perfidy

In case you're curious, a transcript of the final moments of Flight 93 is available over at the Smoking Gun.
 

Maybe not. But the Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme might be running into some more problems. Recently, the Brits threatened to pull out of the quarter trillion dollar project over technology sharing issues. Though that seems to be on track to resolution - both sides having reported "extremely productive" talks in negotiations - there is a something else on the radar screen.

UAE owned holding firm Dubai International Capital bought Doncasters, a privately held British aerospace manufacturer, in a deal worth $1.2 billion. That company is involved with the F-35, and another congressional investigation could cause yet another row. I think that this is another case of a (relatively) innocent company being guilty of little more than "driving while arab." There is reason to be cautious about our secrets and all, but if this busts out into a minor scale controversy, you can be sure that it is much more likely to be about some hack politician's reelection chances than about a legitimate security concern. And if it pisses off the Brits, that's a damn shame, because we couldn't ask for a better ally, and should be doing all that we can to include them in, not acting like they're our wierd bug-eyed cousin wanting to borrow twenty-grand for a fur bearing trout farm.

Murdoc of Murdoc Online, skirting the edges of responsible journalism, has been recruited/drafted/shanghaid/volunteered for the job of MC for Winds of Change's new feature the "Military Transformation Uplink." In concert with Joe Katzman of the aforementioned WoC, professional publications Defense Industry Daily, Military.com's DefenseTech, and eDefense Online, Murdoc will be hitting you monthly with a barrage of high tech military linkage. (All of these sites are great resources for military type stuff, even the stuff that Murdoc doesn't link.)

The first edition is up now at WoC. If, like me, you have a hankering for things that go boom in a particularly high tech manner, go check it out. Murdoc outdid himself on this one.

In Friday's OpinionJournal Best of the Web Today, James Taranto included a story entitled "Docs for Starvation", highlighting this news item:

"More than 260 doctors yesterday called on the American authorities at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to allow detainees to starve themselves to death," reports the Daily Telegraph of London. We guess that explains hospital food, but if the docs want the prisoners to die, aren't there quicker and more humane ways of accomplishing it?

Now, I'm clearly a fan of snark, evidenced, inter alia, by the fact that I read and enjoy Best of the Web each weekday that Taranto's not on vacation.

So I read it and chuckled a bit, then moved on. Later, however, I got a link to a story in The Independent that more fully described things, and was somewhat embarrassed by my earlier chuckling. Why I'm telling you this is beyond me, because none of you were there when I was chuckling, nor was anyone else, but mild guilt has strange effects. Among other things, the Indy article points out that:

More than 250 medical experts are launching a protest today against the practice - which involves strapping inmates to "restraint chairs" and pushing tubes into the stomach through the nose. They say it breaches the right of prisoners to refuse treatment.

...

Since August they have been routinely force-fed, an excruciatingly painful practice that causes bleeding and nausea. The doctors say: "Fundamental to doctors' responsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners have a right to refuse treatment.

"The UK Government has respected this right even under very difficult circumstances and allowed Irish hunger strikers to die. Physicians do not have to agree with the prisoner, but they must respect their informed decision." The World Medical Association has prohibited force-feeding and the American Medical Association backed the WMA's declaration.

(ellipses mine)

Damn, I said to myself, the docs have a point. Contrary to Mr. Taranto's punchline, it's not the doctors who want people to die - it's the people who themselves want to die. All of which, in retrospect, is quite obvious, so shame on me.

I'm not of a mind with all other sentiments reported in the article, such as the UN's demands that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp be closed down, at least not that it should be closed down because of the force feeding. But I don't have trouble agreeing with them when they say that "...treatment such as force-feeding and prolonged solitary confinement could amount to torture."

I can even understand why the military command at Camp X-Ray would think force feeding was preferable to body bags filled with dead detainees. Understanding, however, isn't the same as agreement, and I think that if the detainees prefer to shuffle off their mortal coils rather than to remain in detention, that's their right, and that right shouldn't be infringed.

And no, I don't think that because the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist (even though this is self-evident). In fact I don't even think that everyone at Camp X-Ray is a terrorist, or even deserves necessarily to be (or still be) detained. I'm comfortable that some of them deserve it, and I only wish the military could be a bit more crisp about sorting all that out, without releasing folks who will do harm after being freed, and without returning inmates to home countries in circumstances in which they'd be in personal danger. Both types of detainees exist, along with the odd innocent, and not everything at Camp X-Ray is wrong - perhaps most things at Camp X-Ray aren't wrong.

But force-feeding prisoners who'd prefer to let it all end naturally seems clearly wrong.

I don't frequently post about politics, much to your collective relief. I don't usually have much to add to the bloviations and insights that whiz around the internet, and when I do I just can't really be bothered. I pay attention to politics, sure, but I don't have a deep grok of policy the way I do, say, the behavior of bread dough. And even if 99.99% of the people that happen past this website don't give a flying crap about how a certain recipe for bread behaves when refrigerated overnight prior to baking, I still feel that my sharing that information is more of a net good to the world than chiming in with a "me too!" when somebody posts a particularly insighftul nugget about energy policy.

But not today. I have been watching the flapdoodle over the NSA spying thingy with mounting alarm. It quickly became clear to me that Bush's people were doing their best to deflect attention from the full implications of their theories of law, and that investigators were becoming too wrapped up in the niceties of FISA law. When the Vice President can pull a jiu jitsu move on his questioners by merely stating, "we have an interest in knowing why an American citizen is talking to terrorists, said questioners have clearly not thought deeply enough about what they are doing. The salient questions are not really about FISA warrants, but about whether domestic spying, supra FISA, is happening, and under what legal authority.

Going all the way back to the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, by a military tribunal without trial, charge, or habeas corpus, I have worried about the fragility of our way of life. This is especially so when defenses of the Padilla dentention, or Hamdi, or Abu Ghraib, etc., amount to "don't you know there's a war on??"

I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book by Tom Reiss called The Orientalist. Ostensibly about a writer named Lev Nussimbaum who published bestsellers set in Persia in the middle part of the last century under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, the book is much more. Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the son of a Jewish oil magnate. He spent his teenaged years fleeing war and rebellion as World War I, the Russian Revolution, the flight of the White Russians, the counterflights of Azeris, Armenians, Gypsies, Turks, and Jews, pogroms, the collapse of Germany's "democracy," the descent of Berlin into chaos under the rule of the Freikorps, buffeted him and his family across Europe.

Along the way Reiss gives us a staggering array of capsule histories: of the last days of the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Baku as the first big oil boomtown in the world - there was (is?) so much petroleum there that the ground sometimes burst into flame spontaneously, not surprisingly making the city a major stronghold of Zoroastrianism (not to mention Islam and Judiasm); the assassinations that brought down the Czars; the spread of Bolshevism; vignettes about strange peoples like the warrior mountain Jews of Azerbaijan and an enclave of German speakers in the middle of southern Georgia; the fall of the Habsburgs; the rich multiculturalism of pre-20th century Persia, and more.

One recurring theme is that of fragility. The great empires of the 19th century fell quickly; once permanent, immutable and terrible, they turned practically overnight into scared collections of aristocrats stuffing priceless antiques into carpet bags as they fled revolution. The scrim between placid civilization and barbarism is tissue thin, it seems.

Which is why I worry that, in their zeal to prosecute the War on Terror, Bush & co. are doing something very harmful to the Republic we cherish. By now we've all been reminded that past Presidents suspended civil liberties for this reason or that. The difference is, those wars ended. This war, if it is a "war" in any recognizable sense, doesn't have an end-point. What... the last terrorist on earth waves the white flag and we're done? That is what makes any invocation by the President of "wartime necessity" as a defense for his actions very perilous. There will always be terrorism, and there will always be threats. So wartime necessity becomes mere "necessity."

All of this is to say: I have become increasingly convinced that the sum total of all the small gestures the Bush administration makes that signal a disregard for established procedure or finding wiggle room in Constitutional clauses come distressingly close to creeping authoritarianism. I am well aware that the notion that Congress runs the nation died the day John Adams signed the Sedition Act, but do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

And now for the obligatory concilation. I am well aware we are at war, and even if I don't agree with Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn's alarmist and alarming essays in last month's New Criterion (short version: Islam terror fall of Rome; Bread and circus, decadent soft complacent. Liberals concilation, immigrants angry hatred xenophobia, Islam Islam Islam, demographic time bomb, our children will wear the chador, gays and Hollywood lead the way.), I acknowledge and agree that we have to be serious about confronting threats to our way of life.

But again, do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Much of what I hear from ardent hawks reeks to me of desparation, the cries of people who have looked to long into the abyss and gone mad. Sites like Little Green Footballs (no link from me) have as their stock in trade a shreiking denunciation of people who won't accept that sometimes hard times call for stern measures or whatever. Torture, spy, bomb, and nuke, if we must, and if you disagree you clearly hate our freedom.

But that's all crap. When the talk turns from "shall we, as a society, condone the waterboarding of prisoners as a policy" to "when is it appropriate to waterboard prisoners," from "shall we condone the dentention of American citizens without warrant" to "when is it appropriate to detain..., " from "should the government read our mail," to "when should the government be allowed to read our mail," we edge closer and closer to abandoning for expediency's sake the very principles we hope to export to countries we libervade. Any one of these sets off my alarm bells, but as long as any one of these occurs alone, I'm not going to man the barricades. But a whole bunch of similar stories all unfolding at once isn't a curiosity, it's a trend.

Hate our freedom? I love it! And unlike the torture-hawks, I'm not so afraid of a few splodeydopes that I think we need to abandon ship in orde to save it. I'm all for winning the War on Terrorism, whatever that means. But I'm dead against winning at all costs.

What brought all this on? Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a long and rich discussion about what we don't know regarding what the President has done with the powers he says he now has, with long excerpts from the Gonzales hearing earlier this week, and it depressed me.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging on robots, food, beer, music, and fart jokes.

Having won the Palestinian elections in a landslide, Hamas immediately put forward a sensible and forward-looking plan to establish amicable relations with Israel and bring peace to that troubled region, and prosperity to its beleaguered citizens.

The first point of its comprehensive one-point plan is so simple and profound that it is truly astounding that no one in fifty years had ever hit upon it. Israel must change its flag. I mean, sure, those two blue bars on the Israeli flag are clearly indicative of the zionists desire to create a greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. We all saw it, didn't we? We just didn't want to say anything, embarrassed as we all were after that Holocaust thing that didn't really happen, but which would still have been a good idea if someone had only done it.

Yeah. Change the flag. All will be well.

I think we can anticipate an endless series of well thought out and reasonable policy proposals from Hamas. Now that they're the head of an almost state, they'll certainly have to be more polite. Maybe instead of killing Jews, they'll just suggest in polite diplomatic language that the situation will be greatly improved if most or all of the Jews would somehow cease living. Maybe the Iranians could help out with that.

[wik] Loyal reader #0003, NDR, notes in the comments that claims such as these have a long history. He recommends this Daniel Pipes article, and having read it, I do as well. However, before I read it, a funny thing happened. I am so conditioned as to assume that NDR is disagreeing with me. So before actually reading the article he linked, I did a panic check on my source. The only other places linking that article were places like NewsMax. Egads! Had I unintentionally linked to the Israeli equivalent of NewsMax? I broadened my search, and discovered that the Jerusalem Post had also mentioned the incident, here. As I read, I realized that the Pipes article was referring to the long history of Arab claims. Not some sort of fantastical notion of Israelis claiming that the Arabs claimed that the flag stood for Greater Israel, or whatever it was that ran through my noggin.

My only excuse is that it is unseasonably warm, and the air conditioning at work has only two settings: warm and hot. And it is only set to warm for three days in October. The rest of the year is mostly unbearable, especially when it is sunny outside. Today, according to the cheap thermometer I keep in my office, it is 86 degrees and no air movement whatsoever.

My brain is melting, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

UPI is reporting that Australian company Metalstorm will be demonstrating a new weapons system for the US Military in Singapore next month.

The author of the article is not exactly hip to the intricacies of military technology.

Next month a new high-explosive munition will be fired in Singapore and then tested again by the U.S. Army, heralding what may be a sea change in weaponry: a gun that can fire 240,000 rounds per minute.

That's compared to 60 rounds per minute in a standard military machine gun.

While 240,000 rounds a minute is in fact a lot, his figure for regular machine guns is off by an order of magnitude. Just think back to the last war movie you saw - were the machine guns firing one round a second?

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

Not likely. Nevertheless, this is good news. A metalstorm system could be very useful as an automated point defense system to protect our troops from incoming mortar fire. Hooked to a radar system, once an incoming mortar is detected, the metalstorm pod would quickly rotate toward the incoming and fire as many as a hundred rounds in a fraction of a second. Modern military radar systems are quite good, but the limitation has been in the speed of defensive firing systems. If the rate of fire is 600 rounds a minute (ballpark for a typical machine gun) you may - may - get off a few rounds in the seconds before the mortar hits. Odds are, you'll miss.

The beauty of the metalstorm system is that it does not depend on mechanical processes to fire and reload bullets one at a time. No matter how refined that process becomes (and in the case of electric gatling guns, that is very refined indeed) the mechanics of the process limit the maximum rate of fire. Metalstorm has no moving parts. Bullets are fired electronically, and to get around the problem of loading new bullets, they are simply stacked in the barrel. Each barrel could have ten bullets. Get a bundle of barrels 10x10, and you have a thousand rounds. And they can all be fired in very, very rapid succession. Whole pods of barrels could be replaced as a unit, for easy reloading.

With the electronic firing system, bullets can be fired in patterns, or at any desired rate of fire. Lighting up just the top layer of bullets would create a wall of lead - a hundred bullets fired in a fraction of second. And this - combined with an accurate fire-finder radar, would stand a very good chance of hitting an incoming mortar round.

Metalstorm has lots more ideas for its technology beyond mortar defense. They're currently testing a grenade launcher system that could be mounted under an assault rifle in the same way standard grenade launchers can be mounted under the M-16. They've proposed four barreled handguns with a 24 round capacity. These nifty items could fire four rounds simultaneously - before recoil kicks in, for greater accuracy. Air defense, gun pods for uavs, even for use with sub-lethal ammunition - the possibilities are nearly endless.

All they need to do is figure out a way to explode IEDs with them, and we won't have to spend a quarter billion dollars on the F/A/R/C/E 22.

With electronic firing

Attentive readers will be aware that I supported the war in Iraq from the beginning. I had some few quibbles about the Patriot act, but on the whole felt that the powers it granted our government were reasonable given the threats that face us.

But what is entirely unacceptable, if true, is the report in the Times that the administration secretly allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrent.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant ­ intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups ­ and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

I can understand that people in the NSA and elsewhere in the intelligence community want to have the ability to act quickly to prevent some very bad people from causing us harm. That is admirable. But in their zeal to prosecute the war on terror, we must be aware of the consequences of the actions that we take. We must be very cautious in granting powers to government, and especially to secret government intelligence agencies. There is already far too much secrecy in government. Vast powers can just as easily - even more easily - be used for ill as for good. To err on the side of caution is a good rule of thumb when it comes to liberty.

However, blatantly violating the Constitution is not a reasonable exercise of executive power no matter how "bad" the people we wiretapped are. No matter how clear the connection to known foriegn terrorists is, the law and our constitution must be obeyed. Liberty is more important than safety. Much more.

Via Rand Simberg, we find the Battle for Monrovia, or The Definitive Guide to Gangsta Hip-Hop Urban Combat. A true classic, and one that illustrates why many third world military forces are so... ineffective.

Long time commenter over at Murdoc's place, Nicholas, has spun up his very own blog. The Smell of Freedom is off to a shiny start, with several long, but yet tightly argued posts. As a fer-instance, check out his piece on the white phosphorus non-controversy, which is about the best explication of the issues involved as I've seen.

Via Blackfive, this incredible story about the Marines who take care of their fallen comrades and their familes here at home. Don't read it at work unless you have someplace to go be alone for a while.

For anyone not yet ready to pull into the garage, turn on the car, and breathe in the brown cloud of death (off the cuff paraphrase stolen from Richard Jeni) - to push you over the edge, we now have the collected writings of Osama bin Laden: From the November 17, 2005 UK Telegraph: "The world of bin Laden: no drinks, no gambling, no pictures of women". And if the title alone isn't enough to make you turn on the ignition, read just a bit farther, and you'll see:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

As a lapsed Catholic, I'm generally indifferent to comparative religion, and these "demands" on the part of the increasingly redolent bastard sheep of the bin Laden clan are hardly new. Their inclusion in a "collected words" volume is the only reason they're "news". However, the reminder of the breathtaking stupidity inherent in radical Islam's view of what the world should be, well, almost takes my breath away. And not due to excessive carbon monoxide, either.

On the bright side of the ledger, however, looking at living a life constrained by these and many of the other inane supposed strictures of Islam, I can understand why bin Laden spent so much time tempting, nay, begging for death at the hands of a U.S. Marine. The self-styled head fuckwit among his radical segment of Islamic fuckwits (who knows if it's a small segment? who cares?) must have welcomed death when it came, as I continue to presume it did. (Thus, the increasing redolence.)

The Telegraph article mentions some "horrendous errors" in the initial translations of the book, and alleges they're all fixed now.

So am I the only one who thinks the addition of the Kyoto treaty at the end of the mini-screed attributed to him above is the least bit odd? It fit in there about as well as a declaration of fatwa against the styrofoam-headed guy who plays the lead in the Jack in the Box commercials, fercripesake.

Ran across a couple cool quotes from Marines today. In Niall Ferguson's Colossus, this from Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni referring to the first Gulf War:

Desert Storm worked... because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically, with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.

And this from Robert Kaplan's amazing book Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground - Capt. Jason Smith, to a Iraqi resident of Fallujah during the first assault on that town:

Sir, we are truly sorry that we had to ask your family to leave the building. You can all go back in now. We will compensate your for the inconvenience. We are United States Marines, a different breed than you are used to. We do not take kindly to people shooting at us. If you have any information on the Ali Babas, please share it with us. If you know any of the Ali Babas personally, please tell them to attack us as quickly as possible so that we may kill them and start repairing sewers, electricity, and other services in your city.

Just so you know, Ali Babas was Marine slang for the jihadis who were the targets for the assault.

And speaking of war, Victor Davis Hanson has a new one out, A War Like No Other : How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. NRO is publishing chapter ten online, in four parts, available here: one, two, three, and four.

Hanson is one of the best military historians going. He has an encyclopedic command of military history as a whole, and his classical training informs not just his wonderful discussions of Hellenic warfare, but also of more modern conflicts. His study of Sherman in The Soul of Battle is on par with Lidell Hart's study, and along with Sherman's own autobiography, an absolute must read. (Autobiographies of Civil War generals are really amazingly good reads. Grant's is justly considered one of the best memoirs ever written.) Based on the excerpts, this most recent Hanson work looks to be fully as good as the others.

Today is the 230th anniversary of the birth of the United States Marine Corps. On November 10th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress authorized the raising of two battalions of Continental Marines. In the last 230 years, Marines have traveled throughout the world and proved time and again that in the Marines, you can have no better friend, and no worse enemy.

So, find a Marine. Don't give 'em a hug. Just shake his* hand and say. "Thank you!"

Read the Commandant of the Marines' birthday message here and General Lejeune's message from 1921 here. An excerpt:

In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our Corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term "Marine" has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the Corps. With it we also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our Corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish, Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as "Soldiers of the Sea" since the founding of the Corps.

You can also witness R. Lee Ermey's birthday multimedia extravaganza, read more about the heritage of the Marines, and visit the internet home of the Marine Corps.

* or her

[wik] Great article by Mac Owens over at NRO, thanks to the Llamabutchers.

[alsø wik] Semper Fidelis!

Jay Tea informs us that WMD have been found in quantity in Iraq. According to Richard Miniter in his book, Disinformation, the following have been uncovered over the last year or so:

• 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium
• 1,500 gallons of chemical weapons
• Roadside bomb loaded with sarin gas
• 1,000 radioactive materials--ideal for radioactive dirty bombs
• 17 chemical warheads--some containing cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin

And they also found the mobile bioweapons lab that Powell mentioned in his UN speech. Jay's got a more lengthy excerpt over at wizbang, go read it. It is interesting that this hasn't gotten more attention. I'd heard about the roadside bomb and the warheads, but not about the other stuff. Our wonderful media - you'd think that with a "if it bleeds it leads" mentality, there'd be a little more on this, and a lot more on France. Coverage of the rioting in France seemed painfully thin.

Murdoc Online has some discussion and links regarding a WaPo article that makes the astonishing claim that poor kids enlist because- hold onto your hats- it's the best opportunity for them. The article reports that 44% of enlistees- presumably across all service branches- are from rural areas and also reside in zip codes where incomes are below the national average.

The firm that did the zip code study, comparing residency data to economic data to enlistment data, was conducted by the National Priorities Project, a "nonpartisan research group" in Northampton, MA. For readers unfamiliar with the area, Northampton is a town that celebrates diversity by stifling or ridiculing any thought to the right of Karl Marx. Everything that happens there is charged with politics and opinion; nothing is "nonpartisan"; you're lucky to get a meal there without being exposed to another fuckwitted conspiracy theory, or walk down the street without having to dodge protestors of some sort. You could always go to the NPP site and see the groups it links to (Greenpeace, moveon.org) if you think I'm making it up. I find the concept of their project fairly clever, and that's enough; don't blow smoke up my ass by telling me it's non-partisan.

So between this clearly partisan organization and the crack, fair-minded journalists at the Post, we get the vibe that the military exists as a vehicle to kill off poor people in a perpetual class war. Yawn.

Now, everyone associated with the Ministry knows I was active duty Army from 1989-1993. When I enlisted I was living in rural Massachusetts, so far culturally and geographically from true opportunity I might as well have lived on the Moon. It's a place where when the Wal Mart finally came, it was the biggest employment opportunity in the area since the paper mills closed in the '60s. It's a place where a good job is $12 an hour on first shift, with mandatory witholding of 1% of pay for a company retirement plan that the company doesn't contribute to. I know what it means to buy food at the corner convenience store with food stamps. I know what "welfare cheese" looks, tastes, and feels like. And even though I'm 1,000 miles away from the places in the WaPo article, culturally I'm their neighbor.

I know firsthand why young poor people enlist. It's the only way out.

Thinking back, of the hundreds of soldiers I was privileged to meet, and the dozens I was lucky enough to serve directly with, I think 44% of them being from rural nowheres was low. The list of servicemembers from Manhattan or Chicago's gold coast is pretty short, and even in my era I remember thinking that if we plotted all our hometowns on a map, and connected the points, that they would sketch borders around properous parts of the country. Most of the men I served with were from towns I never heard of in states I never really believed existed: Dullard, NY. Shitheel, MI. Huyuk, WV. Nowhere, NM. Las Vegas, NV.

It's too bad that the Post chose this moment to report this astonishing fact, that poor people compose a large portion of the services. If more of their writers had ever served in uniform, instead of jerking off at Columbia's journalism school for a couple years, they might have found out long ago that for alot of people in this country, the military is a viable, acceptable, even -gasp- honorable way to get where they want to be in life.

I couldn't remember the exact composition of the OODA loop when I was writing my novel earlier. I found this nifty webpage that lays it all out, with a pretty picture.

Folks, this shit ain't right. This is, or usedta be, America.

[wik] Like John McCain said,

"I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America. We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation. We are not simply any other country. We stand for something more in the world – a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will we win. The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies. "

In the immortal words of the Original Rube (one of my many avatars), fuckin' A, dude.

This amuses me so much, I'm going to dance on the dessicated corpse of fair-use, and post it in its entirety:

Iraq Constitution Approval Another Setback for Bush
by Scott Ott

(2005-10-25) -- In yet another setback for the Bush administration, Iraqi electoral officials announced today that voters have approved the new Iraqi Constitution by a margin of 78-to-21 percent.

This new bit of bad news will likely drive President George Bush's popularity ratings into the single digits, according to an unnamed expert from a non-partisan, progressive political think-tank.

"The Bush foreign policy continues to be fatally-wounded by clarity of purpose, dogged persistence and a pathetic failure to capitulate in the face of opposition," the source said. "At a time when a real leader would be paralyzed with self-doubt over the meaningless deaths of 2,000 American troops, Bush continues to act as if freeing 25 million Iraqis from decades of oppression, torture and death is somehow worth the price paid by those who volunteered to fight."

"It's sad to watch our international credibility crumble like this," the anonymous policy expert said. "In 2008, I'm afraid you're going to see voters leaving the Republican party in droves, desperate to find a leader who provides a stronger sense of nuance and ambiguity."

When even jihadis are telling you to chill the hell out, it's a cinch you've gone too far. Citizen Smash reads the latest letter between international terror superstar Ayman al-Zawahiri and blowin-up-in-Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. His take: we're winning.

To wit, Zawahiri admonishes Zarqawi that the average Joe (or Jawarhalal, Jafar, or Jakub) really hates the "blowing people up and cutting off heads" thing he's doing so maybe stop that please, begs Zarqawi (currently on the lam in Iraq) to send cash to him, thinks that Iraq is turning out juuuuust like Vietnam (which implies that the terrorists, what... have the material backing of a gigantic and wealthy world power? Read the Democratic Underground? Oh-kay.) and, well, just go read Smash's thing.

It's a cautiously good sign that all the misery Iraqis are bearing might some day not be in vain. Given that an abatement in terrorist acts is probably a prerequisite for long-term stability in Iraq, and given that "you broke it/ you bought it" is currently the USA's lot, here is cause for hope.

(Of course, I'd'a been happier if things had never gotten to this juncture, but hey... you play what you're dealt when it's heads-up time.)