warfare and politics

Prometheus quotes David Broder :

Today, only 121 veterans of the armed services are in the House -- barely more than one-quarter of the membership. A generation ago, in 1975, 318 of the 435 representatives had worn their country's uniform, and a good many of them had seen combat in World War II or Korea. Comradeship came more easily to them, and so did the kind of mutual respect that makes possible compromise and, ultimately, agreement.

None of the top leaders of either party today has been in the service. Most of those who aspire to be their successors also lack that experience.

It is not just politicians and legislators who would benefit from undergoing the discipline and experiencing the rewards of giving a period of their lives to tasks assigned by their country -- either military or civilian. That is the surest way we know to restore the sense of shared commitment so lacking today.

We need more veterans -- and we desperately need more people who know the difference between warfare and politics.

Sokrates (channeled by BDL):

As long as you divide the world into clan members to be helped, clan enemies to be killed, strangers to be robbed, or heretics to be burned, the chances for world peace are low.

For variety (and equal validity) you can substitute "country" or "county" for "world".

misc

Found via The Right Christians, a Calpundit-hosted thread on libertarianism - the beginning of which has some very good stuff, sparking off of this comment -

Libertarianism has two virtues for its adherents, folks who tend to have a high degree of spacial, analytical intelligence and an extremely low degree of empathetic, emotional intelligence:..

BDL (quoted out of context from here):

...illiberal and destructive patterns of thought: a belief that quantitative measurements are not the base on which one's interpretation should be built but rhetorical weapons to be used for advantage, a belief that anecdotes are persuasive without inquiring into whether they are representative, an assumption that all elements of the current situation one likes are part of the natural order of things, and a belief that anyone else's use of economic or social power is profoundly illegitimate...

From metafilter, what it's like to live with prosopagnosia ("face blindness", aka poor to no facial recognition ability). Take it from me, this is not a good disorder to have - even just a mild case - when you live in a small town.

fluff, no meat - go read something useful.

alas no time - such are the perils of employment - also no desire to see weblog lapse into another coma, so i'll just throw stuff into its maw for now. And hope that blogger doesn't just swallow it and refuse to regurgitate upon command like it did with my last post.

via TNH, confirmation that we are living in the future

via thestraightdope.com -
There are 2 types of people in this world, those that finish what they start

via bdl discussion here:

Collectivists are the nutcases who believe nothing should be private property, libertarians the nutcases who believe everything should be. (If it isn't obvious why this leaves a vast expanse of options in between, my apologies for calling you a nutcase)

photo of Salam Pax

some spy links

spy shortage:

...That lack of informants is a major handicap for U.S. intelligence, something unlikely to be helped by a range of new technology being sent to Iraq to help track anti-coalition groups.

"Maybe some of these gizmos can tell where people are hiding, but so far as I know, none of them can tell the difference between a civilian with a water bucket and a guy in civilian clothes with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)," said an official in Washington. "And none of them can tell what target they're going to try to hit next. To do that, you need to recruit spies, and that's messy and hard and it takes time."

bush, cia, and credibility:

"The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once you prostitute it, it's never the same..."
...Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan...

Krugman on Plame, the Plame chronology

a view of the future

"A luxury once sampled becomes a necessity." - we need news to be reported like this. Paul Andrews ("I've noted in recent blogs how print media could better serve their readerships by annotating online stories with hyperlinks...") provides a good contrast between the old way and the new.

Philosophical investigation leads to hot Nevada County Schwarzenegger-Ackerman expose'!

be patient, the truth will be revealed...

for fellow philosphical illiterates, i discovered why Crooked Timber is so named - (in A&L daily)

Darwinian Politics in its way exemplifies Kant's famous remark that "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." It is not, to play on Kant's metaphor, that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material. Social constructionism in politics treats human nature as indefinitely plastic, a kind of fiberboard building material for utopian political theorists. Evolutionary psychology advises that political architects consider the intrinsic qualities of the wood before they build.

and, speaking of philosophy (and via a Crooked Timber discussion -thanks kes), Mark Lawson (presenter, 'Front Row', BBC Radio 4) recounts his Greatest Mistake. you didn't hear it from me.

and, in a not unrelated vein, via Neil Gaiman, Playboy centerfold science - "the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." (Warning: safe for work.)

to go further yet (but is it "too far"?), Dan Weintraub on the recent Schwarzenegger-Lockyer dustup -

"Unbelievable," said Democratic campaign consultant Richie Ross. "How ironic that California's strangest political bedfellows would find themselves in an argument about groping."

too far: via the memory hole, the infamous oui interview

why the allegations didn't hit a lot sooner - they usually sprout from the tabloids, which (due to business connections) were starry-eyed for Schwarzenegger

re Schwarzenegger-Republican culture shock-

...Or Schwarzenegger could take a pass, and the Republican Party could stay its current course, alternating between Old Testament morality and new age [???! - ed.] sexuality in accord with the demographics of the district. Call it a big-tent party, or a boundless well of cynicism.

on the other hand, last week's AP news article suggesting that he may try to terminate Stupid Growth in CA was encouraging-

[he seems to have] a bent toward "smart growth" which favors transit, rebuilding existing cities and slowing development on vacant farmland. His Web site has pledged wholesale restoration of declining urban environments, criticized "fiscally unsustainable sprawl" and promised new incentives to build homes on blighted, bypassed land in older cities.
...
"I have every reason to think the basic principles are understood by Arnold and are going to be acted upon," said former San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery, a Schwarzenegger transition team member who launched one of California's most striking downtown rejuvenations.

- so here's hoping he surprises us. (but then that's what i was hoping bush would do - and in terms of magnitude he did indeed, just got the sign wrong)

OK, at last, we reach the shocking news - yes, there is indeed a Schwarzenegger - Ackerman connection, and it goes way back! (for you out-of-towners, Jeff Ackerman is the publisher of The Union, Nevada County's one and only newspaper.) not only that, but we come full circle...:

SCHWARZENEGGER - What does it mean?:

Schwarzenegger seems like a pretty typical type of name, describing a person by colour (his coloration, hair colour) and job. The name "Egger" would be pretty close to the English name "Tiller." "Egge" is a big metal square with "teeth" drawn by horses or a tractor. It rakes the field, breaking up the big lumps after the field has been plowed (by the tillerman= Ackermann). Another name of this type is Heidegger (the philospher Martin Heidegger), tiller of the heath.

yes I know, words are failing you too.

(btw, more on the Union when I have more time - time that is not being wasted on trivia - you guys have been doing an excellent job lately.)
p.s. and not just the editorials.

shorts

John Maynard Keynes was famously quoted as saying: 'When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?'

From Healing Iraq:

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." - Jonathan Swift

seen somewhere in blogland, attributed to Sinclair Lewis: "It is difficult to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."

seen on Metafilter:

There's something to be said for finding a group of people who share your basic principles: it lets you get past arguing about the basic principles.

Friendship is almost always a union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots." -- George Santayana

via Andrew Tobias:

Spending tens of thousands of dollars on a person's last few months of life is compassionate -- but spending tens of thousands of dollars to improve a person's first few years of life is investment.

Also this one:

"The American ideal is not that we will all agree with each other, or even like each other, every minute of the day. It is rather that we will respect each other's rights, especially the right to be different, and that, at the end of the day, we will understand that we are one people, one country, and one community, and that our well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of each and every one of our fellow citizens."
- Arthur J. Kropp

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's archive of web classics, including the "tugboat meets bridge" series

speaking of tugboats, on Crooked Timber the Tugboat Potemkin asks "Never mind the evolutionary explanations for why 'frequent masturbation may protect men against prostate cancer', what's the creation scientist's explanation?"

At Poynter Online, Newspaper Nicknames: The Good, the Bad and the Scatological is kinda cute, but the real gems are in the reader responses.

D-Squared Digest with this:

Schopenhauer correctly pointed out that "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents".

and these:

(That's the Blairite Third Way, btw, not the fascist movement of the same name, and astute readers will perceive here a man battling for his life against the forces of digression)
....
I happened to grow up in one of the small idealised in-and-out-of-each-others'-doors "communities" that the communitarian theorists went on about, and thus knew that it was bloody horrible.

(but do not visit mr. digest's dastardly doggerel on the deceased. at least not while drinking milk.)

yet another complaint about the media

Sadly, The Onion just doesn't get it - some things hit too close to home to be funny.

compare and contrast

The truth about Jessica Lynch:

In the end, only one hero remains. She's the one we started with, Jessica Lynch. But she's a different kind of hero than we were led to expect. A bigger, braver hero, actually.

She did something every bit as brave as confronting those Iraqis. She came back home and told the truth.

Former POW from Kansas recounts capture in Iraq:

After he and his fellow soldiers were set free, there were stories of [Pfc. Patrick] Miller pestering the Iraqi guards by constantly singing a pro-American song, and by giving them chewing tobacco that he said was candy in hopes of making them sick.

"It's small victories that keep your hope up," Miller said. "You got to have small victories when you're in a situation like that."

making the rounds, and deservedly so:
via TPM, Slate articles by Jacob Weisberg, examining the evidence on Do Dim Bulbs Make Better Presidents? and on Occupational Hazards - How the Pentagon forgot about running Iraq -

The difficulties we have faced...were largely to be expected from a devastated post-totalitarian society in a part of the world overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and its interests. What is surprising-amazing, in fact-is how unprepared we were for these problems...How did the world's greatest military power plan the invasion of a country without also planning its occupation?

Also Seymour Hersh on Niger:

When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study's exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. "Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads," the official told me. "You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails."

TPM - "Hope is not a plan"

Some really good writing

Stunning (in both senses of the word, respectively) pair of essays, first Kim du Toit on The, uh, feminization, Of The Western Male (which I could swear I saw reported approvingly by right-wing blogging superstar Glenn Reynolds a day or so ago although now it doesn't look that way...could be my memory though), with rejoinder (via crooked timber) by Winston Smith, the Philosoraptor (all-time best blogname). Great writing - true, WS engages in a little more of the (more-typically-rightwing-blogger) shrillness than I'd like but hey i'm a wimp. And the substance is GREAT.

and via PressThink, an also stunning article in Columbia Journalism Review by Matthew Miller, on faults and potential of the press to play an active and constructive role in a democracy. Go read the whole thing, it is a treasure. i know i shouldn't quote this much, but it is sooo good! besides for all i know the CJR sticks stuff behind a firewall after a while, or moves everything to make linkrot, or otherwise allows me to rationalize this misbehavior....sorry. (Tell you what, go buy the book)

The media end up in cahoots with politicians in creating this illusion of meaningful action, both because 1) media norms don't allow reporters to say "this is a charade" even when they know it is (reporters are supposed to be "objective"), or 2) because it cuts too close to the bone for reporters to admit they are often tacit conspirators in such hoaxes.
...
"News" is largely defined as what public officials say and do. The poles of debate on major issues are thus set by the mainstream Republican position (today the Bush administration) and the mainstream Democratic position. The national press faithfully reflects these two poles, and the fifty-yard line in American politics is between them.
...[this] brings a clear downside: in times when neither party is serious about addressing major problems,...assures that public debate remains impoverished.
...
if candidates do put forward ambitious ideas, the top news outlets generally aren't equipped or inclined to assess them.
...
So it's Bush says "X," Gore says "Y." You decide. But people don't have any capacity to decide . . . . They [the media] either said "they're both full of it" or they say "we're not going to decide who's full of it," but they never come down hard one way or the other when one guy's numbers are based on sand and the other guy's may be fudged a little bit but make more sense.
...
...what's new isn't the same as what's important. We obviously need our top news outlets to give us the latest. But it would transform public life if they could also keep us focused on the big things that matter.
Wasn't there some way that the most important daily bulletin boards in our public life could institutionalize regular attention for things that are important - even though there isn't "news" on them? ...[and thus] perform a public service by mitigating the gap left when officials prefer not to address important issues?
...
Meanwhile, at The Sacramento Bee, editors are considering a Still True-like feature for the editorial page.
...
Despite its political ring, a feature like Still True does not represent a call for a return to the partisan newspaper wars of the early nineteenth century, when each political party had outlets that purely parroted its party line. Indeed, the idea is inspired by the fact that neither party is addressing these issues seriously, so the task of at least raising their dimensions has to fall to someone independent, with the power to bring them up.

Last but not least, Theresa Nielsen Hayden on today's NRA Woman..."If I were the editor responsible, I’d want to avoid walking along backlit ridgelines for a while...."

warmed-over haggis, or burning issues, or burned haggis, or something

it's late.

wapo via msnbc on sprawl vs nature, and fire:

"The weapons of mass destruction have been found," a San Diego resident wrote in the letters page of Thursday's Los Angeles Times. "They are poor land-use planning, budget cuts, arsonists and one foolish hunter."

via DeLong, Matthew Yglesias Can't See The Forest For The Timber Company Profits:

I should state at the outset of my discussion that I do not give a damn about America's national forests and that if George W. Bush wants to let the timber companies cut them all down, I wouldn't be particularly upset...

LA Times, Little of Tax Hike Goes to Fight Fires:

Ten years ago, voters statewide passed a half-cent sales tax increase to provide money for county and city public safety programs. Proponents credited the measure's success, in part, to wildfires that burned hundreds of homes in Southern California the week before election day.
...when Proposition 172 was passed, a lot of people who voted for it assumed that some of the money would be going to the Fire Department and that hasn't happened."
Ten of the 28 counties that responded to informal surveys by the California State Assn. of Counties in 2001 and 2003 reported using Proposition 172 money for fire protection...Most of those reported using just a small amount for fire, such as .8% in Placer County and 5.63% in Santa Cruz.

New York Times, In California's Inferno, an Oasis of Planning Stands Out:

"With more people being born than dying, we add 400,000 to 700,000 people a year, even if no one ever moves again into California," said Timothy P. Duane, an associate professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written about wildfires. "That is a Fresno to a San Francisco every year. That is a lot of people that need to go somewhere."

fyi, not that you are likely to care but i added some more links to religion, the economy, and the press below.

on blogging and the web

web helps californians during wildfires:

It gave the village a set of drums to get the message out," said Gary Stebbings, a construction manager who monitored the Web site regularly after evacuating his home in the alpine town of Lake Arrowhead.
The phenomenon was "the ultimate democratization of the media," said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." "The AP has only so many reporters and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access."

from Christopher Lydon,
Stirling Newberry (www.theclarksphere.com) -

"St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere... " In his own voice he continued: "That's the image you should have of what's happening on the Internet. Anyone on any given day can be the center if he has the best observation that resonates. There is no boundary of the circle... You get to sing a song and listen to the echo. You get to hear... how other people have taken what you've done and turned it into their center."

Doc Searls on The Media:

Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you'll like or use....But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. More importantly, you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Yes, Even if They are NPR and the New York Times. They are The Media. Information is a form of "content" that moves from Them to you, on an almost entirely one-way basis.

The Web is ours, not theirs.

Doc again - "blogging is one more way that the demand side is supplying itself"

Nate, from discussion on dan gillmor's site on govt attempts to erase history:

The key difference between "1984" and any attempts to emulate the rewriting of history today is the Web. Time after time politicians are caught by their saved words. The mainstream media may let them get away with pretending they "never said that," but the Web remembers...

More electronic skew-the-voting machine pieces

BTW, blackboxvoting.org is your one-stop shop for news and other info.

From Nov. 3 Newsweek, Black Box Voting Blues:

Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections

From Wired Nov. 6, Suspect Code Used in State Votes:

An investigation by California's secretary of state has revealed that Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software on electronic voting machines in a California county.
Voters in Alameda County...

Nov 3 Christian Science Monitor:

Electronic ballots, hailed as the antidote to hanging chads, will make a mark on Election Day. But critics warn of risks to democracy.

visit Tomorrowland - cast your vote at the Fraud-o-matic today...

from internetnews.com, EFF Case Vs Diebold Stalls, re Diebold's attempt to use copyright law to block the publication of information about flaws in their software:

The political element surrounding the case might have ramifications that will be felt in elections for years to come. If the San Francisco judge ruling on the restraining order today finds against the ISP Online Policy Group, the ISP and many others will be forced to stifle any mention of the machine's flaws.
With no incentive to fix the machines vulnerabilities, Diebold might not, giving every election day loser a way to contest the validity of the votes. It'll be a revisitation of the "hanging chad" fiasco during the Bush-Gore elections.

and, most powerfully, Britt Blaser with Secreted Ballots and a War Story - "Far more than you want to read about e-voting and maybe not quite enough about burning airplanes..." -

On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache...
...
To me though, [the e-voting story] feels like molten aluminum dripping off the left wing. There is no larger story.

Read it.

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."
-attributed to Josef Stalin

The will of God

Anne Lamott - "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

from yet another damn blog:

A couple of years ago, my parents decided it was time for them to leave their church. In the middle of it all, my dad said something that really struck me, "Last week, at Calvary, the minister was talking about morality, and doing the right thing, and everything he was saying was about what 'they' should do. It was all about other people. This week, at First Lutheran, it was the same topic, but it was all about what 'we' should do. I like that a lot better."

How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans

He doesn't seem to appreciate blasphemy.

Scott Rosenberg on Bush and God, church and state

...We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.
...I'll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It's not always and inevitably a bad thing -- the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it's usually a sign to watch out.

Regarding our divinely appointed leader, Robert Brady weighs in:

It occurs to me that God must have a pretty damned high IQ, and a pretty broad spectrum of people to choose from, were she to have a hand in selecting the leader of America. The thought that she might select George W...

...you read it.

Apropos, via a BDL discussion,

a Bush admn. official said after the failed coup against Chavez in Venezuela, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters".

(ref. here?)