So. I read on Dave Winer's site that he thinks we should apologize, put the tanks in reverse, and bring all the troops home now.

I would like to invite Dave Winer, and anyone who thinks like him, to read the following three articles:

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The new viral super-pneumonia from China, SARS, is responsible for the panic of millions of Americans. But even in China, where the "epidemic" began, it seems only a minor threat. In Hong Kong, the virus killed 10 out of 316 who were hospitalized with it -- a death rate of about 3% -- and that doesn't count people who caught the bug but weren't sick enough to seek medical care. In the United States, forty people have been hospitalized with SARS, and none have died. Other forms of pneumonia kill about 40,000 Americans annually, so SARS has a ways to go before hysteria is justified. More debunking here courtesy of science writer Michael Fumento. The best news: contrary to many news reports, there is a drug that has proven fairly effective at fighting it.

Remember the Campain for Democracy in Iraq? Well, thanks to the hard work and dedication of MT Politics, we have finally finished the Official List of Web Sites in Support of Democracy in Iraq!

If you want to join the campaign, or just see the list of sites that are part of it, there's no time like the present. You'll find everything you need on that page.

Thanks again to MT Politics for making this possible.

Those of you who enjoyed the Interview with Chris Muir I did a few weeks ago may be interested in this: Dodd over at Ipse Dixit has done a further interview with Chris Muir that takes up where my interview left off. Dodd finds out a little more about what Chris does for a living, shows off some art work by Muir that you've likely never seen before, and of course publishes some more of Muir's Day By Day cartoons. Enjoy!

In listening to much of the recent war coverage, you'd think that we're experiencing little but a series of unmitigated disasters, shocking betrayals by the administration, horrifying surprises, and stunning setbacks in the slow-grinding quagmire that is the war in Iraq. Not all reporting has been like that, but it's often rather disorienting: I'll go from listening to NPR, wondering how we'll ever recover from this horrible mess we've gotten into, then head over to The Command Post and I'll see information from all sides and perspectives, from around the world, and I'll realize: hey, things aren't that bad at all. In fact, they're pretty good, if you get past the bug-eyed coverage from so much of the press.

I think Rand Simberg has the most clear-eyed perspective on the war coverage I've seen so far. And the funniest.

Andrea has an interesting question: Is it just me, or did women in the forties have some sort of confidence and glamour that modern women (at least, the ones who pose scantily clad) lack?

I think that the answer is yes, but it's not as different as it might seem at first.

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Iain Murray has a fine analysis on the highly useful expertise brought to the allied coalition by the British. He suggests why, despite their smaller footprint and firepower tonnage, their presence has already saved lives, and is likely to save many more in the coming weeks.

(Via Moira.)

USS Clueless has published an analysis of the Iraq war sent in by a retired military officer. Read it to understand why it's far too early to declare (as some have) that we're losing. If this analysis is right, our forces are about to begin the Whoop Ass phase in earnest.

I heard this on my drive home Friday. Courtesy of Deminsky & Doyle at 97.1 Detroit's FM Talk.

How do you know that the world has gone mad?

1. World's Best Rapper is WHITE
2. World's Best Golfer is BLACK
3. One of the Tallest Players in the NBA is CHINESE
4. France accuses the United States of being ARROGANT
5. Germany DOESN'T want to go to WAR

I thought it was funny - thought you might too!

Assyrian Ken Joseph Jr., a committed peace activist, recently visited Iraq as part of his effort to prevent the war with Iraq. He came away convinced that he was completely wrong, by the very people of Iraq who he visited to save from the impending war.

Joseph claims to have brought back tapes of ordinary Iraqis who wish for war to end the brutal tyranny of the Baathist regime. These tapes will be shown by Barbara Walters next week, according to Joseph's web site.

Joseph's accounting of his journey to, and escape from, Iraq, is gripping. Joseph also claims that his tapes, along with an extended interview conducted by Barbara Walters, will appear next week on ABC.

(First link via Viking Pundit.)

by Stephen Vincent Benet, first published in 1935

For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time…

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I need (a) volunteer(s) to help out with a small item for the Iraqi Democracy project. We have about 150 weblogs we need to list in a database. MT Politics has worked up a terrific data base for us to list all the sites who have signed up for the "Support Democracy in Iraq" project. But now we need to get the data entered. It's only about 150 web sites but I keep not finding the time to do it with the other items I've committed to.

Does anyone have an hour or two to spare to help us finish getting this project up and running properly?

You don't hear much about what the Australian forces in the coalition against Iraq are up to. But over at Samizdata, they have an interesting report you probably won't read elswhere about how Australian special forces operate behind enemy lines.

Always did like them Ozzies.

* Upate * - Might also want to read this one too, while you're at it.

Apparently, Dean's World is doing pretty good in the market:



I will offer to sell shares at half-off to anyone who wants them.

What great cause has ever been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"? --Margaret Thatcher

The place that had been the embodiment of liberal expectation after World War II had moved towards totalitarianism: the inversion of truth, the Big, Big Lie--this was now the language of the General Assembly. --Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former Ambassador to the United Nations, on the passage of the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, 1975.

(Via Pejman.)

Scientists yesterday released data suggesting that a certain tree fungus is, in fact, one single gigantic organism that's between 2000 and 8500 years old. It's raising serious questions about the definition of the word "organism," and even more serious questions about forestry management practices. Fascinating stuff.

Trevor Van Meter's FlyGuy is a unique and oddly addicting... what do you call it? Presentation? Toy? Game? Well anyway, it's unique and oddly addicting, and something you could only do with a computer. (Thanks Jerry.)

You'll need the latest Flash Player, by the way.

Your photo of the day:


Taken from the Army Times story on field medic Joseph P. Dwyer at the time of an intense gun battle on the banks of the Euphrates:

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Dissident Frogman fisks the human shields coming home with their tails between their legs. I'm sorry, but they deserve every word of it and more. The only question: will they have the courage to speak out even more from now on about their own mistakes? Let's hope so. You haven't done anything really noble until you've admitted your mistakes and tried to help others learn from them.

The world is never the simple place we would like to think it is.

David Hardy says that the film that just won an Oscar® for Best Documentary isn't a documentary. In fact, Hardy goes so far as to call it "deliberately, seriously, and consistently deceptive." And provides evidence.

SFGate, that well-known bastion of right-wing apologism and bloodthirsty, pro-Bush pro-war slant, has published an excellent piece on the Iraqi resistance. It's a genuine must-read item. The basic thrust: countless Iraqis wish to join the resistance, but are afraid they'll be let down by the Americans as they were in 1991. And, Saddam's regime has done some rather frightening things to keep them under control.

In the cloud of war news, I'd like to pause for a moment to note the passing of one of the most influential men in America over the last half of the 20th Century. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is dead.

It is difficult to describe the influence and importance of this man to shaping American public policy over the last few decades. Michael Barone said he was "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." That's pretty hard to argue with.

There were those who didn't like him, of course. That's politics. But he was, truly, a giant.

* Update * Kaus has a eulogy for Moynihan that's worth reading.

What some parents won't do in the name of patriotism. You have to see this:

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IMAO has a funny skit on how we should respond if Iraq uses WMD's. We will send in a Happy Bomb!

Here is a snippet:

..."If Iraq uses WMD's against U.S. troops, will you consider striking back with nuclear weapons?"

"No, absolutely not. Karl Rove carefully explained to me that the diplomatic costs are too high." He looked around. "Where is he?"

"We have some new technology related to that," Rice told the press, "This is a new weapon to help us defeat our enemies but isn't as mean and scary as a nuclear weapon. It's a 10 megaton 'Happy Bomb'." Rice then pulled back a sheet revealing a large bomb with a smiley face displayed prominently on the front. "Look it's smiling!" Rice exclaimed, "Isn't it happy?"

"Wow! It is smiling!" Bush said excitedly, "Let's use it now!"

"Isn't it that actually a nuclear bomb with just a smile painted on it?" asked one reporter skeptically.

"Yeah, that's a good question," Bush said to Rice, getting suspicious, "Did you just paint a smile on a nuclear bomb?"

"No, of course not," Rice replied innocently. "There are also stencils of bunnies on the side." ...

The whole thing is really funny. You should definitely give it a read!

I just (3:30 pm) got a note from Jesus Gil. He can't post to his own weblog at the moment, but he has some impressions from what he's seeing on Al Jazeera out of Spain. Pretty gruesome stuff:

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Heh. Heh. Heh.

National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice has an editorial in this morning's Wall Street Journal. In it, she notes that the coalition against Saddam Hussein now consists of 50 nations. She notes that all 50 "have the will to face the gravest threat of our time--the nexus between outlaw regimes, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism."

In one of the more moving parts of the piece, she mentions that "...some have only recently emerged from tyrannies imposed in no small part because of that failure. Months ago, the prime minister of Estonia told President Bush that he did not need an explanation of the need to confront Iraq. Because the great democracies failed to act in 1930s, his people lived in slavery for 50 years."

She also notes for special praise the assistance being given by Polish, Danish, Czech, and Slovak forces, as well as the work being done by the Australians.

Dean's World appears to have become the unofficial home of the Trogdor the Burninator Fan Club. That thread is now the second-most posted to thread in the history of Dean's World. It has gotten at least one message a day, more often 2-3, ever since created, even though it rolled off the front page two weeks ago.

"Trogdor" is now also the #1 search term by which people find Dean's World. No kidding. "Trogdor the Burninator" is #3.

Everyone knows that this is because Trogdor is the ultimate at burninating!

Andrew Cory, better known to some as the Punning Pundit, conducted an interview today with an Iraqi expatriate named Yousip Enuiya, who once served in Saddam's military. As the interview was taking place, word flashed on CNN that there was a civil uprising against the Baathists in Basra, which is Yousip Enuiya's home town. Cory's report is as follows:

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Thom Hartmann has a fairly smart piece over at the progressive site Common Dreams about what he thinks liberals must do to beat Bush in 2004: join the Democratic Party in droves, take over its leadership, and remake it in the far left's image. By "fairly smart" I mean that it's nice to see progressives finally acknowledging that they shot themselves in the foot in 2000 by voting for Nader instead of Gore, and it's even more encouraging to see them taking notice of the fact that Republicans are currently much, much better at the political game than anyone on the left. Progressives are often so far out in left field that any indication that they can actually percieve reality is like a breath of fresh air.

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The Iranian New Year began yesterday. It is now 1382 according to their calendar. In celebration, the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran released a statement in support of making 1382 the year ending clerical rule and bringing democracy to Iran. Many (not all, but many) Iranians believe the war on Saddam will help these aims.

* Correction * -- Due to my carelessness, I said the Iranian new year was yestrday, when I should have said it was Friday the 21st. Sorry about that.

If you haven't read Jerry's thread on The Philosopher of Islamic Terror yet, you should. The article he links is long but very good. The discussion we're having about it, in the comments, is also very good and worth going out of your way to read. It illustrates pretty well why many of us think this war is so necessary for the long-term security of Western civilization and, really, the world. It's nothing that can fit on a postcard, but it matters. Give the discussion a read, and feel free to join in.

It's good to see comment traffic going back up to its previous high quality levels, too. It was getting slow there for a while. :-)

There's much noise making the rounds about how the Iraqis are using Global Position Satellite jamming systems to mess up coalition forces' targeting systems. A lot of people are mad at the Russians about it. But as Donald Sensing reports, the GPS jamming stories are mostly bunk. It appears that the Russians are making themselves rich at Iraqi expense, not ours. Read the materials Reverend Sensing links to, and you'll see why.

Political feminism's ongoing implosion is nowhere better demonstrated than in this LA Times story about Asparagirl. Go read it. Yes, it requires registration, but it's free, and the LA Times is one of the better online papers, so it's worth it.

Feminists of the world take note: young women think you are a joke. You're dying because you no longer honestly represent what most young women believe in or care about. And by "young" I actually mean "40 and under." So who is it you think you represent? From what it looks like, it appears to be "Baby Boomer Women Who Only Vote For Democrats." Which isn't what feminism was supposed to be about, is it?

Dean's World denizens will have noticed by now that while Dean does most of the posting, he's not the only one. Our featured authors have until now included my firebrand wife Rosemary, history maven Paul Fallon, and the estimable Gary Utter (along with occasional submissions from other authors). Now joining our crack editorial team is one Jerry Kindall (a.k.a. "Jerry"), who will be posting articles that aren't right for his own entertaining but nonpolitical weblog.

Jerry is one of those people who I truly despise: a really really smart guy who knows more than I do about a lot of stuff, reads faster, and writes really well. Instead of having him killed for rivaling my talents, I've made him a contributor. (For now. Mwahahahahahaha....)

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent article on the writings of Sayyid Qutb ("KUH-tahb"), whose book Milestones is is cited as a manifesto of Islamist philosophy. But the relatively shallow Milestones is merely the distillation of ideas Qutb developed in a 15-volume commentary on Islam titled In the Shade of the Qur'an, which he wrote while in prison in Egypt. (He was executed in 1966.)

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Apparently, the left-leaning black community, as well as much of academia, believes that it is funny to call Condoleeza Rice a bitch-whore-slut ("skeeza").

Not that this is anything new. Any uppity black person who refuses to toe the lefty line is frequently subject to these kinds of high-tech lynchings. They can be done any time, anywhere, by just about anyone--and no one has the least bit of fear of being called to task for it. Indeed, other than a few conservatives, very few people ever bother to say anything at all.

This is another Trent Lott moment if you ask me. The Left has blown many such moments before. Will they blow this one too?

I guess we'll see.

(Via Instapundit.)

Hey Kim, it’s George. How ya’ll doing?

Listen, you watching TV? Oh wait, what am I thinking? Of course you are, you’re the only one in the whole damn country with a set. Listen do me a favor, turn off the porn for a second and switch over to Fox or CNN…Pretty cool, huh? Watch this… (KA-BOOM!) Bullseye! Cool, eh?

What’s that?...

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I posted a ton of stuff on the war this weekend. I'll be throttling back on that. However, I will be posting occasionally to:


The Command Post.

It's a collective blog dedicated to breaking news on the war. It's updated at a furious pace, with a couple of dozen contributors. If you want up-to-the-minute war coverage, I suspect you won't find a better place online.

The Times Online has reprinted the speech of a British colonel to his men on the eve of battle. I must say, it's an impressive bit of oratory:

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There's a good piece by Howard Kurtz in yesterday's Washington Post about the influence of weblogging.

There are those who say this new medium is meaningless and has no significant influence. They are wrong.

By the way, I'm quite relieved to see this morning that Salam Pax is back online. Since he hadn't posted since Friday, right at the beginning of the Chockenaw campaign, I was getting really worried about him.

The Jerusalem Post reports that U.S. forces have captured an Iraqi chemical weapons factory. Hmm.

* Update * Instapundit is reporting that this story may not be true. Not clear yet. Stay tuned.

* Another Update * Sky News and Fox News both quote the Pentagon as saying it's true.

Jesus Gil has extensive information on the Americans captured by Iraqis, including a pretty detailed description of who they appear to be and their conversation with Arab reporters.

Well, after all the heavy stuff, this should amuse you: Business 2.0's annual '101 Dumbest Moments in Business'. I'm hoping to fly one day on Hooters Air, myself.

And boy, am I glad I never worked for McCall's...

Via The World's Greatest blog on economics.

So. Justin Raimondo is upset with the behavior of the San Francisco protestors for acting like violent thugs. Rand Simberg says that if you lie down with dogs, you should expect to get fleas. Well, maybe that's a little harsh. Then again, what do you think Bernadine Dohrn would say?

* Update * - Athena has a picture of cops engulfed in flames from a Molotov cocktail thrown by peace protestors. "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, off the pigs'n blow up buildings, riot now..."

I want you people who think you're protesting for "peace" to have the courage to read this piece written by Daniel Pepper for the Sunday Telegraph.

You people have no idea how much I'm restraining myself. But I will say this: I hope you never again claim to be a liberal. That you never again claim to be a humanist or a humitarian. And I hope you never, ever, ever try to claim again that it is "peace" that you advocate.

I'll stop now before I start swearing.

Gotta love it:

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A senior Kurdish official says U.S. Troops are on their way to Kurdistan to open up a second front.

This should alleviate the need for any Turkish troops, we should hope.

Eric Alterman has a refreshingly honest piece about Jewish loyalties in his MSNBC column. Although he gets one fact wrong that too many anti-Christian paranoids get wrong all the time: Bush is not a fundamentalist, he's a Methodist.

Anyway, I consider Jewish loyalty a non-issue for the moment, but it's nice to see someone talking about this without getting his nose out of joint. (Courtesy of Ara.)

As reported in The Guardian:

Afraid that the US and Britain will abandon them, the people of Safwan did not touch the portraits and murals of Saddam Hussein hanging everywhere. It was left to the marines to tear them down. It did not mean there was not heartfelt gladness at the marines' arrival. Ajami Saadoun Khlis, whose son and brother were executed under the Saddam regime, sobbed like a child on the shoulder of the Guardian's Egyptian translator. He mopped the tears but they kept coming.

"You just arrived," he said. "You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave."

"For a long time we've been saying: 'Let them come'," his wife, Zahara, said. "Last night we were afraid, but we said: 'Never mind, as long as they get rid of him, as long as they overthrow him, no problem'." Their 29-year-old son was executed in July 2001, accused of harbouring warm feelings for Iran.

"He was a farmer, he had a car, he sold tomatoes, and we had a life that we were satisfied with," said Khlis. "He was in prison for a whole year, and I raised 75m dinars in bribes. It didn't work. The money was gone, and he was gone. They sent me a telegram. They gave me the body."

You people have no idea how much I'm restraining myself.

Go Kurds! Go Kurds! Go Kurds! Go Kurds!

Oh man I'm getting really worked up over this Turk thing now. Damn the Turks. They need to leave these people the hell alone.

(Link snitched from Celissa again.)

From today's UPI story on people fleeing Iraq (none of which, interestingly enough, are Iraqis):

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

By the way, he's not the only one to hear about the Shredder. There are also first-hand accounts. In case you were wondering. (Do you suppose this Human Shield and the Welsh member of parliament traded notes? That must be it...)

(Link snitched from Celissa.)

Click here.

Courtesy of Politburo, via him again. (But I beat him to the officer-fragging story! :-)

The Turks are threatening to invade Northern Iraq, to prevent a "flood of refugees." What refugees?

The administration says if they do it, it will be over their objections. It damn well better be. If selling out the Kurds had been a necessary condition to getting Turkish support for basing out of Turkey, I would have reluctantly concluded that it was a necessary evil. But they turned us down, and this now looks like a naked power grab by the Turks, and I hope the administration does whatever it takes to prevent it.

So. Apparently among some "peace" activists, Molotov cocktails are standard equipment.

I'm sure someone will be quick to point out that these people are a minority. And they are. But it would be smart to remember that extremism breeds violence, and this is no less true for "anti-war" activists than anyone else. As I've written before, political violence can come from any quarter, and almost any ideology. It's smart to always keep that in mind, no matter what your viewpoint on the war or anything else.

(Link to Molotov article courtesy of that crazy woman.)

Wild Monk has written one hell of an essay on the roots of our conflict with the European elite. It's academic and lengthy, so I don't know if all of you will find it as interesting as I did--but I know that many of you will. Hint: if an essay that talks about Rousseau, Marx, Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, and how they help explain French, German, and American behavior during the current conflict sounds interesting, then this is your meat.

I have long argued that the ideological conflict that America faces long-term is between Classical Liberalism (aka modern conservative libertarianism) and Transnational Progressivism. This dispute goes well beyond the simplistic labels of "conservative" or "liberal" or "left" vs. "right." Indeed, the postmodernist left and the fringe right are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. No, this is a deep-seated argument based on fundamentally differing interpretations of the nature of humanity, rights, the individual, the role of the state, and of economic justice.

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