 criminals. Also true is the fact that information surrounding Presidential pardons is readily available and public--though the relationships between pardoner and pardoned tend to be less transparent.

Essentially, the problem with Presidential pardons is that they inherently favor prominent figures usually of political persuasions similar to the President who pardons them. It is a power without check or balance, a Constitutional authority that sits above the law, and anything above or outside the law has the potential to do great good, or be greatly abused, and usually the latter prevails. Certainly every President in the past few decades has pardoned people that most Americans consider at the very least controversial, from George Steinbrenner to Marc Rich. President George W Bush has actually pardoned far fewer people than his predecessor, and neither man came close to FDR's staggering figure.

President Bush has pardoned far fewer high profile offenders than Clinton, though with the emerging data on illegal torture activity condoned by the Administration, it is quite possible that more are in the offing. If there is one dark legacy that will stain the history of the Bush Administration it is the top-down orders for the use of torture as a method to interrogate prisoners. It will be blacker still if nobody is held accountable, and could certainly embolden future leaders to take similar steps outside the law.

The very fact that we are not as bad as our enemy, and that even the torture we utilized was not as heinous as the crimes of our enemy, should act not as justification for our actions, but the most pressing argument against them. Torture is simply not an American institution, and regardless of political persuasion or perceived threat, it should never be used, and never condoned, and never pardoned, lest it become one.

Nor should terrorism. John Walker Lindh should remain in jail, and feel lucky that he wasn't executed for his crimes against his country and people, something past generations would have had no qualms doing.

So here we face the true moral dilemma of the Presidential pardon. The terrorist we rightfully leave to spend his days in prison, yet the torturer goes free. The traitor is denied his pardon, but the men who acted as representatives of the American people and then used an abhorrent, un-American practice on the prisoners in their care should be pardoned de facto, sans trial.

Is that there any clarity in this, moral or otherwise? Was this what our Founders intended when they wrote this power into the Constitution?

Like so many of the powers granted to our Executive Branch, Presidential pardons do not have to be abused. It can be hoped that the men and women we elect to serve as our leaders can choose to rebuke the many corrupting powers they are given--to use them in the way they were intended by our Founding Fathers--carefully, and cautiously. Perhaps the model future Presidents should follow is not that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but of George Washington, who in eight years of service to his country pardoned only sixteen men. Maybe if our future Presidents look to his actions more often they will stray less from the mission they've been given--to lead us safely and honestly forward as a nation; to preserve our integrity as a people; and to act as our first diplomat to the world.

Somehow pardoning white collar criminals, cocaine dealers, and political officials responsible for endangering our troops through despicable acts of torture, simply doesn't seem to fit into that job description. These are hardly Whiskey rebels.

Somehow I doubt that George Washington would approve.

Bailout Santa

Damn. I had this idea a few weeks ago--planned to write a story about it, actually. I probably still will...too funny.

Merry Christmas

Quote of the Day

If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian. And if I cannot engage him, then I am not worthy of being called a writer. And if we cannot work with Obama to bridge these divides, none of us will be worthy of the great moral cause that this civil rights movement truly is.

~Andrew Sullivan

Scott Payne agrees with Sullivan's conclusions, arguing that "Divisiveness breeds its own and perpetuating stereotypes about those that oppose you only provides fodder for the perpetuation of the stereotypes you seek to address."

I was having this discussion with my wife last night actually. I argued that the gay activist movement had pushed this marriage thing too hard, and she said that while she agreed that it wasn't likely to move very far very fast, that the only way to really get anything done was to keep protesting, keep making noise, and not let the movement die out, or become too passive.

I didn't have an argument against that, though I still feel that the initial, short-term effects of overselling the gay marriage idea is more pain for the homosexual community--like here in Arizona, where the voters have decided to amend the State Constitution to legally define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Er, one man, and one woman. Gotta be careful with those definitions these days...

Essentially where my wife and I do agree is that nothing major will happen until the older generations die out and the newer, more open-minded generations take their place. Think how many more young conservatives support gay marriage than a decade ago, after all...think how much more support there is amongst the youth of today than the youth of yesterday.

Who said that--that most good ideas simply have to wait until their opposition dies out before they can be implemented? I can't recall, but it's very true, and I think we have decades to go before gay marriage becomes a national right in this country. I hope I'm wrong.

Orthodoxy

I'm fascinated by the Orthodox Church, I must admit. I'm enthralled by the artwork and iconography. I love the history and the depth of theology. Still, I come at this world with a generally open-minded, even dare-I-say liberal view--I regard homosexuality, for instance, as totally normal, totally natural. I'm pro-life but I have huge reservations about banning abortion, as we are in no way as a society ready to handle that backlash, nor are we prepared, I think, to morally handle the rise of an abortion black market.

Certainly as a country and a society we haven't done nearly enough to change the situation on the ground that leads to abortion. We have not embraced or provided for the single mothers of the world, nor the rape victims, etc. To be truly pro-Life I think we must start from the other end, working toward fixing the problem rather than just sweeping it under the rug, as a ban would most certainly do.

I've always been at odds with my faith and my personal experience of the truth of this world. I think there is always something that draws me toward the Catholic or Orthodox Church--that sense of age, of history, of theology and a sort of deeper, more mystic understanding of the divine that you really can't find in protestant Church, and certainly not in something like the Unitarian Church.

Still, difficult to find a way to reconcile these conflicting things--the social conservatism of these older, more conservative Churches, and my own more modern views.

Well, Andrew Sullivan manages and he's Roman Catholic. So I guess anything is possible.

Poem of the Day - "The Fall of Rome"

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

~W.H. Auden

Christmas is for atheists, too

What a lot of nonsense. The point of cultural conservatism is not to do away with atheism or any other group. I consider myself a social liberal in the context of today's debates, and a cultural conservative, in that I believe in tradition and civilization and not being reactionary....and I see the sort of blustering reactionary talk in this video utterly absurd.

Conservative? More blow-hard than conservative. This talk doesn't represent my conservatism any more than silly atheist activists represent most atheists.

Allahpundit asks: "Um, what exactly is Gretchen saying here? Christianity’s going to disappear unless we … take away atheists’ First Amendment rights?"

Seriously.

The outrage game? Really?

Kyle Smith thinks Parker and Stone should give it up and move on with their lives:

Having nothing left to prove with the show, Parker and Stone would be smart to cast it aside, knuckle down and come up with a full-length feature as enduringly hilarious as Team America: World Police every couple of years instead of spending that time spitballing their way through 28 or so half-hours of hit-or-miss comedy. Like immensely rich versions of your friend in study hall, though, they won't listen to reason: They're signed to produce more episodes through 2011.

Well, I for one am glad they're signed through 2011. South Park is the ultimate hit-and-miss show. I find some episodes utterly repugnant; others boring and silly; and yet every now and then there is an episode that just works on so many levels--from the vulgar potty-mouth to the extremely timely and satiric--that, well, I keep watching.

In fact, I'd say South Park really slowed down around season seven, and had far more misses than hits, but in recent seasons has made a huge resurgence. I mean, the World of Warcraft episode was pure genius--and the "Day Before the Day After Tomorrow" episode was hands down the funniest spoof on global warming I think I've ever seen.

So, I say take the bad with the good. It's not a perfect show, and it doesn't aim to be. It's just self-aware enough to not take itself too seriously, and just smart enough not to devolve into pure silliness.

So it may not be the "graduate-level satire" that the Simpsons is, but it fills a void in TV, between the silly and the serious, and the smart and the stupid, that is altogether its own...and that's something, isn't it?

Sullivan v Carter

Carter responds to Sullivan:

I’ve been on record as supporting a form of civil unions for over four years. In fact, in November 2004 I wrote about it on my former blog. I noted that Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family Action, supported a bill in Colorado that would facilitate certain contractual obligations or legal arrangements for any two "unmarried persons who are excluded from entering into a valid marriage under the marriage laws of this state." I too supported the bill and believe that an expanded form of the proposed reciprocal-beneficiary contracts is the model for civil unions iin America.

Where Sullivan and I likely differ, however, is on the question of who should be allowed to participate in such civil unions. To me the civil unions should cover a broad range of domestic situations, such as two elderly sisters who share a home or a widowed parent of an adult child who has Down’s syndrome or other potentially disabling condition. Such legal protections should be completely desexualized and open to any two adults who desire to form a contractually dependent relationship.

Well, it's a novel idea. Personally, I like this a lot. I would just add the libertarian caveat that we do away with state-sponsored marriage altogether and replace it with, well, this idea. Then you can take your civil union paper down to whatever priest or pastor or rabbi you might occasionally visit and get hitched, or married, or whatever you want to call it. Two consenting adults--that's the qualifier.

Now go love each other...

more on vouchers and our tradition of public education

Freddie has a post up in defense of public schools--a defense I share--which has got me thinking again about the entire subject. Freddie believes the entire debate has been skewed by misrepresentations of the failures (or lack thereof) of the public school system.

As someone who is an ardent supporter of public education, and a committed opponent of vouchers, one of the most frustrating aspects of the conversation is the amount of work done by completely unfounded and unsupported notions about widespread public school failure. Simply put, a huge difficulty in our discussion on education is really paralyzing lack of reliable data on which schools are succeeding and which are failing. We just don't know, really, how many school districts are reliably good, how many reliably bad, and we really don't know about individual school quality within those districts.

Mark Thompson weighs in, arguing that the questions being asked-, and really the entire framework of the debate--is all wrong:

Importantly, changing the debate to focus on the question of "how much control do we give individual parents over their child's education" avoids the moral absolutism and elitism that comes with the existing debate, which makes it difficult to discuss on terms that all sides understand. Instead, changing the debate puts us all on something of a sliding scale in which individuals are forced to recognize the complexity of the issue.

But I think Mark is entirely off-base with this. First of all, is it really a new angle, or is it merely reworking the issue to once again make this about school choice, which has been the modern conservative argument all along? Does this actually level the debate, as Mark suggests, or does it simply skew the question in favor of the presupposed conservative case? Mark's take undermines the larger question, which is simply this: do we want, as a nation, to maintain our tradition of a robust public school system or don't we?

We can't have it both ways. Vouchers will kill the public school system, I have no doubt. They will take an under-funded system and cut funding further. I wrote on this before, and stick by what I said, regarding the effects of vouchers:

First, public schools will face budget cuts, layoffs. Students will have a harder time taking "unnecessary" subjects like history, art, theatre, music, etc. This will have a long-term effect of dumbing down America and making it more difficult for us to compete in the global economy.

Second, it will cause private schools to raise their tuition rates. There will be more money in the hands of people who can already afford to send their kids to school, so the schools will have no qualm, and no reason not to raise the cost of attendance. (This is why a need-based "grant" system might work better, though even that could cause the price of private school to go up. Just look at college tuition. Direct funding of colleges rather than easy-loans and easy-grants would keep tuition and debt lower).

Third, it might lead to the opening of new private schools ... but if everyone is going to private school, then I imagine we'll see a very similar decline in quality that we've seen in public schools. The low end of the scale will be the least funded--perhaps solely paid for by vouchers, and populated largely by the lowest achievers. The high end will also be paid for by vouchers, but its tuition will be higher, so more private money will inundate these schools. The gap will be similar to what it is today, only now people will not have the safety net of the public school system, and that will be a great loss.

So the question to me is not to what degree parents have choice over their kids' education. As Freddie writes in the comments:

Now, if you decide you want to send your kid to a private school, go right ahead. But you can't have public money to do it, just like you can't take "your share" of public money to use a private subway, or a private fire department, or a private police force, or a private military, or a private water department. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way.

Parents already do have choice, but the choice is not about their tax dollars. They can spend their own money however they want, but they're still required to contribute to the public coffers. This is not "socialism" -- it's community. And giving people the choice to no longer contribute even that small amount to their community is not a course that America should take.

painting of the day - "saint andrew"

~Artus Wolffort

Computer Games

Back when I had time to play PC games (and the rare occasions I still have time) I generally stick to online shooters. Actually, I pretty much only play Team Fortress 2, and even that pretty rarely. Anyways, I love the game's sense of humor. Here's a trailer:

We are all Ponzis now....

Peter Schiff takes a crack at the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, and draws unsettling comparisons between it and the housing collapse:

Madoff’s inspiration came from Charles Ponzi, the Italian-born American immigrant who promoted an investment plan in the early 1900s’ that traded postal coupons. Rather than paying investors from legitimate investment returns, Ponzi hit upon the innovative idea of paying out early investors with money collected from new investors. By creating an illusion of success, interest in his investment plan ballooned. Over time the schemes have become known by many other names, such as chain letters or pyramid schemes. They are united by the fact that they always fail in the end.

When the influx of new investors inevitably slows to the point where distributions to current investors can no longer be maintained, investors look to withdraw funds. When this happens, the entire structure falls apart. The profits received by those who “invested” early as well as any funds skimmed off by the promoter, are offset by all the losses of those who came late to the party.

To a large extent, the same concept has driven the major asset bubbles of the last decade. Given the ridiculously high valuations seen by tech stocks and real estate during their respective booms, the only way the bubbles could be perpetuated was if newer “investors” could be found to pay even more outrageous prices (the greater fool). But when these new buyers balked, the whole structure crumbled. Although there was no Ponzi or Madoff to orchestrate these manias, the entire financial and economic apparatus of the country had successfully convinced the public that “investments” in tech stocks and condominiums were bullet proof and that the supply of new buyers was endless.

Schiff doesn't stop there, however. He takes it one step further, leveling the Ponzi scheme accusation next at Social Security:

The Social Security Administration runs its “trust funds” with precisely the same methods used by Madoff and Ponzi. As money is collected by from current workers, the funds are then dispersed to those already receiving benefits. None of the funds collected are actually invested, so no investment returns are ever generated. Those currently paying into the system are expected to receive their returns based on the “contribution” made by future workers. This is the classic definition of a Ponzi scheme. The only difference is that Ponzi didn’t own a printing press.

From there he tackles the national debt and the risk we run in this Ponzi economy of foreign creditors trying to sell of their investment in the US. It's pretty scary stuff.

I reccomend reading the whole thing, and everything else that Schiff writes on the subject. After all, he was right long before anyone else was. He saw this whole mess coming years ago, and said so unflinchingly, despite constant criticism.

What are the implications of this? Is our entire economy a house of cards? It seems more and more that way. And as much as I don't like the concept of bailout, I sure as hell don't like the concept of losing our last major manufacturing base.

Quote of the day

As I finish up tonight’s blogging with a nice glass of scotch beside me I realize that if I could spend my days and nights like this, alternating between writing longer form political and social analysis and shorter form blog entries, interrupting only to cook good, quality, home-made meals with locally sourced, organic foods and to do yoga, I would pretty much be in heaven.

~Scott Payne

And I would add that yes, that sounds pretty amazing. One symptom, however, of the shorter blog pieces is that I find myself focusing so much more on that format, that I begin to lose the will to write the longer pieces. Of course, that may also have to do with my 18-month old still not sleeping through the night....I find sleeplessness breeds a short attention span. Perfect for blogging--but for longer essays?

Not so much.

Virtual Torture

James Poulos doesn't like the idea of "making things safe by making them virtual"...especially our concept of pain ...

Frustrated by the irreducible remainder of suffering in the world, we want at least to be in charge of it — or at least take control of the administration of sessions in which we experience virtual suffering. We try to separate real suffering from a sense of suffering, under a therapeutic version of Mill’s ‘harm principle’ in which only real suffering, as opposed to virtual suffering, really harms people. If we can only master our response to our sense of suffering — use it to create a real hardness in ourselves — then perhaps we can face the real world with less fear and neurosis.

And I'd say that through these attempts we make ourselves less capable of empathy, or at least we leave ourselves with the illusion of empathy, when in fact we have become strangers to the basic problems of being human, first among them pain and suffering...

In any case, the whole notion of creating virtual pain (or virtual anything for that matter) to better understand ourselves and the world, strikes me as rather wrong-headed. If anything, the more we've become exposed to the "unreal" in its many forms (movies, video games, nightly news) the more detached and apathetic we've become--and this entirely by accident. We don't set out to become more numb to the world, but I think that's the price we pay for virtual living as opposed to real life.

Stopping genocide

Yglesias has a good, balanced take on this. I admit, I'm struggling on this issue. Larison has me stumped. Every time humanitarian intervention comes up it sounds quite good, but then the logistics of it--the history of the conflict, the regional realities, etc.--makes the problem quite baffling.

But non-interventionism vs interventionism seems to leave other options off the table.

In any case, here's a sample:

The basic way the conversation goes is basically that whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them. And sometimes we invade Iraq. But then whenever anyone suggests that the U.S. commit itself to following international law and not using non-defensive military force absent a UN Security Council authorization, people show up insisting that we need to maintain the right to unilateral non-defensive war in order to stop genocide. Then whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them. But the larger cause of unilateral militarism lives to fight another day. Or something....

...The flipside of these considerations is that when skeptics of far-flung war-fighting hear that someone or other wants to do more to prevent mass killings of civilians abroad, they shouldn’t just assume that what the person has in mind is starting a lot of new wars. That is what Robert Kagan and Max Boot have in mind. And it’s what some Democrats have in mind, too. But other people — usually the people with a real interest in humanitarian issues and the crisis-afflicted regions, rather then generic Very Serious People — are talking about actually finding ways to prevent people from being killed, not finding new pretexts for killing people.

Exactly.

And so the question becomes: can America or the UN or any organization really, truly stop genocide? It seemed to work in Eastern Europe in the 90's, but then again, did we merely postpone a war that was meant to be had? Would it break out now if our troops left the region? Tensions there are still remarkably high. Nationalism doesn't simply fade when the fighting stops.

It's an emotionally driven issue, and rightly so. Images from Rwanda or Darfur or the Congo, or the countless other African crisis zones are heart-rending, appalling, and make even the most dovish among us wish for some good, swift military intervention.

It's simply not as easy as all that. I'd offer up Somalia as a vision of sorts for the trouble with what appears to be a rather simple humanitarian mission. The best laid plans, as they say...

Quote of the day

Allow me also to state unequivocally and without reserve that if President Obama does not entirely repeal the policy authorizing the use of torture, and the use of rendition to achieve the same repugnant ends, then he deserves to be described the same way that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are rightly labeled: war criminal.

~Eric Martin

These new reports on the top-down torture policy of the Bush Administration are frightening and sad, and I for one won't defend Bush for a heartbeat.

Let them eat cake...

Pat Buchanan can't understand what the hell the Senate Republicans are doing:

Is the Republican Party so fanatic in its ideology that, rather than sin against a commandment of Milton Friedman, it is willing to see America written forever out of this fantastic market, let millions of jobs vanish and write off the industrial Midwest?

So it would seem. “Companies fail every day, and others take their place,” said Sen. Richard Shelby on “Face the Nation.”

Presumably, the companies that will “take their place,” when GM, Ford and Chrysler die, are German, Japanese or Korean, like the ones lured into Shelby’s state of Alabama, with the bait of subsidies free-market Republicans are supposed to abhor.

Buchanan's arguments in this piece are compelling. Of course, these days I'm so adrift in the arguments and counter-arguments to the bailout of US Auto, it really has become a bit difficult to wrap my brain around.

Buchanan points out a number of fallacies in the GOP argument. First, the foreign auto makers that are here are heavily subsidized both by our government and theirs. Then, too, in the world of globalization not all free trade is really all that free. Other countries protect their industry against us, and we should not feel so beholden to leave our own out there without any sort of...here's that word...protection.

The way I see it, though, is without a little protectionism (what's the government for after all?) we can't keep good American jobs here in America. They'll all be shipped away. And the crappy service jobs that do remain will all be taken by illegals since the government also doesn't see fit to enforce immigration laws. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a foreign work force in good times. Hell, if there were good blue-collar jobs here, letting illegals work the crappy service jobs wouldn't be a big deal, would it?

But both?

That just strikes me as a remedy to get the rich richer and the middle class poorer. I'm all for globalization, but let's do it right. Let's do it slowly. Let's be bloody conservative about this process, and yell "stop" every now and then, instead of just watching our wealth and national pride slip through the drain and float overseas, bit by bit by bit...

Buchanan goes on:

When an icon of American industry, Harley-Davidson, was being run out of business by cutthroat Japanese dumping of big bikes to kill the “Harley Hog,” Reagan slapped 50 percent tariffs on their motorcycles and imposed quotas on imported Japanese cars. Message to Tokyo. If you folks want to keep selling cars here, start building them here.

Fear of Reaganism brought those foreign automakers, lickety-split, to America’s shores, not any love of Southern cooking.

Do the Republicans not yet understand how they lost the New Majority coalition that gave them three landslides and five victories in six presidential races from 1968 to 1988? Do they not know why the Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are going home?

The Republican Party gave their jobs away!

How? By telling U.S. manufacturers they could shut plants here, get rid of their U.S. workers, build factories in Mexico, Asia or China, and ship their products back, free of charge.

Republican globalists gave U.S. manufacturers every incentive to go abroad and take their jobs with them, the jobs of Middle America.

Sorry to quote so much of Buchanan's essay (Tokyo Republicans) but I really do think it's worth reading. Jobs are not an abstract concept, though they may be to the upper echelons of the investment class (that class that so easily obtains its bailouts, no?).

Then again, I'm not in favor of this bailout without a few strings attached here and there. First of all, the unions may not have wage issues (the $70/hr figure includes benefits and other factors) but they do have unrealistic pension/benefits packages, and need to realize that in order to really qualify for this bailout, they should fall in line with most of American workers and accept 401ks and the like.

And the executives (not just the CEO's) of these companies need to make some serious concessions as well. Lose the perks for a while. Tighten your belts like everybody else. Sacrifice for the good of the company, the country, yourselves. People aren't going to buy many cars right now in this climate of tight-credit, so it's going to be a rough ride even with a bailout.

What keeps me leaning toward bailing out the industry (and it's a bitter pill, I admit) is just the notion of that many Americans losing their livelihoods and entering the already brutal job market.

I'll leave you with more of Buchanan's scathing words:

In today’s world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn’t even know who “us” is.

Trade is good, people, but every country needs a manufacturing base. We'll be in some seriously troubled waters if we choose to ignore that.

Now, somebody talk about inflation and get me all depressed again...

A shoe by any other name...or..."a similar foot"

Regarding the shoe-thrower, al Zaidi, in Iraq (who missed Mr. Bush by a hair at a press conference):

Yes, this man could have (or could have tried) to do something far more diabolical. He could have attempted to smuggle in a bomb or weapon and attempted an assassination. That would have been horrible, obviously, and the alternative--the throwing of a pair of shoes--is a far more benign form of protest. And I understand it. Sometimes these symbolic gestures speak much louder than all the words we can muster. Perhaps this journalist thought of this--perhaps he was thinking of some scathing article he could write, and found himself facing the futility of repetition.

So he tossed a shoe at the President. And then another. I get it. Iraqis do have every right to be frustrated--possibly with the invasion, but more likely with the really, really bad management post-invasion. I don't think spending too much time on the supposed "hilarity" or "horror" of the event is important. Personally I am a bit offended when my President has a shoe thrown at him or is faced with any sort of violence no matter how small, and I don't find it in the least bit funny. I thought Bush himself handled the event rather well. But I also don't think this is an act of cowardice or wickedness on the part of the shoe-lobber either.

It's more likely just an act of writer's block, or desperation, however you look at it.

I'd be frustrated too.

Wouldn't it be "nice" if Iraqi's had all just taken off their shoes and begun throwing them rather than blowing themselves up willy nilly ? If only. Such a novel protest may have been quite effective--who knows? Certainly after a couple years of incoming shoes the Americans may have gotten the point. And since security issues never would have reached the level they are at now, perhaps Americans could have pulled out long ago, chased back to the USA by a downpour of Iraqi shoes, sandals, slippers, and so forth.

Then again, what good does "if only" thinking do us? In the end, like the flying shoe itself, this is an exercise in futility. The point has been made already with dozens of suicide bombs. The shoe came too late, and missed its mark.

I suppose the next question is whether or not Obama will face a similar fate?



Quite an arm on that guy, eh? And quite the nimble President we have...

painting of the day - "the consummation of the empire"

I don't know. I thought this was fitting. Timely. I used it as the new header at NeoConstant, too...

Censorship at Culture11

Following is Hermione Gray's post "In Defense of the Hook-up Culture" in its entirety. Ms. Gray's post was cut from LadyBlog due to its supposed "moral stupidity" though I would take moral stupidity over bad censorship practice any day of the week.

By Hermione Gray

Poor Charles Blow. It must be hard to produce a fresh and entertaining column for the New York Times on a regular basis, even if he does only publish on alternate Saturdays. Today’s column critiques the Millennial practice of “hooking up” and the supposed death of traditional dating, which has, of course, been done to death. Blow offers nothing new, but to briefly recap: “Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse.”

Critics of hooking up rely heavily on the unsupported myth that women are more interested lasting romantic attachments than are men. But according to a 2003 survey of 12,000 men and women, Nearly 66% of men, compared with 51% of women agree with the statement, ‘It is better to get married than go through life single’. Moreover, women file two-thirds of all divorce suits, although men are only slightly more likely to be accused of infidelity and allegations of physical abuse are rare.

If most people of both genders want to be married eventually, why has dating given way to hooking up? I think that the so-called “hook-up culture” is the natural result of a cultural shift that has permitted men and women to form more and deeper platonic attachments: as fellow students, as work colleagues, as good friends and confidants. The ritual of traditional dating – in which you took an attractive near-stranger to dinner in order to get to know her better – was popular in an era of gender-segregated colleges and workplaces, which offered few other opportunities for meaningful interaction between the sexes.

Blow cites a 2006 academic paper with findings that reflect my own experience: people usually hook up with friends rather than strangers. While it seems true that men experience, on average, fewer downsides to purely casual sex, the hook-up culture may encourage more rather than less responsibility. After all, you will see a friend again, especially if you have many mutual friends. While sex between strangers does happen, I’d argue that today’s paradigmatic hook-up partners know each other better than a typical 1950s couple on a third date at the drive-in movie theater, and are more likely to be on speaking terms a few months later. A finding from the Centers for Disease Control perhaps supports this view: today’s young people are having less sex than their elders despite the hook-up dynamic.

It’s ironic that the rebellious Boomer generation has reached the stage of life at which they can be found bleating, like their elders, “Social change is ba-a-d!” But love, as Richard Curtis reminds us, remains all around, whatever its complex and evolving forms.

UPDATE: This is from one of my comments on the original thread, responding to Joe Carter...

And I guess, in the end, I simply feel that sometimes even more can be gained from a piece like this than lost. After all, sometimes the most valuable argument is the one we have to argue against. I, for one, find the “hook-up” culture morally shallow and just overall very sad. I think leaving the post up and commenting on it would have been a valuable contribution to this site, if only to allow those of us who disagreed completely with it to be able to air our thoughts and make our case.

Damn you, Snowboarders!

Austin Bramwell is not pleased:

The fall of Taos—as alarming to North American skiers as the fall of the Bastille to the ancien regime—typifies everything obnoxious in American life today: the sacrificing of the will of the majority to the complaints of the obstreperous few, the cloaking of every cause in the phony garb of victimhood, the wanton destruction of the traditions that make life worthwhile, the relentless homogenization of the cultural landscape in the name of “diversity.” Even non-skiers may take it as a warning.

Now, I'm a skier, but I've only ever skied at hybrid hills--where skiers and snowboarders shared the slopes.

In fact, I didn't even realize such a grand thing as ski-only resorts even existed, though apparently they are about to become a thing of the past.

How often do we find things just on the brink of extinction? Like magic in the Lord of the Rings, or honesty in politics...

underwhelmed

Coming into this week I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed at the prospect of blogging. Perhaps this is due to the encroaching Holidays; perhaps to the still-lingering weariness of too-little sleep this weekend; or maybe it is because I am working on a larger piece and it's having the usual effect on me: writer's block--that hideous curtailer of ambition...

I'll snap out of it, I'm sure...

painting of the day - "silence"

John Henry Fuseli

Supreme Court Overturns Bush v Gore

Breaking News! The Supreme Court overturns Bush v Gore:

WASHINGTON—In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America....

...Gore will serve as commander in chief from Dec. 10 to Jan. 20.

"Allowing this flaw in judgment to stand would set an unworkable precedent for future elections and cause irreparable harm to the impartiality of this court," said Chief Justice John G. Roberts in his majority opinion. "Furthermore, let me be the first to personally congratulate President Gore on his remarkable come-from-behind victory. May he guide us wisely into this new millennium."

Cocaine dealer pardoned by Bush

John Forte, perhaps due to Carly Simon's advocacy, has been pardoned by George W Bush. This despite the fact that he was arrested for smuggling well over a million dollars of liquid cocaine into this country.

Who says celebrity doesn't pay? (actually, I'm not sure anyone said that....)

Taki has this to say:

Now I ask you. Is this man Bush for real? How can someone who keeps talking about family values and is a devout Christian pardon someone whom the book was not thrown at purely because the right--wrong--people asked him to? I know that politicians hold all of us in contempt, but this is so outrageous it would shock good people even in Mexico. I wonder how he justified it? Did he believe that the smuggler thought he was carrying Pepsi but it turned out to be coke?

No kidding.

Sam's Club Socialism?

I just finished reading Richard Spencer's review of Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Here's where I get into trouble on these matters: I really like the ideas presented by Ross and Reihan, the populist approach, getting more people invovled, but I have to in the end agree with Spencer--inflation is the silent killer of all these plans, and of much of liberalism in general. Spencer tackles the notion of more people going to college and basically states that the more people who go, the less the value of the degree becomes, and the lower the standards become to even attain the degree in the first place.

Regarding higher education, and the cultural divide between grads and dropouts, Douthat and Salam’s propose a plan that would essential inflate the Bachelors Degree into oblivion. So that more Sam’s Club voters “get in,” the authors throw out the idea of “class-based affirmative action.”

Well I couldn't agree more.

I'm still amazed at the (lack of) quality of many of my former fellow students. And let's face it, the bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma. We'll make it even more worthless if we keep letting more and more students into colleges. This, too, is made worse by the easy money students have access to to get into college regardless of merit--it allows schools to keep jacking up their tuition and their enrollment at the same time. This, I have to say, is the wrong way to fund our universities. It may sound liberal, but I think the better tactic would be to simply actually fund the universities through State budgets (with a little help from tuition) and get rid of all these easily gotten Federal subsidies. We'd have lower tuition but students would still have to actually pay for it or get scholarships rather than merely take on boatloads of debt. In my mind, this is actually a more conservative approach.

Spencer also tackles wage subsidies. He's fairly gentle in his reproach--and exhibits a great deal of admiration for Douthat and Salam--but he lays bare many of the fallacies in their approach:

If there’s a kind of “theme” running throughout Grand New Party, it’s the authors’ total obliviousness to the concept of inflation—that dolling our more of something almost always decreases its value.

This is most obvious with their plan for “wage subsidies.” I think most high schoolers who passed the AP Econ exam could explain to Douthat and Salam that simply giving workers more money inflates prices of everyday items (a classic case of too many dollars chasing too few goods). In this way, there’s no real distinction between, say, giving everyone $10,000 and one million—in both cases prices would jump at a clip reflecting the size of the handout.

This is basically the "good-intentions pave the road to hell" critique. Of course it would be good to have everyone make more money--except that if everyone has more money, prices will simply go up and in the end, everyone will have the same or less money. This is also the problem with continuing in this vein of mass-debt, massive-spending, etc. Everyone feels as though they are prosperous, but that is simply because they can spend a great deal more than they can earn. It's all an illusion. Populist policies can be helpful when restrained, but can be devestating when they begin to cause high inflation. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to restrain populist policies. Entitlement programs like to grow. Just watch this bailout to see what I'm talking about. Throwing money at a problem can work, but not if the money in question is play money. The American dollar is looking more and more like Monopoly money all the time.

It's tricky to know what's best. I'm the first to admit that the more I know, the less I know. That's the paradox of knowledge. Ignorance leads to boldness and blustering, the claiming of certainty sans fact. Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds confidence and uncertainty in a sort of perpetual duel. The more I learn, the more I question.

what I've been reading

Let's see, I've kept my reading fairly light lately. When I'm not reading articles and blogs and pouring over politics and theology and other heavy subjects, I'm typically reading fantasy, science fiction, or historical fiction/non-fiction.

Recently I've read the amazing and terrifying The Devil in the White City, a story of serial murder and the extraordinary Chicago World's Fair. It is historical non-fiction with some liberty taken. The prose is darkly beautiful, and the story compelling. It's one of those books you can't set down, and yet wish you could at times there are moments so appallingly sad. Quite a strange juxtaposition of destruction and creation, and a slice of our history that all Americans should read about. The ingenuity of mankind at its best, and the brutality of mankind at its worst.

From there I decided I needed to go light, and read the Amulet of Samarkand, the first in a trilogy of young adult fantasy. Quite clever. Not fantastic, but fun and witty.

I know I'll likely leave out something. It's hard to keep track of all that I read (often two or three books at once). I ought to keep a spreadsheet.

Let's see, I just finished Son of a Witch, the sequel to Wicked. I liked it a great deal, though it was not as good as its predecessor. Perhaps the novelty of Wicked had worn a bit thin by the sequel. In any case, it was a bitter-sweet read. Lovely prose, but oddly unlikeable characters once again. I'm a sucker for at least one or two "good-guys" in a book. I like dynamic characters, but I prefer more redeeming qualities, and this book came up rather short of that.

Then I read the surprisingly short "Tales of Despereaux" which was a lovely little fable about a brave mouse and a damsel in distress. It was, as I said, extremely short, so this is one of those books you can do in an evening (or two). It's not terribly deep, but it's fun, and the author does a fantastic job inserting herself in a sort of quasi-narrative style with many "Dear readers" and little questions and warnings. A good book for young adults and adolescents, and I actually think you could read this one to much younger children as well.

Then I read The Giver, and I think I'll dedicate an entire post to this one later. Amazing book. Somehow I missed this one growing up. I generally read everything as a child, so I don't know how this masterpiece slipped by me. The themes of tradition and memory hit home, to be sure. Like I said, a great deal to ponder on this one, so I'll leave that for another post. If you haven't read this book go buy it now--it's important reading.

Now I'm about half-way through The Dead by James Joyce. It is supposedly the "perfect" story, so for a writer it's a must read. From there, I'm not sure what I'll read. I'm planning on getting into the Naomi Novik books soon, but before I delve into epic fantasy I think I'd like to get some classics out of the way. Perhaps I'll tackle War and Peace. Or Reflections on the Revolution in France. Or, The Histories.

Any suggestions?

the Congo...

Larison explains, rather well, why intervention in the Congo may sound a whole lot better than it would actually be in practice.

Congo stands out as a country that has numerous deep, intractable problems. Its government in the west exercises limited control over much of the country, its army is ineffective in suppressing militias and foreign forces in its territory, and it is ringed by neighbors that have no scruples against fishing in its troubled waters. Kagame winks and nods at Nkunda’s rebels, but claims to have no control over them, while the government in Kinshasha has not done much, partly because it cannot do much, to strike at the surviving genocidaires. What will outside intervention do that is going to change this dynamic in a fundamental way? Even if Western states were willing and able to establish some buffer force to keep Nkunda in line, what would prevent that force from being pulled into a multi-sided conflict as the Nigerians were in Liberia? At what point would such a mission be deemed too costly or futile to continue? What would keep such a mission from becoming a near-permanent deployment? Obviously, at no point in his column does Gerson answer any of these questions, nor does he explain why the problems of central Africa should not be primarily the responsibility of the states involved and of the African Union.

Typically it is these "deep, intractable problems" that make intervention such a messy business. Think of the sectarian divides in Iraq. If Iraq had been a less divided country, certainly our intervention there would have been much simpler. The fact is, however, it is a country and region despairingly divided. We did not take history into account when we invaded that country. Would we be exhibiting the same short-sightedness should we intervene in the Congo?

Should Europe (and by extension America) simply wash its hands of the post-colonial fall-out it largely helped create? Does meddling only make matters worse?

I don't know if either school of thought has the right answer--indeed, I believe that each situation as it arises needs to be taken into account. Darfur is not the same crisis as the Congo. Each must be judged on its own set of circumstances.

Or does the credo "mind your own damn business" deserve more merit on the international stage?

Painting of the Day - Mad Woman

Eugène Delacroix

It was real, and it was genuine

Roland Dodds offers up his advice for small government conservatives in the wake of Bill Kristol's recent column. Yes there is evidence that Roosevelt's New Deal may have done more harm than good, but that isn't necessarily the way Americans saw it at the time (and remember what they say about vision and hind-sight...)

What I can say however is that a majority of the citizenry believed Roosevelt was helping them during those dire years. A majority believed he was on their side, and that he was doing all he could to make their lives better. That perception matters, both in politics and in our assessment of history. When George Bush stood at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks, and said we would do all in our power to bring the people responsible for the tragedy to justice, it struck a chord with many Americans. It took years of incompetence to squander that goodwill (with an equal share of hyper partisanship from the opposition), but it was real and it was genuine.

Now this is an interesting point, and plays back into the "politics is personality" thing somewhat. The abstraction inherent in small government conservatism is the problem, I think. Abstract ideology does not put food in your belly, nor money in your pocket. And ideology that focuses so far into the future that it sidesteps the immediate problems our country faces (i.e. job loss right now as opposed to theoretical lack of future job creation) is not going to look very good to people who are facing tough economic times.

Over-stretched

Alex Massie responds to Michael Gerson's latest from the Congo:

I'm more sympathetic than some to humanitarian intervention, but where does Gerson actually think these troops will come from? Even if there was any great political or popular desire in Britain for intervening in the Congo - and there is, rather emphatically, none whatsoever - there simply aren't the troops to do it. The same might be said of the United States. We're over-stretched as it is. Gerson knows this, I assume, making his column more a matter of moral, concerned ostentation than any practical response to a ghastly situation.

We are running thin on troops, as are our only really formidable allies in Europe. This is the cost of foolish interventionist wars like Iraq. I believe that if we have the established political capital and military strength to intervene in Africa and elsewhere than we should, if it means protecting millions of innocents from genocide. We don't, however, thanks to the clumsiness of the Iraq war.

At this point, until our economy strengthens and until we finally pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we will not be able to pursue humanitarian intervention.

Lately I have steered further and further into the Realist school of thought with that one caveat: there are times when we as a civilization must rise up above our national interest to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Again, this is not an ideological matter, but rather one that questions our duty as human beings to one another. We cannot be world police, but at times there are reasons compelling enough for us to use our force to bring about stability.

As the world becomes more globalized this becomes more necessary, sadly. In the long run, such intervention will increase American national security. But we must not attempt nation building, nor can we continue the pipe-dream that is democracy spreading. Democracy is an organic thing, and it must grow on its own. In some places it may never grow, that's true. Then again, in some places it is perhaps best that it doesn't. (Gaza, anyone?) Security, on the other hand, is implemented. We can do that when absolutely necessary and still keep American first...

Piece of Shit Car

H/T Ericka Anderson

Marrion Barry Quotes

Too funny. Former DC mayor Marrion Barry is awesome:

"The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather."

"I promise you a police car on every sidewalk."

"If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate."

"First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl."

"Bitch set me up."

"I am clearly more popular than Reagan. I am in my third term. Where's Reagan? Gone after two! Defeated by George Bush and Michael Dukakis no less."

"The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist."

"I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria, or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?"

"People have criticized me because my security detail is larger than the president's. But you must ask yourself: are there more people who want to kill me than who want to kill the president? I can assure you there are."

"The brave men who died in Vietnam, more than 100% of which were black, were the ultimate sacrifice."

"I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican."

"What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?"

"People blame me because these water mains break, but I ask you, if the water mains didn't break, would it be my responsibility to fix them then? WOULD IT!?!"

"I am a great mayor; I am an upstanding Christian man; I am an intelligent man; I am a deeply educated man; I am a humble man."

Wow.

Re-engage, elevate...

Scott Payne has an interesting piece up on community, in which he discusses one direction he'd like to see conservatives take their politics (which gets into the Sam's Club Republican vein a little)

I would like to wax theoretical about the GOP and conservatives more broadly moving to become the party and movement that goes about reengaging and reinvigorating those considerable segments of the population who feel utterly disenfranchised. When I suggest that kind of re-engagement I mean it in more than just the economic fashion that Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat suggest in their book Grand New Party. I mean a re-engagement in the first principles of democracy that don’t necessarily swing into simply populist majority rules democracy, but the intellectual and emotional re-engagement in the ongoing discussion about what the country does and how it goes about doing it. I would like to wax optimistic about this as the responsible direction for American conservatism moving into the future, but I’m not optimistic.

Neither am I, at least not any time soon. I used to be a hawk until I began to realize the many ways in which our aggressive foreign policy has made governing here at home nearly impossible. From there I moved in the ideological direction of the paleo and crunchy cons, who seemed to fit my style of community-building, strong-families, etc. as well as my hunger for real, intellectual discussion. Just read Daniel Larison's work and then head over and read Michelle Malkin and you see the difference in tone and depth. Read The American Conservative and then go read some of the nonsense over at Pajamas Media. Read Ross Douthat and then read Charles Johnson.

This isn't to say we don't need hawks. They can, at times, push through the inertia that builds up around the school of realism.

In any case, I stray from my point. Which is....

Too much focus has been on foreign affairs these last eight years. Too much time has been spent, too much money, worrying about terror and fighting the "war" on said tactic and on its residuals Iraq, Afghanistan, et al. Conservatives have forgotten that governance extends to the home front, and that they are in a unique position to, as Scott says, re-engage Americans who feel left out. Isn't this in a sense exactly what Obama has done?

Now, as I said, I'm not optimistic, but I am heartened by the great discussion going on at least in the blogosphere--or should I say at least in some corners of the blogosphere (which is mostly populated by less-than-intellectual discussion) which seems quite intent on forging something better, more rational, more substantive...

Scott writes,

Not only do blogs have the ability to generate meaningful communities that might not have previously existed, but those communities then might be spurred to meaninginful action that could very well have wide ranging impacts.

Exactly. This has been my feeling regarding the community-building potential of blogs for some time. There is always a give and take between tradition and technology. We always put our traditions, our communities, our relationships somewhat at risk when we adopt new technologies. Our advancements, our new tools, our new infrastructures, at once open up new realms of possibility and shut down old ones. The neighborhood was never the same after the advent of the car, nor were towns after the building of the national interstate highway system. We become slowly more encapsulated within our gadgets--connected and apart.

Yet blogging, at its best, does just the reverse in a sense, too. It is no replacement for actual communitites, but it can bring together like minds who are passionate about community and help them make a difference. It can elevate the discussion.

That is what we need. Elevation...

Perhaps we should do away with voting altogether and just annoint some princesses and princes?

Much has been made of Ruth Marcus's recent column advocating the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate, and especially to her gushing endorsement of Kennedy mostly due to the "fairytale-like" quality that such an appointment would have. I doubt Miss Marcus was expecting quite the outpouring of disdain when she penned the column, but ever last drop of ink, every last pixel of it is true. We shouldn't be foisting dynastic politics on Americans. We've seen plenty of the Clinton's, the Bush's, and quite frankly, the Kennedy's, too.

I was talking with my wife about the appointments Obama has made thus far, and while we both agree that the choice of experienced people is a good thing, a wise move in general, we're also both a little perturbed by the Clintonian shape this administration is taking. Another Kennedy in the Senate, maybe Jeb Bush too? Jesse Jackson Jr.?

Daniel Larison has these words of wisdom:

Many Palin critics mocked her selection as something out of a cheesy Disney movie; Caroline Kennedy’s advocate in Ruth Marcus is openly declaring her desire to have Enchanted performed in the Senate.

Now this made me laugh (I thought Enchanted was excellent, by the way) but isn't it true? And on that note, have we begun electing mere caricatures? Palin the down-home mom's mom from Alaska; Kennedy the princess; Obama the savior; McCain the soldier....perhaps we've been doing this all along, I'm not sure. I've only been voting this century, really.

Well let's read a bit of Marcus's post:

What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age -- I'm a few months younger than she -- Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother's hand at her father's funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eye.

How romantic.

Ross responds quite aptly:

This is, of course, a pretty good distillation of the case against dynastic politics: Namely, that it transforms the business of republican self-government into a soap opera, in which the public/audience thrills to the "intriguing subplots" involving a President's daughter, a President's wife, and a Governor's son who happens to be the President's daughter's sister's ex-husband ... and sighs, enraptured, at the "fairy tale ending" when the President's daughter grows up to have a Senate seat handed to her as a reward for having endorsed the President-elect.

Now, admittedly, this would be less aggravating if it were simply a call for Caroline Kennedy to run for the US Senate. One can choke down dynastic politics if they also happen to be the will of the electorate. When discussing appointments however, meted out by Governors, to one of the most important political positions in the country, one cannot merely shudder and write it off as silly. Thankfully such minds as Douthat's and Larison's and many others are working hard to cast this as the dangerous societal tendency it seems to be becoming.

It's not "girly", writes Douthat of Marcus's moment of self-deprecation, it's an embarrassment.

Painting of the day...

Deposition by BACCHIACCA

Finland

Finland pays their teachers a great deal more than we do here in the States--%146 of average GDP--and treated with the sort of respect Doctors and other professionals get here in the states. Finnish children learn three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English.

One important aspect of the success of children (and probably teachers, too) though is the early education benefits they receive. Writes Yglesias:

Early childhood policy in Finland in a nutshell:

Mothers are entitled to five weeks maternity leave. After that, there’s a parental leave period of ten additional months that can be taken by either mother or father or divided between the two. After that, children have an “unconditional right to day care.” That can be provided either at municipal-run institutions or else at private ones. There are fees day care charged on a sliding scale according to income that max out at 233 euros per month. That’s far less than the cost of care, which, clearly, is heavily subsidized. A family that prefers to have a parent stay home and take care of the children can do so and receives a home care subsidy. Thus, the system is neutral between traditional and working-mother models. About 30 percent of Helsinki children are in the home care / allowance system.

You really can't put a price on good education. You simply can't. And if this country wants to compete the way we used to, we'd better start refocusing our priorities toward the welfare and minds of our children.

Quote of the day...

"Nothing worse than seeing your elected official being hauled off to jail. Yet again, there is nothing finer than seeing your elected official being hauled off to jail."

~Daniel Stark

This in regards to that crook Gov. Blagojevich.

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday morning on corruption charges, including an allegation that he conspired to effectively sell President-elect Barack Obama’s seat in the United States Senate to the highest bidder.

I know what Daniel's talking about. My former Congressman, Rick Renzi, is a major crook. The scumbag hasn't seen the inside of a prison yet, but we're crossing our fingers...

A Poem by Milton

On the Lord Gen. Fairfax at the siege of Colchester.

Fairfax, whose Name in armes through Europe rings
Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,
And all her jealous monarchs with amaze,
And rumors loud, that daunt remotest kings,
Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings
Victory home, though new rebellions raise
Thir Hydra heads, & the fals North displaies
Her brok'n league, to impe their serpent wings,
O yet a nobler task awaites thy hand;
For what can Warr, but endless warr still breed,
Till Truth, & Right from Violence be freed,
And Public Faith cleard from the shamefull brand
Of Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed
While Avarice, & Rapine share the land.

400th anniversary of John Milton's Birth

Archbishop Cranmer has reflections on the man and poet:

He was quite simply a religio-politico-philosophical genius who articulated some of the most fundamental and valuable insights about politics, society, morality, and human nature.

He was a prophetic philosopher poet.

We shall not look upon his like again.

Indeed.

Double plus good...

The Oxford Children's dictionary is getting dumbed down in a very tragic manner. It appears "raven" is getting offed in favor of "MP3 Player" (quoth the MP3 player, Nevermore!); where once we had a kingfisher, instead we have voicemail; and say adieu to the lonely beaver--we have shoved him out in favor of that omnipresent word so en vogue these days: tolerant.

How sad.

Starbucks hatred

It's been a while since I've encountered any anti-Starbucks rhetoric, probably because I don't hang out in any of our local coffee shops, and especially not in the local Bahai-owned granola cafe which I actually really like but which began smelling too distinctly of patchouli. In any case, Elizabeth Nolan Brown hasn't either, until recently, and thus she offers up her defense:

Starbucks has always seemed entirely utilitarian to me. It’s comfortable, but not charming. If you live in the city, there’s one on every corner, so it’s often the easiest option. It’s quick (usually), and you know there’s not much variance from one locale to the next (a fact which some people,I guess, see as a flaw, but I find comforting). This is all by way of saying I find anti-starbucks sentiment utterly baffling, in the most amusing way possible.

The thing I like about Starbucks is that it isn't aesthetically quite so overtly exact as other chains. From the street it doesn't necessarily look like a Starbucks in the way a Burger King or a Jiffy Lube look like a Burger King or a Jiffy Lube. Perhaps its less signage. Perhaps they just look nicer, and so they don't bother me as much. I'm picky when it comes to these things. The aesthetic of our communities is important to me. Go figure.

Inside, it's just as Elizabeth says: comfortable, but not charming. That works for me. I like other coffee shops, too, and if I could afford to go out to coffee shops I probably would go to whichever was most convenient for what I was doing. Starbucks if I'm on my way somewhere because they're quick. Probably a local hippie shop if I want to sit and read because they're more interesting. As far as I can tell, in my home town, no matter how many Starbucks popped up, no existing coffee shops went under.

My major complaint? Starbucks is way too expensive. Coffee should not exceed one dollar per cup, thank you very much....

Newsvine

I have to say, when I first started "blogging" at Newsvine I really enjoyed it. Now, not so much, and for many reasons.

Let's see, how about a list?

1. It's gotten sort of boring. The same old arguments on the same old threads by the same people.
2. Contrary to number one, the newbies don't help at all. They're typically just a recycled version of the last newbie to come in guns blazing.
3. It's really not the place to "get smarter" as the stated intent of the site proclaims. Most of the articles on the front page are garbage. I think if one were to take the top ten writers from the site you would lose 90% of the quality there.
4. Culture11 is better. More original content. You actually do get smarter there.
5. Blogging is better. There are more options (like videos) and more freedom in general.
6. The site has gotten slow.
7. And buggy.
8. The new comment editor sucks.
9. The fact that the article editor doesn't even have really any editor features at all is even more sucky.

I'll append the list as I think of more stuff to add...

Civil Unions for Everybody

Just more reason, in my mind, to abolish State-sanctioned marriage altogether, give out civil unions to adult partners, and leave marriage to the Church. Larison, in his denunciation of Meachem, writes:

The heart of Meachem’s argument does not bear much scrutiny, and we have not even come to the question of how entirely divorced Meachem’s entire argument is from a Christian understanding of the purpose of marriage. Procreation is an important part of that purpose, and joining two people from different sexes in complementary relationship is another, but beyond that it is a vocation to unite oneself to a person radically different from oneself. The uniting of complementary opposites as a type of the unity between Christ and His Church is one of the mystical meanings of marriage. The Christian conception of marriage is of two people joined into one flesh, the full expression of which is a child. Nowhere in the “great Judeo-Christian tradition” that Meachem supposedly takes so seriously is there support for his argument.

So you see, on a theological basis this will never, ever be resolved. It simply won't. The Bible forbids homosexuality, eating pork, masturbation, and hundreds of other outdated things, and people will focus on that and on the notion that marriage is solely for procreation (the logical conclusion being we should not be allowed to marry even if we are straight if we don't plan on having kids) and not on the more compelling Biblical truths like love and redemption and sacrifice and holiness.

So give marriage over to the Churches, universalize civil unions, and be done with it.

Patrick Appel defends Trig Palin

Patrick Appel, writing for Andrew Sullivan on the Dish, gives Andrew's Palin conspiracy theory a sucker punch:

The easiest way to disprove these conspiracy theories is to consider what would be required for them to be true. Palin's doctor, along with a good number of Mat-Su Regional's doctors, nurses, and administrators would need to be in on the cover-up. On multiple occasions Palin would have had to pad her belly to make herself look pregnant. She would have needed to get friends to lie about seeing her breast feed. She would have had to silence an entire community – including two 17-year-olds and their friends – while the national media and the National Enquirer snooped around. Implausible to say the least.

I don't believe Sarah Palin is capable of pulling off such a cover-up. And, like Alex Massie and John Schwenkler, I don't understand what is being accomplished by continued investigation.

Yes! Thank you! Andrew, I admire your blog and your politics and your obvious intellect and the fact that Jonah Goldberg refers to you as "the Party of Andrew" but this Palin nonsense has got to stop! Let it go....

Song of the day

Double Violin Concerto, for 2 violins

~Vivaldi

Lovely.

A pound of flesh..

The brutal truth that no one in Washington dares acknowledge is that our systemic economic problems can only be solved by a reduction in consumer borrowing and an increase in savings. We must repair our national balance sheet and a painful recession is the only path to achieve this. By interfering with the market’s attempts to bring this necessary change about, all the proposals currently coming from Washington or bubbling up from think tanks and Nobel prize-winning economists, will only exacerbate the imbalances and lay the foundation for even greater losses and a larger crisis.

~Peter Schiff (right, as usual)

Sad in a way. It's like a lesson your dad gives you when you take out your first credit card. Keep your savings high and your spending low. Live within your means. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

The elites...

Ross says the elites that got us into this financial mess bear more of the share of blame than the rest. He makes the case rather eloquently, of course:

The mistakes that our elites made, and that led us to this pass, have their roots in flaws common to all elites, in all times and places - hubris, arrogance, insulation from the costs of their decisions, and so forth. But they also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this elite, and this time and place. Flaws like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd expect from a to-the-manor-born elite - without the sense of proportion and limits, of the possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (as opposed to the upper-middle class, where most meritocrats starts) ... and without, as well, the sense of history, duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to.

Indeed.

I'd add more but the cold I've been writing under these past few days is catching up with me. I fear I'm approaching total shut-down mode.

Extreme Makeover

So I caught the tail end of an Extreme Makeover during Thanksgiving break. I don't usually catch the tail end of anything as I don't own a TV, but over the Holidays I watched a bit. In any case, I hadn't seen an episode of this show since its early days, and what really surprised me was the house they built for this poor family. It was huge, beautiful, lavish. It was, essentially, the exact sort of house we should not be encouraging people with modest means to want. It struck me as culturally just another way to create envy. We watch this show and think, well I'm struggling, when is somebody going to come along and build me that mansion?

What the show should be doing is teaching viewers ways that they can achieve home ownership for themselves; teach viewers how to build energy efficient, green domiciles; and preach the message of modesty rather than luxury.

A few decades ago houses were smaller. They were more basic. In the decades that lead to the present day, we had an opportunity as a people to make those houses better, more efficient, cheaper, etc. Instead we threw those houses out and started building gargantuan, hard-to-heat, hard-to-clean castles.

I watched this down-on-their-luck family getting so excited over this house and thought: "Well, how are they going to afford the property tax? The utilities? How will their peers treat them now?"

But more importantly, why is this show doing this at all? Do they think that each episode needs to trump the last? I imagine so.

Well how about this then? How about lose the entire "home" thing and move into public works? Go rebuild schools or medical centers. Go work on communities. Be realistic. Don't push this Hollywood, uber-capitalist fantasy on to your viewers like every other show out there. This is a show that's trying to help people, right? To do good?

So do good. Quit adding to the misery by promulgating this nonsensical dream. I mean, how many shows have this sort of opportunity to actually do good? It's a shame it's been so squandered.

Speaking of role-models, I just had to include this picture of environmentalist Al Gore's house. Lest it be forgotten, it's incumbent upon Americans to know that actually having a mansion leaves a lower carbon footprint than having a small home of modest means--but only if you purchase some of Al Gore's carbon credits. Also, said carbon credits will purge you of your immortal sins and allow for a place in the rather cool and pleasant heaven--not in Hell, which has suffered many epochs worth of global warming...

I don't mean to be especially hard on Al Gore here, but he fits right in with the Extreme Makeover people. They're both in a position to lead by example. Al Gore preaches, but he most certainly does not live his gospel.

Israelis v Israelis

The maelstrom that is Israel got a bit more stormy yesterday, as Israeli police evacuated hard-line settlers out of an area of the West Bank in an effort to move closer to a Palestinian State there. The scene was quite reminiscent of the Gaza evacuations, though on a much smaller scale. Then again, perhaps it should be a vision of the future. Massive forced evacuations will be necessary to move enough settlers out of the West Bank to create a sustainable, manageable Palestine.

Ah, the ghost of 1967...

The operation, carried out by 600 soldiers and policemen with stealth and efficiency, took half an hour and resulted in two dozen relatively light injuries. But events did not end there. Young settlers then rampaged through Palestinian fields and neighborhoods, setting olive trees on fire and trashing houses.

Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli Army spokeswoman, said the southern part of the West Bank, known in Israel as Judea, was designated a closed military area. That means only those who live here may now enter, an effort to prevent outside settlers from causing further trouble. Within an hour of the order, cars were backed up in huge lines at new military roadblocks.

The contested building, which occupants had dubbed the House of Peace, is on the road to the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives are said to be buried, a site Muslims and Jews have coveted and fought over for centuries.

As the sun descended, the area around the building looked like a war zone. Evacuees were still being dragged about, with four police officers per person; rocks were strewn on the roadways; plumes of black smoke were rising from the olive groves; and hundreds of helmeted troops in riot gear were confronting a crowd of infuriated settlers.

Now that's a culture war.

More on social conservatism...

James Poulos is on the right track with this:

I’m running through this logic — though it isn’t very earthshattering or groundbreaking — because of one thing that does seem to get lost in the shuffle: moving in the direction I’ve insinuated doesn’t necessarily mean that "conservatives" should throw religion under the bus. The move I’m envisioning, in fact, is a twofer: more overtly religious talk outside of politics and more talk about other things inside it.

To me this cuts to the essential problem with social conservatism in general. With the rise of the Christian Coalition, Christianity and morality and all these other personal questions became very politicized. But they became politicized essentially to self-perpetuate. The social conservative movement has fought all sorts of obscure battles over things like the Ten Commandments being set outside courthouses; a long and bitter battle over abortion that has done little to find any semblance of compromise but rather has incensed partisanship; and now the futile gay marriage debate.

Social conservatives do need to take religion out of politics--for religion's sake if nothing else. Start showing, not just telling. Start pushing for smart social programs that encourage strong families. Push for stronger educational programs. Work to clean up cities and bolster infrastructure. Join the new urbanist movement and start working for cleaner, greener, and more walkable, neighborly towns. People can't have other people's values force fed to them, but they can wander into the idyllic situation to adopt those values. Safer, warmer towns will encourage community building. Stronger safety nets , incentives for stay-at-home parents, reasonable health care proposals--essentially actual compassionate conservatism--these will all do more to actually help your fellow man than simply trying to legislate your brand of morality.

This nation is founded on separation of Church and State to protect both institutions from one another. We do, however, have the Western tradition wound up pretty tight in our form of Government, and that includes many Christian ideals. It's high time social conservatives accepted this separation, and looked for creative ways to live their message, inspire others, and get rid of this partisan message that has begun to divide the GOP. No, they're not the only ones to blame for the split, but they're part of it.

The Ultimate "I told you so"

Peter Schiff had it right. Everybody else? Dead wrong. Now, possibly due to my own poverty, possibly due to my disbelief at the rising home prices to such astronomical levels, I saw the bubble bursting. No, I didn't see the sub-prime mess coming. I'm not that savvy. But yes, I saw this whole thing falling out from under us. I wasn't wise. I didn't save every penny. So it goes...now just watch these Peter Schiff vids....awesome...





They laugh and scoff and shake their heads in disbelief. Ben Stein, who I think is very smart--lots of these commentators are very smart--gets it so wrong it's almost laughable. Schiff's predictions are uncannily on the money...

More on the Mumbai torture victims

It appears that reports of torture at the Chabad house may be very true indeed. How horrible:

Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the police said.

This from the New York Times. I'm still trying to understand how anyone could do anything so horrible. And it just seems to get worse. I don't think I'll ever understand.

The Thinkers

It appears Indiepundit is a "Thinkers" blog.

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

H/T -- The New Centrist (also one of The Thinkers...)

A very fascist list...

ModernityBlog has a wonderful resource posted, if you happen to live in the UK. A list (and more lists) along with links to much commentary regarding the members of the BNP (British Nationalist Party) the resident UK fascist party. It's well worth reading even if you aren't a Brit...

Were the Chabad Jews tortured?

Via Marshall Herskovitz--

On Monday, Dec. 1, the UK Telegraph reported statements by doctors who examined the bodies of those killed in the Mumbai massacre. "Many of the bodies showed signs of torture," they said, one going on to explain that "of all the bodies, the Israeli victims [clarified elsewhere in the article to mean the victims at Nariman Chabad Center] bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again."

Horrifying. And mystifying -- because this news item, carried around the world, has been utterly absent from the mainstream U.S. media. Other than The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report (unusual bedfellows indeed), you cannot find this report anywhere on CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post -- nowhere.

I haven't a clue why this would be, unless it really isn't true. It may not be. I hope it is a huge fabrication, because this story is already far too tragic.

Limited Government vs. Privatization

I consider myself to be a traditionalist and an independent. As such, I tend to disagree often with liberals and conservatives alike--and what do those brands really mean anymore? Generic boxes in which to store our ideologies, confine our thinking. Conservatism is a disposition. Well, perhaps liberalism is, too. As a traditionalist, I like to look at change with caution, even change in the reverse direction. Modernity is a mixed bag, and tradition, after all, has in every culture been a living thing, evolving over time.

The problem with modernity in many ways is quite simply the pace of change, especially in technology. It often outdistances our better judgment, confounds us. We have sudden new power, new control, new ways to communicate or entertain. The leaps made between one generation and the next are larger than ever before. Rampant capitalism and individualism are at once causes and reactions of this change of pace.

As a traditionalist I believe in the value of limited government--but not necessarily in the endless expansion of private enterprise. For instance, the privatization of prisons, I believe, has lead to the capitalization of crime. There is a capital interest in, for instance, keeping prisoner rates high--even for non-violent offenders. Thus the prison industry itself becomes a lobbyist for tough drug laws on marijuana use and other such nonsense. Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on making criminals out of stoners--resources that could be used to better protect our borders, put actual criminals behind bars, and so forth. Of course, pot-related crime is inevitable so long as it is a criminal offense, and thus private prisons can depend on a steady stream of guests to fill their coffers.

Also, there is the question of school-choice, and particularly school vouchers. I'm against school vouchers for a number of reasons. First of all, I believe that if private industry is as capable as it claims, then they should be able to provide quality affordable school in competition with public schools. Taking money from the public school system makes it less competitive and gives private industry a leg up it really doesn't deserve. Quite honestly, if we ever move to such a system it can only be done ethically by changing the admittance process to lottery rather than merit, which sort of defeats the point. This is how charter schools do it, and it seems to work. But charter schools have a slightly different target audience than private schools.

And if private schools really are as cheap as the proponents say they are, then why should the government need to subsidize the parents at all? It seems to me that vouchers would allow the parents who could afford to send their students to those schools already to save a few bucks at the expense of public schools. For instance, if there are 100 children enrolled in town A's private school this year, and next year school vouchers go into effect for $3000 a pop, then automatically $300,000 is drained from the public school budget. There are still only 100 kids at the private school. There are the same number of kids going to public school, too. Only now those kids have less money.

In the end the effect will be manifold.

First, public schools will face budget cuts, layoffs. Students will have a harder time taking "unnecessary" subjects like history, art, theatre, music, etc. This will have a long-term effect of dumbing down America and making it more difficult for us to compete in the global economy.

Second, it will cause private schools to raise their tuition rates. There will be more money in the hands of people who can already afford to send their kids to school, so the schools will have no qualm, and no reason not to raise the cost of attendance. (This is why a need-based "grant" system might work better, though even that could cause the price of private school to go up. Just look at college tuition. Direct funding of colleges rather than easy-loans and easy-grants would keep tuition and debt lower).

Third, it might lead to the opening of new private schools. Town A might have a second private school open and another 100 students admitted (draining another $300,000 from the public schools). This still leaves the other 800 students without choice, however, and with less funding. Class disparity widens, especially if the private schools admit based on merit (the point) vs. lottery. Ideally, conservatives believe that somehow all 1000 kids will eventually be able to go to private schools paid for with government vouchers. This may be. But if everyone is going to private school, then I imagine we'll see a very similar decline in quality that we've seen in public schools. The low end of the scale will be the least funded--perhaps solely paid for by vouchers, and populated largely by the lowest achievers. The high end will also be paid for by vouchers, but its tuition will be higher, so more private money will inundate these schools. The gap will be similar to what it is today, only now people will not have the safety net of the public school system, and that will be a great loss.

The alternative is to nationalize all schools. Then you'd really have school choice. But that would have a leveling effect, a dumbing down effect, that people with money certainly don't want to see.

So school choice seems fine to me if its the charter school/lottery system that adds public competition to the public school system. But privatization at the cost of the public good does not seem to be the answer to our education problem.

I'm not saying there isn't a huge problem to address with our public schools. I think there are problems with how they're funded in the first place (largely property tax); some serious issues with teachers unions and the lack of merit incentives; huge amounts of waste and a stifling bureaucracy; among many others. But crippling funding of our educational system is so counter-intuitive, so un-American, that I can never get behind the school voucher program.

I will, however, support a system of need-based grants for students too poor to attend private school, that would not pilfer fromt he public coffers. I know many of these schools, however, already have foundations and scholarships set up to deal with this, so I'm not sure it's really an issue.

I also support paying teachers more, just on a base level. Pay them more and demand more of them. If teachers made a starting salary in most locations of closer to $50,000 than $20,000 you'd start seeing many, many higher quality teachers enter the system. That's just a fact.

More on limited government vs. privatization of the public sphere later.

International Criminal Court

The real benefit to signing this could be the eventual TV deals daytime networks could conjure up. In any case, Roger Cohen writes

I can think of no better place for President-elect Barack Obama to start in signaling a changed American approach to the world, and particularly its European allies, than the International Criminal Court. Even short of American membership, which would involve a tough battle in Congress, there is much he can do. But “re-signing” followed by ratification should be Obama’s aim.

I'm not really a fan of international institutions. The UN is ineffectual at best--counter-productive at worst. It is a fine place to discuss, to conduct diplomatic initiatives, but it is really not the place to mete out judgment or strategy. Similarly, an international court of law would trump our own laws, override our own Constitution, and put our sovereignty at risk. I think a better alternative would be to allow for more transparency, more civilian oversight, of internal military affairs. Thus, if a marine were to be accused of some heinous crime in Iraq, rather than the entire matter being solved from within the military, it would be addressed in a special civilian/military court in the United States.

Nor do I believe our leaders should be tried by an international court--at least not until they've been tried here. International courts, I fear, would be too influenced by global opinion, and would turn into more of a popularity contest (or, rather, unpopularity contest) or a witch hunt.

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Via Culture11

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Larison defends Dreher

Daniel Larison defends Rod Dreher's latest column, in which Dreher (rightly) states:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

Larison agrees, and chastises several of Dreher's critics.

We have been living in a culture that encourages the deferral of responsibility, and to one degree or another most of us have participated in it, and this is inconsistent with sustaining ordered liberty. Those who have not participated in this culture, or have done so only a little, should be the least offended by what Rod is saying, because his words are not directed at them. To the extent that we are all paying the price for an era of profligacy, what he says is relevant for all of us.

I have most certainly taken part in this culture of excess. We are so constantly battered by materialism, consumerism, the conservatism of "greed is good" rather than "save your damn money" that it is almost impossible not to succumb, occasionally, to this irresponsible way of life.

We are promised the moon--it's as easy as swiping your Master Card. And where have the conservatives been in all of this? Keep spending! Don't let those mean old terrorists get you down, just go to Target and buy whatever you want.

That's the American Dream, isn't it? You get whatever you want, no matter what. Right?

Iraq

Totten has a piece in Commentary about the dismal state of affairs in Iraq:

For the past two weeks I’ve been embedded with the United States Army in Baghdad, and I find myself unable to figure out what to make of this place. Baghdad, despite the remarkable success of the surge, is as mind-bogglingly run-down and dysfunctional as ever, even compared with other Arabic countries. Iraq is a dark place. At times it feels like a doomed country that has only been temporarily spared the reckoning that is coming. Other times it is possible to look past the grimness and see progress beyond the mere slackening off of violence and war. Is Iraq truly on the mend, or has a total breakdown been merely postponed? Opinions here among Americans and Iraqis are mixed, but nearly everyone seems to agree about one thing at least: terrorists and insurgents will respond with a surge of their own in the wake of the upcoming withdrawal of American forces.

This has been my concern for some time now. So much of the success in Iraq is built upon factors like the Anbar Awakenings, population shifts, etc. It could all crumble in an instant once we leave. Perhaps there's nothing for it but to collapse. Perhaps our mission was accomplished those many years ago when Bush stood cockily beneath that banner: Saddam was deposed. Iraq had been freed. End of story. Perhaps this has merely been an exercise in futility these past five years.

Prop 8: The Musical

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

H/T Althouse

The Daily Show isn't going anywhere anytime soon...

No, it's not what it used to be, but John Oliver is still spot-on.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

A Christian Left?

Tony Jones wonders if there is a Christian Left in America.

This is a question that interests me, in part because I'm now commonly placed in the "liberal" camp, not only by self-proclaimed conservatives, but also by emergent movement leaders who wish that the theological provocations of McLaren, Pagitt, and Jones would just go away. I've been invited to a summit of leftward theologians in March who have a Ford Foundation grant to "rekindle theological education" among progressives.

Tony goes on to say,

I tend to think that the bipolarities of "liberal v. conservative" are a holdover from Enlightenment epistemology and, as such, are less and less helpful. I thought of this again as I heard Pat Buchanan proclaim on Morning Joe this morning that Obama's cabinet picks thus far are "center-right."

Good question, and good point.

I would probably fit more into the Jones brand of liberal Christianity than into Dreher's more conservative vision (though I love the earthy aspects of Dreher's philosophy, and the simplicity of it all). For one, I think conservative Christians and evangelicals focus far too much on dogma and far too little on the point, and yet still fall far short of the radicalism preached by Jesus. As Freddie notes,

One of the greater tragedies of the Christian evolution in America, concurrent with the terrible policy positions it has led to, is the gradual watering down of the teachings of a genuine radical into bland pablum. Jesus does not merely advocate charity. He advocates charity at almost any cost. Some people say give 'til it hurts, Jesus says that hurting is no excuse to stop giving. Turning the other cheek does not just mean don't fight back. It means present your other cheek for your attacker to hit you again, to extend the bonds of charity to such an extent that it involves helping someone who wants to hurt you to hurt you.

I would say that the Christian community, right and left, fall far short of this standard, which is okay. To live in the mold Jesus put forth is nearly impossible. And that's the point. You have to cut and paste to some degree in matters of faith, any faith. This is why fundamentalism is so absurd.

I find myself on the left on social issues, and yet I think I could justifiably call myself a social conservative in that I believe in the importance of faith, family, and other old institutions in building and maintaining a strong culture. I'm in favor of limited government, and lately classify my foreign policy in the owl/realist/occasional hawk mold, though I'm against nation building.

We're all a little more complicated than our ideologies would allow. Quite frankly, I can't come to a personal consensus on the bailout. Economics appears too complicated for even the economists these days. I don't think there's much evidence for the efficacy of supply-side economics. I think there is evidence that low taxes can help the economy, but they have to be accompanied by low spending, and that ain't happening any time soon...

So I say out with this question of Right and Left altogether. Aren't we all becoming a little tired of being boxed in? Conservatism, after all, isn't so much an ideology as a disposition, correct? Is Liberalism any different? Pragmatism? Realism?

Is Obama a bigot?

Much has been made recently of the passage of Proposition 8 in California, nullifying the recent court decision to permit same-sex marriage. Now, I am a supporter of gay marriage for many reasons, not the least of which is my belief in the family unit and the societal importance in bringing the homosexual community into the mainstream. We should afford our fellow citizens basic equal rights. It will make for a stronger culture and a stronger nation. It is cruel to deny the foundation of marriage to adults who love one another. That's what I think. Others disagree, and they are welcome to disagree.

There are those, like the Westboro Baptist Church who are most certainly comprised of bigots. They protest at the funerals of soldiers and say that America has brought about the deaths of our brave young men and women through our lax moral code, our acceptance of gays, etc. They hoist signs that say "God Hates Fags." Just check out their website. It is a crash course in hatred and bigotry.

I doubt I'll find much argument on that point.

But a much larger swath of America disagrees with me about same-sex marriage. Many moderates, religious or otherwise, think that marriage is sacred and that it is defined by the union of one man and one woman. (I take issue with both points, citing divorce rates as one major flaw in the argument, but that is neither here nor there...)

One such opponent of gay marriage is our own President-elect, Barack Obama, often described as "the most liberal Senator in the United States Senate" or "in the history of mankind" or something to that effect. Not liberal enough, apparently, Barack Obama has made it very clear that he does not support gay marriage, but does support gay rights.

Is this like saying, "I support civil rights for black people, but not black marriage"? Or should I not touch that with a ten-foot pole?

In any case, the hue and cry out of the gay activist scene now is that bigotry brought about the passage of Proposition 8. Only bigots voted for it. This begs the obvious question: If bigots are the only ones opposing gay marriage (and no argument of tradition or religion has any merit) than does our new President-elect qualify as a bigot?

You tell me. Is Barack Obama a bigot for not supporting gay marriage? Or is it a more complicated issue? Once we start using such black and white language, the obvious flaws in this reasoning become apparent. After all, if Obama is a bigot, then how do we describe the members of Westboro Baptist Church? Do we begin to water down our words when we start to use them overmuch? Or do we hold all accountable equally?

Like I said...

Andrew is right:

I'm as struck as Mark McKinnon by the sudden, if tempered, swooning of the center-right for Obama. even Fred Barnes has had an epiphany of sorts. They are responding to his obviously sensible and accomplished picks for the economy and foreign affairs as if they have realized for the first time who "that one" actually is. He is not now and never has been a leftist ideologue. That was a paranoid fantasy that helped kill the GOP this year. He is a pragmatic, sane, reasoned centrist liberal. He doesn't want to surrender to terror or abolish capitalism - he wants to hone our fight against the Islamists to better effect and to save capitalism from itself. And the core meaning of his candidacy - an end to the polarizing culture war battles of the post-Vietnam era - is not just hype.

Of course, the more Obama seemed to say sensible things, the less he sounded like the crazed lefty so many on the Right believed him to be (or wanted him to be?) the louder the cry of anti-American, "palling around with terrorists" etc. became. Now there is a two-part reaction to his picks. On the one hand we have the so-called center-right, which is, as Sullivan points out, fairly well-pleased with the Obama cabinet choices.

On the other we have a strange union between the far Left and the far Right, the former critical of Obama for what they perceive to be a betrayal, and the latter simply irreconcilably unhappy with any Liberal, no matter how centrist, sitting in the White House. Make no mistake, this crowd would have been almost as unhappy with McCain. In fact, I'd say the reactions would have been similar under a McCain Presidency, from all parties...

Linklove

I pondered whipping up an "around the web" suggested reading list, but Bob from Brockley has one that is quite good, and so I defer...

On story-telling...

Peter Suderman can't decide:

Part of me thinks this is a problem; action movies train us not to react with horror to these sorts of events. But I also wonder if it isn’t natural, a release of some sort, a way to indulge violent urges without resorting to real violence, or a way for human beings to understand the daily, life-and-death struggle for existence — long before movies, human stories revolved around death and violence, and often involved heroes who slayed all those in their way. For whatever reason, we, as a species, seem to be drawn in by narratives of calamity, destruction, and bloodshed.

It is difficult, isn't it? Add to violent movies the violence (and easy re-birth) we find in video games. There we can kill and be killed with ever more gruesome detail and reality, and still only ever pay that easy price of beginning at the last save-point. Is this merely the natural continuation of these "narratives of calamity" or have we moved beyond even that, into a society so numbed-down to violence that tragedies occur around us without giving us any pause at all?

Change the channel: no more Mumbai. Or watch the drama unravel, distant and detached. We die yet we still have eight more lives and the possibility of parole...We can always change the channel and watch something funny to revive us, wipe this dark knowledge from us.

I'm not about to advocate any actual action we can take as a State to curb this, but I do think it's important for individuals within this society to teach our children to be compassionate, empathetic beings. This cuts to the heart of the question of community in my mind.

Yes, since we could speak and dance we have had narratives of death to accompany us. Legends of heroes and gods and devils told in songs or whispers around the campfire. But perhaps therein lies the rub. Perhaps the way these stories are told changes the way they are heard, or the way we learn to listen changes the way we act, speak, pass the stories on. Perhaps the campfire shines a different light on these tales than the glow of an LCD screen.

Have we lost some sense of reverence for the dead? As an avid reader of fantasy as a child, I used to ponder the difference, the moral and physical difference, of killing someone with a gun, at a distance, and killing someone with a sword or a spear, up close. That seemed like it would be much harder, much more personal. You would need to touch your enemy, feel his skin. All your senses would participate.

Then, too, the difference of shooting someone dead and dropping a bomb on them from the sky, and now from an office somewhere in Colorado. It's the same death, but more remote. It's the same death, but not necessarily the same kill. The same story, but not necessarily the same story.

We are telling our stories now in theatres and on television screens, where nothing is sacred. Perhaps that is the real tragedy modernity has placed upon our backs. We have forgotten what it means to tell a story, but not the means to tell it.

Reading List update

I have added "The Politics of Scrabble" to the reading list. I don't have a blogroll because I prefer the Blogger reading-list feature. There is an ever-changing order to it; a sample of the writing. It is a useful tool for me as well, allowing me to glance at many of my favorite blogs quickly, directly from my own...

Scott Payne is interested in the notion of community, as well, which I have been dissecting lately, and will continue to do in my new-urbanism posts.

Islam, as such...

Freddie deBoer takes umbrage with Rod Dreher's broad strokes in labeling the Mumbai terrorists "Muslim terrorists." Such a complicated issue, for so many reasons...Freddie writes,

So there's about 1 billion Muslims in the world. A billion. A billion is a lot. What would a billion man plot look like, exactly? How would they communicate? Coordinate? I mean if you could really get a billion people together to attack Mumbai, you might as well try to take over a whole country. Ah, but maybe by "are behind" he means "support". That kind of contention is thrown out there all the time, of course, and it has the virtue of requiring no form of proof whatsoever. Just like the contention "The average Palestinian would murder every Jew if he could," this kind of statement has no referent, invites no verification, requires nothing but the author's say-so and the guts to think you can leave it out there, orphaned and unsupported. This in non-falsifiable nonsense. I'm sure, say, the thousands of impoverished Thai Muslims living along the coast with no television or newspapers would be surprised to learn that they support a terrorist attack they've never heard of. Dreher has left himself an out, here, but he's done it in about the weakest form possible: possibly most Muslims weren't behind these attacks. Mmmm.

I think both Dreher and deBoer are missing the point. First of all, Dreher is too quick to jump on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon and leave it at that. No, this is not really a struggle between Christians and Muslims, or Hindis and Muslims, or any of that. This really isn't about a religious clash at all. A more relevant discussion would focus on the Pakistani effort to destabalize Afghanistan and India, a strategy of nationalism rather than religious ideology.

Then again, the nationalists in Pakistan, Palestine, elsewhere do indeed use Islam both as a tool for recruitment and a rallying cry behind much of what they do. It is far easier to convince young, typically poor and uneducated men, to blow themselves up if they then become martyrs, go straight to Heaven. Serving Allah is a far better thing than simply serving Pakistan's regional ambitions. Religion will always trump geopolitics when it comes to fervor. It's simply a sexier alternative.

Freddie worries that people are blaming all Muslims for being behind these attacks--and indeed, many people suffer from great bouts of ignorance and intolerance and are quick to blame the "other" especially if that other happens to be a religion with a long history of clashes with the Western world. No better Bogey-man.

Still, there is blame to lay at the feat of the Islamic culture at large. Unlike post-Reformation Christianity, Islam is very much a religion of homogeneity--less so with Sunni than with Shiite, but culturally both still basically follow orders from on high, with some exception. Essentially, Islam is more like Catholicism than Protestantism. So, like the Catholic Church, Islam should be open for systemic critiques. The abuse of boys at the hands of Catholic Priests is a problem inherent in the Catholic Church--not necessarily in the dogma, nor in the average adherent, but in the Church itself. Terrorism, and specifically suicide terrorism in the mid-east and neighboring regions, is a problem that has been born out of that deadly coupling of post-colonial nationalism and massive religious resurgence. The problem is fueled by both continuing economic disparity funded largely by oil, and widespread fundamentalist teachings of a religion that was born during more violent times--the Koran, after all, is rife with violence and justification for violence.

The trouble with fundamentalism is that it makes it so easy for any religion to pick and choose those pieces, give them greater weight than they deserve, and create out of them something utterly missing the fundamental point.

Freddie goes on to ask,

So what should we do, guys? There's this resilient movement within our national discourse, since 9/11, of people who are fighting mad that more of us aren't fighting mad. Islam is the enemy! This is an existential threat! You're not taking the threat seriously enough! If these statements are more than self-aggrandizement, if they are made with some goal in mind beyond letting the world know what a brave opponent of terrorism the person making them is, then there has to be some action advocated by these people.

I would say that as mere bloggers there is little we can do. And yes, over-all the world has taken this threat seriously. There is better collaboration, better investigation, a more pervasive understanding of the threat. Then again, as witnessed in Mumbai, we are still vulnerable. We may always be. We may not be able to do much more ourselves. However, I don't think we should take the apologist approach, either. Freddie notes that he knows "very few people who argue that Islam doesn't need reform." Fair enough, but at the same time, we have these wings of the debate that argue either "Islam is the enemy" or "Islam is not to blame, just a few bad apples." I would argue that the truth lies somewhere in between. Islam is not to blame, nor is it the enemy, but there are systemic issues within the religion that need to be addressed by those members of the faith that have the most authority. And we as a society, as a government, as an international body, need to pressure these people to act. The clerics need to denounce terror, violence, oppression against women. The clerics ought to be a counter-balance to the nationalists, not play a supporting role. So rather than take the extreme argument from either side, perhaps it is time to say that yes, this brand of terror is an Islamic problem that Islam needs to address. No excuses. No matter that most of the 1 billion Muslims in the world aren't terrorists. Most of the 1.5 billion Catholics in the world aren't child molestors, either.

To do anything at all to address the problems within the Catholic Church, they first had to have their feet held to the flames. What makes us think that any less is required when addressing the Islamic Church?

Update: Thomas Friedman makes a similar point in yesterday's New York Times:

“I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community.

We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.

Words to the wise

Jac hits the proverbial nail on the head:

If we're going to be skeptical of the mainstream media's analysis, we should be even more skeptical of bloggers' critiques of the mainstream media's analysis.

This was in regards to the media coverage of the Mumbai catastrophe, but I think it's good advice to anyone getting their information from the blogosphere. Blogs are wonderful places to find information or analysis or opinion. A good blog will link out to all sorts of relevant information, and will boil all that information down into something somewhat more approachable. There is a frenetic quality to blogging and to reading blogs, a sort of disjointedness that appeals to those hungry for lots of news, clips, tidbits, little morsels of wisdom, the occasional brilliant analysis or prediction.

But I think many people place too much faith in the hands of the bloggers they admire.

Certainly if you want real news, go read the New York Times or CNN. Don't come to my blog for original stories--just my own, often-flawed opinions. I love blogs for what they are, and they provide a new way for us to gather knowledge. I love Wikipedia for similar reasons, but I certainly don't trust it to do anything more than get me started down a path of revelation.

Perhaps the old cautionary wisdom holds true: Trust, but verify.

The new face of Islamic terror

Sometimes the images of horrible events are too much to bear. Sometimes our brains simply transcend the horrors, allow us to cope. Seeing the burning buildings in Mumbai, the Indian commandos, the ambulances...it's all almost too much, and so we filter it out. This was the case for me during 9/11. I thought perhaps it was because I was simply too young, too immature, too desensitized--that day felt like a movie in so many ways, one we've all seen played out time and again--but then again, during the Mumbai massacre and hostage crisis, I felt numb again. Part of it was my being on vacation. I turned off the news for a few days. I'm American and have the luxury to do this most of the time, though most of the time I choose not to.

This picture of 2 year old Moshe, whose parents were murdered in front of him, who was found weeping at their bodies, and is pictured weeping at their funeral--this finally drove it home for me. Perhaps this is the face we should think of when we consider the "new face" of Islamic terror.