Necktie Party

The AP reports that mobs are roaming the streets in the Sudan looking to lynch the British "teddy bear" teacher:

Khartoum, Sudan (AP) - Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Sudan's Islamic government, which has long whipped up anti-Western, Muslim hard-line sentiment at home, was balancing between fueling outrage over the case of Gillian Gibbons and containing it.

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The government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, but the show of anger underlines its stance that Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said. The uproar comes as the U.N. is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.

Many in the protesting crowd shouted "Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!"

In response to the rally in central Khartoum, Gibbons was moved from the women's prison across the Nile in Oumdurman to a secret location, her chief lawyer Kamal al-Gizouli told the Associated Press. He said he visited her there to discuss her conviction Thursday on charges of insulting Islam.

The 54-year-old Gibbons, who was sentenced to 15 days in jail, spoke Friday with her son John and daughter Jessica in Britain by telephone.

"One of the things my mum said today was that I don't want any resentment towards Muslims," the son told AP. "She's holding up quite well."

The Times Online reports that Lord Ahmed has been sent to pour oil on troubled waters:

Lord Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, is due to meet President Bashir of Sudan today in an effort to secure the release of a primary school teacher jailed for blasphemy.

A source close to the Sudanese Government said that it would consider offering Gillian Gibbons a pardon so she could fly home within days.

Ms Gibbons was being held at a secret location last night after hundreds of protesters, some of them wielding knives and ceremonial swords, called for her execution.

I think the incitement here is not entirely on the Sudanese side. The supine behavior of the West, abject surrender to every demand, it's willingness to shame and degrade itself without limit, is in large part responsible for the provocations now directed toward it. Some people are already ready to admit it's Gillian Gibbons's fault. Newsbusters.org reports this talk-show exchange on "The View":

SHERRI SHEPHERD: I think it’s like it’s sacrilegious to name a stuffed toy Muhammad. But you know, you would think that with her being in Sudan, she would know the rules and customs. Because I know I performed stand up in Turkey, and they gave me a big thick packet on the customs, and what you could and could not do, and how you would offend people. So I’m surprised that she didn’t know it might be offensive.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Yeah, because you’d think if you’re going overseas, I mean, we had this discussion yesterday about people coming to America and learning the customs and knowing what is cool, and what isn’t cool. But I find that maybe we are not- and I say we just as European and American, we’re not as anxious to learn the customs before we go places. It’s just one of the reasons we’re called the ugly Americans.

But you have to know something to call people "ignorant". As information from Astrolabe, an Australian Muslim site shows, age-old Muslim "holy customs" are sometimes made up on the spur of the moment to suit political requirements. There is apparently no prohibition against naming teddy bears for Muslim prophets. However this is unlikely to dissuade those who want the West to apologize on every occasion, out of general principles. The cries "cut off the blasphemer's head!, cut off the blasphemer's head!" are likely to be echoed by its Western equivalent: "we're still guilty! we're still guilty!"

What is clear, however, is that much of the discussion around it being completely and utterly forbidden for teddy bears to be given the same name as Prophets is somewhat misinformed. There is a reason, for example, why we haven’t seen the hordes calling for the people selling Adam the Muslim Prayer Bear or Adam’s World to be decapitated.

A picture of the "Adam the Muslim Prayer Bear" as sold on SimplyIslam.com is shown below.

"Everthing is Beautiful" until it morphs into a "Bird Killer" Part 2

The Guardian carries this feed from Reuters, emphasis mine:

LONDON, Nov 29 (Reuters) - One in five carbon credits issued by the United Nations are going to support clean energy projects that may in fact have helped to increase greenhouse gas emissions, environmental group WWF said on Thursday. The United Nations runs a scheme under the Kyoto Protocol that allows rich nations to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries and in return receive certified emissions reduction credits (CERs) to offset their own emissions. But WWF said in a report that the credits are being delivered to projects that would have gone ahead anyway, even without the extra incentive provided by U.N. approval under the scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). ...

It said the problem damages the global carbon market, which is expected to more than double in value to around $70 billion this year.

This is a variant of the problem discussed earlier here.

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Wikipedia explains how the "Clean Development Mechanism" is supposed to work:

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment (called Annex 1 countries) to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries. The most important factor of a carbon project is that it establishes that it would not have occurred without the additional incentive provided by emission reductions credits.

As the CDM is an alternative to domestic emission reductions, the perfectly working CDM would produce no more and no less greenhouse gas emission reductions than without use of the CDM. However, it was recognized from the beginning that if projects that would have happened anyway are registered as CDM projects, then the net effect is an increase of global emissions as those "spurious" credits will be used to allow higher domestic emissions without reducing emissions in the developing country hosting the CDM project. Similarly, spurious credits may be awarded through overstated baselines, causing the same problem. Such a rejection is termed a "false positive".

On the other hand, if a project is rejected because the criteria is set too high, there will be missed opportunities for emission reduction. Such a rejection is termed a "false negative". For example, if it costs $75 to remove just one tonne from a domestic power station in a developed country, while the same money would reduce 37.5 tonnes of emissions through a genuinely additional CDM project in China, it is important that the validation process does not become so bureaucratic or onerous as to dissuade the more effective option. Some observers report that the CDM process is producing far more of these false negatives than false positives.

NGOs have criticized the inclusion of large hydropower projects, which they consider unsustainable, as CDM projects. Other concerns are the lack of renewable energy CDM projects and the inclusion of sinks as CDM projects.

Negotiators have not yet been able to agree on whether, or how, carbon capture and storage projects should be allowed under the CDM. They are also discussing how to reduce as much Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) emissions as possible under the CDM without creating a perverse incentive to build more HCFC-22 production facilities just to get the revenues from selling CDM credits. If this were to happen, developing countries' obligations to stabilise (2016) and phase out (2040) HCFC-22 would be in jeopardy.

In one adroit move international bureaucrats and NGOs, persons who are accountable to one, not even to an electorate, have achieved vast power over economic activity in every country. Now people the world over are hearing about "fine tuning", "thresholds" and credits -- the whole vocabulary of regulation and bureaucracy -- and realize that it applies to them. All without having enacted any of those measures. The Kyoto Protcol operates in many ways like a Trojan virus, "a piece of software which appears to perform a certain action, but in fact, performs another", loaded up through a backdoor.

Rochester

The high drama of the moment is a hostage situation at Hillary Clinton's office in Rochester, NH. It's not clear whether all the hostages have been released nor even who the suspect is. Almost everyone is holding their breath to see whodunnit so that the conspiracy theories can begin.

Update: The suspect's name is apparently Leeland Eisenberg, AKA Lee Eisenberg of Sommersworth.

Nothing follows.

Reworking a Classic

Austin Bay sends word:

Jim Dunnigan and I are working on a fourth edition of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War. Today I re-worked the “Iran” chapter from the 1996 edition. In many ways I am surprised at how little has changed. Oh, there are big changes. US forces are now on the mullahs’ eastern and western borders (Afghanistan and Iraq). Yes, Iraq remains a threat to the mullahs, but not in the form of Saddam. It’s a threat because it is an emerging Arab democracy next door to the mullahs’ failing Iranian (Aryan) despotism.

Nothing follows.

War movies

Roger Simon tries to understand why antiwar movies have been doing so badly at the box office. Brian de Palma's Redacted recently grossed so little worldwide it has excited the pity of even amateur movie makers. The artistic failure, Simon believes, is rooted in the distance between the film-maker and the subject. They don't care about the great perils facing the world. They don't care about the history of war-torn regions. They don't care about the causes of the war itself except as a backdrop to make a political statements. The action of Redacted might be located in Iraq, but everyone knows it is really set in Vietnam. A curtain descends between the artist and his subect, a "curious distance, almost alienation" prevents an accurate portrayal of human dilemmas of war. When the primary goal of the cinematic narrative is to portray the United States as Nazi Germany and Bush as Hitler, a cartoon without humor becomes the inevitable result.

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What enables a war movie to stand the test of time and achieve critical and commercial success is that it should be first of all about the War. And achieving that is harder than it seems. Very few of the hundreds of war films produced between 1941 and 1945 were really about the war. Beyond scenes of Hellcats taking off and landing from aircraft carriers, or actors pretending to be soldiers in some recently reported battle, many were nothing but soap operas or B-movie thrillers in exotic settings.

It's not surprising that one of those few movies that was actually about the Second World War emerged as the war movie per excellence. Casablanca had no combat footage whatsoever and was set almost entirely inside a saloon. But because it explored the great issues of a civilization torn between barbarism and freedom and the dilemmas of people caught in its tides it became, by popular acclaim, the greatest war movie of the 20th century.

Every line in the script was devoted to the War and its effect on the fugitives trapped in Rick's Cafe. It was about "small people whose troubles didn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world"; about trying to be a man when you didn't have a country ("It says here you're a drunk. Oh? Then I'm a citizen of the world"). It was about salvaging a last memory before plunging into the abyss ("you've brought back Paris"). It was about great issues, the ones than endured. And therefore Casablanca has remained true, as propaganda never could, even as time went by.

Since September 11, 2001 only one film has come remotely close to being the Casablanca of the war on terror: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is not as surprising as it might seem. JRR Tolkien was a combat veteran of the Great War; of the Somme in fact, and John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War carefully argues that Middle Earth was the canvas upon which he projected all the experiences that the Great War had imprisoned within him. John Cofeld, reviewing Garth's book at Amazon wrote:

The heart of this book deals with the influence of the War on Tolkien's writings on Middle earth. I will never be able to read of the Fall of Gondolin again without thinking of the Somme, and never think of Eressea without remembering Tolkien returning home on a hospital ship to see the green hills of England once more.

It's the themes that speaks to us. And it should not have been surprising to hear, in Peter Jackson's film, echoes of so many of the lines that I learned by heart in the endless screenings of Casablanca at the Brattle Street theater in Harvard Square. Here are Humphrey Bogart and Sean Astin delivering essentially the same lines.

Brand A and Brand B

How well would a country with no almost no accountability to the public, able to apply unrestricted amounts of brutality and firepower and unconstrained by legal or humanitarian rights fare against a Jihadi foe? While those who believe that President Bush actually is Hitler may think the foregoing is a reference to the US campaign in Iraq, it is more accurately a reference to the Russian campaign in Chechnya.

The Russian campaign in Chechnya is interesting as a control case to Iraq not only because it lets the historian examine a counterinsurgency waged without American political constraints but also provides a real-world benchmark for what constitutes a truly brutal campaign as opposed to one only imagined that way by Hollywood directors like Brian de Palma. The Chechen campaign provides an an actual example of a counterinsurgency waged by an ex-socialist country compared to the actions of what has been described as a bestial colonial power, the United States of America. It's a contemporaneous side-by-side comparison by two different systems waged against a similar foe. And how have the two fared?

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An unpublished paper presented at the American Political Science Association by AM Lopez has this succinct judgment.

This paper is a preliminary look at the similarities and differences of the insurgencies in Iraq and Chechnay and at the similarities and differences of American and Russian counterinsurgency efforts respectively. It argues that the Russians have some inherent advantages in Chechnya--smaller country in terms of both terrain and population, greater will to fight the war--than the Americans in Iraq. However, Russian counterinsurgency policy, and in particular the over-reliance on force and failure to include Chechens in the local politics, has increased the likelihood of long-term failure. In Iraq, while the Americans have not conducted themselves flawlessly, their more measured use of force and incorporation of a wider swath of Iraqi society into the political scene increases the likelihood of long-term success. The danger for the Americans, however, is in the short-term.

In plain language, the US appears to be doing better than the Russians, despite the ability of the Russians to be significantly more violent and brutal. The Jamestown Foundation has a detailed evaluation of the Russian position in Chechnya prepared on Oct 18, 2007. It basically concludes that the Russians have not succeeded at any of the goals they have set for themselves.

Yakov Nedobitko’s [ the commander of the Russian Joint Military Group in Chechnya] comments imply that the Russian authorities have not yet achieved any of their key goals, which include:

1) Shifting the responsibility for maintaining the stability in the republic from federal bodies to local authorities;

2) Withdrawing most of the troops from the republic, leaving in Chechnya only one division and one brigade that will be stationed there permanently in large garrison camps;

3) Destroying the centralized command structure of the Chechen and Caucasian rebels;

4) Disbanding or at least reducing commandant offices of the Russian armed forces in the republic.

Of particular interest are the factors that did not help the Russians in their campaign. "Neither knowledge of the local language, nor the knowledge of the terrain and the other advantages cited by Nedobitko, helped the units to defeat the guerillas who are hiding in the mountains."

Although it is fashionable in certain "sophisticated" circles to deride it, one of the key American success factors in Iraq may be the policy to "bring freedom" -- political empowerment -- to the Middle East. Rather than being a naive emotion at odds with "adult" foreign policy, the idea of politically empowering a population may actually have great practical value. This is not to say that the Russian campaign in Chechnya has been without result, but a straighforward comparison between the two campaigns against a Jihadi foe shows that the American campaign has been surprisingly effective.

It's interesting to note that at the very moment that al-Qaeda seems have been defeated in Iraq it appears to be augmenting its presence in Chechnya. Bill Roggio reports today that "Doku Umarov, one of the last remaining original leaders of the Chechen rebellion and a close associate of al Qaeda, has declared an Islamic emirate in the greater Caucasus region."

The setbacks of the Russian campaign stand in some irony to the persistent left-wing criticism of the American strategy in Iraq. If the former Soviet Union and its successor state in Russia are at all representative of how the left wing would fight a counterinsurency it suggests that not only would they be more brutal but they would also be far less successful.

The edge of the known

Will serious scholars always require libraries and books or will they one day be supplanted by online documents? The World Wide Web is the closest thing in history to a universal mind dump, a download of the sum total of our knowledge. But can we ever map its extent? Or will our knowledge always grow faster than our ability to catalogue it?

The Library of Congress, which is larger than the New York Public Libary, contains about 11 terabytes of information. That’s a huge amount of information. Yet it is dwarfed by the amount of information already accessible online through search engines, about 167 terabytes. This is about fifteen times as much as the Library of Congress, a figure which even Grafton admits is impressive. But the information available through search engines like Google in turn shrinks to a literal dot compared to the material for which no ready directory exists: the so-called Deep Web. Deep Web is that part of the Internet for which there is no street map. The University of California in Berkeley estimates the Deep Web to be 91,000 terabytes in size — 545 times larger than all the material indexed by search engines and 8,150 times larger than the holdings of the Library of Congress.

Read the rest of my article at Pajamas Media. Nothing follows.

"Anti-fascist" Students Storm Oxford Union Debate, Riot

The debate at the Oxford Union between BNP leader Nick Griffin and anti-Holocaust historian David Irving did not push through as planned, although the speakers were allowed to continue in guarded rooms.

Scuffles broke out as anti-fascist groups yelled "Shame on you" at members filing into the union building, and the police shut the gates with the chamber only half full. While a handful of students crushed against the main gate to create a diversion, others scaled the wall and barged past the tight security, occupying the area around the debating table until they were hauled out by guards. ...

Access to the meeting itself, entitled The Free Speech Forum, was restricted to about 450 Oxford Union members. It went ahead after students voted in a ballot by 2-1 not to cancel, despite pressure from MPs, and from Jewish and Muslim societies, who combined with Unite Against Fascism to organise last night's protest. About half of those with tickets found their way barred after demonstrators barricaded the entrances.

Well since the Nick Griffin and David Irving debate didn't work out so well, let's run our own face-off here on a different topic. The subject of Free Speech. Posters please indicate whether you are for the affirmative or the negative. Proposition: some persons and ideas are so reprehensible that even a society which espouses "free speech" cannot allow them expression. Take your sides, let the debate begin.

Nothing follows.

Nor help for pain

The AP has this story up:

RENO, Nev. - Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, an underdog Texas congressman with a libertarian streak, has picked up an endorsement from a Nevada brothel owner.

Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite BunnyRanch near Carson City, said he was so impressed after hearing Paul at a campaign stop in Reno last week that he decided to raise money for him.

I'll get all the (working girls) together, and we can raise him some money," Hof told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "I'll put up a collection box outside the door. They can drop in $1, $5 contributions."

Ever since the days of the Alhambra Saloon and the frontier Comique (pronounced komik-kyoo) theater, certain venues have always been the scene of political discussion and deal-making. In a world of limited government, there's got to be some bad to go along with the good. The Jawa Report and Hot Air have commentary.

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Patrick Ruffini tries, in his own words, "to square the circle" of libertarianism and judge the Ron Paul phenomenon.

Some campaigns can win big without ever coming close to winning an actual contest. Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians. This is not a counterweight to the religious right per se, since Paul is identified as pro-life, but it does potentially open up a new army of activists on the right not primarily motivated by social/moral issues. ...

As someone who routinely called myself a libertarian prior to 9/11, here’s how I would square the circle: Absolute freedom within our borders, for our own citizens; eternal vigilance and (when necessary) ruthlessness abroad. For libertarian ideals to survive, they must be relentlessly defended against the likes of Islamic extremists. Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s writing right after 9/11 to see this ideal in its purest form; far from a religious crusade, ours was a war for secularism, tolerance, and free societies where gays don’t get stoned to death.

The key principle is one of reciprocity. If you behave peacefully and embrace the norms of a libertarian society, we leave you alone. If you seek to destroy a free society, we will destroy you.

Yet somehow I think there'll always be a contradiction between "absolute freedom" and "behaving peacefully". You can have as much freedom as you can stand, provided, like Wyatt Earp you are willing to keep intrusive noses out of your business. But it comes at the cost of being able to slam the shot glass down and meet the stare across the bar. There's no free lunch nor life without taint either in taking Norman Hsu's millions or opening the collection box at the Moonlite BunnyRanch.

for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Terry and the Pirates

If men who build IEDs out of cell-phone parts, explosive and Radio-shack components are called referred to as "Minutemen" and "patriots" by the some journalists what would you call people trying to build protective devices from century-old technology? Besides "mercenaries"? The Virginian-Pilot describes a something a little unusual over the skies of North Carolina.

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For nearly two years, Blackwater has been developing an airship to tap a growing government demand for aerial surveillance and security - from patrolling U.S. borders and coastal waters to guarding military bases in hostile lands.

Earlier this month, its efforts finally got off the ground.

Officials with Blackwater Airships, a business unit of the Moyock-based tactical training and security company, say they successfully field-tested a 170-foot prototype on the grounds of a former Navy air station here.

Called the Polar 400, the non rigid blimp is designed to be unmanned and remotely controlled from a ground station. It would carry aloft such payloads as intelligence-gathering cameras, radar, communications gear and infrared sensors.

Blackwater! Well it's got to be bad. But why exactly? The article continues:

The increasing dollars have drawn plenty of companies to the market, including defense and aerospace giants Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Lockheed Martin and SAIC both are working on unmanned airship projects.

"Blackwater is attempting to enter a crowded market, and it would seem to me that they're going to have to have a pretty good story to tell - and maybe they do," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria-based group that monitors military and homeland security issues. "Companies like Blackwater are not going to have Iraq forever," Pike said. "They would have to be looking around to figure out other brand extensions they can develop that are relevant to their existing customer base."

Maybe this is the reason why Blackwater-built blimps are so much worse than those built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

Back in World War 2 private participation in the war effort was commonplace. For example, the Singer Sewing Machine factory made items ranging from .45 caliber pistols to B-29 fire control computers and turret castings. Why, Singer products might well have flown on raids over Tokyo! Politics is interesting because it makes things good or bad depending not on the things themselves, but on a point of view.

Making ends meet

Politicians the world over like to kiss babies. That's the trouble.

Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month. Investigators from Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father.

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They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto's vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi.

"At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant," investigators were reported as saying. "But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir's vehicle."

Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.

Now here's the rest of the story. After the infant story the remainder of the tale reads like a non-sequitur or a chapter from a totally different book. But it's the same book; in fact, from the same chapter.

Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf rushed to Riyadh for crisis talks with his Saudi royal family benefactors yesterday as his emergency rule came under threat from caretaker officials ordering the release of thousands of detained political workers and lawyers.

The officials, appointed to run the country's national and provincial governments ahead of elections scheduled for January 8, were expected to do no more than maintain the status quo until the poll.

But last night, led by interim prime minister Mohammedmian Soomro, their first action involved ordering the immediate release of thousands detained in the security crackdown that followed the declaration of the state of emergency on November 3.

In an interview, Mr Soomro said he had issued instructions to release "recently arrested" political leaders and workers, lawyers and journalists and that the process was under way. He insisted "the elections will be the most transparent and fairest in the country's history".

Counterinsurgency in Pakistan -- and maybe in Iraq as well among other countries -- may consist in making deals with some bad guys in order to fight the badder guys. Maybe diplomats should quit reading Foreign Affairs and start surfing Gangwar.com or peruse Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, from the Army Stratgic Studies Instute. Recently the BBC ran a breathless article entitled "Boston Miracle inspires UK's gang fight". Look closely at what strategy the police employed to cut down gang violence in the Hub.

Scotland Yard's latest initiative to deal with youth gun crime is modelled on a successful gang-busting initiative in the US.

Within two years of implementing Operation Ceasefire in 1995, Boston had reclaimed the streets from the gangs. The Boston Miracle, as it is known, reduced violent crime by about 50% in two years. ...

Launched in 1996, Operation Ceasefire was a city-wide strategy aimed at deterring youth and gang firearm violence.

Gang members were invited to meetings with police and church leaders where they were told things had to change. Those who chose to change their ways were offered jobs, counselling and other forms of support to get their life back on track.

Those who ignored the tough new stance were threatened with longer, harsher sentences in federal prisons. And it was no empty threat. Gang member Freddy Cordoza received more than 19 years in jail for possessing a single bullet.

As I've written elsewhere the process of "reconciliation" doesn't mean mindlessly making nice to everybody -- as some well-meaning persons seem to think -- it means making nice "on average". But the process is also accompanied by an increase in the contrast in treatment between two populations; being a lot nicer to the cooperative and the innocent but also being a lot tougher on the bad guys. While the average "niceness" improves greatly, the distribution of niceness is altered drastically as well. The Boston police were essentially running a "divide and conquer" operation on the street gang scene so that they could isolate and destroy the hardest core enemies. The logic behind the maxim "no better friend, no worse enemy" is that ultimately there can be only dominant coalition in society.

I wonder how many promoters of "reconciliation" believe the "healing process" actually consists of destroying the contrast between the innocent and the guilty; treating people who wire up their infant children as bombs in the same way as legitimate oppositionists to Musharraf. Finding the man who tried to bring a baby-bomb to Benazir Bhutto belongs in the same chapter as releasing oppositionists. But as in a real book the the fate of the chapter characters must vary. Knowing who to release, who to make nice to and who to hunt down is essential. That's why good intelligence is the key enabler of successful counterinsurgency.

"The Worst Form of Government -- Except For All the Others"

The Washington Post tells what may be a typical story of a "bundler" of political cash for candidates who comes up with the quid. But what is pro quo?

During the first nine months of this year, Sen. Barack Obama raised just $2,086 for his presidential campaign from people who live in and around this border town of stucco bungalows and weed-covered farm lots, and most candidates raised even less. But Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has already raised more than $640,000 here, and her campaign expects to collect even more.

Clinton's success in this unlikely setting is based almost entirely on her friendship with one man, McAllen developer Alonzo Cantu. A self-made millionaire who once picked grapes on the migratory farm labor circuit, Cantu persuaded more than 300 people in Hidalgo County, where the median household income in 2006 was $28,660, to write checks ranging from $500 to $2,300 to the senator from New York.

Alonzo Cantu explained the purpose of his fundraising.

"Money and votes. I think we've shown we can raise money. That will get us attention, or at least get us a seat at the table, get us in the room." ...

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So far, so good. Why else do people raise money for politics on both sides of the aisle except to get themselves into the room? But the Washington Post article hints the proceedings have an air of calculation about them. "The last thing you want to do is get on Alonzo's bad side," he said with a smile. Reyna donated $1,000 to Clinton. "Understand, I don't want anything," Cantu said. "Just to help South Texas."

And I guess he's a resident of South Texas too. One who realizes that a border fence is bad for busines, in particular for a hospital he's helped build.

Lately, Cantu has been pushing his contacts for help in bringing an interstate highway to McAllen. He has told them about local opposition to the Bush administration's plan to build a border wall along the Rio Grande. And he has asked lawmakers, including Clinton, to block legislation that many believe could hobble the hospital Cantu built in town. This was a driving concern among many of the doctors and other McAllen area medical professionals who wrote more than $145,000 in checks to Clinton.

Now it's natural to understand why the Senator from New York, whose main concern is health care, might fight to keep a hospital from closing due to lack of business caused by a border wall. But not everyone is convinced the hospital is entirely desirable.

The only problem with the hospital was its ownership model, which gave doctors 80 percent of the stock. That sounded alarms in Congress, which had taken steps in the past to put restrictions on doctor-owned medical facilities out of fears that if doctors share in the cash flow they generate, they will be tempted to conduct unnecessary procedures.

"It's just a channel through which they get kickbacks," said Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), who inserted language into a larger bill that would force doctor-owned hospitals, such as McAllen's, to restructure. The bill recently passed in the House and awaits action in the Senate. ...

A campaign spokesman said Clinton has not followed the legislation or sought to influence its outcome. "Mr. Cantu is a friend and a longtime supporter of Democratic causes," Phil Singer said when asked about Cantu's relationship with the senator. ...

A longtime local surgeon who left the hospital said Cantu and the other hospital board members referred to the political contributions as "protection money."

"They said, 'We've got to give this money to Hillary so we can be exempt from the bill,' " said the surgeon, who asked that his name not be used.

Horse trading is defined as "negotiation accompanied by mutual concessions and shrewd bargaining". Politics, whether one likes it or not, is the art of trading something for something; only pacifists and chumps trade something for nothing. Maybe it's a mistake to think about the border fence with Mexico as a legal problem with national security overtones. Maybe it's a business problem that won't be settled on the border so much as on the bundling of contributions and votes. So, does the hospital get affected? Does the border fence get built?

The Circus Comes to Town

Mark Steyn peeks under what he calls the Big Tent.

If I could just sneak out in the middle of the night and saw off Rudy Giuliani's strong right arm and John McCain's ramrod back and Mitt Romney's fabulous hair and stitch them all together in Baron von Frankenstein's laboratory with the help of some neck bolts, we'd have the perfect Republican nominee. As it is, the present field poses difficulties for almost every faction of the GOP base. ...

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as National Review's Jonah Goldberg pointed out, the mainstream media are always demanding the GOP demonstrate its commitment to "big tent" Republicanism, and here we are with the biggest of big tents in history, and what credit do they get? You want an anti-war Republican? A pro-abortion Republican? An anti-gun Republican? A pro-illegal immigration Republican? You got 'em! Short of drafting Fidel Castro and Mullah Omar, it's hard to see how the tent could get much bigger. As the new GOP bumper sticker says, "Celebrate Diversity."

Over on the Democratic side, meanwhile, they've got a woman, a black, a Hispanic, a preening metrosexual with an angled nape – and they all think exactly the same. They remind me of "The Johnny Mathis Christmas Album," which Columbia used to re-release every year in a different sleeve: same old songs, new cover. When your ideas are identical, there's not a lot to argue about except biography. Last week, asked about his experience in foreign relations, Barack Obama noted that his father was Kenyan, and he'd been at grade school in Indonesia. "Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations," he said, "is the fact I spent four years overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia." When it comes to foreign relations, he has more of them on his Christmas card list than Hillary or Haircut Boy.

So who's got the advantage, the lone Jedi Masters or the Clone Troopers? Steyn knows who he prefers. But that's not quite the relevant answer.

Let me ask a question of my Democrat friends: What does John Edwards really believe on Iraq? I mean, really? To pose the question is to answer it: There's no there there. In the Dem debates, the only fellow who knows what he believes and says it out loud is Dennis Kucinich. Otherwise, all is pandering and calculation. The Democratic Party could use some seriously fresh thinking on any number of issues – abortion, entitlements, racial preferences – but the base doesn't want to hear, and no viable candidate is man enough (even Hillary) to stick it to 'em. I disagree profoundly with McCain and Giuliani, but there's something admirable about watching them run in explicit opposition to significant chunks of their base and standing their ground. Their message is: This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

"This is who I am. Take it or leave it." Maybe, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" works better.

"Everthing is Beautiful" until it morphs into a "Bird Killer"

Something has been forgotten in the design of environmentally friendly buildings. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes what:

It is one of Emory University's most environmentally friendly buildings, a hallmark of the institution's efforts to "go green." To hear John Wegner describe it, it's also a slaughterhouse. ...

"The building killed 60 birds in the first year," said Wegner, Emory's chief environmental officer. "It was the wall of death." ... Magnolia warblers, Swainson's thrushes, ovenbirds — no species was safe.

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Now Emory drapes parts of the $40 million building with black mesh netting for about three months each fall, and migrating birds bounce off safely. ...

Turns out, environmentally friendly buildings are often bird killers. Ornithologist Daniel Klem, a professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania who has studied the problem for decades, said between 100 million and 1 billion birds die in the United States each year in collisions with glass.

Buildings that earn LEED certifications, the brass ring of environmentally sustainable construction, are often largely glass. Klem said few architects take their feathered friends into account. They are an unintended consequence of light-filled structures.

What else has been forgotten? Well nothing that we can think of right now. Michael Crichton, discussing modern man's attempt to keep nature in some imagined pristine state argues that if environmentalists want to keep things "just so" then they are going to have to keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting the natural world without end. Because it won't stay still.

The natural system of inherently chaotic, major disruption is the rule not the exception, and if we are to manage the system we are going to have to be actively involved. ... We now know that nature has never been untouched.

The first white visitors to the New World didn’t understand what they were looking at. In California, Indians burned old growth forest with such regularity that there is more old growth today than there was in 1850. Yellowstone was a beauty spot precisely because the Indians hunted the elk and moose to the edge of extinction. When they were prevented from hunting in their traditional grounds, Yellowstone began its complex decline.

We now have research to help us formulate strategies for management of complex systems. But I am not sure we have organizations capable of making these changes. I would also remind you that to properly manage what we call wilderness is going to be stupefyingly expensive. Good wilderness is expensive!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution assures us that all those environmentally-friendly bird killing buildings across the country can be easily fixed -- for a price.

At Klem's urging, Swarthmore College installed "fritted" window panes in a $71 million science building. Small dots make the glass look frosted so birds won't be confused.

And just this year, Toronto adopted new bird-friendly guidelines designed to save the lives of more than 10 million migratory birds, including building with nonreflective glass and redesigning ventilation grates and placing internal greenery away from windows.

But Klem said these are small steps for such a massive problem. Glass companies and the construction companies have to get involved, he said. "We know what it takes to fix it," he said. "The question is how willing is the industry?"

The key question buried in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article is "how does the glass window market react to new information that 'environmentally friendly' buildings kill birds"? Presumably the "environmentally friendly" buildings are now producing a hitherto unrecognized pollutant that needs to be internalized into their cost curve, or at least into those producing glass windows. Then the market create an incentive to convert to pebbled or frosted glass.

One of the least appreciated mechanisms for dealing with externalities is the market. But activists have declared that in the matter of carbon, the market doesn't work well enough. Kyoto is an attempt to impose a penalty, which can be traded in emissions markets, to "fix" the fact that "greenhouse gases" are not part of the private cost curve. But how if the measures adopted to comply with Kyoto themselves created externalities? Would the UN periodically update the regulatory regime? Will it keep "fixing" the markets? And what of the cost of regulation and compliance, because it is certainly not free.

Ultimately much will depend on whether the science is good. Imagine that we were all investing in a project which would return a supposed benefit. In this case the project is "carbon stabilization" which is presumed to have a value. We don't know the optimum levels of greenhouse gases. We don't even know with any certainty whether they matter to the real objective function: human welfare. We can't even agree on a common objective function, whether it is optimizing human welfare or Gaia or whatever.

But the point is that we expect a return on all the effort being poured into Kyoto and are being charged for the investment. But what if it's a dry hole? What if there's no return? What happens if in fact we have to pay for fixing the damage we did with Kyoto because we didn't care about the science since the "precautionary principle" took care of everything? What then?

'The market will fix it'. Yes, but we've fixed the market because it wasn't working to our satisfaction. Kyoto has the potential to be greatest single boondoggle since Charles Ponzi began his illustrious career. That's not to say it won't benefit mankind. But then, how would we measure that benefit? Oh, I forgot: the precautionary principle renders that question unnecessary.

Baghdad blast kills at least 13

The LA Times reports:

A bomb hidden in a box filled with birds exploded among shoppers strolling through a colorful pet bazaar Friday, killing up to 15 people, wounding dozens and raising fears that a stretch of relative calm in Iraq's capital has ended.

The enemy always gets his say in war. They're trying to recover, the only way terrorists know how.

Nothing follows.

Howard loses; Kevin Rudd the new Prime Minister

John Howard has lost his last political battle. The trend in the polls shows that Kevin Rudd will be the new Australian PM. Andrew Bolt who is a conservative Australian blogger, calls its for Rudd. We have the moment the election seemed decided memorialized at Tim Blair's. Howard has now has called Rudd and conceded.

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Here's how the Australian political system functions, courtesy of one of Tim Blair's commenters, who explains things in a lucid fashion.

Some of the basics: We have a house of Reps, and a Senate, similar to the US model.

The leader of the party that has the majority in the Reps becomes Prime Minister and leads the administration.

The two main parties are the ALP, Australian Labor Party, similar to the AFL-CIO faction of the US Democrats, and the Liberal/National coalition, similar to the right wing faction of the US Democrats. The Greens are increasingly a 3rd force, and there are usually one or two independants, often the equivalent of the US Republicans.

Voting is compulsory, and always on a weekend.

The real difference is the preferential voting, where candidates are numbered in order of preference.

This means that I can vote for the two senate candidates of the Liberty and Democracy party as 1 and 2, knowing they haven’t got a hope, then 3 and 4 for the Liberals, and not have my vote wasted.

Parties recommend that preferences flow certain ways based on pre-election deals - “we put you number 2, and you return the favour” basically.

So if 3 out of 4 Greens preferences go to the ALP, the Greens get 80 votes, the ALP 300, the Libs 320, final result after “distribution of preferences” is ALP 300+60, Libs 320+20, giving victory to the ALP on preferences.

With all the complication of the vote counting, it can take a while for the final result to be known. Fortunately, we have some really, really good counting programs, it’s the data entry and checking that takes the time.

What this likely means for US-Australian relations is described in an anticipatory article by Peter Day at Pajamas Media. The mood among the Labor supporters pretty much resembles that of Pelosi's supporters after their Congressional win.

In the end, Howard's loss probably has to be put down to hubris. His margin over Labor and the Left was always much thinner than his oversized image seemed to indicate. His image was so oversized, in fact, that it probably kept a new generation of leaders from rising within his party. On the other hand, Labor ran through a succession of losers until they came to Rudd, who realized he had to run to the right of his predecessors. That cut away Howard's already thin cushion. I guess he thought the old magic would pull him through. But tonight, the magic deserted him. Howard will probably lose even his own seat of Bennelong to a celebrity Labor candidate.

Most readers can probably make a fair guess of what might happen next. The chances are we'll be looking at Kevin Rudd reprising Nancy Pelosi. The end of the Howard era may be a good thing in the end. Labor will ultimately provide the energy for its own downfall, as the Liberals (Howard's party) did theirs.

I've learned over time not to get too disappointed about anything. Looking back, I can remember the long fight against Marcos. So long it seemed it would never end. Most of us can still recall how dim things seemed only a few months ago, not only looking toward Iraq but pretty much everywhere. But that was then; and this is now.

So in a little bit I'm going to go and swill down a beer and think of old times. The guys who missed dodging that last raindrop. The day no one got off the bus. And as for old John Howard, well, he had a good run.

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.

How an ex-Sunni Insurgent Became a US Ally

He [Abul Abed] hailed the car carrying the feared leader of Al Qaeda in the neighborhood, a man known as the White Lion, on one of Amariyah's main streets. "We want you to stop destroying our neighborhood," he told the man.

"Do you know who you are talking to?" said the White Lion, getting out of his car. "I am Al Qaeda. I will destroy even your own houses!"

He pulled out his pistol and shot at Abul Abed. The gun jammed. He reloaded and fired again. Again, the gun jammed.

By this time, Abul Abed said, he had pulled his own gun. He fired once, killing the White Lion. ...

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The next day, a firefight erupted. Al Qaeda fighters closed in on Abul Abed. Most of the 150 men who had joined him fled. Holed up in a mosque with fewer than a dozen supporters, Abul Abed thought the end was near. "The blue carpet was soaked red with blood," he recalled. Then the imam of the mosque called in American help.

Read the whole thing.

Lebanese President Lahoud Steps Down Without Successor

Lebanon's pro-Syrian President, Emile Lahoud, stepped down without naming successor. Gateway Pundit has a roundup of developments. The BBC reports:

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The term of Lebanon's president has ended with no elected successor and a bitter dispute over who is in power. Before pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud left the presidential palace at midnight (2200 GMT) he issued an order that the army should take over control. ...

The US has urged all parties to remain calm and said that under the constitution the Lebanese cabinet should "temporarily assume executive powers and responsibilities until a new president is elected". ...

The tension was palpable on the streets as the crisis over electing the president came to a head, with the army deployed in force and schools closed.

The AP adds that the State Department has issued the necessary warnings to its personnel:

"The U.S. Embassy urges U.S. citizens who live, work or are traveling in Lebanon to exercise responsible security practices." The embassy began restricting the movements of U.S. diplomats in Lebanon on Nov. 20, limiting their travel in downtown Beirut near the parliament building and other government offices and banned all but essential travel to Beirut International Airport until Monday.

Apparently, one of the drivers of this Lebanese domestic political standoff is being a struggle between outside powers over the control of the Lebanese government. The AP article continues:

The anti-Syria camp has sought to capture the presidency to seal the end of Syria dominance of Lebanon, which lasted for 29 years until international pressure and mass protests forced Damascus to withdraw Syrian troops in 2005. Hezbollah, which is an ally of Syria and Iran, and its opposition allies have been able to stymie the government's hopes by boycotting parliament, as they did Friday afternoon when the majority tried to convene a session to vote before Lahoud left office.

Anthony Shadid at the Washington Post has commentary.

This round of Lebanon's crisis is ostensibly over parliament's choice of a successor to Lahoud. But its roots go far deeper. On one side is a coalition around the American-backed government that claims legitimacy from a series of demonstrations that culminated March 14, 2005, and led to the end of Syria's 29-year military presence in the country. On the other is an alliance between Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group supported by Iran and Syria, and Christian followers of Michel Aoun, a former general.

Unlike Lebanon's civil war, often characterized as a Christian-Muslim conflict, this crisis has mobilized the country's Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities against each other, with Christians divided between the two camps.

The Real Surge

DJ Elliot at Long War Journal describes the arrival of what he calls "the Real Surge". Not the 30,000 US troop reinforcement that is normally associated with the word, but the arrival of the 13-division Iraqi Army.

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While the "surge" of five US brigades plus their accompanying support elements, about 30,000 US troops total, is the main focus of commentators when discussing the current situation in Iraq, the real surge in Iraq is happening behind the scenes. The rapidly expanding Iraqi Army is where the real surge in forces is occurring. ...

By the time the US plans to reduce its combat forces to pre-surge levels (July 2008), the real surge is planned to have increased the Iraqi Army to 13 divisions, 49 brigades, 154 battalions, and five or six ISOF [Iraqi Special Operations Force (ISOF)] battalions.

The US is considering plans to draw down to 10 combat brigades by early 2009. The Iraqi Army plans to continue growing to 13 divisions, 52 brigades, 162 battalions, and seven or eight ISOF battalions.

Inside this Iraqi Surge is an "exit plan". But it's not an exit plan that everyone -- especially the antiwar Left -- will like, because it has the potential to wind up an offensive spring. The arrival of substantial Iraqi forces will free up a lot of US maneuver brigades for employment elsewhere. Earlier proposals to withdraw US forces to Kurdistan, Kuwait or most ludicrously, to Okinawa and ceding Iraq to the Sunni rebels and Sunni militias were really attempts to dress up a unilateral surrender as a redeployment. A withdrawal following on a defeat in Iraq would never have freed up forces for Afghanistan or other places to because they would have been pinned in place to guard against a rapidly destabilized Middle East.

The Real Surge DJ Elliott describes is really a relief in place of US Forces by a newly generated Iraqi Army. The difference between a relief in place and a rout disguised as a redeployment is very significant.

In the latter case, a redeployment in defeat would have put US forces on the defensive for the forseeable future. A relief in place by new forces is really also another term for a strategic reinforcement. The danger which the antiwar Left will rightly see in the Real Surge is that it contains the kernel of offensive action. That's not to say that any kind of military action against Iran or Syria is contemplated or even wise. There may be no intent. But it is fair to say that a Real Surge will create the capability to do more things than would be possible in the aftermath of a pell-mell retreat.

Even if the US never takes any military action against Iran the creation of a new and modern Iraqi Army, well supplied with artillery and logistics (as appears to be the case) will create a threat in being for the Ayatollahs. From a situation in which the Teheran could contemplate virtually annexing southern Iraq (as would have occurred if the US had admitted defeat in early 2007 and left) the Ayatolahs now face the prospect of having to maintain large permanent standing forces on their border with Iraq. Nor is this all. If most US ground forces are freed up by the Real Surge the Iranians will suddenly face the prospect of dangerous mobile US reserve. All in all it would be a nightmarish burden for Teheran to shoulder.

Does this mean war in the Middle East? Ironically the Real Surge may actually reduce the prospect of war considerably, while at the same time improving the prospects for the peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem. While it is possible that Iran, watching its window of opportunity closing, may become suddenly reckless and launch an all-out attack to destabilize Iraq, it is probably too late for banzai measures. The odds are that Iran has been strategically beaten, first by the American Surge and worse, by the follow-on Iraqi resurgence.

The intolerable burden of maintaining a war-footing against the new Iraq, guarding against possible American action, Western sanctions and the need to refurbish its collapsing oil industry while maintaining a nuclear program may collapse the theocrats in Teheran in the same way it did the old Soviet Union.

That might be a good thing. For Iran, Iraq, America and the whole world.

Coyotes and Cats

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff chasing Roadrunner but doesn't look down, will he fall?

Today two cosmologists from respectable American universities claimed that man may be significantly shortening the life of the universe by observing Dark Matter as a consequence of an effect predicted by a thought experiment involving a cat -- Schrödinger's cat.

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Schrödinger's cat is an imaginary experiment — a thought experiment — devised by Erwin Schrödinger, which is often described as a paradox. It attempts to illustrate what he saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics when it is applied to systems large enough to be seen with the naked eye, and not just to atomic or subatomic systems.

It is accepted that a subatomic particle can exist in a superposition of states, a combination of possible states. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the superposition only settles into a definite state upon observation. This is known as collapse or measurement.

Which would seem to suggest that in the subatomic world, an event only becomes definite when it is observed. Wile E. Coyote only starts to fall when he looks down. There is lively debate over the "meaning" of certain aspects of quantum theory. Two scientists, Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and James Dent of Vanderbilt University seem to applying the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory to the consequences of measuring dark matter.

"The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."

It is widely believed that large objects do not exist in a state of superposition and so why the measurement of Dark Matter have any perceptible effect on the lifespan of the universe is an obvious question to raise. Einstein in considering the question asked himself if the moon only existed when he looked at it. But the respectability of the institutions with which the two professors are associated probably guarantees they have already considered these objections and still believe there is a legitimate concern. I leave it to the readers to consider this interesting topic on the day after Thanksgiving as an entertaining alternative to the problem of concocting recipes for leftovers. And while we are on the subject of Thanksgiving, have you considered the possibility that there may be many more in store for you in the world of Quantum Immortality?

In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment which was independently proposed in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal, and further developed by Max Tegmark in 1998, that attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat experiment. The experiment essentially involves looking at the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat. Quantum immortality is a metaphysical speculation derived from the quantum suicide thought experiment. It states that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that conscious beings are immortal.

A physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. If the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then the gun will eventually be triggered and the physicist will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into one world in which he lives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the physicist, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the physicist will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be immortal, at least from his own point of view.

Another example is where a physicist detonates a nuclear bomb beside himself. In almost all parallel universes, the nuclear explosion will vaporize the physicist. However, there should be a small set of alternative universes in which the physicist somehow survives (i.e. the set of universes which support a "miraculous" survival scenario). The idea behind quantum immortality is that the physicist will remain alive in, and thus remain able to experience, at least one of the universes in this set, even though these universes form a tiny subset of all possible universes. Over time the physicist would therefore never perceive his or her own death.

You Take the High Road, I'll Take the Low Road

Tigerhawk notices an article in the Washington Post.

More than 300,000 Shiite Muslims from southern Iraq have signed a petition condemning Iran for fomenting violence in Iraq, according to a group of sheiks leading the campaign.

Yes, you read that right.

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"The Iranians, in fact, have taken over all of south Iraq," said a senior tribal leader from the south who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life. "Their influence is everywhere."

The unusually organized Iraqi rebuke illustrates the divisions that Iran has provoked among Iraq's majority Shiites. The prime minister and major political blocs are closely tied to Iran, but the petition organizers said many citizens are fiercely opposed to Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs.

Does this signal the opening clash between the forces organized at the grassroots and those picked by Iranian influence peddlers in the backrooms? Is the Surge now shifting its emphasis from al-Qaeda to Teheran? What a reversal of roles between Iranian insurgents and MNF-Iraq.

The petition, which the organizers said was signed by 600 sheiks, calls on the United Nations to send a delegation to investigate what it termed crimes committed by Iran and its proxies in southern Iraq.

This is the kind of organizing strategy the Left, back when it supposedly championed this sort of thing, would have been proud to espouse. Too bad it left the job of fighting dictatorships to MNF-Iraq. Iraq has been a tragedy for the Left in a way that it has never been for conservatives. Never mind. MNF-Iraq is probably better at it anyway. "De Oppresso Liber".

Bill Roggio describes an incident which illustrates how seriously the terror cells fear the grassroots movements.

"Gunmen dressed in Iraqi army uniforms launched an attack on Howr Rajab, a Sunni village south of Baghdad, killing three soldiers and wounding three," the Associated Press reported. "They then commandeered a military vehicle and charged into the village where they assaulted the headquarters of the Howr Rajab Awakening Council, a local anti-Qaeda front, killing 10 of its members and wounding four."

The Howr Rajab Awakening teamed up with the Iraqi Army and repelled the attack. Upwards of 18 civilians were killed in the fighting. "Dozens of men wearing Iraqi army uniforms entered the area and opened fire randomly at people," an Awakening member told the Associated Press. "The Iraqi army intervened and along with Awakening members fought back. There were fierce clashes ... which are still ongoing." ...

Al Qaeda in Iraq also struck at the village of Al Kulaiyah in Diyala province. "Villagers from Shiite Al-Ambagiyah tribe defended themselves and in the ensuing clashes nine people were killed," AFP reported. "Seven fighters from Al-Qaeda and two from the Ambagiyah tribe were killed in the gun battle that lasted an hour," said police Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim Abdullah.

MNF-Iraq has been headhunting the al-Qaeda leadership in addition to the grassroots opposition.

As al Qaeda attempts to bring down the Awakening movements, US and Iraqi Security forces continue to target al Qaeda's leadership network nationwide. Over the past week, US and Iraqi forces killed or captured three senior leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq's network.

Maybe the Iranian "Special Groups" should start worrying too.

Dangerous Conversations

A driver was tased in Utah after asking cop why he was stopped. There's video at the source.

The video shows the Utah Highway Patrolman pull over Jared Massey and his pregnant wife who also had their baby with them in the car and ask for Mr Massey's license. ...

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A shocked Massey asks "what the hell is wrong with you?" and backs away, turning around as the officer had demanded, at which point the officer unleashes 50,000 volts from the Taser into Massey's body, sending him screaming to the ground instantly and causing his wife to jump out of the car and yell hysterically for help. ...

The icing on the cake comes at the end of the video when the officer lies to his own colleague about the encounter, clearly stating that he verbally warned Massey he was going to tase him, as is the law, when there was no warning whatsoever.

Mr Massey is planning to file a lawsuit against the Utah Highway Patrol. He says he was already slowing down as he approached the 40 mile per hour sign in the construction zone outside of vernal. All charges except for the speeding ticket have been dropped.

UN Greenhouse Confab To Overload Bali Airport With Private Jets

Instapundit has the details. Why am I not surprised? Here's the source article. Nice graphic too.

On the other hand, look at how "climate criminals" travel on the vacations or trips they have to save for. Look familiar?

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

In May this year according to the New York Times, shareholders of InfoUSA, sued the company's founder Vinod Gupta for using the company's money "to ingratiate himself" with high-profile guests. Those high-profile guests turned out to be Bill and Hillary Clinton.

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The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events....

In addition to the shareholder accusations, The New York Times reported last Sunday that an investigation by the authorities in Iowa found that infoUSA sold consumer data several years ago to telemarketing criminals who used it to steal money from elderly Americans. It advertised call lists with titles like “Elderly Opportunity Seekers” or “Suffering Seniors,” a compilation of people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. The company called the episodes an aberration and pledged that it would not happen again.

The incident has made its way back into the news courtesy of an informal SEC probe into whether company officers had used corporate funds to line their own pockets. The Clintons are not being accused of wrongdoing. The Washington Post reports:

Two sources familiar with the company's troubles suggested that investigators would focus their attention on executives' use of company money to feather their own nests. Gupta has been a major financial supporter of the Clintons since he met the president in the mid-1990s. Gupta and his company donated $1 million to help underwrite a lavish year 2000 New Year's Eve celebration at the White House and on the Mall.

He paid the former president $200,000 to deliver a speech to InfoUSA executives in Papillion, Neb., and signed the former president to a $3.3 million consulting deal. For the past four years, both Clintons have used Gupta's corporate plane, flying to Switzerland, Hawaii, Jamaica and Mexico -- about $900,000 worth of travel, The Post reported in May.

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign declined comment last night, referring reporters instead to a Delaware court's ruling in August that allowed the shareholder lawsuit to proceed against InfoUSA on two of the five original allegations. Among the allegations dismissed by the court was one asserting that Clinton's consulting contract was a waste of money.

The chancery court stated in that ruling that while some stock options granted to Bill Clinton may have been approved improperly, the shareholders had failed to prove his consulting arrangement was a waste of money. "Indeed, the company has estimated that the relationship with former President Clinton might be responsible for up to $40 million in sales," the court wrote.

The court, however, said it was possible that shareholders could make a legal issue out of the Clinton flights. Clinton campaign officials said earlier this year that she has reimbursed InfoUSA for flights she took.

The Gateway Pundit has a mini-roundup of commentary throughout the blogosphere.

The suit is against Gupta, not Clinton. Recent scandals involving both Democrat and Republican candidate's supporters have shown that all sorts of moths are attracted to the flame of politics. What people like Vinod Gupta and Norman Hsu hoped to obtain by "ingratiating" themselves with high-profile personalities is a fascinating question. Graham Greene unpersuasively argued that corruption mostly demeaned the corrupter. He wrote, "I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect -- it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."

But I think it would be plausible to argue the reverse: that the superior once corrupted becomes the inferior; a mere hireling. The King, once bought, is no longer the King. And it is to redress this reversal of status that treachery is introduced to square the relationship. Thus both the corrupter and the corrupted must retain the power of denunciation to avoid being completely dominated by the other. The potential to treachery defines a criminal relationship because it is the only way each can keep his self-respect. There are only two virtues in the criminal world: keeping your word and making sure you get even.

Yet despite this, power undoubtedly attracts. Most, if given a choice between flying a corporate jet or becoming one of the targets of crooked telemarketers offering deals for “Elderly Opportunity Seekers” or “Suffering Seniors,” might well choose the corporate jet. As Adlai Stevenson said, "Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely."

Turkeys and turkeys

John Stossel at Real Clear Politics reflects on the lost lessons of Thanksgiving.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

He then goes on to describe America's near miss with the Tragedy of the Commons. But as Crazy Marzouk, one of the commenters on this site would say, "that's not a Belmont Club post!". Well this one is more like it: a video on how to prepare a Thanksgiving Dinner for under ten bucks. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

Nothing follows. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Lost in Translation

Is it possible that truth imitates fiction? Or maybe fiction becomes its own kind of truth. The New York Times has this piece about the epidemic of rape attacks in the Congo.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.

What do tracksuits and Lakers jerseys have to do with forest gangs in the Congo?

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A curious interaction often takes place when people like Congolese jungle gangsters watch the movies. What we see is not what they see. They combine Hollywood ideas of cool with their own ideas of murder. Concepts and words that have one meaning in the West sometimes assume a totally different meaning. The infamous General Butt Naked, for example, understood how to use the telephone. But someone else was on the line.

At age 11, he claims, the Devil called him on the telephone, commanding him to his later excesses. ... Blahyi has said he led his troops naked except for shoes and a gun. Apparently, he believed that his nakedness was a source of protection from bullets ... Some of Blahyi's soldiers — often teenage boys — would enter battle naked; others would wear women's clothes. In June 2006 Blahyi published his autobiography including pictures of him fighting with a rifle, wearing nothing but sneakers. ...

Maybe they were Converse, Chuck Taylor, Five Star rubber sneakers. Now he's been introduced to the concept of evangelism and pastoral care. I hope the words have approximately the same meaning.

Blahyi is now the President of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries Inc., with Headquarters in Liberia. He is married to Pastor Mrs. Josie and has three children: Michaela, Joshua Milton Junior, and Janice.

I've often told the story of cult militias in the Philippines attacking to the martial music of Tony Orlando's Knock Three Times on the Ceiling if You Want Me. And here's a classic I've posted before about the Filipino prison inmate take on "Thriller".

FWIW, Commander Robot of the Abu Sayyaf was so named for his proficiency at doing the Robot dance. Maybe one of the unrecognized skills needed for operating in the Third World is the ability to translate concepts in an effective way. This goes beyond mere language translation and involves creating attitudes and ideas that are equivalent to the ones one is trying to convey. Maybe in trying to explain the idea of secularism and democracy to the Islamic world it is necessary to use analogies and explanations wholly different from the familiar ones.

Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner

Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts tell this interesting story at the Washington Post:

Censorship! That's what some art lovers whispered during the Hillary Clinton fundraiser Nov. 5 at the Woodley Park home of Tony and Heather Podesta. The huge photograph of the nude man was missing from its usual spot on the living room wall, and some guests concluded that politically correct Clintonites had demanded that the naked guy disappear.

My social set would probably run to murals of poker-playing dogs, but in certain circles tastes are more exalted. The Argetsinger-Roberts article continues:

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The Podestas are part of Washington's Democratic elite: He's a top lobbyist and brother of Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta; she just launched her own lobbying firm. They're also nationally known collectors of contemporary art, and one of their favorite pieces is "Soliloquy VII," an eight-foot-tall color photo of a nude man lying on his back, by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood. ...

"Soliloquy VII" will return in a year, he promised. "We are resting it for the presidential campaign but bringing it out for the inaugural ball."

What kind of world puts a "Soliloquy VII" on the wall and starts up new lobbying firms? Maybe Peter Finch's movie soliloquy from Network provides a glimpse.

You people and sixty-two million other Ameicans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned force in the whole godless world...We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds - we're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!

Half Full

The Times Online reports that large numbers of refugees are returning from Syria to Iraq. "The numbers are certainly large enough, as we report today, for a mass convoy to be planned next week as Iraqis who had opted for exile in Syria return to their homeland." Can Iraq be getting better?

Tom Friedman at the NYT admits things are seemingly better in Iraq but brings up the current objection, which goes like this: 'Yes, the violence may be down but political reconciliation has not been effected'. He writes:

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But then I talk to people in Baghdad and look at what is really evolving there and I say to myself: “Maybe you’re missing something that Secretary Rice knows — that there isn’t going to be any formal political reconciliation moment in Iraq, grand bargain or White House signing ceremony. The surge has made Iraq safe, not for formal political reconciliation yet, but safe for an ‘A.T.M. peace.’ ”

That is, each of the Iraqi factions basically agrees to live and let live with the new lines drawn by the last two years of civil war and the Baghdad government serves as an A.T.M. cash machine — supporting the army and local security groups and dispensing oil revenues to the provincial governors and tribal chiefs from each community. ...

I have more questions right now than strong opinions.

So I went to a source I knew I could trust — my colleague James Glanz, The Times’s Baghdad bureau chief who has lived through so much craziness there: “There is a sense of quiet on the streets that we have not seen for a long time in Baghdad,” he told me, “but there is also a big question mark in the shadows of every alley. We don’t know what is lurking back there, but we suspect, and evidence suggests, that it is the same set of problems that were always there.”

Fair enough. However it might be pertinent to observe that many of the colonial creations of the Middle East -- Saddam's Iraq in particular -- were already truces without reconciliation. And they were not even "ATM truces" based on oil revenues so much as an outward calm founded on fear. In Saddam-era Iraq this took the form of the military domination by one group or tribe over the other. Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit, for example, was the source of many high-ranking personages in the ruling Ba'ath Party. Some divided societies worked better than others, as for example did Lebanon, whose government explicitly recognized rival ethnic interests. While the lack of a European-style political reconciliation may be a concern, by regional standards the ethnic discord in Iraq may not be unique. The thousands of Iraqi returnees have glanced at Damascus and preferred Baghdad.

It is important to point out what has been achieved by simply getting to this point, this ATM truce. The current calm in Iraq represents not only a 'partial peace' but a huge victory. For the first time since Algeria at least, a Western army has defeated the combined efforts of a terrorist insurgency, a global radical Islamist attack and the intervention of two neighboring countries in less than five years. Al-Qaeda in Iraq made an explicit effort to precipitate a civil war in Iraq and failed. Syria backed the Sunni insurgency in its effort to restore dominance in Iraq and failed. Iran backed the Shi'ite militias, including the Special Groups and may be failing too. MNF-Iraq took on all comers in what amounted to a military randori and tossed them all out of the ring. You can call that an ATM truce or you can call it something else.

It was recently fashionable to schedule screenings of the movie Battle of Algiers to impress upon Americans how hard and hopeless their task was. This movie should continue to be shown, but it may be ruined by flashing this card as the credits roll: "this is what happened to the French, and seemingly to every Western Army since the 1960s, even to the Israelis in Lebanon in the 1980s. But it didn't happen to the US in Iraq." That would certainly provoke outrage, perhaps because people accustomed to being handed a flagellant whip don't know what to do with a glass of champagne.

It's a startling realization and shouldn't be borne in mind to gloat, but rather to provoke further thought, as Friedman hoped to do with his "ATM" observation. The question that will torment historians, if Iraq becomes viable, is 'what went right?'. It's a hard question not in the least because it so easy to get the wrong answer. Was it more troops? The number of additional forces deployed in the Surge was really quite small, and the Surge began happening even before the full complement was in place. Was it a new strategy or set of tactics? If so, which? Did information warfare play a part? The questions come thick and fast. It is at least as important to figure out what went right as to ask the standard question of what went wrong.

And figuring out what went right is important because Friedman is undoubtedly correct in thinking that complete victory is far from won. Victory is far from completely achieved in Iraq, but most especially with respect to radical Islamism throughout the region and across the globe. We need to know what went right to figure out where to go from here.

But that understanding must begin with the realization, which the returnees from Baghdad may understand better than the pundits in Washington, that something very wonderful may have been achieved in Middle East. It can never come by perversely mis-characterizing it, as some commentators at the Daily Kos have done, as a "gift" truce from Moqtada al-Sadr. A more balanced approach would be to recognize the elements of success for what they are and to apply them to the challenges that are yet to come.

Gentlemen Need No Locks

Popular culture during the Cold War treated nuclear weapons with an almost religious awe, as befitted objects that could end the world. But the fact that nukes are after all only things guarded by men was brought home when B-52s based at Minot AFB accidentally carried five nuclear armed cruise missiles to Barksdale AFB earlier of this year. Now Ultraquiet No More links to a BBC article which claims that "until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key."

That kind of claim gets your attention, so I looked up the link. The BBC wrote:

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Britain is the only nuclear weapons state which does not have a fail-safe mechanism to prevent its submarines launching a nuclear attack without the right code being sent, according to tonight's Newsnight on BBC Two. ...

They say that "Britain is unique" and British Trident commanders can still launch a nuclear attack without any command from Whitehall if the worst comes to the worst. Newsnight also reveals that, until they were retired in 1998, the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the bomb itself.

The British military resisted Whitehall proposals to fit bombs with Permissive Action Links or PALs – which would prevent them being armed unless the right code was sent. ...

Newsnight reveals that RAF nuclear bombs were armed by opening a panel held by two captive screws – like a battery cover on a radio – using a thumbnail or a coin. Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which are turned with an allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or ground burst and other parameters. The bomb is actually armed by inserting a cylindrical bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the bomb, although RAF crews were supposed to always work in pairs if they were near the bomb or had the keys for the bomb.

Correction. It took more than a bicycle lock. It took a coin, an allen wrench and a bicycle lock key. And that was ten years ago of course. But things weren't as bad as they seemed, there was security but it was located on a different level in system. A poster on Ultraquiet No More wrote:

... The Vanguard-class boats are a second-strike deterrent, so the patrolling boats need to be able to launch even if Britain (along with the Prime Minister, who has the launch codes) no longer exists. They still (AFAIK) use a dual-key system, so a single insane captain couldn't launch the missiles. It works like this: There's a safe on the boat, containing the trigger device and the Prime Minister's instructions in case of the destruction of Britain. Only the weapons officer and his deputy know the combination to the safe- the captain doesn't, and it's committed to memory not written down. The captain does, however, have a key without which the trigger device doesn't operate. So launching the missiles requires:The weapons officer to open the safe and connect the trigger to a control panel. The captain to turn the key in a different control panel.

I wonder how these things are handled in Pakistan?