Dean's World

The Queen is unhappy with the Congressman.

This discussion over at Volokh over gays in the Arab and Persian worlds is interesting. It's an interesting question to me; gay identity vs. same-sex attraction are different subjects, aren't they?

Is it offensive that someone's definition of soldier is one by which a true soldier is a tool of his commanding entity and thinks of nothing in times of war other than to fulfill his function, namely, Victory defined as the fulfillment of the duties handed to him through the chain of command?

What if someone held that a soldier, not in planning, who believes that his assessment of the war situation and his prescriptions for it's resolution are wiser and better than the assessments governing the character of the duties handed to him through the chain of command--is not a 'true' soldier in the conceptual sense?

What if someone thinks that the moment one is walking around believing he must retreat, even though his commanding entity still wars-he is less of a soldier than those who obey the dictates of the chain of command in heart as well as mind?

And what if this person had great respect for every fallen American in this war, but also had enough respect for himself to enforce the ideas of his military philosophy upon his world outlook, declaring things conceptually as he sees them?

Are these notions offensive? If so, why?

A person can cease being a soldier at will. Sometimes this is indicative of failure; sometimes, of moral stature. It depends on the context.

If one doesn't believe in the war he is fighting, how can he be soldier in the full sense of the word, which to me connotes a fighter in a war in soul as well as deed.

Nu?

(7:35pm Eastern)

Last night's was one of the best open threads we've had in a long while, and has been duly archived as such.

What a great story!

I hope they nail the corrupt, lying jerk to the wall.

Who will have the Link of the Night?

6:45pm Eastern: Go!

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the consensus of American strategists has been that the best way to fight a cellular terrorist organization like al Qaeda is through a combination of targeted strikes against key leaders and efforts to discredit al Qaeda's takfiri ideology in the Muslim community. Precision-guided munitions and special forces have been touted as the ideal weapons against this sort of group, because they require a minimal presence on the ground and therefore do not create the image of American invasion or occupation of a Muslim country.

A correlative assumption has often been that the visible presence of Western troops in Muslim lands creates more terrorists than it eliminates. The American attack on the Taliban in 2001 is often held up now--as it was at the time--as an exemplar of the right way to do things in this war: Small numbers of special forces worked with indigenous Afghan resistance fighters to defeat the Taliban and drive out al Qaeda without the infusion of large numbers of American ground forces. For many, Afghanistan is the virtuous war (contrasting with Iraq) not only because it was fought against the group that planned the 9/11 attacks, but also because it was fought in accord with accepted theories of fighting cellular terrorist organizations.

This strategy failed in Iraq for four years--skilled U.S. special-forces teams killed a succession of al Qaeda in Iraq leaders, but the organization was able to replace them faster than we could kill them. A counterterrorism strategy that did not secure the population from terrorist attacks led to consistent increases in terrorist violence and exposed Sunni leaders disenchanted with the terrorists to brutal death whenever they tried to resist. It emerged that "winning the hearts and minds" of the local population is not enough when the terrorists are able to torture and kill anyone who tries to stand up against them.

Al-Tunisi was a leader in helping bring foreign terrorists into the country and his death "is a key loss" to Al Qaeda leadership there, Anderson told a Pentagon news conference.

"He operated in Yusufiyah, southwest of Baghdad, since the second battle of Fallujah in November '04 and became the overall emir of Yusufiyah in the summer of '06," Anderson said in a videoconference from Baghdad.

"His group was responsible for kidnapping our American soldiers in June 2006," Anderson said.

He said an associate of al-Tunisi's was captured in one mission on Sept. 12 in Baghdad and another with links to him was captured Sept. 14 in Mahmudiyah when coalition forces targeted the network that facilitates the flow of foreign fighters in the southern belts around Baghdad.

More associates were captured over the next few days. On Sept. 25, commanders received information that a meeting was taking place near Musayib with al-Tunisi and other Al Qaeda in Iraq members. A U.S. Air Force F-16 aircraft attacked the target.

August 19th, op-ed in the New York Times by seven soldiers of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne serving in Iraq:

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

September 12th: NYT reports that two of those soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation. September 26: from the broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. They can't even — if — the next guy that calls here, I'm gonna ask him: Why should we pull — what is the imperative for pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out? They can't — I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "Well, we just gotta bring the troops home."

CALLER 2: Yeah, and, you know what --

LIMBAUGH: "Save the — keep the troops safe" or whatever. I — it's not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.

CALLER 2: No, it's not, and what's really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.

LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they're willing to sacrifice for their country.

audio of Limbaugh's comments here.

UPDATE: well, now.

good job, Rush! way to make the case on the merits! thoat there trend is shaping up nicely... oh, wait. Well, guess there are a lot, LOT less genuine Republicans than there used to be.

Things are getting bad in Burma. The military is shooting into crowds of Buddhist monks who have been protesting the junta that has ruled the nation with an iron fist since overturning elections in 1988. Protests are erupting all over Asia in support of the monks and their pro-democracy allies like Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

By the way, Myanmar is the name the ruling regime gave to Burma, and the name is not recognized by the US, UK or the pro-democracy elements within the country.

China is the junta's main backer. China also happens to be the main backer of the Sudanese regime. There is some hope that the Chinese will step in and force the regime to defuse the crisis in order to avoid making China look bad during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

I saw the same hope raised in relation to the genocide in Darfur. But the genocide there continues.

My second article on Islamic reform is now up at the Guardian website.

It is called The Islamic Reformation (the original title was The Islamic Reformation and the Ijtihad Nightmare). Just an excerpt:

So now that we know how extremists came to dominate Muslim dissent (and Salafism failed to check it) what are we to do about it? Three things.

Comment there please. This article puts me at odds with Salman Rushdie, as the commentators note.

For example, the real radiative equilibrium temperature of Earth is 300.15 K (27 °C), and we want to know the anomaly caused by carbon dioxide, which concentration in the atmosphere was 381 ppmv. If the standard concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 280 ppmv (another subjective number because the real one was fixed by scientific associations and boards, and its value is 350 ppmv), the anomaly in the temperature of the lower troposphere (the layer of air just above the ground and in contact with the surface with not more than one meter thick) caused by CO2 (Partial Pressure from 381 ppmv [CcdL] = 0.00034 atm-m) under a total atmospheric pressure of 1 atm is:

[Equations at link]

Thus, the anomaly of the lower troposphere temperature caused by the increase of CO2, on June 15, 2007 at 18:05 hrs. (UT) was 0.02 K, which is equal to 0.02 °C.

I hereby declare that Donkey is infintely cooler than Shrek himself.

I dare you to defy me, wimp.

I once told a friend of mine I could drag a fine-toothed comb through the facts of his current living situation and find at least one crime to indict him on. He didn't believe me, but I asked him if he did his own taxes. He said he did and I said I wouldn't need to look at anything but his last three returns.

The point being made was rules and laws are so byzantine and changeable that it is virtually impossible to avoid breaking some of them. Nobody notices or cares until somebody who thought they were within the law finds himself the subject of court proceedings and a local or national news story. Those sorts of things can make people view rules and authority as potentially arbitrary, and that attitude leads to a growing disrespect. That disrespect manifests itself in ways that prompt the masses and their enablers in government to spew forth yet more rules and laws. Wash, rinse, repeat. Forever.

The explosion of rules is a poorly conceived and even more poorly implemented attempt to create a civil society out of a mass of individuals who no longer reflexively view themselves as part of any community other than those narrowly defined to provide them with advantages over others, either materially or emotionally. The notion of responsibility to the community at large has been eroded past recovery and it will take a serious dose of compounded tragedies to begin to revive it- assuming there will be enough people who recognize the need to do so.

Discuss

Originally submitted as a comment to this post.

“The worst thing I’ve seen, I think, is the aftermath of a VBIED,” he said.

A VBIED is a vehicle-born improvised explosive device. In other words, a car bomb.

“I’ve seen that about ten times,” he continued. “Some people are turned, literally, into red blotches. Some are just vaporized. Their families will never see them again, not even their bodies. And the smell…there’s this awful car bomb smell, the acrid stench of homemade explosives and diesel fuel. Nothing else in the world has that smell. Most of the VBIEDs were intended for civilians, but the Iraqi Police usually stopped them first at the checkpoints. So they were the ones who usually got blown up. The driver of the VBIED would panic because he was caught and then kill everyone at the checkpoint. Nevertheless, the Iraqi Police kept bravely manning the checkpoints and replacing the police who were murdered. I’m telling you, they aren’t doing that for 310 dollars a month.”

CNN Headline News (Glenn Beck Show) will be featuring Evan Coyne Maloney on the show tonight, at 7:30 EST.

Maloney directed the runaway underground smash hit documentary Indoctrinate U--a devastating expose of what is inadequately called "political correctness" on college campuses. (www.IndoctrinateU.com)

I saw the film some months ago, and thought it was brilliant, shocking, infuriating, and above all else, a stupendous piece of investigative reportage.

Full disclosure: I am the Program Director at Human Rights Foundation, whose founder, Thor Halvorssen, co-founded MPI (Moving Picture Institute) which put out Indoctrinate U.

However, I was on record as LOVING Indoctrinate U even before that was the case.

The film premieres in Washington DC on Friday.

Watch the trailer, sign the thing, be happy.

I suppose some people will find this story very hard to believe, but it perfectly matches the impression I have always had of the President--as a decent, honest, and responsible man who takes the office seriously.

The remaining issue in a theory of quantum + decoherence is that the classical states have the right probabilities, but there is still nothing to explain why we observe a particular classical state (photon measured spin-up instead of spin-down). However the (ad-hoc) postulate of wavefunction collapse, no longer being necessary to explain how the probabilities arise, can in fact be entirely removed if we allow that the global superposition never collapses.

Thus, a local observer (e.g. an instrument or a human) perceives a single outcome only because they are a participant in this "global superposition" (the superposition of the entire universe). The wavefunction of the universe as a whole evolves deterministically.

Some of you might know Nasa climatologist James Hansen for his "speaking truth to power" by bravely standing up to the Bush Administration.

What you may not know is that James Hansen's anti-administration and global warming crusade was funded to the tune of $720,000 by the Open Society Institute - the George Soros fund which spent $74 million of the old man's cash in 2006 attacking Bush, Republicans, and anyone the billionaire doesn't like. Hansen also received a quarter of a million from the Heinz Foundation, Sen. John Kerry's wife's outfit that promotes liberal causes - like hubby's presidential run in 2004.

Nearly a million dollars. That must be a lot of money to a humble civil servant like James Hansen. However since Hansen's climate models are riddled with errors, self-fulfilling assumptions, and bootstrapping biases, I'm not sure I would call what Hansen has done "speaking truth to power." It's more like "telling a rich geezer what he wants to hear for a few bucks."

What's amazing is how unsuccessful the billionaire Soros has been so far. For all the money he's thrown around, Bush is still in office and American soldiers are still in Iraq/Afghanistan.

Bret Stephens does something amazing: shoots his own argument down without even realizing it.

In the article, he says that the Columbia University of the 1930s, prior to World War II, would certainly never have allowed a madman like Adolph Hitler to come and give a speech and be grilled by faculty and students.... but then acknowledges, twice, that Columbia did in fact do exactly that with Hitler's frickin' ambassador, who prattled a bunch of nonsense about his country's peaceful intentions.

What, pray tell, is the difference? Especially, as has already been established (see "How to Treat A Bad Man" below) Ahmadinejad is not his country's dictator, is in fact a figurehead representing a dictator in much the same fashion that one of Hitler's ambassadors would be? Once again, the "President" of Iran holds no military power of substance and only limited political power; the man known as the Supreme Leader of Iran holds all the important power, including all military, security, and media control. If Iran were ever to, say, throw a nuclear bomb at Israel, it would be Ali Khamenei giving that order, not the pathetic Ahmadinejad.

Indeed, there's something ironic here, since "Fuhrer" is German for "leader." So it would be perfectly reasonable to translate "Supreme Leader" as "Supreme Fuhrer" or whatever German for "supreme" would be (Uber Fuhrer, perhaps?).

So, Ahmadinejad is not a dictator--someone else already has that job. He isn't the one setting Iran's military policies--that's the Fuhrer'sSupreme Leader's doing. So what is the difference between hosting Adolph Hitler's representative, and hosting Ali Khamenei's puppet-president? None that I can see.

Mr. Stephens can't have it both ways. Either Columbia was wrong in the 1930s, or they were right this week.

Josh Marshall gets a little silly sometimes.

Circa 130 BCE

Rhumenk, Slodhe had called them. They were rumored to have killed and enslaved some of the tribes far to the south, but Slodhe said they were not hostile in their encounters with his people, merely sought trade and hunting. I was angry at that last, for if they were hunting in my woods they had yet to pay their respects to me.

I found them after only a half a day. They had obviously broken camp, and were headed north crashing loudly through my forest as if they had not a care or concern. There were so many of them, tens upon tens of them, most with extensive weaponry and some with oddly fitted bronze armor. Their garments were of a wide assortment, but all made from impressively finely knit cloth.

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I've been watching Ken Burns' riveting series, The War. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi and Afghan bloggers. Today marks the third anniversary of the CotL under my editorship. I still think it's a great opportunity and I'm grateful to Dean for giving that opportunity to me. It's a hard beat to cover. Every week I check hundreds of blogs, frequently seeing images and reading things that are very hard to stomach. I also search for new blogs regularly and welcome suggestions for blogs that may not be known to me yet. Working this beat enables me keep my ear to the ground in a way that I think is helpful and distinctive and I plan on doing it as long as Dean gives me a platform for it. Maybe longer.

In recognition of the anniversary I'm going to dispense a bit from the usual format and conventions I've adhered to. I'm going to talk more and link less so if you're not interested in that come back in a week or so when I'll return to my regular style and content.

The Iraqi blogosphere has become very, very quiet over the last couple of months. I've gone from a weekly carnival to a biweekly one, largely because there just isn't much to link to. Lots of Iraqi bloggers have left Iraq and, according to my custom, I no longer include them in the carnival (although I continue to read their work). Electricity is irregular and better used for air conditioning during the hot summer months than blogging. And it's quite clear that lots of Iraqi bloggers are very, very discouraged.

Over the last two weeks there have been two topics that have come up repeatedly and I plan to link to one post on each topic that exemplifies what's being written. The topic most mentioned these days is the Blackwater private security forces. Take a look at Treasure of Baghdad's post on the subject.

Blackwater and the many other security contracting companies are part of the problems that are happening in Iraq. People there hate them. They do. I recall many Iraqis wishing their death because they shoot randomly and kill. Some people there link these criminals to the US army and to the US itself. That’s how sentiments against American troops themselves increased. Of course, I differentiate who’s who, but there are uneducated people who think that these mercenaries are basically the same as any soldier or marine who “came to kill, take oil, and then leave.”

John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia, a career diplomat now retired who spent a substantial portion of his career in the Middle East, has argued convincingly that the private security companies need to be retained in order to provide security for State Department workers. His argument is that arming State Department people themselves won't do the trick and there just aren't enough U. S. soldiers to do the job and I'm in no position to argue the point with him. I do believe that armed private contractors need to be in the military chain of command in some fashion and be governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The situation as it stands is extremely damaging to U. S. interests. We can't argue credibly that we're turning the responsibility for governing Iraq over to the Iraqi government and undermine the government of Iraq (as the private security companies do) at the same time. The Iraqis view them as simply another militia and, unfortunately, they may be right.

The other topic is cholera. Consider the post (including linked photo and video) from Last of Iraqis:

that's when I decided to do something , something should be done to stope the cholera in Baghdad.

I decided to use the donation money to buy cholera vaccine (Dukoral) , water filters and clean drinking water for me , my wife , my friends in the clinic and my neighbors , of course that depends on the amount of donations , I'll start with us and then to the friends and neighbours because the vaccine isn't cheap it costs about 95$ without the shipment fees from the site of abc online pharmacy , I will look if I it's available in Jordan then I'll ask my relatives there to buy it and send it to me.

Now I buy mineral water for my wife because she had an infection in her stomach few months ago because of the water as the doctor said , she has a weak stomach , but for me I still drink from the tap water. I don't want to see any of the people I know suffering from cholera or any other disease because of the water they drink , as I have mentioned in earlier posts that 5 000 cases of cholera has been reported in northern Iraq. When I hear about people die because of the violence and explosions I can't stop the violence , but I can try to stop the cholera infections , at least I want to try.

Cholera is a sign of poverty and of government failure. Whatever you think of government involvement in healthcare, public health in the form of clean water and sewers is a government responsibility. There's a simple reason for this: when poor people get sick with cholera, well-to-do people do, too. I don't think there's any better metric for the failure of the government in Iraq than the reemergence of cholera. It's not just in Baghdad. It's in the north in the Kurdish area and the south around Basra, too.

Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.

Muslims Against Sharia claims to be a group of muslims who believe,

- "We, as Muslims, find it abhorrent that Islam is used to murder millions of innocent people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike." - "Twenty-first century Muslims have two options: we can continue the barbaric policies of the seventh century […], or we can reform Islam to keep our rich cultural heritage and to cleanse our religion from the reviled relics of the past."

All well and good. What exactly are their prescriptions accordingly? Looking at their manifesto, we see these action items:

Inconsistencies in the Koran: they wrongly assert that the qur'an contains many passages that "call for Islamic domination and incite violence against non-Muslims." They also want to "change" that.

The Koran & the Bible: They claim that the Bible and the Torah are more pure and that the Qur'an is a corrupted text, stating baldly (and falsely on both counts) that "While neither Testament calls for mass murder of unbelievers, the Koran does."

Accepting responsibilities: This is probably the most offensive of all - they say that "we (sic) must acknowledge evils done by Muslims in the name of Islam and accept responsibility for those evils." Why should any muslim accept even one tiny iota of responsibility for evil done in the name of the faith by twisted extremists? They follow that with another call to censoring "evil passages" in the Qur'an so that "future generations of Muslims will not be confused by conflicting messages". How benevolent.

and it goes on and on. It boggles the mind that any muslim would capitulate so utterly to the Osama bin Ladens of the world thus. The answer to extremism is to expose the false fatwas and selective tajweed for what they are, not accord the extremists' warped interpretations the status of orthodoxy and try to excise them.

One more thing. The so-called muslims against Sharia aren't actually muslim at all. Among the blog team there is Pamela Geller (of the ultrarightwing blog Atlas Shrugs). If there are any true muslims at MAS who have some pride in their faith, then why do they work alongside someone who explicitly called for Islam to be banned?

With "allies" such as Pamela on board, it's painfully obvious to all but the most deluded, naive fools that the true agenda of MAS is to attack the principles of Islam from within. These people are far worse than the Irshad Manji/Hirsi Ali types who make earnest calls for "reform", because the latter are at least honest about what they are and what they seek.

[Josh] Bolten said Bush wants enough continuity in his Iraq policy that "even a Democratic president would be in a position to sustain a legitimate presence there."

"Especially if it's a Democrat," the chief of staff told The Examiner in his West Wing office. "He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out."

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.

What do you feel

When you let go of the wheel

Can you take a leap of faith

Will you face the change of pace

There are worlds out there

Beyond compare

Going on a journey

Somewhere far out east

We'll find the time to show you

Wonders never cease

Morcheeba, "Wonders Never Cease"

Sometimes change happens so gradually that we don't realize it. Then there are times when you do and say "Wow, that's pretty cool."

Last year I picked up a new Motorola phone off Ebay that was unlocked (not assigned a provider like AT&T, Spring or Verizon) and used sim cards. Since then I've sent the Wife off on her travels with the phone. When she arrives at her destination, she picks up a sim card, charges it using local currency, and then can call home whenever she feels like it for pennies a minute. When she travels to another location with a different provider, she simply buys another card, swaps out the old one, and calls me with her new number.

It's an economical solution compared to the international plans offered by American providers which run on average $2/minute. Plus for $4/month I've enabled my cell phone to send/receive international calls, so she doesn't have to call me on a landline. Although I don't use the service much, it's worth $50 bucks a year for times like today.

A few minutes ago she called me on my cellphone here on the East Coast from an Indian restaurant in Tanzania. When the call dropped after about 10 minutes, I checked the number on my phone, added the international dialing prefix "011" and called her back. A few "Brooklyn cheer"-sounding rings later, she answered the phone and we continued our conversation.

After I hung up, I had that "Wow, that's pretty cool," moment.

Consider:

The distance between my office and her restaurant was roughly 12,000 km or 7,500 miles - roughly a third of the way around the world. She was 8 time zones away. The signal from her phone bounced to a nearby tower, where it was most likely transmitted by microwaves to a central location. At this location it was likely beamed up to a satellite which bounced it to another location somewhere on the ground. Then it very likely traveled under an ocean on fiber optic lines, before it was routed several times until it was beamed by microwave (or more likely, carried on landline) to a nearby cell phone tower, which beamed the signal to my cell phone in my cubicle here in the Philly area.

When I first visited Tanzania in 1994 making phone calls across the country from Kigoma to Dar es Salaam was nearly impossible. You had to queue in a line at the post office and wait for several hours - when the lines weren't down. At the time the satellite phone system Iridium was just being built - and I remember hoping that one day when I traveled to Africa I would have one of their phones.

Now, 12 years later, it turns out I don't need a $5000 phone charging $10/minute. All I need is a $100 Razor and a sim card and a wife willing to haul them around the world.

I think that's pretty cool.

I have been asked to write a series of posts on Islamic reform at Guardian newspaper's Comment is Free. I will produce one per week over the next month and a half. I have put a fair amount of research into this so it promises to be interesting.

Please check out part one: The Roots of Islamic Reform.

Comment there please, god knows they need thinking people. It takes a moment to get registered.

Even the injustice of strangers disgusts the righteous, as is written: "An unjust man is an abomination to righteous men." (Proverbs 29:27) (Sforno commenting on our verse.)

So much for tolerance.

Quoted:

At Columbia, university President Lee Bollinger pulled no punches. He called him a "petty and cruel dictator" and said his Holocaust denials suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

"I feel the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for," Bollinger said to loud applause.

I heard him saying these things on the radio, and the anger and outrage in his voice was apparent.

Although on one point, one which can't be emphasized enough, President Bollinger is wrong: Ahmadinejad is not a dictator. He's not a legitimately elected President either, but that's not the point, because he's not a dictator. Supreme Leader Khamenei is the dictator. He holds absolute authority over the military and security forces, including the unilateral right to declare war, the right to approve or reject any legislation, and has absolute control over all media.

Ahmadinejad's position as "President" is almost entirely symbolic, and over matters military he has no control to speak of.

Anyway, to continue:

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University on Monday in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.

"In Iran we do not have this phenomenon," he continued. "I do not know who has told you we have it."

Loud laughs and boos broke from the audience of about 700 people, mostly students at the Ivy League school whose garb included "Stop Ahmadinejad's Evil" T-shirts.

The President of Columbia made a great point too:

"It's extremely important to know who the leaders are of countries that are your adversaries. To watch them to see how they think, to see how they reason or do not reason. To see whether they're fanatical, or to see whether they are sly," he told ABC's Good Morning America.

The College Republicans and College Democrats both helped supply many of the questions, which weren't "tough" so much as frickin' merciless. The man was hectored by Bollinger and heckled, booed, and laughed at by the audience.

I honestly think Columbia did itself proud, and proved the critics wrong.

Quotes taken from here and here. Oh, and for an in-depth understanding of how Iran's government really works, and how it's stupid to call Ahmadinejad a dictator (he's not, he's a dictator's plaything), just read this.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Little Rock. Above is the famous photo by Will Counts (above), the caption to which reads:

Elizabeth Eckford, followed and taunted by an angry crowd after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School, September 4, 1957. The girl in the light dress behind her is Hazel Bryan. Will Counts/Arkansas History Commission.

Vanity Fair has an indepth article on the lives of those two women, which makes for a fascinating tale of racism and redemption in its own right. And yet, the story doesn't quite have a happy ending:

Central High School looks as imposing as ever, but over the past 50 years, its innards have changed unimaginably: the school is now more than half black. It's all misleading, of course, because Central is really two different schools, separate and unequal, under one roof. The blacks go to different classes, sit on separate sides of the cafeteria, have different, and far lower, levels of performance and expectations.

There's a long way to go before the Cosby Show/Different World reality becomes mainstream.

His elder brother having vowed to kill him, Jacob flees to Mesopotamia. He arrives at a watering hole, frequented by the local shepherds.

Noticing that the shepherds are dithering, he rebukes them: It's still early--and if you are payed by the day, you've not fulfilled your contract. And if you yourselves own the sheep--it's not yet time to gather in the sheep. Therefore, go and shepherd. (Genesis 29:7)

The shepherds excuse their conduct explaining how they cannot lift the heavy stone covering the well without the aid of their fellow herdsmen, who had yet to arrive.

(A comment by Rashi is inserted between the dashes)

Remember when you could just walk up to a stranger over whom you had no social leverage and rebuke him about how he was doing his job; give him advice about how he might more efficiently run his life, and have him excuse himself to you?

I've thought for years now that this is the coolest thing ever. This is actual human beings who make these noises entirely with their throats and mouths:

You should totally buy this CD.

I have to say, Columbia was a shameful spectacle today. It got itself into a hole it could not get out of, and played host, however "rudely," to a mass murdering dictator.

Dean is right that to some extent, the debacle of this invitation was ameliorated by the protests and other aspects of this murderous man's visit. But not enough.

I say score one for a fallacy of liberalism -- that the "airing of ideas" is always appropriate.

No. Some people shouldn't be "airing ideas." They should be swinging in the air from gallows. Ahmadinejad is one of those people.

I have to admit, Columbia did a great job here.

Score one for classical liberalism!

See this piece by Jeff G about an official's decision to refuse free doughnuts, pies and breads that were being donated to senior centers around Putnam County, north of New York City.*

Jeff takes issue with the decision's condescending patronizing and sees in it yet another example of the encroaching nanny state.

I wish I could agree totally. Though this is an increase in the quantity of regulation, such institutions have always set standards determining, and thereby limiting, what foods they will accept donations of and serve.

The real problem is that the restriction is utterly insane. They used to weed out ill packaged, or, perhaps, home baked goods for health reasons; now for the very same reasons they weed out sweets. Problem is that sweet baked goods have been for humans a loved staple food for hundreds if not thousands of years. There is not, nor can there be, a cost benefit analysis advising heavy handedly eliminating this food from the human diet.

My argument, in a nutshell, is that the problem here is the content of the regulation, not regulation per say.

Additionally, the right needs to understand that nanny state arguments ring hollow to the ears of modern men who would love nothing more than to slip into a comfortable soma of freedom from want.

But everyone loves doughnuts.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Only six months ago, many Iraqi travelers considered it a suicidal risk to take the insurgent-controlled desert highway that stretches from Baghdad to neighboring Syria and Jordan.

But now Iraqi driver Jamal says the Sunni Islamist al Qaeda insurgents who used to abduct and execute his Shi'ite passengers before robbing him and fellow Sunnis are virtually a thing of the past.
...
Security along the Anbar highway has been transformed by the emergence of a tribal alliance of Sunni sheikhs and their fighters who have managed to suppress Anbar's volatile insurgency -- after repeated failures by Washington and Baghdad.

Despite the slowdown, Mohammed is happy just to be back in business.

"I closed my office last year for several months because too many travelers had been robbed, kidnapped and killed on the road," he said.

"But after the tribes took control of Anbar we saw a lot of people coming back to travel on the road, including Shi'ites who thought they'd never see Anbar again."

The Wife has arrived in Tanzania again. Each time she goes there she does so with a little bit more support. I hooked her up with a group of British expats who support the hospital she's working at, and they've helped with the logistics of her stay in Tanzania. She even got help from a drug rep. Each time they hit her up with a rec for their drug, she hit back by telling them about her upcoming stint in Tanzania. Numerous reps made promises, but only one delivered. MAP International is an organization that's supported by private donors and corporations. The Wife covered shipping, and MAP International sent her 40lbs of drugs boxed in a cube and accompanied with customs letters. My guess is that it will go over pretty well at the hospital there.

The Wife and I have a long relationship with that country. She first spent a year there in 1989 studying chimps, and dragged me there in 1994-95. When I returned there last year I was amazed at how much things had changed. The best way to describe it is a sense of optimism and self-confidence I hadn't seen before. In 1994 I had wandered into a bookstore that sold a few translated copies of Marx, Lenin and mimeographed Nyerere speeches. When I say "few", we're talking less than 20 or so pamphlets and books spread out on wooden tables to fill the space. And that was in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's largest city. Last December I saw bookstores in Arusha, a much smaller city, filled with new and used books, as well as shops brimming with all manner of other goods. Everyone seemed to have a cell phone, and the reception in the Serengeti was better than I get in my own backyard (for AT&T or Sprint that's not an exaggeration; I live in a network gap for them).

But Tanzania still has a long way to go. It remains desperately poor and it will take decades for it to achieve the prosperity its humble and proud people deserve.

One problem Tanzania has is a lethargic dependence often called "Tanzanitis" by expats familiar with the country. Unfortunately there remain some in Tanzania who still haven't shaken off the Communist mentality that people give stuff to you, you don't work for it. While traveling in Tanzania we often saw beggars wearing bored expressions standing by the roadside with their palms out, waiting for someone to stop and give them something. They weren't selling anything, or providing a service like others were. They just stood there, waiting and begging.

This annoyed our tour guide, Cathbet, a hardworking and proud member of the Chaga tribe who runs his own business. Cathbet was embarrassed by these beggars and called them people following the "old ways." For him the new ways were working hard and becoming prosperous, like the cellphone stands that competed with one another for business in every town we passed through.

In 1994 at our research site we found a stockpile of drugs brought by other researchers that were set to expire. We donated them to a clinic outside of the national park. A few weeks later we had to send one of our guides to the clinic, and he discovered that all the medicine we had donated was gone. The clinic officer had sold them in the Congo and pocketed the money.

Corruption remains a problem there, but one shouldn't forget that every industrializing nation including our own continues to fight it. It's a weight that holds society back, but eventually all the developed nations have overcome it for the most part (with the possible exception of Russia which may have institutionalized it).

One of the ways to fight corruption is to make much smaller donations. Map International's travelpacks do just that. They are small, compact, but pack a lot of punch. I believe that because they are small and travel with people who have an interest in seeing them used properly, the aid does stand a better chance of making it to those in need.

Do these packs of aid hinder more than help the people of Tanzania? I don't know. I suppose that the Wife will weigh in when she returns. In the meantime I want to believe that anti-malarials and antibiotics do not contribute to Tanzanitis the way cash and food do.

Overall I'm impressed with Map International, and having seen NGOs in Tanzania and Kenya up close, that says a lot. MAP isn't sending "experts" to live in the best hotels and tool around the country in brand-new SUVs while dining in the best restaurants in Dar and Nairobi with other "experts" and government officials. Instead it provides aid to those working at the grassroots level, and does it without buying expensive ads on TV or issuing press releases to grab headlines.

The UN returns to Iraq.

Just got back from my weekly Jewish service at the base.

In case any of you were wondering whether or not there are any Jewish female drill sergeants, there are.

Err, there is.

After telling her I thought she had the most important job in the military, I recommended she read Heinlin's Starship troopers. She told me she would.

I have never seen the movie version, but I told her to avoid it, seeing as how I do not believe the tract can be done justice in a Hollywood adaptation.

The one thing I wonder about this is, how can you tase someone you're holding down while not shocking yourself? Is there something about this technology or the behavior of electrical pulses I don't understand?

Madeleine L'Engle died recently. Meghan O'Rourke has a thoughtful look at her work.

Tuvan throat-singing, Bangladeshi/Indian music, American hip-hop, and Polish rappers. No kidding. Can you get more "world music" than that?

(Via The Queen.)

I knew nothing - absolutely nothing - about this story until I listened to this report on NPR.

So a bunch of black ruffians beat a white kid nearly to death? No, actually the victim had superficial injuries and went to a party later that evening.

The black students were unprovoked and this was out of the blue? No, actually it was the culmination of a year of racial tension that began when white students hung nooses on a tree to intimdate black students.

HUNG. NOOSES. FROM. TREES.

And loony lefty liberals are making a false analogy to the days of Jim Crow? No,

The first to go to court was Mychal Bell, the team's star running and defensive back. Bell's court-appointed lawyer refused to mount any defense at all, instead resting his case immediately after two days of government presentation. An all-white jury found Bell guilty.

A talented athlete, Bell had a real shot at a Division I football scholarship. He now faces up to 22 years in prison. The other five black students await trial on attempted murder charges.

Why is Jena important? Why make such a big deal out of it? The New York Times piece on Jena says it all:

"I think a lot of people recognize that the criminal justice system grinds down people of color every day," said J. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group based in Montgomery, Ala. "Oftentimes, it's nameless, it's faceless. We know the story in a generic way but not specifically. People see Jena as the tip of the iceberg and ask, 'What lies beneath?' "

I think in the case of Jena, it's pretty obvious. And anyone who says otherwise is either willfully underinformed, or simply in denial.

8:05pm Go!

This was nice to see: the Pope comes out swinging hard for religious liberty.

He is, of course, joined by countless Muslim voices that agree with him, although that's a debate that world has to have within itself more fully.

What an excellent book. I know a lot of people who would profit from reading this. Thanks to the reader who sent it to me (I don't know if you want to be anonymous or not). There's much in here that's inspiring and educational, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians in particular will probably get a lot out of it. Anglicans and mainline Protestants will find interesting challenges but nothing truly distressing. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, will find an awful lot that's deeply troubling.

Well, a NASA astronaut had communion in space, so why not?

For the vast majority of Jewish believers, we are in the holiest of days of the Jewish calendar, a tradition handed down through oral and written Torah for thousands of years. Its central theme is atonement for one's sins against God and against one's fellow man. Indeed, much like Christmas for people who aren't particularly devout in their Christian faith, many even very secular Jews observe Yom Kippur as a holy day.

The anti-religious often look upon things like this as an exercise in self-flagellation and cringing submission by the irrational faithful, but the faithful look upon occasions like this to reflect upon their own flaws, where they may have harmed others, where they may have acted immorally, and resolve to try to do better in the coming years (to put it in secularist terms).

I've got a lot of areas where I think I've failed in the last year, and in my life. Things I could have done better. On the other hand I feel life is a journey, and a constant struggle, and anyone with no regrets and no sense of guilt about anything probably is slightly sociopathic.

So it's an open thread. You can talk about whatever you want. But I thought meditating upon Yom Kippur might be a nice way to kick off our traditional Friday Night Open thread--although you can talk about anything else you want of course.

50 points for the best link of the night.

The Torah commands that Jews "fast ("afflict one's soul," literally) on the ninth day of the month."

But we actually fast the day after, since the Torah tells us earlier on that we "must fast on the tenth."

The Talmud tells us that the injunction to fast on the ninth means that we are commanded to eat and drink plentifully on the ninth in order to fast smoothly on the tenth.

Why then did the Torah not say so explicitly? The Talmud answers that it did not do so in order to convey to us that when one obeys the command to eat and drink plentifully on the ninth, Torah considers him as having fulfilled a commandment to fast.

Though the reward for eating and drinking at the command of G-d is incomparable to the reward for fasting at his command, one who eats and drinks on the ninth of Tishrei receives reward as if he had fasted because of G-d's commandment.

(This is taken almost verbatim from the code of Jewish law. More info is available Sunday, upon request in the comment section.)

When approaching Yom Kippur, Jews are accustomed to wish one another a gemar chasima tova, which translates loosely into, May your inscription for good in the book of life be therein sealed completely.

MOSUL, Iraq - Competent Iraqi security forces and a deluge of tips from residents have helped U.S. troops tamp down violence in northern Iraq despite an influx of al-Qaida fighters responsible for occasional spectacular attacks, U.S. officials say.

But American commanders believe the key to lasting peace is to resolve the region's most vexing political problem — Kurds hold too much power in the local government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Hassan and other Iraqi and American officials said the province's Sunni Arabs turned against al-Qaida after the May 16 attacks, and anonymous tips from the local community have doubled.

Most of Ninevah's Arabs now support the provincial government, and are pushing for new elections in which they believe they will win a greater share of power, officials said.

"We meet with Sunnis here in public forums and in very discreet ones, and they all readily acknowledge (the 2005 election boycott) was a mistake," said Joshua Polacheck, public diplomacy officer for the U.S. State Department's provincial reconstruction team in Ninevah. "I don't know one Sunni Arab who says it wasn't a mistake to boycott those elections."

I have been pondering this link from Instapundit for a couple of days now. It is about, in one sense, a cutesie trend on American campuses now called a "last lecture":

Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

Now the lecture in question in the article really was the last chance, for all practical purposes, for the professor involved, who is dying. I was, however, rather put off by this idea. The man was facing his end, I realized; how churlish could I be about such a topic?

On the eve of Yom Kippur, however — when among Jews the congregation as a whole admits to a state of sinfulness generically, but as individuals reserves the most intimate of confession for the private communication between Man and his Creator — I've had the chance to contemplate the matter some more. Regrettably for those among us who circulate heart-warming emails and who yet care about my opinion (uh, hi, Mom), I want to go with my initial instinct, at least as to the general trend; as to the case in the article, perhaps that requires more thought.

The "last lecture" trend is truly the emblem of ours, history's most narcisstic era. (More here.)

Dr. Helen has one of her usual very sane and thoughtful columns today.

On a Sunday afternoon in late April, 1st Lt. Travis Manion spoke to his father via satellite phone from a dusty Iraqi Army barracks in downtown Fallujah. Manion and his fellow Marines with Military Transition Team (MiTT) 30 - advisors to the 3-2-1 Iraqi Army - had recently watched a DVD of the movie "300," and it made an impression. He told his dad that for the Spartans, there was "no greater honor" than to die fighting for one's country and its freedoms. He expressed frustration that many Americans didn't understand that's what he and his Marines were doing in Iraq. The satellite phone kept cutting out and, unusually, Travis kept calling his father back. He lingered on the phone. He spoke of the importance of honor, strength and courage. He expressed kinship with the Spartans.

A week later, Travis Manion died a Spartan's death.
...
Iraqi soldiers have since named a combat outpost after Manion.

"The advisors on a MiTT team are very different from the other American forces in Iraq. They are choosing to live with us, in our ways, share the same hardships and dangers, and choose to fight alongside of us. Many days. Every day," said Jafar. "Their blood is spilled alongside of ours on the battlefield. It mixes with ours. This is why Mulazam (lieutenant) Manion was, and will always be, our brother."

This evening I came across this piece by the extremely well known and thought of Jeff Goldstein.

This, by the way, is how I commented:

Best satire I’ve seen, so far as I can remember now. I”m not a member of ‘The’ academic literati, but I have seen that there is a lot of satire out there, and Jeff’s piece is to my mind as I mentioned above.

Does that mean I agree with every thing in it? Well, if Truth wasn’t visible through the medium of satire, would it be any good at all?

(the rhetorical question is not meant as a statement that to my mind only truth is visible through the subject of this comment satire.

Great site!

Naftali

Yom Kippur is coming and I hope to get something up about it before or after.

source: Department of Defense report issued this week (h/t Democracy Arsenal).

UPDATE:

Quoth Odierno:

"Attacks nationwide have fallen to the lowest level since before the Golden Mosque bombing" (Feb 2006).

according to the graphic above, Feb 2006 had ~2500 attacks. August 2007 had 3500 attacks. The trend during the entirety of the Surge has been an increasing one. (This graphic answers Dean's critique in the comment thread below).

That takes us up to August. Meanwhile, the report issued by the White House on September 9th responds to the specific Congressionally-mandated benchmark (xiii) to reduce "the level of sectarian violence in Iraq" as follows:

Where ISF and Coalition forces have conducted clear and hold operations, militia control has been significantly reduced. However, satisfactory progress has not been made toward eliminating militia control of local security, in other areas, as evidenced by continued militia influence of certain Baghdad neighborhoods and other areas across Iraq.

Incidentally, how would you define an "attack" or an "incident" ? The very graphs above, and the numbers to which Odierno refers, are taken using convoluted definitions of these terms. And the definitions chane over time. Look at the discrepancy in numbers for the same month, December 2006, on two separate reports:

The Iraq Study Group observed the same thing:

In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base."

Want an example of how a murder of an Iraqi doesn't get counted, and definitions change? It depends on where the bullet enters the head:

according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Car bombs don't count:

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

seriously! car bombs don't count!

According to U.S. military figures, an average of 1,000 Iraqis have died each month since March in sectarian violence. That compares with about 1,200 a month at the start of the security plan, the military said in an e-mailed response to queries. This does not include deaths from car bombings, which the military said have numbered more than 2,600 this year.

Shi'a on Shi'a violence doesn't count:

Mass bombing deaths have not been controlled and car bombings and suicide bombings have not been checked... Overall deaths are down from the peak in January but the count is so erratic as to have limited value and the overall trend is still high. They were 3,190 in January, 2,128 in February, 1,388 in March, 1,664 in April, 2,222 in May, 1,577 in June, and 1,539 in July.

These figures also ignore growing Shi’ite instability in the south, and particularly in the southeast, and a growing threat from Iran.

And let's not forget that there's practically no attention being paid to Kirkuk, which is