Archive for November, 2005
27 Nov 2005

Robert Kaplan’s “Imperial Grunts”

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Imperial Grunts

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

27 Nov 2005

Networks versus the State

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Wretchard proposes a provocative way of looking at current events:

The fundamental issue… is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people…

That Islam traditionally had no fixed hierarchy helped it adapt more readily to networked war. For the Jihadi the requirements of public policy and international law not only proved no hindrance, in a fundamental sense they did not apply: things like the Geneva Convention were the impedimenta of nation-states. Holy warriors were accountable only to Allah, which in practice meant they answered to no one but themselves. This circumstance exculpated the Jihadists from a multitude of sins in the eyes of a Western media capable of recognizing only state actors. Attacks against hospitals, schools, churches; and the use of children as combatants excited no opprobrium because these were understood to be acts of individuals; unfortunate to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial. Only states could commit war crimes, so that Jihadi atrocities, even on the scale of September 11, were only the subject of police action…

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level.

27 Nov 2005

Blog War

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The unaussprechlichen FrankJ is waging war on Glenn Reynolds, you see. The origins and history of this terrible conflict are described here:

Blogging is a hobby of pure ego, whose purpose is to 1) see your words in print, and 2) have other people read them. Currently, one blogger, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) gets far more page views and links than any other, and deservedly so. Glen updates MANY times per day, and his links are usually well worth clicking. However, he normally offers very little of his own commentary. Sometimes just a cursory “indeed” or “hmmm”.

Because he has so many readers, if he links to your site you get a LOT of hits, which is very gratifying. His links are highly prized by bloggers.

Frank J., of IMAO, is an up-and-coming blogger who occasionally mocks Glenn as a way to gain attention. His first method was making up outrageous lies: Glenn puts puppies in blenders and drinks them; Glenn murders hobos for fun; Glenn worships Satan; Glenn is a communist spy who does the robot dance; Glenn punched Frank J.

Later, Frank attempted to get Google to bring up Glenn’s site if the terms “liberal assclown” were entered. Results were mixed.

His latest attempt was to “declare war” on Glenn and asking bloggers to choose sides. Frank’s side is the Blogging Alliance, Glenn’s supporters are the Axis of Naughty. It’s all in good fun, and much entertaining mockery and gratuitous linkage will ensue as a result.

One of FrankJ’s allies, Harvey, has composed an indictment not to be missed by connoisseurs of Blogospheric humor.

27 Nov 2005

Amazing Beliefs about Guns, Pt. 1

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The irrepressible FrankJ posts an amusing collection of “Amazing Beliefs” about Guns, compiled by Michael Z. Williamson :

(excerpt)

That incidents where people shoot criminals in self defense are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to own guns, just as incidents where presidential press secretaries are shot are very rare, and shouldn’t be used as excuses to ban guns.

That guns are the real cause of crime, but we will blame and jail the owner of said gun for the crime, even if the owner wasn’t the person involved.

That a mugger will kill you in the half-second it takes to draw from the holster, but won’t harm you while you dial 911 on your cell phone, talk to the dispatcher and wait half an hour for the cops to arrive.

That gun control works, which is why there are no illegal weapons in Northern Ireland or Beirut.

That the Second Amendment only applies to flintlocks, just as the First Amendment only applies to quills and lead type.

27 Nov 2005

1979 Map of Nuclear War in Europe

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The Telegraph reports:

Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives – including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact forces.

The defence minister, Radek Sikorski, showed off the map at an emotional press conference.

He described it as a “personally shattering experience”, pointing to a long line of nuclear mushroom clouds neatly stamped along the Vistula, where Soviet bloc commanders assumed that Nato tactical nuclear weapons would rain down to block reinforcements arriving from Russia.

About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he said.

On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision.

Soviet bombs rain down on cities from northern Denmark down to Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato. Large red clouds blot out cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and Baden Baden, Haarlem, Antwerp and Charleroi, above the Franco-Belgian border.

In 1979, the town I was living in, Redding, Connecticut, was debating, and ultimately passed –despite some speeches of mine– a Nuclear Freeze resolution, promoted by the American Left throughout much of the United States, opposing the deployment of medium range missles in Europe by NATO. The Soviet Union was no threat, we were told. One does not like to think about what might have happened had Ronald Reagan not been elected president in 1980.

27 Nov 2005

Contemporary Origami by Hojyo Takahashi

Hojyo Takahashi 2004

(click on picture for more images)

Simply astonishing.

Other works

26 Nov 2005

Papieren, Bitte!

Deborah Davis ID

How many movies have we seen with villainous Gestapo men, attired in leather-trenchcoats, marching down train corridors, demanding “Your papers, please!”? The ever-escalating securitization of America, fueled simultaneously by liberal Nanny-ism and by war-time security concerns, produces a thousand stories of nincompoopery and Jack-in-Office excess monthly. One irrational demand for personal ID on a bus in Denver seems to have inspired a web-site erected to do something about all this.

Despite the presence of a banner on that web-site from the Colorado branch of a loathsome organization, I’m inclined to sympathize with the lady’s position. I’ve come pretty close to taking a poke at courthouse rent-a-cops more than once myself.

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Story picked up Sunday, November 27th, Denver Post.

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A disagreeable example of just where this kind of thing can lead is provided by Malaysia, where a cellphone-captured video of a Chinese female suspect stripped and forced to perform “ear squats,” hands-free deep knee bends performed holding hands to ears, has produced a scandal being reported all over South-east Asia: Sydney Herald and BBC.

26 Nov 2005

Essential Reference Material: Urban Legends about the Iraq War

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American Enterprise Online notes and debunks Urban Legends originated by the Left about the war.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg.

26 Nov 2005

Marlowe’s Altered Scene

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(Apologies to our readers. The blogging software has difficulties with exceptionally long postings, so I divided the original into two.)

The altered scene reads in the original:

TAMBURLAINE. Now, Casane, where’s the Turkish Alcoran,
And all the heaps of superstitious books
Found in the temples of that Mahomet
Whom I have thought a god? they shall be burnt.

USUMCASANE. Here they are, my lord.

TAMBURLAINE. Well said! let there be a fire presently.
[They light a fire.]
In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet:
My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell,
Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,
And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet.
There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.
So, Casane; fling them in the fire.–
[They burn the books.]
Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,
Come down thyself and work a miracle:
Thou art not worthy to be worshipped
That suffer’st flames of fire to burn the writ
Wherein the sum of thy religion rests:
Why send’st thou not a furious whirlwind down,
To blow thy Alcoran up to thy throne,
Where men report thou sitt’st by God himself?
Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine
That shakes his sword against thy majesty,
And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws?–
Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell;
He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine:
Seek out another godhead to adore;
The God that sits in heaven, if any god,
For he is God alone, and none but he.

26 Nov 2005

That England, that was wont to conquer others

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Churchill and Wellington, Shakespeare and Milton, and all the other heroes of English history and English letters must be revolving in their graves at a speed of 78 rpm-s today at news of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great being presented on the London stage in censored form, the famous scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Alcoran rewritten in deference to Muslim sensitivities at a time when British military forces are in the field fighting Islamo-fascism.

Can one even begin to imagine imagine London stage performances removing (rather than adding by the barge-load) uncomplimentary references to Nazis during the time of Churchill? or scenes offensive to French sensibilities being excised during the Napoleonic wars? or the London theatre grovelling to Spain in the time of the Armada?

IT WAS the surprise hit of the autumn season, selling out for its entire run and inspiring rave reviews… (but) audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koran being burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, who directed and adapted the classic play, feared that it would inflame passions in the light of the London bombings. Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions”.

The burning of the Koran was “smoothed over”, he said, so that it became just the destruction of “a load of books” relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.

25 Nov 2005

Would You Like to Bomb Us?

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Priority Target

aj-Jazeera gets some women and a kid right up front for their “manipulate the dumb Americans” shot in an insolent new blog titled “Don’t Bomb Us,” devoted to cynically exploiting the recent British press story and otherwise influencing Western public opinion.

25 Nov 2005

Liberal Grinches Steal Xmas in Boston

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Reuters is reporting that Boston has officially renamed the giant tree erected this year in a city park a “holiday tree” instead of a “Christmas tree.”

The Nova Scotia logger who cut down the 48-foot (14-meter) tree was indignant and said he would not have donated the tree if he had known of the name change.

“I’d have cut it down and put it through the chipper,” Donnie Hatt told a Canadian newspaper. “If they decide it should be a holiday tree, I’ll tell them to send it back. If it was a holiday tree, you might as well put it up at Easter.”

Canadian response to PC in Boston.

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