We need...
20-foot long tungsten telephone poles launched from orbit.
All the fun of nuclear weaponry but none of the unpleasantness. And it'll take out hardened, underground targets too. Coordinate a series of strikes and you can probably burrow as deep as you want. Furthermore, as with nuclear weapons "almost" does indeed count, so pinpoint accuracy, a difficult goal from 100,000 feet, wouldn't be strictly necessary.
For those who doubt the ability of such a weapon system to actually destroy targets, we're talking about a highly accelerated dart of solid tungsten (so chosen for its high tolerence of heat) slamming into the ground in speeds measured in kilometers-per-second. This is, potentially, billions of joules.
Cool.
Last September, a Danish newspaper published a series of political cartoons. This month, they were reprinted in a Norwegian newspaper. The cartoons included a depiction of Mohammed (pick a transliteration that works for you).
In case you weren't aware, depicting the Prophet in any form is expressly forbidden. And in case you didn't see this coming, the Arab world has gone completely apeshit.
Umm... Suck it. I refuse to be offended by other people's opinions of my religious figures. I therefore refuse to concede a single inch when someone else gets pissy about theirs being offended.
Until the culture can show even rudiments of maturity and not throw childish tantums, they'll remain wretchedly Third World.*
*Some people think this term is perjorative. I meant it that way.
I'm in the middle of reading a lengthy, in-depth essay about the man who was formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, and who is now Pope Benedict XVI. It's in the latest issue of The Atlantic, so apologies to those who aren't subscribers.
A few quotes of interest:
In his new introduction to Introduction to Christianity, his best known and best respected work:
"He focused on two dates: 1989 and 1968. Upon the fall of communism, in 1989, he argued, Christianity had "failed to make itself heard as an epoch-making alternative." It failed, he suggested, because it had failed earlier, in 1968, when it became captive to Marxist ideas of revolution, which obscured the truth of the Gospel. This was clearest in liberation theology, which promised to free the poor peoples of Latin America but instead left them with no true alternative to dictatorships, only the theories of Marx-addled professors."
Wow.
Elsewhere:
"'It is not the Christians who oppose the world,' he declared, 'but rather the world which opposes itself to them when the truth about God, about Christ and about man is proclaimed.' But his account of the conflict between Catholicism and modernity was eloquent and forward-looking. He was no throwback but a "realist" who simply thought that the reforms that followed Vatican II went beyond what the council fathers had called for. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not a new Inquisition but an institution charged with "the defense of right belief." As prefect he was not an enforcer so much as a kind of physician treating "the pathology of faith.""
"Surprisingly, given his authoritarian image, Benedict has a fairly restricted conception of the papacy, especially when compared with that of the maximalist John Paul. In his personal writings he explains it through the biblical imagery of the rock. Following tradition, he sees the papal office as at once "petrus," the rock on which the Church is founded, and "skandalon," the stumbling block. To these images he adds one from Michelangelo. In Benedict's view, change in the Church is brought about by what the sculptor called ablatio, or removal—"the removal of what is not really part of the sculpture." The Church is in need not of reform but of renewal, and the pope is less an agent of change than a sculptor helping it to attain its noble form."
If you can get hold of a copy of this issue, it's really worth the read.
Jack Schafer has a good bit on the growing devolution and disillusion of the newspaper under the growing threat of technology. First it was electric typesetting that cashiered the old manual typesetters' unions. Then it was the personal computer enabling anyone who wanted to to lay out a professional quality publication. Now it's the internet, enabling anyone who wants to to reach an arbitrarily large number of people for very little.
I believe, unfortunately, that his solutions are precluded by the very problems he identifies:
"But what a lot of [newspaper] guild members miss is that not everybody wants to read John F. Burns, not everybody who wants to read about Baghdad is going to demand coverage of the quality he produces, and not everybody wants Baghdad coverage, period."
Which is why publications like the Atlantic, my current favorite, have about 150,000 subscribers instead of millions. There's room for two or three publications of that genre, quality, and scale in this country, but no more, because there just isn't a market for it.
This, I believe, is what Mr. Schafer has failed to recongize: it isn't just advances in technology that have lowered the entry fee to journalism to the point that anyone can play who wants to. It's also that there's been a significant reduction in demand for the product which journalists produce. No one - relatively speaking - wants high-quality, in-depth, well-reasoned, logical, cultural and political commentary. As long as the sports and celebrity pages are up to date, the rest can pretty much go hang.
For for the few hundred thousand people who actually want something that approximates what a newspaper actually does, there will continue to be publications to meet their demands. But the archaic, large-scale journalist-as-a-class is rapidly becoming obsolete. USA Today is little more than a glorified gossip column that happens to run an AP feed. There isn't enough demand to support more than a few dozen honest-to-goodness essayists.
Now this is a fascinating article. It's an analysis of vindictiveness, schadenfreude, empathy, and, on some level, instinctive justice across gender lines. Turns out that women are more empathic across the board, but men are much more attuned to the morality of a situation and seem to actually want wrongdoers to suffer.
Cool.
We now have, in Palestine, a democratically elected terrorist regime. Iran is thrilled. Europe is less than thrilled. The US and Israel have refused to deal with a Hamas-led government.
Democracy is no cure-all. It's not even morally superior. It's just a tool of statecraft.
All this really does is prove what a lot of people have been saying all along: the Palestianians aren't really interested in any peace that doesn't involve the destruction of Israel. This is nothing new. The only new thing is that peaceniks and other miscreants can no longer argue that the Palestinians are really a peace-loving, victimized people who would be happy to work with Israel and the rest of the world if only they were given a chance. No, in their first truly democratic election they go and choose an Iran-supported terror cell in a landslide.
Fun times.
What we've got here is a speech given by one Frank Lindh, the father of the now infamous "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, at the Commonwealth Club if California.
It's a long read, but worth it. I think his father is probably right about his assertions of prejudicial statements in the media, by both media outlets and politicians, making a fair trial almost impossible. As it turns out, the government dropped 10 of 11 criminal charges against Mr. Lindh, in a plea bargain that leaves in incarcerated for 20 years for providing aid to the Taliban government in violation of sanctions enacted during the Clinton administration. Considering the nature of the original charges against him, this is pretty weak.
Still, I'm not sure what to think. He certainly was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the situation really didn't create an environment conducive to a fair and unprejudiced trial. That being said, sweet freaking corn dogs, what did he expect? Any person who takes up arms with a foreign country, even one of our allies, is in serious - if not automatic - danger of losing his US citizenship.
Well, he probably really didn't expect anything. He went to Pakistan and Afghanistan for personal, spiritual reasons during a period in which some thawing was occuring in relations between the Taliban and the US government. Sorry dude. Tough break. Wasn't your fault that some of your ideological cohorts decided to fly planes into buildings. But come on now, Islam hasn't exactly had a long and storied history of tranquil relations with... well... just about anybody. You want to look out for things like that.
I think his case should be retried, and the legal irregularities ironed out. But that doesn't mean I don't think he got what was coming to him.
How many steps does it take to get from lefty US anti-war types to Iranian President Mahmud Amadi-Nejad?
Two.
Cindy Sheehan is a big fan of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who in turn is a staunch ally of Iran. She's currently down there at an anti-war rally.
Well lookee there.
Hitch has it right again. If I could be anywhere near as right as he is, I'd be okay with that.
Al-Quaida is losing, and they know it. Death fanatics don't sue for peace. They don't offer increasingly generous terms of peace (remember, they offered Europe a separate peace after Spain). They only do this if they're afraid they're going to lose.
The general that secured a Union victory during the Civil War was one Ulysses S. Grant, often called a "butcher" for his tactics, which were relatively simple: refuse to stop the attack or sound the surrender until your enemy is either defeated or driven from the field. He was dramatically unpopular with the American voting public, and his resignation was called for on numerous occasions. During one of his most bloody battles, Cold Harbor, he managed to lose 13,000 soldiers - more than have died or been wounded in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts - in 13 days, up to 7000 of them in 40 minutes.
Lincoln had this to say of him: "I cannot spare this man: he fights."
Well, I don't think we can spare Bush or Rumsfeld. They fight too. And though there cannot be war without casualties, the casualties have been exceptionally light. If the same percentage of the US population was killed/wounded today as was killed/wounded during Gettysburg, we'd be talking almost half a million casualties. Say what you like about the administration and the conduct of the war, we're offering surrender terms, and they're offering truce terms. Who do you think is winning, now?
Maybe it's because "human rights" activists are passing out freaking roadmaps for how to successfully make an illegal border crossing.
And we're supposed to believe that Mexico is doing their level best to do something about illegal immigration and that it is somehow the right of Mexican citizens to work in this country?
Can I get a "what the hell"?
It's been a while. 60 hour weeks are something to which I can probably look forward to for the majority of my professional career, but 60 hour weeks that involve 40 hours of pointless, menial clerical work don't exactly motivate one towards heights of achievement.
This, fortunately for me, is coming to an end. I have been offered a job by a local newspaper covering their municipal government beat, and I've accepted the offer. The pay isn't great, but I'll have a life again. I've given two-weeks notice at the hotel, effective today.
And there was much rejoicing.
Note to self: when making decisions about who to put in charge of your department's financial concerns, someone with a CPA is probably a significantly better choice than an English major. Exhibit A: The University of South Florida has discovered over $275,000 in undepositied funds, including $32,000 in cash scattered around the office for the English Language Institute. Some of the checks go back at least a decade. The university will probably lose in excess of $200,000, because banks routinely refuse to honor checks more than 90 days old.
I'll bet the business department doesn't have this problem.
Daniel Gross has a piece on Slate chewing out twentysomethings for complaining about the job market, etc. He does have something of a point: just because we're on the bottom of the heap now doesn't mean we're going to stay that way. You aren't 25 forever.
But what he's missing is that by the time we're able to afford to have kids, most of us will be too old, assumming men marry women approximately their own age. He is right that not being able to afford preschool if you don't have kids does, on the face of it, sound a bit nonsensical, but it's a damned good reason not to have kids in the first place.
Which is exactly what's happening. Birth rates in post-industrial nations are rapidly falling, to the point where Japan has a negative growth rate, and if it weren't for massive North African and Middle Eastern immigration, Europe would too. Some European nations already do (Albania could lose up to 50% of its population in the next few decades). Tax structures are stacked against us, the massive boomer generation is gobbling up resources, refusing to go quietly into that dark night, and fighting like the dickens to extend their rob-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich "social safety net" programs.
You know that whole "you take care of us when we're kids and we'll take care of you when you get old" implied social contract thing? The deal is off.
Cows are generally considered by most people to be pleasant animals, whether on or off the dinner table. What people tend to forget is that cows generally weigh something in the neighborhood of two-odd tons, and if one decides that it really wants to go somewhere, there generally isn't a lot anyone can do about it.
