Call it Spook’s Inverse Law of Iraq War Reporting: if you don’t see a spate of stories on U.S. casualties at the end of the month, then there must be some good news the MSM is ignoring.
In this case, it’s the significantly lower numbers of U.S. casualties in the war: “a total of 59 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this month, compared to 79 in August–a 26% decline.”
The article analyzes data over the last six months to show that this is not a statistical blip. The surge is having its intended effect of destroying the enemy’s ability to wage war. Stating it another way: we’re winning in Iraq.
When candidates for political office tweak their campaigns ever so carefully to maximize applause and minimize criticism, you know they are pandering. And Americans despise that brand of “leadership.”
Peggy Noonan argues for more openness and risk-taking in campaigns, for candidates getting out among the general population — friend and foe alike — to sell their message.
If you, candidate A, have clear and serious reasons for desiring the wave of millions a year illegally over the border to stop, you should be able to talk to Hispanic groups and audiences about it. You go straight to them and appeal to their patriotism, fairness and common sense. Why? Because they’re patriotic and fair and have common sense. It is a compliment to show you know this.
Will some of them boo? Yes, of course. So what? Too bad. That’s the price you pay for being truthful at a tough time. And in America it’s always a tough time.
The staffs, gurus and handlers of all the candidates are always afraid their guy will get booed. But do they realize how tired we are of hearing the tepid applause that follows the predictable pander?
I know they’re all always eager to laud Ronald Reagan. But Reagan began his fall 1980 campaign in the South Bronx, and argued his case with people on the street. After he was elected, he pleaded for peace in letters to Leonid Brezhnev. Too bad he wasn’t tough enough. Oh wait.
I think the problem is not coming from normal Americans but from our leadership class, our academics and political leaders. The new fearfulness has resulted in new foreign policy: “Let’s not speak to Buffy.” Great. How’s that working for ya?
Americans are hungry for real leadership in these dangerous times. And they’re not getting it from Democrats who refuse to debate on Fox News, or Republicans who refuse to debate at black colleges.
President Bush’s critics argue vociferously for a reduced American presence in Iraq, a smaller footprint that does not arouse the animosity of the locals.
Frederick Kagan points to the remarkable success brought about by the surge as sure evidence that that strategy will not work.
One thing is clear from the Iraqi experience. It is not enough to persuade a Muslim population to reject al Qaeda’s ideology and practice. Someone must also be willing and able to protect that population against the terrorists they had been harboring, something that special forces and long-range missiles alone can’t do.
If the High Priest of global warming catastrophism is not willing to defend his proposition in public debate with qualified opponents — or better yet, put his money where his mouth is — then why should I take his claims seriously?
Oh, wait — his comrades did debate the subject once, and lost badly. Maybe he has cause to be cautious.
Susan Estrich — no right-wing bomb-thrower herself — points to John Edwards’ famous $400 haircut as symptomatic of the candidate’s deeper problem:
In high school, when you call someone a “pretty boy,” it’s not a compliment. Unfortunately for Edwards, the same is true in politics. The reason his haircut has stuck, where Bill Clinton’s fancy one didn’t, is because it captures the flip side of Edwards’ boyish good looks. The flip side is the pretty boy, which is not what a country focused on terrorism and looking for toughness wants in a candidate.
Going into the Monday night game, I was leading my opponent by nine points, and I felt good. But both of us had Dallas players in the mix, and no Chicago players. My guy (Jason Witten) had a pretty decent outing– but my opponent’s guys (Marion Barber and the Cowboy Defense/ST) had a monster performance. I got blown out.
But it was not as bad as another pair of players in my league: 157 – 58. You couldn’t cherry-pick two teams to create that lopsided a score. Ugh!
Cal Thomas documents numerous cases of how “freedom of speech” is practiced on university campuses when a conservative speaker is giving the speech. Curiously, the same standard is not applied to liberal speakers, or even an avowed enemy of our way of life, like Ahmadinejad.
Thomas calls for more even-handed treatment:
Before we allow more of our enemies into America and give them a freedom unknown in their own countries, we should at least demand reciprocity. Their president gets to speak in America? Our president gets to speak in Iran.
Their president has access to our media? Our president should have access to their media. And while we’re at it, how about for every liberal who gets to speak on campus, the school must also invite a conservative.
I’m not holding my breath. Although I sense that some of the students are beginning to get fed up with the hypocrisy.
David Brooks explains why, despite all their bluster and noise, the netroot extremists are not having the degree of influence on the Democratic Party — Hillary Clinton especially — that some are giving them credit for.
The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses.
Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. This time they’re not going to self-destructively deviate from that.
Both liberals and Republicans have an interest in exaggerating the netroots’ influence, but in reality that influence is surprisingly marginal, even among candidates for whom you’d think it would be strong.
The article also mentions one web site that is a treasure trove of such information, specifically relating to WWII aircraft lost in the Pacific. Great stuff.
DNA testing is being conducted on residents of a small village in China to determine if the residents — many of whom have uncharacteristically European features — could be descendants of a group of Roman soldiers who disappeared from history about fifty years before Christ.
The town’s link with Rome was first suggested by a professor of Chinese history at Oxford in the 1950s. Homer Dubs pulled together stories from the official histories, which said that Liqian was founded by soldiers captured in a war between the Chinese and the Huns in 36BC, and the legend of the missing army of Marcus Crassus, a Roman general.
In 53BC Crassus was defeated disastrously and beheaded by the Parthians, a tribe occupying what is now Iran, putting an end to Rome’s eastward expansion.
But stories persisted that 145 Romans were taken captive and wandered the region for years. Prof Dubs theorised that they made their way as a mercenary troop eastwards, which was how a troop “with a fish-scale formation” came to be captured by the Chinese 17 years later.
Certainty is hard to establish when dealing with such thin threads of evidence stretched over so many centuries. One scholarly study of this subject cautions that the connection may be unlikely (sadly, I could not identify the author to give him/her credit).
Still, this kind of historical mystery is fascinating.
UPDATE (12/31/07): Here are some more details about the research that is being conducted in China to unravel this historical mystery.
Historian Arthur Herman notes the parallels between Columbia University’s invitation to Iranian thug-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a resolution of neutrality passed by Oxford University’s Debating Union as war clouds loomed over Europe in 1933. Winston Churchill called the resolution “abject, squalid, shameless.”
Adolf Hitler got the clear message of the 1933 Oxford Union debate: We will not oppose you. Regardless of Bollinger’s “tough questions” yesterday, Ahmadinejad the Iranian president is bound to use his speech to a hall of “open-minded” Americans as a major public-relations victory – and to see it as a clear sign that his enemy is divided at its heart.
As Churchill said, “There is no place for compromise in war. That invaluable process only means that soldiers are shot because their leaders in council and camp are unable to resolve.”
He added, “In war the clouds never blow over; they gather unceasingly and fall in thunderbolts.” It was the falling thunderbolts of Nazi bombs that finally convinced the appeasers of the ’30s that they had been wrong. New York City has already gone through its Blitz. What more will it take before Bollinger and his cohorts admit their squalid mistake?
No, not here in America, but in Eastern Europe. Albania and Bulgaria will be instituting a flat tax next year, joining Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Georgia, and Macedonia, who have already done so. The Czech Republic and Montenegro plan to join the club in the next few years.
The results of the flat tax have been astounding. A former economic backwater like Slovakia has seen skyrocketing job growth, a 9% GDP rate last year, the unearthing of its underground economy, and billions in investment from the likes of Hyundai and Sony.
This simple, straightforward approach to financing government provides a stark contrast to the socialist economies of Western Europe — and, increasingly, the U. S.
Global legal expert David Storobin considers the flat tax the mark of a New Europe. “Tax reforms in Eastern Europe are having a tremendous effect on Western European economies, as companies are bound to move to neighboring states to avoid paying the near-confiscatory taxation (especially when you combine the income tax with corporate, capital gains and dividend taxes) levied in the ‘Old Europe’ to support the Welfare State system.”
I doubt that I will ever see it implemented in America in my lifetime, but it’s reassuring to know that it’s not just theory.
An editorial in the Las Vegas Review Journal draws attention to two recent incidents that highlight the political chicanery — rather than reasoned science — that is driving the current global warming debate, and the financial impact of this hysteria on American business.
Make no mistake, elected officials will continue to try to use global warming fears to increase their own power. The public must insist that this debate take place in venues of their choosing, not in the back rooms of heavy-handed government bureaucracies.
Roger Simon — Hollywood screenwriter, author, Pajamas Media CEO, and former leftist — explains the role that the O. J. trial had on changing his political viewpoint. He struggled to understand how the largely black jury could have acquitted the defendant in the face of such overwhelming evidence.
Of course, the obvious answer, the cliché, was that we had not done enough, not enough aid, not enough affirmative action. But sitting there that day, and in the weeks to come, I started to consider that the reverse was true. Well, not quite the reverse. We had not done too much, but we had done well enough. At the point of history America had reached, probably had already reached some years before, affirmative action had become an albatross around the neck of those who received it. Aid given to people – no matter who they are – when it is not earned carries with it a level of insult and denigration. It comes from on high to down low and carries with it an implicit message of lowness.
I began to think of Johnnie Cochran as condescending to the African-American community, as their enabler, treating them like children who would believe something as imbecilic as “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran was in a way the racist in how he dealt with his own people. He was certainly a racist in the way he dealt with white people.
I didn’t say that out loud in those days, at least not very often, but I began to think it. It was the first chink in my very traditional liberal armor, the first time I thought outside a conventional wisdom that I had never questioned in my life. The groundwork was prepared for a larger questioning after 9/11. The OJ Trial began it all.
You can read a more detailed profile of Simon and his conversion here.
Ed Driscoll has written an excellent historical narrative of how weblogs (blogs) arose as a counterweight to the stranglehold that traditional (and mostly liberal) media have long held on news reporting. He notes the irony of how the old media has responded to the new media:
Soon, there was a blog for every interest, bias, and worldview. But this development put the old media in something of a bind. On the one hand, the left had been preaching endlessly about the need for “diversity.” Well, here it was; but just as they had assaulted Matt Drudge a few years earlier, the mainstream media now attacked these upstart bloggers with a vengeance. As journalists became increasingly scared of the new upstarts, epithets about “navel gazers” and “amateur hour” began to pour out of newspaper op-ed columns. And though reporters claimed to be for the little guy, once that little guy started to talk back to them, they became more defensively elitist and guild-oriented than ever.
The internet has definitely leveled the playing field. It remains to be seen how this development will affect the direction of our national culture.
Most everyone older than fifty remembers the U-2 spy plane and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird. But few (including me) are aware of another plane that bridged the gap between these two Cold War airplanes: The A-12 “Oxcart.”
Like the U-2, the A-12 was a tool of the CIA, used to conduct high-altitude reconnaissance flights over hostile territory. The plane could reach altitudes in excess of 90,000 feet, and speeds greater than Mach 3. Each of the two turbojet engines produced more horsepower than all four of the turbines on the Queen Mary ocean liner. (Of course, it took a lot fuel to churn out that kind of power — 11,000 pounds per hour).
The A-12 flew only a few missions, first over Cuba, then in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, before being replaced by the Air Force SR-71. The SR-71 was based on the A-12, so it looks very similar, but there were significant design and performance differences.
The SR-71 was retired in 1991. (You can actually see and touch a retired SR-71 on display at the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson.) Much of the reconnaissance data collected by these planes can now be gathered much cheaper and faster by satellites. Still, the quiet manner in which the SR-71 was retired leads one to wonder if the government has replaced these old warbirds with something even more exotic.
As we noted in an earlier post, our health care crisis is really an insurance crisis. Max Borders identifies three specific problems with the way insurance is regulated in this country — and outlines the three simple changes that would significantly improve both the coverage and cost of health care. So why aren’t we moving to address these problems?
I believe the majority party in Congress actually knows about these pathologies. In fact, I believe they are making concerted efforts at the state and federal levels to exacerbate these problems in the name of consumer protection and insuring children. Whether through expanding children’s Medicaid into the middle class (which drives up premiums), increasing the number of state mandates (which drives up premiums), or limiting competition through keeping the tax code intact (which drives up premiums), the party in power is using regulation to crank down the government vise in anticipation of a final outcry from Americans who are tired of paying these rates and who have no idea why it’s happening. And with that outcry, they will then be able to sell America a single-payer system like Castro’s.
John Robb analyzes the growing likelihood of large-scale urban systems disruption as the weapon of choice in future wars.
But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.
Robb points to the current plight of Baghdad, where a handful of insurgents have successfully stymied any hope of stability by waging an ongoing campaign of blowing up power lines, water mains, and pipelines.
Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.
He fears that rogue elements will eventually gain the ability to use weapons of mass destruction — most likely biological rather than nuclear — to really paralyze cities and nations.
His solution? Decentralization.
In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.
We won’t realize how utterly dependent we are on this highly complex — and fragile — web of interconnected systems, until it gets taken down. Then we’ll be in a world of hurt.
Mark Davis didn’t like Hillary’s first health care plan, and he doesn’t like her latest one either. It’s a simple issue of economic and personal freedom vs. government control.
True, some people cannot afford health insurance. But the seemingly noble instinct of fixing its cost and making it mandatory is a recipe for disaster. It is the open marketplace that has given us the best doctors, hospitals and technology in world history. Make those things a government-managed resource, and they will become a commodity just like every other line item in a government budget – vulnerable to whim and bureaucratic oversight, leading to rationing, delays and reductions in quality and availability of service.
What we need is not so much health care reform as insurance reform. We are miles detached from the real costs of care in a system where the $12 Tylenol still gets routinely paid.
Look at the magnificent marketplace in Lasik vision surgery, in which people pay for what they need, usually from their own pockets. It is a wonderful world of multiple providers and price wars. Now there’s a lesson from the last decade worth absorbing.
Hillary wants to convince us that the same government that routinely mismanages billions and abuses its clients in welfare programs, hurricane relief, defense contracts, and immigration reform can somehow do an efficient and cost-effective job of providing health care for all 300 million of us. Talk about a willing suspension of disbelief.
In all the news in the last three weeks concerning the search for missing aviator Steve Fossett, there have been several references to searchers finding other previously unknown plane wreck sites. That got me to wondering about the identity of these planes and their occupants. Were these planes lost and never found despite searches years ago? And could these old crash sites yield answers regarding the fates of their occupants?
AP writer Scott Sonner wonders, too, and has written about these other missing airplanes, now found. Although it will take some time for searchers to go back and investigate these sites, authorities do expect to resolve some old mysteries about some planes and pilots that flew off into the wilderness and never returned.
“When all is said and done, they’ll send ground crews in to thoroughly investigate what is left,” Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan said of the old crashes.
Eventually, some of the old crashes should be linked to long-missing aviators, Ryan said. Even small pieces of wreckage can contain a serial number that can be tracked back to the manufacturer and the owner of the plane.
Nevada’s forbidding backcountry is a graveyard for small airplanes and their pilots. Ryan figures more than 100 planes have disappeared in the past 50 years in the state’s mountain ranges, which are carved with steep ravines and covered with sagebrush and pinon pine trees.
Read the story about one of the missing pilots from long ago here.
UPDATE: Some guys make a very serious hobby out of looking for old crash sites, especially Air Force planes.
There’s a surprising number of wrecks still out there. Nearly 22,000 U.S. Army Air Forces planes crashed in the United States during training for World War II alone; B-24 Liberators, B-17 Flying Fortresses, P-38 Lightnings—all the famous warbirds from that era—along with training aircraft and even some fighter jets, left their remains in remote parts of the Southwest, where most pilot training took place. . . .
Fuller and his friends have been able to return dog tags and flight wings to the families of lost airmen. Perhaps more importantly, they’ve been able to fill in some emotional blanks for relatives.
UPDATE (12/23/07): Craig Fuller at Aviation Archaeological Investigation and Research (AAIR) has compiled a detailed list of all the planes that are believed to have been lost in this area, with a brief description of the known facts in each case. Interesting reading.
This is more like it: my team eeked out a win. Not dominating, but good enough for a W.
As in Week 1 the bulk of the scoring came from only four parties: Peyton Manning, Edgerrin James, Jason Elam, and the Pittsburg DST — with a decent outing from Deion Branch. Actually, the biggest element working in my favor was that my opponent was heavily dependent on a good Philadelphia game Monday night, which didn’t happen (thank you, McNabb & Westbrook!).
The lineup changes I made during the week helped a little, but not enough to take my team up to the next level. And judging from the preview of the next game, I’m gonna need to kick it up a notch to have any hope of success in Week 3.
After Peyton Manning’s great Thursday night performance last week, Week 1 looked like it was going to be a cakewalk. Unfortunately, a couple of key players bombed on Sunday, and the Monday night games gave me a tepid point total. So my Week 1 opponent ended up squeaking by me. And wouldn’t you know it — my opponent couldn’t make the draft party, so he was fielding a team that his “friends” threw together for him. I lost to a bunch of nobodies.
For Week 2, I’ve made a trade to beef up my WR spot, and switched a couple of my actives with reserves who had a good first week. Hopefully the next round will be more productive.
The Hudson Institute has released an analysis of peer-reviewed literature, which reveals that hundreds of scientists have published material refuting at least some element of the current global warming hysteria.
A summary of their findings:
A natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age.
Our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun’s irradiance.
Sea levels are failing to rise importantly.
Our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings.
Human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat.
Corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.
Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery notes,
This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850.
The mainstream media, of course, conveniently ignores this growing body of evidence, preferring to wax apoplectic over the latest heat wave in Nevada.
I somehow missed any news reports on this, but apparently Israeli Defense Forces staged a commando raid and air attack last week on a remote facility in Syria, near the Iraqi border. Judging from the map that accompanies this story, the raid was quite a feat, requiring a long distance excursion through the heart of Syria’s air defenses. The raid was successful.
The speculation is that the target was a major weapons cache intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Others wonder if the target was somehow involved in Syria’s nuclear weapons program.
Whatever the details, it is good to know that after Israel’s less-than-impressive performance in the Lebanon war last year, it still has the chutzpah to pull off an attack like this.
Consider two unrelated items getting attention lately:
A new book, Lone Survivor, written by Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL who was the sole survivor of a deadly ambush in Afganistan in 2003. He and his three buddies were involved in a running gun battle with 200 Taliban for over two hours, until the others were dead and Luttrell gravely wounded. You can read a gripping account of his ordeal in an interview with Glenn Beck. The book is a bestseller.
An elementary school in Colorado Springs has banned tag on the playground, “after some children complained they were harassed or chased against their will.”
The juxtaposition of these two items provides a sad commentary on our times. A culture that refuses to let its children play tag for fear of hurt feelings, will eventually end up with no warriors who can defend its existence.
NewsBusters is a web site devoted to “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” They have recently begun producing a series of comedy videos based on current news items. If the first episode is any indication, this will be a can’t-miss item in your weekly browsing cycle.
It looks like serving in congress could be hazardous to your health. Following the death of Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-Ohio) in a fall in his home last week, Josephine Hearn has compiled a brief history of deaths of senators and congressmen. Suicides, crashes, medical conditions, explosions, even a hunting accident — members of Congress are definitely not immortal.
Although some would prefer that we just forget it happened, and Move On to other matters, there are numerous online memorials to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. We should take time on this sixth anniversary to remind ourselves of the meaning of that awful day.
A compendium of news accounts and images of the attacks can be found here.
