Food of the week: Dry Soda's Lavender

So, we were up in Bellevue, an upscale suburb of Seattle this weekend, and we stopped at a Larry's supermarket, to pick up some Apple Beer (a non-alcoholic apple soft drink that is quite nice, and not easily found).
After a bit of confusion ("Apple Beer? That's probably in the cooler with the beers and wines." "No, it's non-alcoholic." "Is it?"), we located some bottles of Apple Beer on a cooler shelf.
But then my eye was caught by a clear bottle, filled with a clear liquid, and a very clean, spare graphic design.
I looked a little closer, and discovered a soft drink made by Dry Soda, in a lavender flavor. (Kumquat, lemongrass and rhubarb are also available.)
"Ooh!" says I, "I gotta try that!" I like lavender, and some of my favorite ice cream is lavender flavored, and I had never thought of a lavender soda.
So, I bought a bottle, and today I tried it.
It is indeed dry. It's not too sweet nor syrupy, and the scent of lavender rising from the clear liquid is surprising. It is sweetened with cane sugar, rather than cheap corn syrup, and that makes a difference. The taste is not too strong, and doesn't linger too long in the mouth. It is quite refreshing, with a good carbonation that is not too sharp nor too soft.
This is good stuff...but at $2.00 a bottle I won't be looking too hard for it. After all, it is just fizzy water with flavoring and sweetener, and I can't think of people I need to impress by offering them designer soda.

Food of the Month: Pure Maple Walnut Ice Cream

I just stumbled across a flavor of Snoqualmie Ice Cream that I had never seen before: Pure Maple Walnut. This is a Western Washington company that makes top quality ice cream (low air content, high fat content, and high quality ingredients), and I have tried a lot of their flavors before (my favorite at this point still being French Lavender.)

I have recently really begun to like walnut ice creams, and I love the taste of real maple syrup, so I had to give this a try. It contains all natural ingredients, and it's fabulous--the dark, smokey flavor of the maple combined with walnuts in the thick, solid premium ice cream is intoxicating. I need to get more! and more!

Multiculturalism and Feminism: strange bedfellows

For another very cogent example of the hollowness or even shallowness of trumpeting multiculturalism as a watchcry to guide the world, take a look at this interview (thanks to Blithering Bunny for linking to it) from FrontPage magazine with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. I was especially struck by this section near the end of the interview:

FP: You discuss the horrifying suffering that women endure under the vicious and sadistic structures of Islam’s gender apartheid. You touch on the eerie silence of Western leftist feminists on this issue, noting “Where two pieties – feminism and multi-culturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

To be sure, the Left has long posed as a great champion of women’s rights, gay rights, minorti rights, democratic rights etc. Yet today, it has reached out in solidarity with the most fascistic women-hating, gay-hating, minority-hating and democracy hating force on the face of the earth – Islamism.

What gives? It’s really nothing new though is it? (i.e. the Left’s political pilgrimages to communist gulags etc.)

Dalrymple: I think the problem here is one of a desired self-image. Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world.

And that is the problem that I have with the American Left. It's not all about me, and how I feel about things.

October 2005 Iraqi Elections

So, the Sunnis have finally decided that the elections weren't puppet elections after all, and have decided to give their yea/nay to the democratic process in Iraq.
An amazing thing to see, indeed.
Yet it seems that some of the headlines in the news are things like this:

Polling Stations Attacked as Iraqis Cast Ballots

A roadside bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers in Iraq, and seven people were wounded during attacks by insurgents near five of Baghdad's polling stations, police said.

This headline screams out about what a bloody election this is (and remember, if it bleeds, it leads), and how bad things in Iraq STILL are because that stupid Chimpy McBushitler decided to go over there and kill Iraqis for Oil or Halliburto....oh, wait, sorry...I started to channel a moonbat there somehow.
Compare this headline to Publius Pundit's compilation of information that he collected:

Terrorism was minimal, with only three relatively unsuccessful attacks wounding two police officers and one civilian — which, out of 6,000 polling stations, is a highly ineffective 0.05% success rate.

This headline is similar to what the more serious news agencies are publishing. Even Al Jazeera mentions this, although they say that the vote is expected to pull Iraq into three pieces (Kurdistan, Shi'iteistan, and Sunnistan, I suppose, although it is unclear what their rather pessimistic prediction is based on other than the standard anti-American viewpoint, that anything America is involved in must be bad and will fail.)
Anyway, yes, there are still some insurgents trying to derail the process--or is that what they are trying to do at all? If they were truly trying to affect the government, wouldn't voting be a better way to do it? If they were truly insurgents, why would they be targeting SUNNI muslims, who have been the ones most decrying the opposition? Could it be that these people might be terrorists?
Well, whatever they are, it is clear that the resounding media silence regarding the many,many instances of voting without death (ho hum, boring, won't sell news to jaded Americans, it's still a quagmire, dontchaknow?) seems to indicate what kind of news they prefer to tell/sell.
If you just read the headline and never bothered to go out and PULL news to you (instead of waiting for it to be PUSHED to you via MSM channels), you'd get a pretty skewed picture.
You want a good picture of voting in Iraq?
For starters, tryIraq the Model. Omar is decided pro-American, and doesn't hide it, but he has some pictures. Quiet and peaceful...but surely that's a lie, just like Michael Moore's infamous Farenheit 9/11 scenes of children playing in Saddam's Iraq? Then look at Sooni's blogspot, with some more pictures. Sooni seems to be a Sunni Muslim, who seems to be tolerating the American presence because of its effects on his country. But his pictures show nary a body--lots of voters--Iraqi military and police exerting security control.
For a very good overview and collection of articles and opinions on what the Iraqi on the street (Sunnis, mostly, since they are the key in this election), peruse The Adventures of Chester and his live-blogging and links. Then go back and read the Publius Pundit link posted earlier.

Good luck, people of Iraq. May your voices be heard, and may they peacefully organize and govern your country to become a safe place you can be proud of.

Multiculturalism and Tolerance near Seattle

This house is the residence of a former US soldier with three tours of Vietnam. He says that he feels like his own freedom of speech is under attack. According to this article, at http://www.komotv.com/stories/39576.htm:

in the last year the mailbox has been blown up twice with fireworks. The house has been egged. Paint has been thrown on the house too. The flags have been torn down and ripped up more than once.
And the 101st Airborne flag has had the
word "murder" and a swastika written on it with a permanent marker.
"It's really difficult for me to see something like this and not feel sad," Potts told us of the vandalism that started around election day last year. Especially, he
says, since the 101st led the charge in World War II to defeat Nazi Germany."

I thought that if somebody was a left wing party member in the USA, he or she was for tolerance and alternative points of view and lifestyles. Of course, I know that these people in this article are pretty fringe-oriented left wingers--it is wrong to tar all lefties with the same brush.

Now, what would be the proper liberal response to this action?

Serenity: the movie

Saw Serenity today, the feature film based on the too-soon-departed TV series Firefly.
I saw the show (most episodes, at least) when it first aired in 2002, and was disappointed when it was suddenly canceled, due to some rather stupid marketing errors and decisions on the part of Fox network.
The complete set of episodes (including unaired ones) was made available on DVD, and we have enjoyed repeated watching of the episodes ever since.
The movie was quite loud, frenetic, and has some great filmmaking in it. I love the cast--they are so good together, and make the whole premise work so well.

Here are some of my thoughts about the movie:
(WARNING--Possible Spoilers Below)

1) It bugs me when characters repeat stupid actions that are vital to the plot. To wit: Mal shoots the (unnamed) Operator once...maybe twice...grabs Inara and then runs. The Operator is wearing body armor, however, and is not harmed. Mal knows about body armor (since Zoe wears it in an episode of Firefly), so why doesn't he MAKE SURE the Operator is dead, before running off?
2) How did Mal know what the effect of the Operator's nerve-ending punch was to be, so he could stand there half paralyzed? Had he seen this before? The convenient reason why it didn't work was a throw-away gag.
3) This film is a love story, above all else. The writer/director Joss Whedon has created some complex characters with complex relationships, and this is why I liked the series so much. Here, we see the depths of love--how far will you (and Captain Mal) go for real, selfless love? It's Mal's love for his crew-family, his ship and even his ideals that make the show more than just a shallow action series. Sure, that's there, but it is this deep subtext that makes the show art. Whedon loves his characters, and the audience who has seen the TV series cares about the ship enough to cringe when it gets heavily damaged.
4) It is heartbreaking to see characters you care about actually die on screen. The deaths are anti-heroic, and this makes it so much less cliche than usual. It also makes the drama of the action so much stronger, because you realize the surving heroes might not actually survive to the end of the show, unlike so many other films.
The film had a few other problems here and there. It might also be confusing to people not familiar with the series, but there is just enough essential information that an awake viewer will quickly figure out who is who and what is what.
I rate it an 8 to 8.5 out of 10.
Well done, Whedon. And Nathan Fillion IS Captain Reynolds.

Multi-culturalism: what is it good for?

Michael Barone discusses the British responses to the 2005 summer bombings in London. He argues that in the UK, multiculturalism is under attack, which is making a lot of left-wingers (for whom multiculturalism is a central issue of their ideology) uneasy. The usual idea behind multiculturalism is, as Barone writes, "that we should allow and encourage immigrants and their children to maintain and celebrate their own culture apart from the national culture." However, this idea has recently come under attack, as Britons (and the Dutch, and many others) realize that this isn't working for many Islamic immigrants, for whom maintaining and celebrating their own culture includes attacking the culture that allowed them in, gave them housing and refuge (and often an income).
In the United States, we have a bit more room (and a much less socialistic government,) so this problem doesn't seem to be seething on the surface. This direct attack on American culture while on American soil is here (as shown in various articles I have read), but seems to be harder to find. But we still, in many parts of US society, seem to value multiculturalism (abbreviated here as MC). In nearly every college job requirement list that I have seen, applicants are required to explain how they support the "doctrine" of MC, and what they do/have done to apply it in the classroom. And at the same time, it is also apparent that much of the members of the academy in the USA turn right around and declare that the culture of the USA is the cause of so many problems, and terrorism, and so on. Often this seems to be an attempt to excuse the brashness, the difference of American culture that is not part of the other. This excuse seems to be an attempt to say, "We know we are bad, but we hope that by admitting it, you will see that we are trying to change it to become more acceptable to you, and so you will be more tolerant of us and not quite so angry at us." This is exactly what Barone points out here:

The Age 's Tony Parkinson quoted the French writer Jean Francois Revel's Cold War comment: "A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." Tolerating intolerance, goodhearted people are beginning to see, does not necessarily produce tolerance in turn.

Barone then points out the relativistic underpinnings of moral relativism. This has even crept into many Christians' ideas about culture (they sing out "Don't judge--Jesus said not to!") But as Barone points out,

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. In practice, that soon degenerates to: All cultures all morally equal, except ours, which is worse. But all cultures are not equal in respecting representative government, guaranteed liberties, and the rule of law. And those things arose not simultaneously and in all cultures but in certain specific times and places--mostly in Britain and America but also in other parts of Europe.

In the American academy, MC is seen as an important aspect of education--much is made of trying to be MC, and teach MC, and to not call anything bad, as if by studying things hard enough, we can see all the good (or conversely, we can see that even we are more evil than we think we are.) This leads, as Barone points out, to fragmentation of information that privileges only that which supports a certain ideology rather than a broad picture:

In America, as in Britain, multiculturalism has become the fashion in large swaths of our society. So the Founding Fathers are presented only as slaveholders, World War II is limited to the internment of Japanese-Americans and the bombing of Hiroshima. Slavery is identified with America though it has existed in many societies, and the antislavery movement arose first among English-speaking evangelical Christians.

Amazing...but very much true. We can penny-wise, and know the minutiae about one aspect of things like slavery, but then completely ignore the rest, and the complete context, and become pound-foolish. The academy, however, seems to spend more time worrying about pennies than pounds (or dollars.) Barone points this out:

But most Americans know there is something special about our cultural heritage. While Harvard and Brown are replacing scholars of the founding period with those studying other things, book buyers are snapping up first-rate histories of the founders by David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, and Ron Chernow. Multiculturalist intellectuals do not think our kind of society is worth defending. But millions here and increasing numbers in Britain and other countries know better.

Therein lies the rub--the definition of just what our society is. Are we citizens of the world? Are citizens of Jesus-land, led by ignorant faux-patriots and neocons? Is American really special, or are we too clever to believe the lie, and we live to be the nail that sticks out, the gadfly of society, the one that is smarter than the rest of the sheep? Is American society worth defending as a whole, or in parts? Which parts do we get to emphasize, and which do we deemphasize? Which are the ones that matter?

Read the full editorial here.

Why do they want the USA to lose in Iraq?

No, I'm not talking about Al Qaeda, disaffected Sunnis, or other Islamist terrorist groups who seek for legitimacy, glory or publicity by fighting the USA in Iraq.
It's the left-wingers in the USA who seem to find a perverse joy in each American death, revelling in the suffering of families and enjoying a vindication of their anti-war = anti-Bush position. But Christopher Hitchens points out the absurdity of this position:

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

Hitchens is right on the money. He also points out the bankruptcy of deciding your war stance on pre-conceived ideology (easy to do from a comfy USA home) instead of what you actually want to happen in Iraq, given the current things that have *actually happened* and that you *cannot* go back and change (i.e. there is a war in Iraq, and it will go one way or the other):

There is a sort of unspoken feeling, underlying the entire debate on the war, that if you favored it or favor it, you stress the good news, and if you opposed or oppose it you stress the bad. I do not find myself on either side of this false dichotomy. I think that those who supported regime change should confront the idea of defeat, and what it would mean for Iraq and America and the world, every day. It is a combat defined very much by the nature of the enemy, which one might think was so obviously and palpably evil that the very thought of its victory would make any decent person shudder. It is, moreover, a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious and totalitarian ideology.

I have briefly wondered, myself, why anti-war demonstrations and sentiments are focused solely on Americans, and not on the people who are aggressively pursuing death and destruction in Iraq. Of course, the answer is likely one of the following:
a) the war is the USA's fault caused by their aggression, so they (never *we*) are to blame;
b) protesting where people ignore you is futile;
c) Iraq is too far away and too expensive to get to, to mount massive marches;
d) if this were tried in Iraq, you will be in mortal danger from those who want war (usually considered Americans, and, strangely, not those who are killing Americans.)
Imagine, if you will, if all human rights groups and world media attention suddenly began to roundly condemn and protest insurgency, and world organizations and funding was diverted to Iraqi causes. What would happen to support for the insurgency then?
But, of course, in many people's minds, that is the equivalent of support for Bush.

Voting Fraud in the USA--who did it?

You hear many stories talking about this, from the 2004 election or the 2000 election--but which are real? Are the stories just the pot calling the kettle black, or are they based in reality?
Read this article written by the bi-partisan American Center for Voting Rights (who are they?), and you may be surprised.
(Home Page) (HTML Article) (PDF Article)
The report concludes, after careful background checking and citing articles, investigations, and even court cases, the following:

While Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression, neither party has a clean record on the issue. Instead, the evidence shows that Democrats waged aggressive intimidation and suppression campaigns against Republican voters and volunteers in 2004. Republicans have not been exempt from similar criticism in this area, as alleged voter intimidation and suppression activity by GOP operatives led the Republican National Committee to sign a consent decree repudiating such tactics in 1982. However, a careful review of the facts shows that in 2004, paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression efforts than their Republican counterparts.

Hmm...Mr Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

Apologizing for Terrorism, or not?

Norman Geras has a very dense and careful post on his blog discussing what is apologizing for terrorism, and what is not. Many writers, after the London bombings in July of 2005, have been writing about terrorism and trying to blame the West while purportedly not supporting the actions of the bombers. Often, these writers drag out the "anger" of the bombers, and often try to say that if we just put our rifles away and attempted to understand these folks, and their anger, we could reach a solution that didn't involve death on either side.

However, there is crack in the argument.

As Geras points out:

The anger either doesn't justify the act or it does. We have ruled out the case that it does; people who think so aren't apologists for terrorism, they're open supporters of it and not the object of the present discussion. But there are those who say that terrorist bombing isn't justified but the whole emphasis of whose comment is either to minimize the responsibility of the perpetrators and their 'managers' and supporters, or to deflect the consideration of this responsibility on to other targets. Here are a couple of questions for such people.

First - a question already posed in my original piece on this - if understanding and not justifying or condoning is what it is really all about, why is this 'understanding' discourse never deployed by the same people when racist thugs, angry about immigration, carry out hate crimes? It might be said, well, because their anger is unjustified, whereas Muslim anger over Afghanistan and Iraq is justified. But it's understanding, remember, and not justification, that this has just been said to be about, so the fact that the anger of the racists is unjustified is neither here nor there. It could still be a contributory cause and in need of being understood as such. You don't, however, read hand-wringing pieces in the Guardian or the Independent about that. It suggests that the apostles of (apologetic) understanding are caught between two places. They don't want to say that terrorism is justified because... they don't want to say it. But they do want to dwell on the anger which feeds it, not merely as cause, because they don't do this in pleading on behalf of white racists, or on behalf of those who, angered by acts of terrorism, attack Muslims. It looks like something else, both psychologically and in terms of subtextual meanings, must be going on - as if they felt that some of the justification for the anger might just seep over towards the act, even though they profess to believe that the act isn't justified.

Second, most of those who opposed the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, though some amongst them did let us know how very angry they were, have not resorted to the bomb and the wrecking of other lives. The vast majority of them, in truth, haven't even engaged in civil disobedience over it. They have remained within the framework of standard democratic procedure: of protest, argument, use of their votes, and so on. Since these people do not invoke anger on their own behalf towards explaining why they might (one day) violate the usual democratic norms as well as other human beings, why are they so ready to indulge others with this type of understanding? If anger is not a sufficient cause in the way they themselves react, how do they judge it such a mammoth cause of what the bombers do?

After due reflection, therefore, I think I want to say - there are apologists among us. Even though to understand is not necessarily to condone, there are those who, during the last month - to say nothing of before that, in relation to other atrocities - have been condoning acts they shouldn't have, under the plea of 'understanding'.

Read the complete article (parts 1 and 2)--it's not easy reading, but Geras is very careful here.

Historical Revisionism revised--World War II and the Atomic Bombs

Richard B. Frank, in his article titled "Why Truman Dropped the Bomb," points out that history research is often a process. The revisionist, military-antagonistic history of WWII that began in the 1960s frequently criticized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan as unnecessary. Frank points out that all historical research is, in fact and substance, revisionist, and points out that it is more correct to term those who argue against the necessity of the bombs as critics rather than revisionists. Frank summarizes the common criticisms as follows:

The critics share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan's situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan's leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation.

Frank draws conclusions from de-classified WWII "Magic" radio traffic to point out that most of these anti-bomb arguments are based on incomplete information (often earlier "Magic" record releases that were incomplete). The information that Truman actually had to work with suggests that the atomic bombs did, in fact, save millions of lives at the cost of the over one hundred thousand who died in (and after) those two explosions.
Frank points out that the US command did make some errors, but not the errors that critics accuse them of making.
Austin Bay's Blog has some more commentary on Frank's article. Among the comments is this little bit of information, that I had never known:
Comment #7:

When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists performed analysis.
They determined that there were reaction products of Uranium 235. They knew from their own weapons program that separation of U235 was difficult. They reported that the destruction of Hiroshima was a bad miracle, a catastrophe, but because of the difficulty in separating U235 from U238, it could not practically be accomplished again. Because of that report, the Japanese cabinet decided to fight on. Their strategy was to continue resistance to get the US to negotiate. With the 30 to 1 exchange rate of Okinawa, the Japanese Cabinet estimated that 30 million Japanese would have to die fighting, to inflict 1 million casualties on the US. They were willing to pay that price.
The US read their response because the US was reading Japanese diplomatic codes. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria began. The addition of Soviet manpower to the equation made their strategy invalid. As that was being digested, the Nagasaki attack occured. It was also analyzed. The Japanese found the reaction products from Plutonium 239. Since Plutonium can be chemically separated, there was now no limit to the bombs that could be produced. The Japanese cabinet reported this to Emperor Hirohito. The Emperor directed that the Japanese government surrender.
He sent members of the Imperial family to remaining centers of resistance.
It should be noted that the Nagasaki bomb was planned for the center of the residential sector, but was actually dropped on the industrial center. Based on German experience at Schweinfurt, the Japanese had move as much of their industry into residential areas. The Nagasaki bomb “only” killed some 25,000 people, compared to the 78,000 some odd at Hiroshima.
Because of the bombs, the Soviet Union did not have an occupation sector in Japan. We know what happened when they had occupation sectors in Germany, China, and Korea. At least Japan was saved that.
Comment by Don Meaker — 7/31/2005 @ 8:52 pm

The process of history continues--information is more trustworthy than ideology.

UPDATED:
Read Plunge Pontificates' whole series of articles on the bomb for a concise overview of the complexity involved.

How IT makes us think about things differently

Matthew B. Crawford writes about the unexpected influence of IT (Information Technology) on the academy. He points out that on one hand, IT liberalizes the academy, giving voices to the voiceless. But he points out how easily that is abused, by giving equal weight to all voices (and thus the rise and abuse of web "services" like RMP (Rate My Professor), which merely counts checkboxes rather than building a case for whether Professor X is really bad, or boring, or whether the student who is clicking the boxes is just a bad student, or bored.

I especially like what Crawford says about the effects of all this information and how it has moved the academy towards commerciality. In other words, butts in seats, and what classes "sell." He points out the dilemma towards what classes are offered, and the subsequent "evening out" of the PC curriculum, in this way:

Ideally, a teacher’s judgment about what is good for you is not colored by what is immediately pleasant for you. But increasingly, what is good for the teacher (professionally) is determined by what is immediately pleasant for the student.

Thus, professors are encouraged to do what the students like, rather than do what may be, in the professor's judgment, best for the student. Not a good place to go, if you ask me.
Read the entire article.

Who's not wild about Harry (Potter)? Terry Pratchett...

In this article, Terry Pratchett points out something that I observed also.

Pratchett, one of the UK's most successful novelists with 40 million books sold, said the media [by focusing on the Potter books and their runaway success] ignores the achievements of other fantasy authors.

At first, one might think this is mere professional jealousy, until one realizes that Pratchett himself is a very successful writer. He isn't actually criticizing Rowling for much, except for wondering why, as she said in a recent interview, she didn't think Harry Potter was actually a fantasy novel.

His full response to Rowling's admission that she did not think Harry Potter was fantasy as she was writing it, was:
"I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?"

As the article mentions, in a recent interview with Time magazine, Rowling said she was "not a huge fan of fantasy" and was trying to "subvert" the genre. Time magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Clearly, the writer at Time hasn't been following fantasy fiction very closely.

But this is just the kind of attitude towards fantasy fiction that Pratchett is actually criticizing. As the article says, Pratchett has complained that the status of Harry Potter author JK Rowling is being elevated "at the expense of other writers".

And he's right--there is so much out there that isn't Potter, even in the Young Adult fiction areas. Yet so much marketing muscle and bookstore space is devoted to Potter, that Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (two writers who I think are better than Rowling yet are overshadowed by the sheer marketing success of Pottemania), and many others are completely overlooked.
It's the same problem that faced Madonna's attempts at writing children's books--if it weren't her name on the books, they would have to compete with books by better writers, and who would be overshadowed by the sheer volume of fame and media blitz that accompanies a big name. Not to mention the fact that beginning children's book and fantasy authors are often ignored in favor of the cash (media?) cow of the moment.

Who believed there was a link between Saddam and Bin Laden's Al Qaeda?

According to this article, even the Clinton administration, way back in 1998, knew that bin Laden was collaborating with Saddam on weapons of mass destruction.
But, of course, many of us have chosen to ignore or forget this, in our zeal to reinforce our anti-Bush ideology.

Max Boot points out that appeasement is nothing new...and still doesn't work.

In his L.A. times op-ed piece, Max Boot points out the obvious--well, what seems to be obvious to people who believe in looking at things through the light of history rather than the dubious light of ideology or the silly light of trying desperately not to offend anybody by saying that all people just want to feel good/understood/accepted/etc.:

Appeasement did not end with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Even afterward, many in Britain (and even more in the U.S.) opposed active resistance. Conservative worthies like Lord Halifax sought a negotiated settlement. Fascists like Sir Oswald Mosley sought to bring Nazism to Britain. And communists and their fellow travelers opposed fighting Stalin's ally until Hitler invaded Russia.

It is evident to me that even in America, even after Pearl Harbor made us realize we were no longer insulated from the war or reprisal, there were people like these who believed that any war was much worse than a war fought to repel facism. As the old saying goes, if we don't learn our history, we are doomed to repeat it. The immediate question then becomes this: what are we learning instead of our history? Multi-culturalism? Revisionist studies? Our semi-intelligentsia run into the same problem that George Orwell observed, as Max Boot continues:

Even in January 1942, when German armies were at the gates of Moscow, George Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that "the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti-war … don't believe in any 'defense of democracy,' are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel."
As if to illustrate Orwell's point, a pacifist poet named D.S. Savage wrote a reply in which he explained why he "would never fight and kill for such a phantasm" as "Britain's 'democracy.' " Savage saw no difference between Britain and its enemies because under the demands of war both were imposing totalitarianism: "Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same."

Surely they jested. Surely they knew that there was a cognitive, measurable distance. But then again, if in our modern world elected Congress-critters from the USA can't tell their gulag from a hole in the ground, why should we blame our young intelligentsia, who are just following their leaders? As Boot reports:

When applied to the embodiment of pure evil, the usual liberal tropes about "understanding" not "condemnation" have an air of Monty Python about them. Yet there are uncomfortable echoes of Savage's sermonizing in the attitude of many modern-day intellectuals toward the Islamo-fascist threat.

Ok, just how do we sit down and understand people who blow up children, and civilians? Usually, of course, what the (inevitably) leftists mean when they talk about such things is gazing into the mirror of themselves. And while we are navel gazing, who will watch our backs while these degenerate humans plant more bombs? "Wait," we cry, "we haven't understood you or your needs yet, but we do know that it was our faul----"

The BBC now refuses to refer to the London terrorists as "terrorists." They are to be known by the more neutral term "bombers," lest the public be deceived by "the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments." Value judgments about blowing up innocent commuters? How gauche!

Enlightened opinion ranging from Amnesty International to Dick Durbin joins in this moral relativism by suggesting that the United States has become no better than its enemies through the actions it has taken to prevent terrorism. Just as 1940s pacifists could see no difference between Nazi concentration camps and British wartime curtailments of civil liberties, so today's doppelgangers equate the abuses of renegade guards at Abu Ghraib with the mass murder carried out by Stalin or Pol Pot.

Moral relativism--intellectual posturing rather than boots on the ground. The solution to every problem lies in impressing people to death with our mental calisthenics.

There is also an enduring tendency to blame the victim. George Galloway, Saddam Hussein's favorite member of Britain's Parliament, suggests that Londoners "paid the price" for their government's "attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq." The implication is that Al Qaeda has reasonable grievances and if only we could satisfy them — by, for instance, exiting Iraq — we would have peace. The same thing was said about Hitler, who complained that Germany had been wronged by the Treaty of Versailles.

And this, of course, gave him every excuse to target his own civilians and slaughter them. But again, avoiding war is an admirable goal, and is to be sought at all costs, right?
But then there comes this problem, that Boot mentions:

The problem was that Hitler's stated demands were a pretext for his maniacal ambitions. He was unappeasable. So is Osama bin Laden, who wants to avenge centuries of humiliation supposedly suffered by Muslims at Christian hands and who dreams of establishing a Taliban-style caliphate over all the lands once dominated by Muslims, from western China to southern Spain. Pulling out of Iraq would only whet his insatiable appetite for destruction, just as giving up the Sudetenland encouraged Hitler to seek more.

Orwell's words, written in October 1941, ring true today: "The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality."

It is so easy to criticize the war from so far away, protected by the very acts of violence we abhor and excoriate. "Not in my name!" we cry, as if that absolves us of guilt by association, and will prevent further deaths (including our own). Violence is a last resort--but against violent people who are repeatedly irrational, it is a matter of survival for those who choose violence temporarily in order to preserve a peaceful society to return to later on.

Yes, these people are "freedom fighters," and we would do exactly the same thing...

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden SUV killed at least 27, including an American soldier, late this morning in the deadliest insurgent attack in more than two months....
Many, if not most of the dead, were children loitering and playing near U.S. soldiers at an impromptu checkpoint in Baghdad al-Jadida, a lower-middle class residential district populated by Shiites, Sunnis and Christians.

Yes, these "brave heroes" and martyrs for their cause are merely fighting for the freedom of "their" country. I am sure that these people are open to negotiation and are ready to stop fighting when their demands are met.

Feh....

No connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda?

Claudia Rosett, in her opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal online, indicates otherwise:

Actually, there were many connections, as Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, spell out under the headline "The Mother of All Connections." Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

You can read the original article by Hayes and Joscely, "The Mother of all Connections," online by clicking on the title.
They make this conclusion:

We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.
All of this is new--information obtained since the fall of the Hussein regime. And yet critics of the Iraq war and many in the media refuse to see it. Just two weeks ago, President Bush gave a prime-time speech on Iraq. Among his key points: Iraq is a central front in the global war on terror that began on September 11. Bush spoke in very general terms. He did not mention any of this new information on Iraqi support for terrorism to make his case. That didn't matter to many journalists and critics of the war....

We know that in the context of a decade-long confrontation with the United States, addam reached out to al Qaeda on numerous occasions. We know that the leadership of al Qaeda reciprocated, requesting assistance in its endeavors. We know that ports of meetings, offers of safe haven, and collaboration persisted. What we do not know is the full extent of the relationship. But we know enough to know that there was one. And we know enough to know it was a threat.

So, can we put this ideological stance that is based only on anti-war ideology rather than actual evidence (or non-evidence) to a well-deserved rest?

Hoh Hoh Hoh, to the rain forest we go!

I have lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest. Mountains and trees are in my blood, you could say. When was young, I saw pictures of the temperate rain forests preserved on the west side of Olympic National Park, and knew that I had to go there someday to pay homage to these unique trees.
Well, I finally made it there, after 30 years of waiting. Trees are patient, though, and didn't mind.
I went with my wife and baby daughter, accompanying a friend who was visiting a relative in a work camp in the area.
I had been to Port Angeles before (to take the ferry over to beautiful Victoria, the capital of the Canada's British Columbia), but never beyond. Soon after leaving the city limits, highway 101 plunges into the mountains, heading west. The large tracts of lowland forests were some of the first resources used by the white man in the region, and many are more tree farms than forests. Constant reminders of logging are all around--old stumps, new stumps, signs telling when the region was first cut, when planted, and when the next cut will be. We ate lunch in one of these forests, marvelling at the tangled forest floor and the huge stumps.
These forests once used to be part of the long string of coastal rain forests stretching from California up to Alaska. I love the redwood country, where my father grew up, and this reminded me a lot of that part of the world.
As we ate, I learned how to identify a Sitka Spruce (they don't grow where I am from), and we ate a few nearby salmon berries as we slapped some mosquitoes (standing water is everywhere in these forests--be warned!).
And then we headed up the road to the Hoh rain forest, perhaps the most famous of the three that are features in the park: Hoh, Quinalt, and Queets. (In reality, all of the western facing river valleys in the Olympics are rain forests, including the Bogachiels.) The Hoh is the most easily accessible, though, and is likely the most crowded. The road sometimes runs by the Hoh river. We could see old logging, and new logging, and old plantings, right up to the park's edge, where suddenly the stumps disappear.
The parking lot has an information center (closes at 4 pm, don't forget!), and three trails: a very short paved trail, and two longer loop trails. The parking lot is also the main trailhead for access up the Hoh valley to Mount Olympus itself, a long and demanding multi-day hike/climb.
But we were only here to spend a short time with the trees, and so we did.
The trees were magnificent--huge and lovely. I have never seen trees to rival the redwoods before, yet here they were. (The difference is that down in coastal redwood country, *all* the trees are huge, and some are more huge.) The light was soft and green, and though we had driven through sunlight at the valley head, it was suddenly raining hard--only to stop raining after 15 minutes. The clouds stayed, though--I would like to come back in the sunlight, although it is very hard to find a dry day in this part of the world.
And yet as I looked at the trees, I realized that most people think this rain forest is found only here, or that parking lot, or that one. It used to be one long, unbroken chain, and here we see the last untouched bit.
I have never seen the full extent--it was gone long before I was born, and it is endangered even now further north in Canada and Alaska, where it is still a wild forest and not a park at the end of a paved road. But what I have seen will be preserved for my daughter to see when she is older, and for her future children as well. That, at least, is a good thing.

Looking at maps of the Pacific Northwest, my eyes keep wandering out to the Queen Charlotte Islands, to the Haida Gwai'i. It's a long ways away, but surely I can get there, too...

How to Appease Terrorists...and Like It

Here is an excellent argument on Strategy Page as to why the 'strategy' of appeasement won't work against terrorists. Sure, it is a very short-term solution, but it is more of an ideology than an actual strategy.
I will quote it in full here:

INFORMATION WARFARE: Selling Appeasement to Europeans

July 8, 2005: Al Qaeda, and Islamic radicals, would not be a world terrorism problem were it not for global Islamic media, and media coverage that treated the goals of the Islamic radicals with seriousness and respect. For decades, Islamic radicalism played in its own backyard, trying to replace Islamic tyrants with Islamic religious dictatorships. These Islamic terrorists didn’t get much publicity, and what they did get was mostly negative. Most Islamic nations were dictatorships, with the local media tightly controlled. That changed, for a while, in the 1980s, when the fight between Moslem Afghans, and atheist Russians, was given ample, and positive, publicity by the media in most Moslem nations, and throughout the Western world. The battle in Afghanistan was considered a jihad (Holy War) by Moslems, and what good Moslem could refuse to heap praise on that. The thousands of Moslems who went to Afghanistan (Pakistan, actually, which was where the Afghan rebels rested between missions), were considered heroes when they returned home. Many of these “Afghanis” soon ended up in jail, for spouting off about how great it would be to have a little Islamic revolution at home. Moslem countries went to war with their Islamic radicals in the 1990s, an event largely unnoticed in the West. There was always some unpleasant violence going on in Moslem countries. Either religion or politics would set things off, and this wasn’t news in the West.

That changed in 1996, when al Jazeera, an international satellite news network began. Now the millions of Moslems in the West could get news delivered using modern, compelling methods, but with a Moslem slant. That slant was quite different from the view of the Moslem, especially Arab, world provided by Western news. The biggest difference was how Israel, and Islamic terrorism, was explained. To Moslems, Israel was a great crime inflicted by the West on the Arab world. To the Arab media, Israel did not deserve to exist, and any Western nations that supported Israel, especially the United States, were enemies of Islam. Extreme stuff, but the sort of line you had to run with if you wanted to succeed as a journalist in the Arab, and Moslem world. This line was supported by most Arab governments, because if took attention away from the fact that most Arab governments were corrupt dictatorships that had never done much for the Palestinian people the Israelis were accused of oppressing.

The only large scale opposition to Moslem corruption and dictators was Islamic radicals, especially in the form of al Qaeda. But this opposition failed in the 1990s, and al Qaeda decided to turn its attention to targets in the West. According to al Qaeda, the ultimate cause of all the problems in the Moslem world (the corruption, the poverty, the dictatorships) was Western influence. Decadent Western media, and political influence in the form of Western support for Israel and current Moslem governments, must be destroyed before al Qaeda could clean things up in the Moslem world. Once the Moslem world was “purified” and united under one religious dictator, the rest of the world could be converted to Islam, and a planet wide Islamic religious government establishment. This is what al Qaeda wants. Does anyone believe they have any chance of achieving it? No one does, except millions of Moslems mesmerized by the al Qaeda message, and the thousands of al Qaeda warriors ready to die for the cause. Many of these al Qaeda supporters were in Moslem communities in the West. Thanks to al Jazeera, the Internet, and other satellite based media, the twisted logic of al Qaeda, was presented as news. The rabid anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic reporting so common in Arab media, but absent in the West, was now available anywhere in the world.

This created an enormous “expatriate patriot” effect. This is what happens when expatriates become more enthusiastic about violent solutions than the folks back home. This was seen rather vividly among Irish immigrants to the United States in the 19th century, where these Irish patriots formed armed groups, and engaged in terrorist acts in North America, in support of liberating Ireland from British rule. After this happened in the 1920s, the expatriate Irish still maintained the most anti-British attitudes. In the 1970s, when Irish terrorism began again, in Northern Ireland, which was still under British rule, much of the monetary support came from Irish overseas. The Irish in Ireland were much less enthusiastic about Irish terrorism than were the Irish overseas. The same thing is now happening with Moslem support for Islamic terrorism. In Moslem nations that have suffered from Islamic terrorists, places like Algeria, Egypt and Iraq, al Qaeda is hated. But among Moslem communities in Europe, there is a rather more idealized and romantic view of these Moslem “martyrs.” Recruiting is easier in Europe, as is raising money. While only a small minority of the expatriate Moslems support the terrorists, that amounts to over a million supporters, and thousands of volunteers for suicide attacks and terrorism.

There is another problem, particularly with Europe. When confronted with a growing Moslem minority, and its enthusiastic adoption of al Jazeera’s breathless coverage of Islamic terrorists, and the usual anti-Semitic coverage of Israel, Europe blinked. Rather than resisting this, Europe again went for appeasement. This didn’t work with the fascists in the 1930s, or the Soviets during the Cold War. But appeasement is a very popular policy in Europe. It isn’t working with Islamic radicals who, like the nazis and communists, want to conquer the world, and are willing to kill millions to get the job done. Appeasement is deeply embedded in the European psyche. Even after the nazis made it clear what they were all about, and had conquered much of Europe, many Europeans preferred to collaborate with the new tyranny. Even after the Cold War was over, many Europeans are nostalgic for the “failed experiment” of Soviet communism. If only someone else could come back and try it again, and do it right this time. This same twisted logic is being applied to al Qaedas mad march towards world conquest.

Al Qaeda lives on Moslem frustration at not being able to deal with cultural, economic and political problems at home. Moslem media, especially the international networks that reach the expatriate community, prosper on reporting al Qaedas propaganda as news, rather than nonsense. Al Qaeda killers are often described as “martyrs” and defenders of Islam. The Arab networks, like al Jazeera, also play international politics. For example, al Jazeera persists in describing Islamic terrorists in Iraq as “freedom fighters,” trying to liberate Iraq from foreign (U.S.) occupation. What al Jazeera won’t admit is that Iraq is mainly a battle between Shia Arabs who, by and large, are seen as allies of Shia Iran and enemies of the Sunni Arab world of the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Officially, Shia and Sunni Moslems get along. Unofficially, Sunni Arab governments (all Arab governments, except Iraq, are run by Sunnis) are terrified of Iran, the most powerful Shia Moslem government in the world, and a traditional enemy of Arabs. Iraqis know that al Qaeda is allied with the Sunni Arab minority trying to regain power, but to al Jazeera, this battle between Sunni and Shia in Iraq does not exist.

While no government on the planet officially supports al Qaeda, the terrorist organization still has the support of several percent of the Moslem population. Al Qaeda maintains the loyalty of those Moslems, especially the wealthier and better educated expatriate Moslems, via the relatively favorable reporting in the international Moslem media like al Jazeera. You can’t shut down this media, which includes the Internet, but you can’t ignore it either if you expect to deal with the terrorism. There are many historical examples of this kind of terrorism, and the only way to deal with it is to infiltrate the terrorist networks, hurt them as much as possible, and wait a decade or more until popular support for the killing fades away. It will be back, under a different banner. But that’s something for future generations to worry about.

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I think the writers are right on the money--it worked for the North Vietnamese, after all, and Al Qaeda has had years to study the Western Media to learn how to work the system.

"We Will Never Surrender..." -- Britain, and Terror Bombings

Here is a comment on a post about the recent terrorist bombings in London from the Sound Politics blog. I include it in full here:

I am angry.

I am angry at a lot of people, so read on, because this could mean you.

First and foremost, I am angry at Islamic fundamentalists and their desire to kill innocent people in the name of their god and their ideology. I am angry at a group that cannot allow others to believe differently then they, who feel the need to demonize their enemies, who marginalize others in their belief that their way is superior and that those who don't follow their way are contemptible. I am angry that they believe children are expendable.

I am also angry at those on this board who, in their anger advocate or speak out in favor of inhumane responses to such actions. I am angry that they cannot see that it is critical that we maintain a higher moral standard despite the cost. We ARE better than these "creatures". I am angry that someone would even suggest that they would prefer terrorists to bomb their political opposites as a punishment for political views. I am angry that anyone would suggest mass killings of innocents in efforts to get the perpetrators. We don't defeat this enemy be becoming like them, we defeat them by being intolerant to what they do. However, we respond in a dignified and moral way. Yes, that includes war, attacking another nation if that is what it comes to, and detaining and interrogating the prisoners. It means that we do capture them, not kill them outright. It means that we treat them AS prisoners, but we treat them humanely. It means that we DO use coercive tactics but we do not torture them. If we were at war with a nation, there would be no debate as to our right to collect prisoners of that nation for detention. Since our enemy knows no flag and adheres to no rules of war, we are forced to use tactics outside of the normal scope, but while we are at war with a borderless enemy, we must neutralize him, for the duration if necessary. This enemy declared war on us a long time ago but we did not "accept" this "declaration" because it did not come from a "nation". That was a mistake. These people consider themselves as a nation and we need to change our perception and treat them as such. If they act as infiltrators and spies, we treat them no differently than captured KGB agents.

Finally, I am angry at those who undermine our efforts to conduct this war. I am angry at people, who through their words, and efforts contribute to the injury and death of our soldiers, who provide encouragement to the enemy, who weaken our efforts and prolong the war, who, for political gain put our soldiers, our people, and our nation at greater risk.

There is a LOT of anger going on. Many times it is inappropriately acted upon. Islamists are angry, so they blow up people. Conservatives are angry so they advocate indiscriminate retaliation. Liberals are angry so they advocate undermining the war. All this anger is misdirected. We can see how the killing of innocents is wrong, but sometimes we cannot see how allowing innocents to be killed is wrong. One should seriously consider the impacts of certain types of dissention in this country before embarking on said dissentious course.

I have many issues with the war in Iraq, but I will focus on just a couple. When President Bush pronounced to the world that he would defeat terrorism, he made a promise. He promised that he would not only pursue the terrorists wherever they may be, but he promised to go after the countries that enable those terrorists. When the UN made resolution after resolution against Iraq those too were promises. The difference comes in whether one follows up a promise or not. You see, no one embarks on a major undertaking with the expectation of losing. The choices any person or group are almost always predicated on the fact that the reward exceeds the price or risk. Hitler would not have invaded Czechoslovakia unless he though he could get away with it. He would not have invaded Poland unless he though he could get away with it. The success of those events and reaction of Europe convinced him that he could press on and take all of Europe. Saddam would not have invaded Kuwait unless he thought he could get away with it. He would not have defied the UN unless he though he could get away with it. In those cases, the acting party decided that they could attain their goals using the methods employed. The same thing goes for the terrorists. They methods they employ are based on the expectation of ultimate success. The methods they employ are also based on their own capabilities, capabilities that stem from the support of governments both passive and active, the support of moneyed benefactors, and the support of powerful influencers such as media and high profile personalities. This brings me back to promises made. Part of the reason these terrorists became so bold is that there were few significant reprisals for their actions. In the same way Hitler moved on Poland and Hussein defied the UN, Al Qaeda flew planes into our buildings. Ultimately it was because they could and that the reprisals had insufficient deterrent effect. Now, when President Bush announced that he would pursue the nations that supported terrorism, he basically set the stage for action. The choice was, rattle the saber and hope it is enough, or draw the saber and demonstrate our commitment to living up to our promises. It is fair to debate whether Iraq was the best choice for an operation, but the stage had also been set there as well. With promises being made at the UN, the choice was to continue to prove that promises meant nothing or to prove that they did. I believe that the lack of consequences in the past was a key factor in the terrorist activity leading up to and including 9/11. Without the resolve to back up our promises, our enemies will be emboldened to act. It does not get any simpler than that.

Iraq was a promise kept. Now, some people want us to renege on that promise and others. That is a dangerous position to be advocating. The thing is, the debate about Iraq belongs BEFORE we took action. And that debate DID occur. It occurred BEFORE the war. And the result was overwhelmingly in FAVOR of action. The congress granted President Bush the authority to act. The fact that they did not like his decision is moot. If they did not trust his ability to act, they were wrong to have given him the authority to do so. NOW they are wrong for challenging his decision after the fact. That brings us back to the concept of one's expectation of the results of one's actions. In many cases throughout history, the winner of a conflict was not always the one with the bigger army, the better equipment, and the best trained, or any of those factors. The winner quite often was the one with the greater will to win. Wars are won by will in far greater weight then in anything else. I would say that will is THE determining factor in success in any conflict. Obviously will is not enough. A greater force can sap the will of another army, but not always. The revolutionary war was won by will, not by military might. Vietnam was lost by will not by military might. And, Iraq will be won or lost by will alone. The consequences of this outcome will have long lasting impacts on the security of our nation. At this point, it does not matter whether we should have gone into Iraq. The fact is we are there now. We either complete the job and fulfill our promises to rebuild that nation and leave it with a stable and free society or we cut and run and have the world know with certainty that our word is null and void and that we have no resolve. That is the stakes. That is the goal of the terrorists: to prove they have resolve, to prove that we do not. Their victory will ensure increased attacks on all nations because the terrorists will have unimpeachable proof that their tactics will ultimately succeed. Bombings, beheadings, gross atrocities will be the weapons of choice in the future. Tactics that have been proven to bring down the mighty.

If will is the factor that determines the outcome, then will is the place where we must consider here and now. As far as our enemy is concerned, we MUST make them believe that they cannot succeed. We MUST make them sure that WE will prevail. We MUST prove to them that their tactics are ineffectual. There is a down side to that. Once an enemy realizes their tactics are not succeeding, they will change them. With an enemy of this nature, that could result in greater atrocities than we have yet seen. Yet, even then we must prevail. We must continue to demonstrate OUR resolve and OUR willingness to see this to the end and DEFEAT them. Since they have shown little regard for decency and life, since they have shown that our very existence is provocation to them, no amount of diplomacy or concessions will achieve an end satisfactory to our nation. The only solution is the demonstration of our willingness to defeat them despite their tactics.

Our goal is to defeat the will of the enemy. His goal is to defeat ours. Any indication that the enemy's will is faltering will bolster our own will. However, the opposite is true as well. Any indication that our will is faltering will embolden the enemy's will. Unfortunately, from the very first minute of this conflict, parts of our country have shouted from the very mountain tops just how little will they have to win the war. They demonstrate clearly for our enemies that we don't want to fight. They give clear indication that enemy tactics are successful. In effect, they give aid and comfort to the enemy and spur them on to continued fighting because they tell the enemy in clear messages that if they continue in their tactics, the United States will be defeated.

As I said before, the debate about whether we go to war is over. We are now at war, and the ONLY debate we should have is on what tactics are most appropriate for prosecuting that war. It is marginally fair to state that you are unhappy about our decision to go to war, but beyond that, anything else will embolden the enemy. Think very long and about what is at stake here. It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to be pro America while actively dissenting on ongoing conflict. It is bordering on treason for a public official to undermine the war effort, the Commander in Chief and the military publicly for all the world to see. We have started down this path, and there are but two choices: to win or to lose. There is no "suing for peace" with this enemy. Now, that does not mean you have to become militaristic and be a war monger. You can be a peacenik, but you need to consider that unless you want to see the United States harmed, you should cease criticism of the war itself until after it is won. There is plenty of time to castigate the people who made what you perceive as errors AFTER we have finished the job. However, if you persist in presenting disunity and a weakened resolve to the enemy, you take direct responsibility for the lives of all Americans, Iraqis and foreign terrorists that will die subsequently. The quickest way to end the war is to be united, to demonstrate unshakable resolve, and to have the enemy surrender. Or, YOU can surrender to the enemy. Anything else will just prolong the killing. This goes infinitely more so for our public leaders. What they do for political gain is completely unconscionable.

Posted by Eyago at July 8, 2005 08:28 AM

I think this is very succint, and right on the money. There is no appeasement wanted by this enemy, and if all people around the world who react in horror to the aims and practices of these people do not band together in purpose (if not method), then these bombings and deaths will continue.
They don't ask if you are muslim, or democrat, or a Bush-hater, or American, before the bombs explode.

Ward Churchill--Professor, Indian, Artist or Plagiarist?

Perhaps the famous scholar/activist/victim Prof. Churchill made a mistake when he tried to create his own art...as the original story goes,

An exclusive report by CBS4 News indicates embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill may have broken copyright law by making a mirror image of an artist's work and selling it as his own.Placing Churchill's work beside that of renowned artist Thomas E. Mails and the two look like mirror images. But one is a copyrighted drawing. The other is an autographed print by Churchill.When BS4 News reporter Raj Chohan tried to talk to Churchill about a possible copyright infringement, he received an angry response.

Um....err....whoops. Perhaps it's time for "Professor"Churchill to swallow his towering pride (and rage) and quietly retire.

Food of the Month--Cuban Mojito

We are quite fond of our nearby Trader Joe's. Until a couple of months ago the closest one was 20 minutes away by freeway--too far for regular visits. But now there is one very close to us, about 4 minutes away. So now we can go more regularly and stock up on goodies like the topic of this entry--Trader Joe's Cuban Mojito Simmer Sauce.

I don't know much about Cuban food other than the one Cuban restaurant I used to go to from time to time in college (all you can eat lunch buffet...mmm!). But this mojito is good!
According to the jar, it is a "tangy citrus sauce and marinade." In the jar is a coludy mixture of orange and lime juice, containing finely chopped onions, garlic, olive oil, cilantro, vinegar, cumin and oregano. I have tried this on chicken--superb! I have tried this on pork chops--lovely! I have tried this in black beans--excellent! When I open the jar and sniff it, I almost want to eat it straight out of the jar--no kidding! I have become very fond of Mexican Mole sauces recently, and this reminds me of a mole in its richness, but not the heat. This isn't a hot sauce (like many Jamaican sauces tend to be) but it is spicy.

The citrus and spices together make it a tangy sauce with a touch of sunny Caribbean tropical sweetness. I will have to try some more of this in the summer grilling season. It should prove to be fantastic.
I will have to try more of their sauces and give a report on them.

Making a Statement about Iraq

I met a young college-age girl the other day who was talking about Iraq. She was somewhat upset by the fact that Americans were bombing people in Iraq (apparently for no reason), and so it was only right that the beleagured Iraqis should rise up against these vicious soldiers. I engaged her in a brief conversation that went something like this:
"So all Iraqis are against the United States occupation?"
"Yes!" she said.
"Do you know what "Sunni" and "Shi'ite" mean?"
She looked at me blankly and said, "Ummm...no."
I then proceeded to tell her the difference, and why it pertains to events in Iraq.
I then asked her, "Do you know where these insurgents are coming from?"
She quickly replied, "Iraq, of course!"
I asked, "You heard the name Zarqawi, the current "ringleader" in Iraqi terrorist circles?"
She nodded.
"Did you know he is not an Iraqi?"
She had not known that.
I then proceeded to explain that many insurgent/terrorists/homicidal maniacs do not come from Iraq at all (although many do.) Thus, I pointed out, "How can these people be fighting for the occupation of their country if they aren't even citizens of that country?"
She didn't really have a reply, other to say that war just wasn't fair, and that because it wasn't fair, we shouldn't be over there killing Iraqis.
I told her about the story I read about an Iraqi man who was going to join the insurgents. This was the unlucky fellow who got his house searched by American troops. They found his stash of contraband cheesecake magazines (not porn, but close) and stacked them on his bed (possibly next to his Koran, or possibly not.) That wasn't so embarassing, but this guy's mother found out about this. After the Americans left, without stealing anything, without arresting anyone, without blowing anything up or killing anybody, this slime starts beating on his mother to make sure that she won't tell anybody about his girly magazines. It is this that made this true son of Islam want to join the insurgents.
I asked the girl, "So, what did the Americans do to this guy that justifies him making a bomb and blowing up some Americans and some unlucky fellow Iraqis?"
She mumbled something about how we would feel if somebody invaded our house, and how it isn't fair.
Anyway, she had to head off to class, so the conversation ended there.

But I thought it was an amazing thing--how can you condemn something about which you know so little? But of course, in America the most important thing you can do (as indicated by most celebs, pop singers, and other celebs) is "make a statement." That's the American way--free speech, to say whatever I want, and thus to prove to the rest of the world that I am an idiot (and I'm so sorry, and whatever I feel good about is good, and whatever I feel bad about is bad.)
Where do kids learn this?

Human Shields in Iraq

An interesting thought--
There were a bunch of folks who were clamoring to be "human shields" around certain targets in Iraq before the US invasion. The idea, I suppose, would be that Americans would hesitate to attack or bomb certain buildings or targets, knowing that innocents would be killed.

Would they volunteer to be "human shields" around voting booths in Iraq at the moment? The idea, I suppose, would be that Insurgents/Terrorists would hesitate to attack or bomb certain buildings or targets, knowing that innocents would be killed.

So...anybody heard of people heading over to Iraq to become human shields in the name of freedom, liberty and democracy? (I nominate Michael Moore--a guy his size ought to be able to cover a couple voting booths and absorb a rocket or two without any problems.)

The resounding silence says volumes.

January in Puget Sound

I saw a tree today that was budding.
Seriously--the buds had broken open and I could see the leaves start to stretch out. The heather that grows alongside the sidewalk is blooming, and smells...well, heathery. It's foggy, and misty, with a bit of rain, but it's January, and some of the trees are budding.
Winter is easy in this part of the world, if you can stand the grey.
And I can.
Some people look at grey skies as depressing, as the clouds close in and blot out the blue sky and the yellow sun (often for days at a time). But I grew up in semi-arid regions of Southern Oregon, where infrequent rain was a welcome surprise, that brought a wet note of sage and dust into the air. I loved to go the wetter side and see the thousand shades of green, the riot of plants and the wet air. I learned that grey was not the main color. I had to learn to look around the grey, and learn that grey skies intensify the other colors.
The car that drives by in the sunshine is dull in color. But under grey skies, or in the rain, it glistens, and the colors become richer.
The trees in the sunshine lift up leaves and needles to the sun, seeming to forget all else. But in the rain, they seem to glow, giving off the light they stored up.
Flowers against a backdrop of blue sky and bright light are fine. But put against a backdrop of grey skies, they are no longer overshadowed by the sunlight.
The ocean and grey skies seem to blend together, either (to me) doubling the amount of ocean, or doubling the amount of sky.
In the grey season, drops of water hang off the long needles of pine trees like Christmas ornaments, glowing with diffused light. Sounds are diffused like the light. The world becomes like the inside of a cathedral, lit by an indirect source that can't be placed, but you can sense its presence. Temperatures and light are moderated, and extremes are banished to other places, like fabled sunny California, or snow-covered Rainier (on the few days you can see it in the wintertime.)
And when the clouds drift away, and the sun comes out, it is glorious. That's January on the Puget Sound, when the trees start to bud and the long, exuberant spring often begins.

In the Beginning...

In the beginning, there was the Internet. I remember in the early 70s, in Southern Oregon, when my elementary school had a single computer teletype hook-up to some university somewhere. I was fascinated by this remote machine that you could command, and it would obediently type out a word in Pltword, or play golf, or play Star Trek...
I was too young and in too small of towns to know about machines like the Altair, or the original Apples. I was never rich enough to own an Apple II (back when a floppy drive alone cost 500 dollars), but they were the first computers I actually got to mess with at my high school. I tried to figure out machine language, shape tables, apple basic, and some other fun stuff.
In the early 80s, not being rich enough for an IBM or an Apple, or even for the TRS80, I purchased my first computer, a Commodore 64. 64 whopping kilobytes of memory! Color capability! Sound chip! Sprite animation! Wow! Who could ask for more? I learned a bit about programming (and Poking, and Peeking), but I didn't have a reason for a modem at the time.
Not until later, on my 386 (16 screaming Mhz) , did I start exploring the BBS world (ah, the days of Random Lunacy.)
And then suddenly, I realized that there were things out there on the internet that were more than just programmer stuff, and I began to learn HTML, and put up my own websites. I was never really a programmer, so I never learned C, or Perl, or Java, or the real geek stuff. I've always been a fringe geek, I suppose. I never really got interested in computers and programming for the sake of its geekiness, but only when it related to my other interests.
Besides, to be a real geek took a lot more money than I ever had.
And so, now I am on the blogosphere.
I never imagined such a thing, way back when.