DIFFERENTIATING LIMBO AND PURGATORY

Captain Ed today notes an interesting Catholic theological decision on a conceptual question that puzzles many Christians and may very well divide Protestants and Catholics. Apparently, limbo is to be emphasized no more:

One of the reasons that limbo has been in, well, limbo is because the concept presents a stumbling block to Christian unity, especially for those who practice from a literal form of sola scriptura. After the Church could catch its breath when it emerged from four centuries of [martyrdom] and oppression, theologians presented many questions about the nature of the faith which challenged the thinking of Church elders. Among them: what happened to unbaptized babies at death? Instead of just leaving such questions up to God, distraught parents and theoretical thinkers wanted answers, and limbo came into being.

Limbo, it should be pointed out, differs from purgatory, another difficult but more scriptural-based concept of Roman [Catholicism]. Purgatory refers to the process of purification that has to take place between the death of a sinner and their entry into heaven. Misunderstood as a particular place in space and time, purgatory would at first appear to be an unmentioned third possible destination for the dead, but the Church teaches that all souls who enter heaven must necessarily experience purgatory to be cleansed of sinful impulses before final acceptance into the presence of the Lord. When I taught confirmation classes, I used to explain it to the teenagers as an extra rinse cycle in the washing machine ... which may explain why I don't teach confirmation classes any longer.

Purgatory as a concept would have also explained what happens to the unbaptized, and done so with much more elegance than the notion of limbo. I suspect that if limbo gets the heave-ho it deserves, the Church will probably emphasize purgatory as the merciful process that it is and the path of the unbaptized to reach heaven when judged deserving by the Lord -- who, after all, makes the rules and the choices without consulting any of us on our opinion anyway.

Very interesting.

 

DOES UNFREEZING THE MIDDLE EAST COUNT FOR ANYTHING AMONG THE DEMOCRATS?

Michael Barone makes the point, and asks the question, by pointing towards a Jim Hoagland column in the Washington Post. Barone maintains that:

[t]he key quote is from the brave champion of democracy in Egypt, Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

“But it is a Middle East in which those who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors, even though we still face big obstacles,” says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt’s battle-scarred democratic activist. Ibrahim originally opposed the invasion of Iraq. But it “has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives,” Ibrahim told me in Washington.

Egypt has allowed nongovernmental organizations to monitor local elections this month, and it is permitting more freedom of expression in a handful of independent newspapers recently established there. “The regime still cheats in elections but less than before,” said Ibrahim, to explain his relative optimism.

An Arab battle-scarred democratic activist can give the President more dap than the Democrats? Surely a majority of Americans can see through this foolishness.

 

MY PROBLEM WITH THE DARWINISTS . . .

. . . is the same problem Robert Gordon of One Cosmos has with the extreme sides within both camps of the God-Science debate:

[O]ne topic I don’t think I’ll be posting about again is Intelligent Design. It just doesn’t generate a fruitful dialogue, because the debate seems to consist of “true believers” on both sides. If you take a moderate position, as I do, then the extremists on either side see you as arguing against them, and you simply end up talking past one another, like one of those political TV programs. There are radical secularists just as there are religious fundamentalists, and I certainly belong to neither group. People in my camp (which it should go without saying does not include literal creationists) are perfectly willing to concede every single point of scientific discovery, but those on the anti-ID side are unwilling to concede a single point of metaphysical reasoning or acknowledge a single one of the genuine problems that plague a purely reductionist view of life and consciousness. I do not believe there is any evidence that will convince a true creationist that evolution has occurred, any more than I believe there is any evidence that will persuade an anti-ID reductionist that science is competent to explain only a very proscribed plane of existence.

Right on the money as far as I’m concerned.

 

A RIFF ON THE THERAPEUTIC EQUIVALENT OF RELIGIOUS INDULGENCE

ShrinkWrapped has a post that has to be read to be believed. Please do so. It involves a couple in New York, obviously financially successful, but she’s in therapy because she can’t get a home with a sufficiently acceptable view of Central Park.

Seriously.

As I said, it has to be read to be believed but Robert Godwin was prompted to respond thusly:

Speechlessness is the only appropriate response. File under the heading, “bad everything drives out good everything,” including therapy. In this case, the patient has been granted the therapeutic equivalent of a religious indulgence, in that she has been given a fraudulent pass on the deeper nature of the problems that brought her into therapy. This is not therapy, it is magic--a classic case of an iatrogenically facilitated “manic defense.”

But it’s what makes the world go ‘round. People can never get enough of what they really don’t need.

Ain’t that last sentence the truth? In fact, ain’t that the essential truth in the world? And always has been?

This is because YOUR interpretation of what they really need is irrelevant.

I’m beginning to think that although the Republican intelligentsia may disrespect this fact, they have at least come to terms with it. Intellectual Democrats have not, neither have the elite classes in Europe.

Regular American folks, of course, don’t give a damn about it. Just don’t tread on them as they pursue things they really don’t need.

 

WRETCHARD, NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE, AND A DEBATE ON MULTICULTURALISM

Wretchard the Cat has a great post up on Network-centric warfare and what it means for America and those on our side versus our enemies and those on the jihadist side:

One of the coolest posts I’ve read in a long time is Chester’s Globalization and War. His reference links to Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles and the really nifty eMachineShop alone are worth the read. The fundamental issue he discusses is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people. Many activities, from community building to earning a living have jumped over traditional boundaries. Criminal and terrorist organizations have been among the first to exploit this fact. Viewed from one angle, modern Islamic terrorist cells are not so much a return to the forms of the 8th century as new structures made possible by 21st century technologies.

Attempts to develop “network-centric” methods of warfare in the service of a nation state are ultimately limited by their subordination to a highly centralized command and control system.

Can we meet the Islamofascist challenge? Wretchard isn’t sure:

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level. We are some of us familiar with the idea of multithreaded applications which can leave the main program and be re-entrant at an indeterminate point. Max Boot had hoped in 2003 that decentralized decision making would be part of the “new American way of war“, multithreading within a larger architecture. Yet no sooner had those tendencies appeared when they were reined in by an American Left determined to impose all the blessings of the bureaucratic state upon networked warfare: oversight, endless hearings, legalisms -- the clanking apparatus of the unitary Sovereign -- to ‘aid’ in the pursuit of nimble bands of modern Mongols contemptuous of boundaries.

It’s a typically good post. The entire discussion in the comments revolves, naturally, around individuals, groups, cultures and nation-states. Most interesting to me, however, was a response to a comment in the thread that Wretchard made:

When directions can be given in the broadest possible shared terms -- in terms of a culture -- then detailed instructions are unnecessary. Individual initiative can be given full scope.

However, when the first order of business is to destroy one’s own culture then it necessarily becomes impossible, or at least very difficult, to exercise control through broad guidance. What multiculturalism does is reduce membership in a society to a legal relationship. All expectations are delimited; all responsibility is parsed. Nothing “goes without saying”; everything must be spelled out. The parts of the social organism which are not positively commanded will remain inert, or perhaps, even attack the main organism as part of its “democratic” duty. Not that any of this is objectionable, but it does characterize a mode of behavior and describe its limits.

Well, sir. That really caught my attention. His definition of multiculturalism seemed to go well beyond mine. Is this a final hurdle I’m going to have to traverse on my journey toward conservatism, or is that simply an unnecessarily extreme definition of multiculturalism? I responded in the thread:

This is all starting to come together for me, and I suspect, many others.

When I first read Den Beste talking about hive minds, etc., I thought it was interesting but I wasn’t sure of the real applicability.

Great post, Wretchard. I’m still not sure that multiculturalism is necessarily what you say it is. “What multiculturalism does is reduce membership in a society to a legal relationship.”

I don’t see mainstream black people understanding multiculturalism that way and I suspect we’re in a situation where the same language is being spoken (e.g., American English vs. Dutch English) but there are crucial misunderstanings occurring in both directions. This is similar (it seems to me) to the whole anti-disco thing when it was very hard to determine if it was “disco” that was hated, or just black music.

It has been a revelation to me, this viewing of multiculturalism as some sort of proxy that leads back to Marx, etc. I don’t know how to express this more succinctly so I’ll just state it: this viewpoint seems so “white,” if you know what I mean.

Does everything loop back through Europe?

Maybe Europeans have bastardized multiculturalism so much that within “their” concept, it is nothing but a proxy. However, does that settle the matter?

I’m not so sure about that.

Later on, another commenter (Kevin, known to be quite liberal) posted an excerpt from Chester (not known to be quite liberal) on globalization and contrasted it with the Wretchard language on multiculturalism I used above and asked:

Aren’t globalization and multi-culturalism the exact same phenomenon; with “globalization” the label employed when seen as positive and “multi-culturalism” when regarded as negative?

After all, is it really possible to have globalization without multi-culturalism?

That’s a good question because it gets at the heart of whether the definition used by Wretchard was/is unnecessarily extreme.

As often happens on Wretchard’s website, another commenter steps up to make a thought-provoking contribution. Here, cardozo bobo concurs that the reduction of human relationships to legal responsibilities is the problem in adequately fighting Al Qaeda but disagrees (I think) that multiculturalism enhances the problem:

If there is any one thing that will strangle our ability to compete with Al Qaeda, you are correct in assuming it is the reduction of human [relationships] to legal responsibilities. I think though that you misdiagnose the source of the disease. As I see it, it’s not multi-culturalism that reduces all relationships to a legal relationship, but rather some combination of Civil Law and litigants run amok. I was speaking with Lord Bhikhu Parekh a week or so ago (British House of Lords, [Royal] Society philosopher) and while his politics were different from my own he correctly (IMO) diagnosed Britain’s current legal culture as moving from one based on liberty to one based on rights, but not because of multiculturalism (a topic he knows quite a bit about). It’s the EU’s body of law, the Civil Law, which is doing it. It is the antithesis of the Common Law.

The Civil Law (and Civil Lawyers) are working their way deeper and deeper into many aspects of our Anglosphere culture. Our relationships are being stifled by legalisms while at the same time our freedoms are being surrendered to ignorant stewards. It’s much more than Justice Stevens looking to how ‘Europe’ is solving one legal problem or another. The informal networks and relationships of many networks (banking networks, vocational networks, charitable networks) gets sucked up and absorbed into the ever-growing body of law; frozen in time and burdened with ‘substantive rights’ while unchecked by due process or other democratic safeguards. At one time arbitration between peers possessed liberty and gave justice; now it does neither. Meanwhile our most cherished public freedoms, hard fought for, such as civil rights and commercial freedom from monopolistic thuggery, are entrusted to ‘arbitrators’ in Paris, Tokyo, and further abroad, without a hint of judicial review.

Meanwhile the effects our tort system [has] had on our society is the talk of newspaper columns, and well known to all. Our plethora of networked individuals will be quite reluctant to extend their hands to Iraqis and Afghans in need of aid if they fear they’ll just get sued for it later.

I thought that made a hell of a lot of sense.

But later, cardozo bobo took exception to the assertion that globalization and multiculturalism are “good” and “bad” takes on the same thing. In doing so, cardozo bobo regurgitates a notion as accepted fact that I believe is most definitely in dispute:

[Multiculturalism] is a philosophy which posits that no culture is superior to any other culture.

Says who, pray tell? Even more curious, however, is this assertion from cardozo bobo:

Globalization is based on the idea that my Western way of life is superior to your tribal way of life, and if you want to escape the endless cycles of famine and violence man was subject to for the first million years of its existence you must abandon the bad philosophies which your ancestors handed down to you.

Is this generally accepted as fact vis-à-vis the conceptualization of globalization or is , too, from an extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to defining globalization? Beats me, but check out this concluding flourish from cardozo bobo:

[Multiculturalism] and Globalization [are] as different as night and day. One is a philosophy, and the other is an observed process which proves the philosophy wrong.

Well, damn. Kinda sorta ipso facto, huh? Which leads me directly back to earlier statement I made:

I don’t know how to express this more succinctly so I’ll just state it: this viewpoint seems so “white,” if you know what I mean.

Next, Kevin offers up a quote from Chester on just one myth related to globalization that seems to call into question the doctrinaire assertions of cardozo bobo:

1. Globalization will inevitably lead to Westernization. It’s rather ironic that so many leftist academics espoused this theory, since it manages to embrace a sort of assumed Western superiority while at the same time turning the rest of the world’s cultures into victims. Or maybe, Westernization would result because we in the West are so aggressive? No matter. The assumption is false. If there is any lesson to be learned these days from globalization’s effects on people and cultures, it is that it transmits all of them, and transforms all of them. There is an process of give-and-take at play in nearly every place -- whether physically or in cyberspace, or other media -- where two or more cultures and peoples collide. In this way, we find radicalized Muslims as easily in Munich as we do in Mecca, and democrats as easily in Kabul as in Kansas. Moreover, the very cultures that were thought soon to be washed away by the onrush of global capitalism find themselves just as easily transmitted by it as those of the West. Witness the border region of the US and Mexico, which is a teeming hybrid of both Western and Latin cultures, or examine the growing influence of Chinese and Japanese pop culture upon the rest of Asia and even the United States. Western -- and American -- culture have influenced each of these others in turn, but by no means can be described as ascendant, and even less and less so, as dominant.

Sounds right on the money to me.

Here, then, is the dilemma for white folks in America: cardozo bobo disparages (one of) Chester’s take on globalization posted above and (apparently) walks right into a trap of his own making:

Why is it that America is willing to adopt Mexican music, but that France fights against “cultural imperialism”? The same reason that French farmers attack McDonalds: they fear change. [RattlerGator: so far, so good] They don’t want their way of life to change. They know that Western culture, American culture, is more seductive than their own.

Come again, Kimosabe? Western=American, French≠Western? Yeah, right. When confronted with such a trap, act as if you don’t see it, comprehend it or acknowledge it. Naturally, cardozo bobo, does just that:

Both American entrepreneurs and the French peasants ‘know’ that their culture is superior to the other; ergo, neither can be a multiculturalist.

Now, does that make sense to you? Sure as hell seems wrongheaded to me – not because it is wrong, per se, but because it goes to an unnecessary definitional extreme. It may be a technically incorrect formulation based on the English language . . . but that’s what I call a doctrinaire postulation, cardozo bobo.

Discussion in the thread then bounced around, including a focus on the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and its relationship to the present drive for an all-encompassing governing body by the EU and a competing drive for a worldwide caliphate by Usama bin Laden. Ultimately, commenter Arthur Parry made this response:

Wretchard – I wasn’t advocating Westphalia so much as trying to point out that it represents a point within the spectrum of centralization rather than an extreme. Personally I think that the trends of globalization, decentralized networks, and emergent order are mostly unalloyed goodness, though they are disruptive to formerly isolated cultures and economies. And to would-be mandarins and caliphs.

With an eye firmly on the domestic front, and noting that the difference between classical liberalism and what passes for liberalism today is a quite distinct difference, Bob Smith wrote:

If the Democrats were to return to their classical liberal roots, they would present a more effective opposing ideology to the evolving strength of conservatism.

As best as I can tell, the Democrats, as a party, are being held hostage by the socialist liberals, in a case of political activism subsuming more moderate voices, many of which are either converted moderate Republicans or looking for a relevant platform.

If those whose views are more accurately described by classical liberal ideals, rather than utopian socialist ideals, then the challenge is balancing the equation between rights and liberties in a way that allows the participation of non-legal influences, such as culture and family structures. Removing such influences with the sweeping stroke of “all are equivalent” is not an effective rebuttal position to the conservative goal of preserving historical institutions at the expense of the experimental.

A net-centric organizational model would seem to favor experimentalism.

The issue will be moot if the party does not shed its socialist skin.

Naturally, I agree with that sentiment.

On the multiculturalism discussion in this thread, it always seems to me that white Americans have a supremely difficult time conceptualizing our Pacific future; the ascendance of our Asian theater of operations rather than our previous focus on the North Atlantic. This difficulty is most obvious in a discussion such as this.

I think cardozo bobo is basically right (that means Wretchard, too) but goes well beyond what is necessary (in defining multiculturalism) because of an almost obsessive and unnecessary focus on Europe.

 

FLORIDA 34, FLORIDA STATE 7; THE NATURAL ORDER HAS BEEN RESTORED

No matter how you slice it or try to spin it, Florida totally dominated FSU and left no doubt who was the better team, winning 34-7.

On GatorCountry.com, a great poster with the handle of GhettoGator came up with this piece below honoring a Seminole showing his behind like little brother so often does. I’ve tweaked it just a bit, but only just a bit:

Lorenzo Booker, when asked about playing arch rival Florida: “We personally feel like, you know, they’ve got some great athletes on Miami and things like that, but we just don’t like guys from Florida. We feel like they don’t belong on the field as us . . . none of that, you know, so it’s, it’s more of like a, you know, you guys think you can play with us? It’s almost disrespectful that we have to go down to Gainesville and, and, and, and, and play these guys on Saturday. You know it’s a, it’s a, it’s a really, I mean, like a hatred rivalry, like you gotta ugly stepsister that you just got to get out of your family portrait.”

Lorenzo’s performance in the aforementioned game: 6 carries, 4 yards.

Final score: Florida 34, FSU 7.

Brandon Siler on Lorenzo Booker and Ernie Sims: “They were on their high horse and talking a lot of trash. Ernie guaranteed a win. Booker said he’s wasting his time coming to the Swamp. Well, we said come on down to the Swamp and we’ll show you how to control yourself. They came to the Swamp, and we whipped them. We felt unstoppable the whole game. Booker got us alive and kicking, and I thank him for that.”

Lorenzo Booker came out of California with nothing but hype, hype, hype and he goes out the same way. Unlike the Pony Express of long ago or FedEx and UPS today, he just couldn’t deliver. But he has gone down in Florida-Florida State history; congratulations, SloLo.

Also, if you’ve ever wondered why FSU loses to Miami so many times, wonder no more. The Canes have suckered these fools into believing they don’t have a hatred rivalry – both of them HATE Florida. Cool with me. But only Miami wins in a situation like that and FSU can’t seem to figure that out. It shouldn’t have been TOO hard to figure out the secret: hate us equally, fool.

 

NOW THAT PAJAMAS MEDIA HAS . . .

. . . officially been born as Open Source Media and apparently made a mad dash back to the Pajamas Media name, how is this baby going to crawl? Bill Quick at Daily Pundit has an interesting tale up on his site that may push Pajamas Media toward some better definition of what we are or aspire to be. I missed the story completely because of my travel to Hong Kong and back but it involves an apparent “glitch” at CNN and the Vice President’s image being blotted out with an X during some story they were doing. Bill and many others tried to find out what the deal was, did so, and the glitch was confirmed but an offending customer service rep was fired for callous disregard of CNN customer service protocols. The result was this comment from Bill:

I’m not certain what Pajamas Media intends to be, but I do know this: If it intends to function at least in part as a news organization that will “syndicate” reports from its member blogs, it played no roll in my story, which was, by any definition, genuine original news reporting. Everything that happened, including the links from Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, Roger Simon, Polipundit, Wizbang, Emperor Mischa, and all the rest, all the feedback and input from my own commenters, as well as other blogs and their commenters, would have occurred without Pajamas Media existing at all. As far as I know, no mention of this story ever appeared on the PJM portal, which was instead occupied with “news” that consisted of “liveblogging” of Thanksgiving Day parades, Turkey Day recipes, and suchlike.

If PJM is ever to be anything other than a loose band of blogs aggregated for the purpose of marketing advertising en bloc, it needs to address what I think was a failure here - not because the story was mine, but because any such story would probably have been ignored. That’s sclerotic thinking, the sort of thinking we get from the MSM. And even though we may eventually supplant much of the MSM, it won’t be by duplicating the failures of the MSM.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the tail of the story. After the CNN spokesman had emailed me the official statement, she called me back to make sure I’d gotten it. I told her I had, and that it was already posted on my website. She said, “Wow, that’s fast.”

No, that’s the Blogosphere.

True dat.

 

DISNEY DAY IN HONG KONG

Since I strayed from a chronological posting of our visit, this was Day 5 of our stay in Hong Kong. With two former students working as cast members in the Festival of the Lion King show at Hong Kong Disneyland, we could not visit Hong Kong without a trip to see the big, bad, beautiful mouse. First up was a visit to their (the cast members) living quarters. One word: wow! The area is anchored by the Gold Coast Hotel, self-described this way:

Hong Kong Gold Coast Hotel is Hong Kong’s only 5-star resort and conference centre. Set in ten acres of beautifully landscaped gardens overlooking the South China Sea, the hotel offers panoramic seaviews from every one of its 450 spacious guest rooms.

The hotel combines unrivalled banqueting and conference facilities with four food and beverage outlets serving a wide range of first-class international cuisines. In addition, there are extensive recreational facilities including free-form swimming pools, a gymnasium, a health and beauty spa, golf driving nets, archery range, tennis courts and much more.

Disney doesn’t put their folks up, long-term, at the hotel. They have leased residence spots that are like apartments but certainly nice enough.

ENTRANCE TO GOLD COAST RESIDENCES	THE RESIDENCES SIT AMONG UPSCALE FACILITIES

 Take my word for it, Golden Beach is a beautiful setting:

WALKWAY ALONG THE RESORT WATERFRONT	SCENE ALONG THE RESORT’S GOLDEN BEACH

One of the fascinating things about Hong Kong (to me) is their total use of bamboo scaffolding. I mean TOTAL. Look at this photo of high rises at Gold Coast being refurbished:

 

Isn’t that incredible? Well, I can’t convey in these pictures just how beautiful it was to kick back at Gold Coast, feel the beautiful air and sunshine, and sense the relative peace and quiet compared to urban Hong Kong. We had good conversation and, seemingly, the run of the place:

VIEW OUTSIDE THE LIVING ROOM WINDOW	DOLPHINS AT THE END OF THE BEACH

In keeping with the Asian spirit of the place, James had those four tablets (happiness, tranquility, love, harmony) you see in the above left photo in his bay window. Here’s a better shot:

 

Good stuff. Although those tablets, in all honesty, were purchased in Florida and are Japanese.

After checking out the living quarters, cooling at the resort and walking the grounds, etc., it was time to head to Disney:

VIEW OF THE HARBOR ON THE WAY TO DISNEY	REMARKABLE BUS SIGN THAT EVERYONE IGNORED

Isn’t it amazing how big brother that above, right photo seems – and isn’t it equally amazing that it seems to be routinely ignored?

Disney has its own subway line extension, and at the terminus . . . DISNEYLAND!

From the moment you exit the subway line you can see and feel that famous Disney attention to detail. The entrance reminded me of an area adjacent to Florida Gulf Coast University that I posted a picture of in this link. It’s an indication that Hong Kong is more tropical than Central Florida, which was a bit of a surprise for me:

SCULPTURE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE PARK	THE VIEW UPON ENTRANCE TO THE PARK

Maybe it’s just me, but I think this a photo of visitors from the People’s Republic of China:

 

You do find yourself wondering how the party members are dealing with their kids desire to visit such a successful symbol of capitalism.

WALKING ALONG MAIN STREET, WAITING FOR THE PARADE	WAITING FOR THE PARADE JUST OFF OF MAIN STREET

As you can see, Festival of the Lion King is a popular show at the park:

THE FOLKS WAITING TO GET INTO THE SHOW	REAR VIEW OF THE FOLKS WAITING TO GET INTO THE SHOW

I misunderstood the rules and thought I could not videotape the show; and my digital camera doesn’t handle lighting situations like that well if the scene is constantly moving. So, there were many missed opportunities here.

Jesse has a starring role as Simba. Here he is AFTER the show, out of his costume, in front of their set:

 

And James has a starring role as Skar. Here he is DURING the show in a blurry shot that for a variety of reasons seemed appropriate to me:

 

So, our Day 5 was devoted toDisney and it was a very good day. We closed it out with the finest massage (a deep-tissue massage) either one of us has had the pleasure to experience. Simply fantastic. And if I say so myself, this closing photo kinda sorta captures the magic of the day and the magic of Hong Kong Disneyland:

 

Beautiful.

 

THE WAR IN IRAQ HAS ALREADY BEEN WON

Citing a Max Boot opinion piece in the L.A. Times, Cardinalpark at TigerHawk echoes my sentiment that we have already defied the critics in Iraq. Our success is a question that is actually settled (no matter how much media mavens talk about “chaos” and “insurgents” and other assorted nonsense):

I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times. Iraq is already “won.” The enemy leader and his heirs are in jail or dead. A new democratic government has been elected, a constitution voted upon and ratified and new elections are upcoming. [Boot] also cites data which reveals dramatic economic and military progress as well.

The American press doesn’t create self fulfilling prophecies [in] Vietnam or Iraq. That is an immensely arrogant, even ridiculous, concept. [RattlerGator: I’m not so sure about that, at all] Eason Jordon, Dan Rather, the CIA, the Russians and the French couldn’t ultimately protect Saddam from his own fetid behavior meeting up with American strategic and moral interests. [RattlerGator: That is only because of the fortitude of President Bush; another Republican or Democratic President would likely have blinked] Iraq is well on its way to its post Saddam existence. This new Iraq may, and may not, align itself with US interests in the future. Its representative government alone will determine this. But it seems to me that there is no significant opposing force which will derail majoritarian rule in Iraq. Could it devolve into a civil war, or Iraqi dissolution? Every day that passes, this likelihood shrinks to vanishingly small, especially post constitution.

If the Murthas and the Democrats were serious about caring for our troops, rather than their [obsession] with Bush, they would stop declaring defeat as a way to bring the troops home; they would instead declare victory as a way to bring the troops home.

The truthfulness of the situation as stated above makes the Democratic Party political maneuverings even more contemptible for me. The fact that the mainstream media is going along with their charade is equally contemptible. American leadership, whether political, corporate or military, should have garnered continued support on this effort but these punk ass surrender monkeys bitch and moan about two thousand American deaths.

Pathetic.

What the Democrats are obviously doing is disingenuous. They KNOW that victory has been won. They also KNOW that the media is spinning a quagmire that is not coming. But, because nation-building is a years-long process, you can certainly SPIN that process as a quagmire. So . . . , with a drawdown obviously having been planned-for previously by the military and civilian command, the Democrats have cynically demanded essentially a cut-and-run position and calling it something else, knowing good and well that it will never happen. Then, because victory has been won and the drawdown obviously coming – when it in fact does naturally occur, they will try and spin it as the President bowing to Democratic pressure to bring the troops home from the “chaos” that is Iraq.

And I know plenty of people silly enough to believe just that.

 

TSIM SHA TSUI

Through sheer serendipity, I selected a travel package to Hong Kong that placed us in a great location to check out the city. Tsim Sha Tsui, colloquially known as TST, was a perfect choice because it provides a magnificent view across Victoria Harbor to the primary Hong Kong skyline and is home to not only some fantastic museums but a dazzling choice of shopping venues. This map, below, demonstrates the point. Our hotel sat atop the MTR Jordan Station shown at the top of the map and a walk from there down to the waterfront was very manageable:

 

Hong Kong; I highly recommend it.

 

WE HAVE ARRIVED BACK IN “THE WORLD”

Absolutely no problems on the flights home. We were greeted in Tallahassee with a cloudless sky, 81 degrees, and all is right in the world.

Once I get over this surreal feeling arising from suddenly being in Hong Kong and (just as suddenly) not being in Hong Kong, I’ll make some sense of all that happened.

Until then, however, and in honor of my Hong Kong visit – check out this story on a pre-eminent Hong Kong blogger, Roland Soong, which was buried in The Standard at the bottom of the online Metro page but originally published on November 14, 2005:

So who is this guy?

His name is Roland Soong. Born in Shanghai in 1949, he and his family fled to Hong Kong four weeks after he was born. “I’m a little bit older than the People’s Republic,” Soong said wryly.

He has a PhD in statistics, and when he isn’t blogging, Soong is the chief technical officer for KMR, the world’s second-largest media research firm.

He has also freelanced as a translator and interpreter for the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s investigations of Chinese triad operations in New York.

Soong’s blog, (EastSouthWestNorth), gave hints of where he’s been and reflects what Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of Danwei.org, a Beijing-based Web site on mainland media, calls Soong’s “catholic [which he spells with a small `c’] and voracious reading habits.”

“East and west because I was maintaining two homes, one in New York and one in Hong Kong,” said Soong. “South because my job involved a lot of work in Latin America and I also lived in Australia. North for North America because I spent 32 years in the United States before returning to Hong Kong.”

Of course, it’s somehow fitting that I find out about this guy just after I get back from Hong Kong. So it goes, but he does appear to be very interesting. Maybe there will be a return trip to Hong Kong in the near future – with an opportunity to dine with Mr. Soong.

Finally, how about another picture of three Rattlers in Hong Kong? We hit the promenade on the Kowloon side down by the museums and watched the waterfront laser show just hours before flying out of Hong Kong. It was the perfect ending to a great vacation and the slow walk back to the hotel was a good one.

 

I know one thing: Florida A&M University should be proud.

 

THE PEAK, THE MARKET, AND THE MEAL

I’m running out of time for posting so I’ll just post the material from yesterday. Day three photos will be posted later. Day four was a bit of a photographic disaster; this was the day for visiting Victoria’s Peak and great opportunities for some fantastic photos. I whipped out my video camera and began to film, only to be notified that the battery was out of power. I was stunned. I had just charged the thing the day before and it had more than 655 minutes of power. I still don’t know what happened. It gets worse. Just as we were approaching the area where you load into the tram:

my digital camera notified me that it was out of juice. No!!!

So, no photos. Victoria's Peak was as beautiful as advertised but I won’t be able to show you shots that would certainly have been of interest to me. To salvage some documentation, we paid for the privilege of having one of the vendors snap our photo. This is the result, represented by my photo of the photo:

 

Then it was off to Mong Kok; I would certainly have been interested in some shots there, as well as video, but that was not to be. So, I let my two compatriots go on about the business of shopping without me. I’m not fond of that mess at all. Instead, I picked out a spot and began to people watch. Very interesting faces, all quite different. The tight roadways, full of people and vehicles, were a sight to behold and I’m amazed no one got hit or run over.

Soon, however, it was time to run back to the hotel and prepare for our meal that night with a local woman who uses the Anglicized name of Doris. She works at Disney with our friends James and Jesse and suggested a restaurant within walking distance of our hotel, the Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant:

 

Since we had a local pro with us, we heavily relied on her. After some serious consultation, she did her thing:

 

However, in ordering, Doris had to try and figure out what wifey and James might be able to eat. That wasn’t easy because they are finicky eaters and ain’t shamed about it at all:

 

Doris and Jesse, however, were quite a pair because Jesse is far more adventurous with his eating habits:

 

I can report that we had a great meal in a bit of dim sum fashion: a fish dish that was very tasty, a chicken dish that was also good, some vegetarian dish that consisted of bean curd that looked like noodles with beans and other veggies, we led off with some kind of dumpling that had pork within. We dipped that dumpling in some kind of juice and, after prompting by Doris, jammed that baby in our mouth and tore it up.

Very good. Also, I thought the beer was excellent. It was Chinese but hell if I can remember the name right now. The conversation, of course, was fantastic. I had desperately wanted to hook up with a local who could give us a little flavor of Hong Kong and Doris certainly did that. She is to be married in January. Best wishes for a happy and fruitful marriage, Doris.

Afterwards, we gathered to say goodbye:

 

Of course, they will be seeing us again today because we will be visiting Hong Kong Disney. More on that later as our trip to Hong Kong winds down and we prepare to head “back to the world” as we used to say in the Army.

 

MICHAEL BARONE ON THE INTERNAL POLITICS OF BUSH DERANGEMENT SYNDROME AT TWO NEWSPAPERS OF RECORD

Here is what Barone wrote on November 17:

Woodward’s reporting on George W. Bush, as is evident in his books, is seen by many critics as pro-Bush. In my view, he has taken Bush at face value, describing how the president makes decisions and taking Bush’s own words seriously. Which is, in my view, the way it should be. [RattlerGator: No, no, no. That is COMPLETELY the way it should be in a serious world.] Pincus’s reporting, on the other hand, has relied heavily on critics of the Bush policies, including, it appears, sources in the CIA. It is obvious that cadres in the CIA—the folks around Valerie Plame who sent Joseph Wilson on his mission to Niger, the folks who authorized the publication of Michael Scheuer’s “anonymous” book—have been trying to discredit and undermine support for Bush’s policy of liberating Iraq. [RattlerGator: Included here should be the Brent Scowcroft crowd of Republicans, including Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.] I suspect that Pincus takes the same view, though he could argue that his reporting was justified regardless of his own views: He was just reporting what others, with some knowledge of what they were talking about, were saying. I don’t want to say that Woodward is pro-Bush and Pincus anti-Bush. But I can see how readers who don’t know these men as well as I do would so conclude.

One sees something here that resembles the intra-newsroom internecine warfare at the New York Times between Judith Miller and those—the great majority in that newsroom, it seems—who believe that her stories on reports that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were illegitimate journalism. That seems to me quite wrong: She was reporting on what sources she had reason to believe were legitimate said, and she was not obliged before she wrote those stories to seek information to discredit what in fact the intelligence agencies of the United States and all serious countries believed. Miller’s reporting was trashed in a huge mea culpa story in the Times last year, and she has now been forced to leave the paper. I am inclined to believe that she has been found guilty of writing stories that furthered the goals of the Bush administration, which of course is something the Times cannot allow.

The Post’s position is different. Downie did not order Woodward to write about his interviews with administration officials immediately after Woodward informed him about them. But after Woodward provided sworn testimony to Fitzgerald, the paper promptly wrote up the story, together with Woodward’s statement, and then allowed Kurtz to pursue the story further. It put the contradiction between Woodward’s and Pincus’s recollections out there for all to see and interpret as they wish. Downie, who presumably made the decisions about what the Post would print, has let the facts and the reporting speak for themselves and not imposed a politically correct frame of reference. This is in line with what I expect from Downie, whom I have known for at least 20 years, and who I believe seeks fairness and accuracy above all else. Mickey Kaus speculates that the official from whom Woodward heard that Wilson’s wife worked in the CIA was Secretary of State Colin Powell. It’s obvious from more than one of Woodward’s books that Powell is one of his best sources.

Although I certainly wasn’t the only one, I can document that I suspected this led back to Colin Powell and Richard Armitage at least as far back as July 7, 2005:

Just curious (I haven’t been following this at all) but would Colin Powell qualify as a senior White House official at the time of the supposed leak? How about Richard Armitage?

It is that quote of a supposed official “ratting” on other White House officials that makes me think of the State Department.

That’s good reporting by Michael Barone, breaking down how the internal politics plays out in a newsroom while showing the Washington Post operating as a more honest player (relatively speaking) than the New York Times.

That certainly squares with my take on things.

 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

I survived the hike around Lamma Island in style; no real problems for me. Our biggest concern was wifey’s animal phobia – lots of dogs accompanying tourists along the way. I don’t have time to post pictures – will try and get that tonight. The interesting (and stunning, really) thing about Sunday in Hong Kong are the Filipino women out on the public areas . . . squatting, so to speak. They were everywhere; in the morning and even late at night some of them were still around. Few men, lots of women. Another thing, we saw more Africans, Indonesians, and Indians on Sunday (by far) than any other day.

Football: yes, I’ve noticed the college scores. What the hell happened to the Canes? I knew I would meet a Gator fan over here and sure enough, we were walking through an area full of bars and sitting outside this one joint are two white guys who see me in my FAMU Rattler jersey. So, one of them yells out, “FAMU!” and after acknowledging him, he identified himself as a Gator and his friend as a Nole.

Gators and Noles getting along in Hong Kong – ain’t life grand?

I thought, given the plentiful places that have vegetarian food here, that my wife would do well with the food. Wrong. Her finicky ways simply won’t allow for that, so we aren’t having as many “food” experiences as I would like.

And finally, politics: I’ve read with interest the whole Murtha mess. For years I heard people claim that our politicians and media screwed the military in Viet Nam and I’m beginning to completely believe them.

Completely.

Believe.

Them.

 

DAY ONE IN HONG KONG: CIRQUE DU SOLEIL DAY TWO IN HONG KONG: BIG BUDDHA

The first great adventure for us on our stay was trying to find a taxi to take us to the Cirque du Soleil show. Our local friend said he had never had such a severe problem getting a taxi and reasoned that the problem was related to him living far away in the New Territories – a good fare. We had many taxis turn us down.

But, we did finally get a guy to bring us over and we made the venue and were seated at 8:00 p.m. sharp, just as the show was beginning. The review? It was an enjoyable show but not spectacular. My wife said this was likely because it is performed under the big top, and not within a permanent structure. Afterwards, we visited “SoHo” and a spot called the “Flying Pan” where we were happy to be able to get an American-style breakfast at midnight. The grits weren’t bad and the omelet was good. That set us up for the next adventure: Big Buddha.

First, we have to figure out the subway system which, luckily, has a station directly beneath our hotel. After some initial confusion, we got it done and soon were down at the Central Pier area.

It’s an interesting scene with construction EVERYWHERE, but some places do seems a bit serene, like Statue Park:

 

But it’s impossible to forget that you are in skyscraper city:

 

Finding the pier we needed was no easy chore. Soon enough, though, we were on board a big ferry on very choppy waters. Better vessels passed our view:

 

At Mui Wo, we docked and got into line for the bus up to our destination:

 

The ride up was reputed to be “thrilling,” but that wasn’t quite true. It was, however, very interesting. To a black man, at least this black man, seeing some of the places where the Filipinos obviously live was curiously interesting. It was also exciting to near the top and see the back of Buddha while still some distance away from the location. No other vista had provided any view of the symbol at all.

Once there, wifey (a terrific walker) was ready to go.

 

At this point yours truly, Fat Daddy, was oblivious to the challenge awaiting him, still interested in getting some shots and properly framing them, etc. Here is a structure down at the base prior to your walk up:

 

Then, and only then, did I begin to understand the upcoming challenge. This was a magnificent view – and a sobering one:

 

At this point, there was nothing left to do but suck it up and get on with things. Wifey probably was waiting to give me hell – or maybe, after getting halfway up and noticing the burn in her own legs, she just wanted to finish the chore, just like me. Reportedly, there are 268 steps to the top and I gare-ron-tee there are at least that many:

 

I’m happy to report that we both survived the walk up in flying colors. And yes, I am vain enough to have a Florida Gator jersey with a RattlerGator script on the front and back . . . and wear it to see Big Buddha:

 

It was a beautiful sight, with a very nice breeze and a commanding view of the landscape beyond:

 

There was an equally commanding view of the landscape below, around the monastery:

 

Finally, as we were preparing to descend, I got this imposing side view of the Buddha:

 

For more information, this Big Buddha description is from Wikipedia:

The Tian Tan Buddha (天壇大佛) is a large bronze statue of the Buddha, located at Ngong Ping, Lantau Island, in Hong Kong. Also known as the Giant Buddha, it is the world's tallest outdoor seated bronze Buddha. The statue is located near the Po Lin Monastery. It symbolizes the harmonious relationship between man and nature, people and religion. It is a major center of Buddhism in Hong Kong, and is also a popular sightseeing attraction.

It was a good day, we slept our behinds off when we got back to the hotel, and around midnight ventured back out into the city around our hotel. The streets were absolutely packed.

Count me impressed. I’ll have more pictures later if our hike today doesn’t kill me.

 

WAY TO GO, BASKETBALL GATORS!!!

The victim this time? Syracuse, 75-70.

I very much wanted to watch this game yesterday but my wife insisted that we keep to the itinerary – Big Buddha.

I have no idea if I could have even found the game but I’m pretty sure I could have.

 

SOME BASIC SHOTS FROM OUR FLIGHTS AND OUR HOTEL

Wow.

A 32-hour ordeal is over and now we’ve got to recover and go make some memories. So, how about a few generic photos to memorialize our plane rides?

We made our flight arrangements through Travelocity, flying via Delta and Korean Air. Neither my wife nor I had flown through John F. Kennedy International before and were surprised by how drab it seemed. We had to walk from our terminal to (what I suppose is) the International terminal. It was more modern and here are a series of shots from there showing the artwork that dominates the terminal. First, from the lower level:

 

This next shot is basically the same piece viewed from above:

 

This final piece is the artwork from the second level, looking at the upper reaches of the design:

 

Next is a shot taken from the plane as we fly over Korea; I don’t think of hills when I think of Korea but that was the dominant look of the terrain below:

 

This is a shot of wifey inside the Seoul Airport (Incheon International) wondering when the hell will these flights be done:

 

Since we arrived at night, shots of Hong Kong will come later but here is a representative shot of the view outside our bhotel room window:

 

And this is a view (looking left) from the elevator stairwell at the Prudential Hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui section of Kowloon Province, just across the bridge from center city Hong Kong:

 

This view is from the same location, looking right:

 

As you can tell, VERY URBAN. Construction is everywhere. I can hear it right now, as a matter of fact (not overbearing – just present, if you know what I mean). Finally, my big brother just informed me via e-mail that the Gator basketball team has defeated Wake Forest, 77-72. Hell yeah, this trip is off to a very good start.

 

WE HAVE ARRIVED IN HONG KONG

This is a test post just to make sure I can in fact post to the site. We touched down somewhere around 10:30 p.m. local time after basically being up for a solid 32 hours, got to bed somewhere around 12:30 a.m. I slept for nine straight hours and I don’t think I’ve ever done that as an adult. I used to pride myself on being A.O.K. with only four hours of sleep. Those days are long gone.

They are 13 hours ahead of east coast time but I don’t think I’m going to have a jet lag problem. If all goes well, we will see a fantastic Cirque du Soleil show tonight.

If all goes well, I’ll have some basic pictures up soon. It’s Thursday, November 17 at home but Friday, November 18 around 12:45 here [having some problems; so, technically, is Friday at home now, too -- 12:05 a.m. if this goes through].

Later, gators.

 

ANOTHER FACE OF THE AMERICAN SOLDIER

Michael Yon seemingly never fails to deliver; today, a great post on a former Argentine who is now a new American and a proud Soldier in the biggest, baddest, boldest, finest fighting force on the planet -- Walt Gaya:

 

Hooo-ahhhhh, Walt Gaya. Welcome to the family.

 

PETER DRUCKER

Kudos to Peter Schramm at No Left Turns for tossing out this nugget while discussing Peter Drucker:

Matt Peterson reminded me of this interview that me, [Larry] Arnn, and [Ken] Masugi conducted with Drucker back in 1984. It’s pretty good.

That led me, of course, to the link. I immediately recognized that it would be a good read. The clincher was when, early on, the discussion moved to Norman Angell and whether Drucker was familiar with him. It turned out that he was quite familiar with him:

He was an English Quaker, and he had more to do with the coming of the Great War than any other single individual because he wrote the book called The Great Delusion in which he proved beautifully that modern war had become impossible because three months after the outbreak of modern war, with the cost of modern armament every government would be bankrupt and would stop fighting. And you have no idea how much this undermined the resistance to war. There is in the German documents before 1914 the famous dispatch from the German Ambassador in London who was a very strong dove in which he more or less said to his government, “If you keep on in this line of action, this will increase the danger of war,” and the Emperor wrote in the margin: “Hasn’t the fool read Norman Angell?”

Norman Angell was absolutely right; by Christmas 1914 every government was bankrupt, and not one stopped—partly because, to the great surprise of those pre-1914 statesmen, the First World War was an incredibly popular war. You know, that’s the end of socialism basically. The great appeal of socialism in the pre-1914 world was that the proletarian masses would rise up against war in a general strike—instead of which they could not enlist fast enough. And why? Because maybe after one hundred years of a society split by class war into two nations, suddenly the war offered an integration, so they streamed to the colors, and they couldn’t enlist fast enough. And those socialist leaders who tried to stay with the announced pre-war program, which was a general strike and refusal to vote for war credits, were ostracized by their own people. No civilian government could have stopped the war in 1914 because its own working class wouldn’t have let it. Now that is not economics.

And so, long ago, I saw economics as an extremely important way of looking at things. But I don’t accept the idea that it is a science, that it is mathematical, that it is rigorous, and that it is autonomous. In American economics today, there is no basic economic theory—no theory of price, no theory of value, no theory of change, no theory of the correlation of technology and economics, no theory of work—all the basic problems of economics are excluded because they are not capable of being quantified. That’s much earlier, that’s 1920. Economics is the last discipline in which logical positivism [the doctrine that the only truths are those affirmed by the methods of natural science] still holds sway, and that’s why you can predict with certainty that this is the last generation of modern economics. Because in everything else, logical positivism is gone. And you know I was born into it. Logical positivism is the result of the marriage of America and Vienna. Do I have to explain that now?

Yes, of course he would. I didn’t (and don’t) have time to read on but this was a great way to start the day. A fascinating introduction to someone I’ve never heard of who in turn is discussing a figure from history I’ve never heard of.

I’ll have more on the subject of Drucker within the next few weeks.

 

DAMN YOU, STEVE SPURRIER!

Congratulations to the Carolina Gamecocks, 30-22 victors in a game they earned playing a style folks tried to get Steve to adopt in the NFL at the outset but he wouldn’t.

So, that NFL experience did teach him something. Here is what I wrote immediately after the game. The context for the discussion was could you, as a Gator, do what Steve did – agree to come back into the division and coach against not only the school that put you on a platform to win a Heisman Trophy, but gave you a national championship:

I was conflicted when he made his decision and I still am.

I feel weird, weird, weird.

Many people can rationalize it all they want, but the bottom line is this: it (taking the Carolina job) simply does not speak well of him as a Gator.

It does speak well of him as a University of Florida graduate.

Can you acknowledge the difference? I don't think it's just semantics. There are many coaches (probably the overwhelming majority of them) who couldn't do it either, if the circumstances were similar.

However, Steve is Steve. He's an absolutely unique mickey-fickey and got over on us today. I'm not sure he outcoached our new guy but his team sure as hell executed magnificently and that is the greatest tribute to him. I think he gave a nod to his NFL experience today and it served him well.

I'm happy for him and I'm happy for Carolina. I've kinda sorta followed that school since the late '70s -- they deserve some success under Spurrier.

I'll give them this year (ain't that nice of me, seeing as how they've already taken it) -- but it was a weird game, and it should have been a weird game. No other kind of game would have been fitting. Right?

I also come out of this game feeling good about Urban Meyer. I'm hoping he's taking notes and not overreacting. He ran into a perfect storm this year vis-à-vis our conference away games with ascendant programs. He's definitely the right man. That was affirmed for me after watching Markus Manson on SunSports after the game. In fact, all of the guys were impressive to me. A record of five wins and three losses is probably about right, given the circumstances.

Beat Florida State and I will be satisfied in year one with wins over State, the Vols and the Dawgs. Now I gotta go have some drinks.

Come morning I may be mad as hell all over again.

Well, morning has come. Auburn has indeed defeated Georgia, 31-30, and all Gators now know that we would have been in the championship game if not for the loss to Carolina.

But I’m not mad as hell. My thoughts this morning:

Urban Meyer ran into the perfect storm this football season; that means we did, too. And it was a transition year for us. Nuff said, in my book.

He showed flexibility one game [Georgia] too late [should have been the LSU game]. Our entire season is explained by the LSU game. I hope people realize that.

A road game, against a top five team, that we should have won. Had those away games against top third teams in the conference been home games, we're (likely) in the championship game. Instead, reality is what it is and we missed the SECCG yet again.

But our coach has established his protocols. His offense now has greater diversity. He's had one hell of a learning year and I'm betting that he's going to put it to good use.

I can live with that. Even with the absolutely brutal schedule we're going to have next year. I do think, however, he's going to have to ease up a bit with his in-week practices and all the heavy hitting.

Time to move on and prepare for the Seminoles.

 

KUDOS TO RICHARD SAMUELSON

I’ve often wondered to myself about what is truly animating the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party in their complete capitulation to Bush Derangement Syndrome and Instapundit reader Richard Samuelson succinctly nails it:

The response to your posts is interesting. One question that might be interesting to ask. To what degree to your critics believe that patriotism is a good thing? To what degree do they believe it is proper to support one's own country ahead of others?

How to criticize one's country responsibly is a very interesting question, particularly with regard to an ongoing war. On the one hand, it is one's duty as a citizen to support one's country when it is engaged in a war. Even if one opposed the war at the start, it is one's job in a democratic republic to show faith in one's fellow-citizens, and give them the benefit of the doubt on the rightness of the decision. On the other hand, a good citizen has a responsibility to criticize the government when he finds it to be misguided.

I wonder if the passion behind the rhetoric here is existential. If this war is justified, it raises doubts about whether the world will ever become war-free. For that reason, it raises fundamental questions about the possibility of true progress in any grand sense. If this war is justified, it might mean that patriotism will always remain a virtue in some circumstances, because the world will always, in some ways, be divided between us and others. It might be, in short, an attack upon the implicit universalism of so much modern ideology. Giving that up might be too high a price to pay. Hence it's easier to dismiss the war as fundamentally corrupt from the start.

Voila! The contemptible unseriousness is explained. From that very same e-mail, these questions bear repeating, and asking:

[1] To what degree do you believe patriotism is a good thing?

[2] To what degree to do you believe it is proper to support one’s country ahead of others?

Those two queries should be asked of every politician running for the federal House, Senate, and Presidency.

 

AFRICA ROUNDUP

From the Mail & Guardian in South Africa:

Ensuring that justice delayed is not justice denied
David Gicheru is a former guerrilla who fought British colonial forces from hideouts in the dense forests of central Kenya ahead of independence in 1963. As much as the prospect of a poor harvest gnaws at him, so do memories of his struggle against the British -- and Kenya’s subsequent treatment of those who liberated the country from colonialism.

Still no prime minister for Ivorians
Côte d’Ivoire has been left lingering in a constitutional twilight zone for a second successive week, waiting for continental leaders to make the next vital move. Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo have to attend a special forum in Yamoussoukro to help decide on a new prime minister to lead the country to elections.

Footballer vs granny
On the potholed and bullet-scarred streets of Liberia, a former world footballer-of-the-year is trying to beat a 66-year-old politician at her own game. Next Tuesday, ex-Chelsea and AC Milan player, high-school drop-out George Weah will go head-to-head with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a grandmother with a Harvard degree, in the presidential run-off in this war-ravaged West African country.

Nigeria: 10 years after Ken Saro-Wiwa
Ten years after the world watched in horror as Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed by the Nigerian government on trumped-up charges the Ogoni people living in the oil-rich Niger Delta are little closer to justice. Nigeria may be Africa’s biggest producer of crude but in Ogoniland oil from rusting pipelines contaminates farmland and police continue to attack residents.

Refugee tragedy unfolds amid Cairo Eid celebrations
As Muslims held a mass prayer at Cairo’s Mustafa Mahmud mosque, the personal tragedies of Sudanese refugees continued to unfold a few metres away, screened off from the Eid al-Fitr festival like an eyesore. For the rituals marking the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, the authorities had temporarily erected coloured screens to hide the chaotic makeshift camp from the mosque.

Spies target Zanu-PF bigwig
Zimbabwe’s intelligence agents have bugged the phones of Rural Housing Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, and have been conducting surveillance on his two Harare homes on the instruction of President Robert Mugabe. A senior Central Intelligence Organisation operative told the Mail & Guardian that Mugabe feared his former protégé was planning to defect from Zanu-PF, taking with him disillusioned sections of the ruling party.

Mbeki’s MDC migraine
Infighting over the Senate elections in Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change could scupper President Thabo Mbeki’s plans to broker multi-party talks with the ruling Zanu-PF. At a meeting at the Union Buildings recently Mbeki impressed on the MDC top brass that a fragmented party would weaken his political leverage over President Robert Mugabe.

Land for loyalty?
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has allocated thousands of title deeds for land in a move his opponents say is an attempt to “bribe” voters to support a controversial draft constitution in a November 21 referendum. Environmentalists charge that the “illegal dishing out of land” spells “ecological disaster” for a country lauded internationally for its stringent legislation to protect wildlife.

Reporting on Aids orphans a balancing act
The plight of Aids orphans in Swaziland, currently labouring under the world’s highest HIV prevalence rate, is an issue that demands coverage. Journalists often find themselves in a quandary concerning how best to tackle it, however. “A child could be scarred for life by something that is written about him or her,” says Sara Page, assistant director of the Southern African Aids Information Dissemination Service.

Changing appearances in Malawi -- at a price
Malawians have found a solution to the problems posed by lack of cleavage, or an insubstantial derriere. Inspired by television programmes on extreme makeovers, which beam across the continent via satellite television, both men and women are taking action to change their appearance.

Play for the presidency
Diplomats and civil society activists fear the second round of voting in Liberia’s first elections since the end of the civil war will spark a flurry of behind-the-scenes deal-making that could compromise the new government. The National Electoral Commission announced that former football star George Weah and ex-World Bank official Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will face off for the presidency on November 8.

Infighting puts party at risk
Academics, economists, lawyers and the Harare-based ambassadors of Britain and the United States have been frantically shuttling between rival factions in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the past week. Political scientist Brian Raftopolous, economics consultant Eric Bloch and lawyer Innocent Chagonda have attempted to mediate tensions over the November 26 Senate elections.

Too many illegal abortions, too little contraception
Dubbed the “babies in bags” scandal, the discovery of 15 foetuses last year near a river in Nairobi horrified Kenya -- and drew government assurances that illegal abortions would be brought to a halt. A pregnancy can only be terminated in the East African country if it puts a woman’s life in danger.

MDC’s unedifying war over elections
Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is fighting a civil war over whether to participate in elections for an upper house of Parliament next month. The battle is being fought in full public view as newspapers carry daily reports of party leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s increasingly desperate attempts to block candidates from filing nomination papers.

Escaping Africa’s longest civil war
The Nile has witnessed more centuries of human eccentricity than any of the world’s great rivers, but what it is now experiencing must rank high in its annals of misery. Hundreds of people laden with bags, bedding and bicycles wait disconsolately on wharves. Under the unremitting sun, anxious passengers crowd the flat decks of rickety barges meant only for cargo.

Transport problems cripple SADC development
On paper, regional integration in Southern Africa has made advances -- with countries being knit together by protocols and agreements of every stripe. It’s a pity there isn’t a similarly comprehensive network of roads and railways, say transport analysts -- who point out that true regional integration will remain a pipe dream if goods cannot move efficiently between Southern African states.

Malawi’s top dog under fire
The Malawi Council of Churches has threatened to enter the country’s National Assembly draped in gowns to protest against opposition moves to impeach President Bingu wa Mutharika and to press politicians to focus on “problems besetting the people”. It is estimated that up to 4,2-million Malawi citizens, of a population of 12-million, face serious food shortages.

‘Everything could be eaten by the volcano again’
Nicolas Muhamiriza (47) was once the owner of a thriving bottling plant. Now he’s among thousands in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern city of Goma who struggle to pay rent for wooden shacks, their livelihoods destroyed nearly four years ago when lava submerged schools, hospitals and houses.

Sudan starting to slip again
Darfur seems hell-bent on regaining its appellation earned two years ago as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Three African Union peacekeepers and two contractors attached to the force were killed, recently -- the first fatalities for the 6 600 strong continental force in the troubled west of Sudan.

Government forces the Basarwa out
Members of the Basarwa, an ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers, submitted an urgent application in court on Wednesday to bar the Botswana government from seizing their livestock and preventing their people from entering the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

The fascinating continent so often relegated to the status of a single country never fails to amaze, for good and ill.

 

JUST ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THE INTERNET

This feeling of, “man, I love the internet” occurred to me while reading a thread on Roger Simon’s site about the Decline of Hollywood:

Lately a number of people, including Brian Anderson in City Journal, have noticed that Hollywood is in decline. ‘Twas ever thus, I’m afraid. I can remember many saying the same thing when I started writing movies in the early seventies. Indeed, if you look at what was produced in 1939, for example, pretty much everything after that pales in comparison.

Still, Mr. Anderson has a point. Movies are in many ways worse than ever and have the box office numbers to prove it. As he writes:

Film attendance is down a wrenching 12 percent from last year, and a May USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that nearly half of American adults go to movies less often than they did in 2000. Some pundits have blamed the rising price of tickets, but in constant dollars a ticket costs less than it did 25 years ago. Others believe that it’s all those DVDs that people are buying-except that DVD sales are slumping, too.

Anderson (quoting the often-moralistic Michael Medved) blames the leftism of Hollywood stars and films for this. Well, maybe. But leftism is certainly not new to Hollywood and its stars. In the glory days, Cagney and Bogart were well known for their left-wing politics and it certainly didn’t stop audiences from seeing them. The likes of Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, no matter what their views, are not even on the same planet when it comes to charisma and interest and never could be, no matter what they produced.

No, the problems for Hollywood are deeper than politics and the production of more movies like Spiderman II (a good programmer which Anderson makes sound like the second-coming of Lawrence of Arabia) is not about to solve them.

Three obvious reasons for this situation were given:

1. The desertion of the core audience of teenage boys for computer games, which, I am told (I’m too stupid to play them myself), are often more original than today’s movies.

2. The continued corporate take-over of Hollywood. It has been going on now for decades and has reached a tipping point. It used to be said that movies were the blending of art and commerce with commerce finally taking precedence. Now, art isn’t even mentioned. Movie studios in the seventies were fun; now they’re like industrial parks making industrial product.

3. The rise of the internet and other alternative forms of entertainment. This is probably the most significant. There’s just plain too much competition for business as usual in Hollywood. If I were twenty and starting out in film today, I wouldn’t even think about Hollywood. I’d go straight to the internet and start from there.

This post by Roger set the table for some very interesting discussion and highlighted for me what I love about the internet – being able to sit in on a good conversation of your own choosing, without having to be a participant while the option to participate is available.

Reader Ed Driscoll (at least I think he’s one and the same as the linked-to party) responded to a comment in the thread and offered a contribution:

Dale Gribble wrote above:

There are no male stars who are men. It’s a bunch of 5’5” ,45 year old(non threatening) adolescents. William Holden wouldn’t go huntin’ or drinkin’ with any of them.

Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a tremendous essay on that very subject recently. It’s well worth a read.

Briefly, here’s an excerpt from her piece:

In a review in the Village Voice of the film The Aviator, Michael Atkinson dubbed our current crop of childish male actors “toddler-men.” “The conscious contrast between baby-faced, teen-voiced toddler-men movie actors and the golden age’s grownups is unavoidable,” he wrote. “Though DiCaprio is the same age here as Hughes was in 1934, he may not be convincing as a thirty-year-old until he’s fifty.” Nobody has that old-style confident authority any more. We’ve forgotten how to act like grownups.

Maybe “forgotten” isn’t the right word, for the Baby Boomers fought adulthood every step of the way. About the time we should have been taking on grownup responsibilities we made a fetish of resisting the Establishment. We turned blue jeans and t-shirts into the generational uniform. We stopped remembering the names of world political leaders and started remembering the names of movie stars’ ex-boyfriends. We stopped participating in fraternal service organizations and started playing video games. We Boomers identified so strongly with being “the younger generation” that now, paunchy and gray, we’re bewildered. We have no idea how to be the older generation. We’ll just have to go on being a cranky, creaky appendix to the younger one.

Good stuff. Later in the thread on Roger Simon’s site, someone named Lindenen wrote:

Roger, [you wrote:]
“Now, art isn’t even mentioned. Movie studios in the seventies were fun; now they’re like industrial parks making industrial product.”

During Hollywood’s Golden Age, it was run exactly like an industrial factory, and they turned out fantastic product. Sure, some of it was awful (some of it will always be awful) but some of it is the greatest ever. Also, I read recently (but for the life of me cannot remember where) that the largest drop in attendance came when Hollywood finally jettisoned the Hays Code in the late 60s/70s. Yeah, that much vilified thing, without it we wouldn’t have many great films, but it also caused a large number of people to turn away and never return. They shouldn’t talk about art at all. They should just make the best film they can.

I’ve been reading recently some books on John Ford and they discuss how Westerns were their meat and potatoes films back then. The westerns cost very little to make, could be made in large numbers and quickly, and they made buckets of money at the box office. The tentpole films Hollywood relies on nowadays cost too much, are too few in number and fail all too easily. They need to figure out how to make something cheaply that grosses large amounts of money.

I can’t even imagine a director today having the ability of a John Ford to direct a film a year for 20+ years. It’s now treated like a ming vase and they make one once every six years. While a great artist, Terrence Malick is probably the worst offender.

I’m absolutely convinced that ticket costs are driving people away as well. There was an article about some study in the NYTimes a while ago that seemed to blame video games and tv, but in the middle of the article it mentioned that large percentages of young men weren’t attending because of ticket prices. No one seemed to want to talk about that.

“The decline in Hollywood mirrors the decline in the quality of American culture in general. The last golden era of Hollywood was the seventies, which also reflect the fact that American life in that time so much cooler in almost every way.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone declare the 70s “cool” :)

To which, Driscoll added this:

[Lindenen wrote],

“I read recently (but for the life of me cannot remember where) that the largest drop in attendance came when Hollywood finally jettisoned the Hays Code in the late 60s/70s.”

That was probably from this piece by Michael Medved in the Wall Street Journal last year:

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history’s most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation’s film fans to break the habit of movie going. You ended your post with, “That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone declare the 70s ‘cool’”.

Hearing it described above that way reminded me of the New York radical chic art crowd, who recently pined for the return of Manhattan’s 1970’s high crime Death Wish/Taxi Driver era.

Yeah, I love that kind of stuff.

Three cheers for the internet – hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!

 

INTERESTING HONG KONG BLOGGER

I’ve found an interesting, artsy, Hong Kong blogger. Her site is called Glutter and her name is Yan Sham-Shackleton. Check out her bio page. She’s probably quite liberal but I do hope I get a chance to hook up with her during my week in Hong Kong. Here, by the way, are some links specific to her hometown from her website:

Hong Kong Quick Links

• ATV Schedule
• Absolute Mag
• BBC: Hong Kong Facts
• BC magazine
• Broadway Circuit
• Centamap
• Cheung Chau Island Dot com
• Fringe Club
• Government Information Centre
• HK Mag Weekend Picks
• HKAPA Performance News
• Hong Kong Arts Centre
• Hong Kong Ballet
• Hong Kong Clubbing
• Hong Kong Daily
• Hong Kong Film Archive
• Hong Kong Ticketing
• Lamma-zine
• RTHK On Internet
• TVB Schedule
• UA CityLine
• Wakeboard Asia
• Weather Underground of Hong Kong

Yes, my week in Hong Kong is going to very, very interesting.

 

SPECIAL SESSION FOR THE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE

Here are the basics from Tallahassee Democrat:

Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a special legislative session Friday to tackle two festering concerns: implementing slots rules for casinos in Broward County and reforms to cut Medicaid costs.

Bush's call for the session the week of Dec. 5 also resolves a backroom dispute between House and Senate leaders in recent weeks over what issues merited special attention. Senate leaders wanted to revisit lobbyist ethics reforms, while House Speaker Allan Bense and his captains wanted to press for further tort-reform measures.

Senate President Tom Lee said neither chamber had reached agreement and that the governor couldn't wait any longer.

"If the Legislature were to come to some arrangement, (the call) would have to be somewhat broader than that," Lee said

Here is a link to the proclamation from the Governor. Clearly, Jeb is still charging hard here:

At a time when previous two-term Florida governors were easing into lame-duck status with modest legislative agendas, Bush is preparing one final, sweeping package of tax, education and Medicaid spending proposals for coming months.

Bush last week called lawmakers into special session Dec. 5-9 to implement his Medicaid plan and create rules for voter-approved slot-machine operations at Broward County pari-mutuel facilities.

The governor's renewed ambition comes despite wholesale office turnover, as members of his team quietly angle into new jobs -- a sure sign of an administration in descent.

Former Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood's resignation last week as secretary of state made her the sixth high-ranking official to exit in recent months.

Administration in descent? That’s a curious reportorial sentence. It’s also a sure sign that an administration interested in continuing Republican governance in Florida is getting some new blood some valuable experience. Isn’t that obvious? So why write administration in descent?

Very, very curious writing.

 

THE SUNSHINE IS SLOWLY BUT SURELY COMING TO THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Apologies, Dafydd, but I’m reproducing your fantastic post in full because the subject is just that fascinating to me:

I wonder if Deborah Orin reads Big Lizards? Somehow I doubt it... though it’s a nice thought to contemplate. In any event, I must rise to correct one small point in her otherwise excellent New York Post column on the Joseph Wilson scam, flagged by my favorite blog, Power Line. Actually, though it’s a small point in her column, easily corrected, it’s a monumental, colossal point in the history of the Iraq war and aftermath.

The column lays out, with perfect clarity, the case that far from wanting to keep the lid on Joe Wilson, the CIA actually encouraged his repeated lies about his trip and what he found (and “didn’t find”), even though it knew this would jeopardize the career of his CIA employed wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. In the course of the column, Ms. Orin found occasion to wonder why they would be so complicit in Wilson’s attacks on the president; she concluded, with admirable straigtforwardness rare in the MSM, that the CIA was in full CYA mode by the time Wilson went public in mid-2003:

But then, all this came at a time when the CIA division where Wilson’s wife worked had an intense need to cover its rear: Remember — they were the ones who (along with every other intel agency in the world) had insisted that Saddam had WMDs — but no WMDs were being found.

The irony of this could choke a horse. The reason that “no WMDs were being found” is that the Iraq Survey Group, a creature of the CIA as well as the Pentagon and the IAEA, was headed at that time by David Kay; and Kay had made a conscious decison not to count as WMD any item that had a dual civilian use. Read how carefully Kay parsed his words when he resigned in January 2004 (via Wikipedia):

I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical weapons there.

Note that this would elegantly rule out any chemical weapon that was not “deployed” -- that is, rockets made to accept chemical payloads but which were currently empty, even if they were found twenty-five feet away from 55-gallon drums of cyclosarin-based “pesticides” in a camouflaged ammunition bunker. This is akin to cops searching a convicted felon’s home and refusing to arrest because all the guns they found were unloaded, thus not “deployed” and “militarized.”

So if the CIA was in the doghouse, as clearly it was, its embarassment was entirely of its own making... both for predicting (one can only presume) that we would find warehouses of carefully labeled WMD, all loaded up and ready to fire -- and then after the war, for allowing David Kay to construct a definition of WMD so crabbed and narrow that virtually nothing would qualify except the cartoonish scenario above.

That in turn causes me to wonder whether there were some in the CIA so anti-Iraq War, so anti-President-Bush, that they were willing to sacrifice even the good name of the Company itself, so painstakingly rebuilt from the nadir of the Carter era, if only that would hurt President Bush’s reelection chances. If so, all we would have shown (alas) is that the liberal rot was no less advanced within the CIA than within the State Department, academe, and the mainstream media.

Simply amazing. You game the system, you feed the opposition politicians, then you play victim – confident in the assurance that your media allies will keep you firmly in that role.

All while there’s a war going on and Americans are fighting in the field.

 

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE?

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, discussing the ongoing conflagration in France (just take a look at ¡No Pasaran! for a decent, and running, overview), noted the all-too-obvious left wing dilemma when it comes to addressing Muslims and their “legitimate” aspirations:

In a certain kind of liberal universe, French Muslim rioters are victims who want nothing more than to enjoy the bourgeoise pleasures of secular France. Iraqi Muslims, by contrast, have little yearning for freedom, self-government, and prosperity, preferring civil war, a Saddam-style strong man, and/or a theocracy. They are victims of U.S. aggression, which denies them these things, at least temporarily. To me, however, it seems plausible that Iraqis Muslims will find satisfaction in their own democratic state before European Muslims will find satisfaction in a western-style democracy.

Strange, in a very sick and paternalistically racial kind of way. Many of them HAVE to recognize this, they simply must already recognize it.

 

ONE MORE NOTE ON STILL CELEBRATING THE GEORGIA WIN

First, here’s Tony Barnhart in the Atlanta paper, speaking (or writing, that is) the truth:

Steve Spurrier did a lot of impressive things during his 12 years as the head coach at Florida.

He won 122 games, an average of 10 per year. Not bad considering that when he took the job, Florida had NEVER won 10 games in a season.

Until he got there, Florida had never won an SEC championship. He won six.

He won a national championship (1996) and became the single most dominant SEC coach of his era.

Still, all of that pales in comparison to what Spurrier did to the psychology of the [Florida- Georgia] game.

Florida just beat Georgia for the 14th time in 16 years. Think about that. Nobody should beat a top drawer SEC team 14 out of 16 years. But that is what Florida has done. And they won last Saturday’s game, I believe, because of the mindset created by Spurrier.

It was and is Spurrier’s greatest gift to his alma mater. Because it keeps on giving, and giving, and giving! And not just on the football field. In response to Barnhart’s statement, GidgetJo just couldn’t help herself and posted this beauty:

First of all I’d like to say that I agree with everyone’s comments as a whole, however, I’m not so sure I do with Northwest Dawg. Sure you ask some good questions but when it comes to saying that Richt is satisfied with (and even more outrageous, considers it as good as a TD!) just a field goal(s) is preposterous. Richt has said himself that they need to do more than just kick field goals and that it’s unsatisfactory. Yet, the fact that the Dawgs haven’t done so well in the Red Zone is still well known. The playcalls definitely weren’t up to par for the FL/GA game either, which Richt did say he was going to work on calling for plays that were better suited for JT3. I’m a diehard GA fan and it gets worse every year, which also expands my interest in having knowledge about the team, the past, and the entire SEC in general. Yes, I haven’t been a diehard fan my entire life, but I definitely am a true GA fan because I loved them even before we were a winning team. Mark Richt is a Godsend! I told everyone, just give him a couple years to get really comfortable with the UGA program and the Dawgs will be winning more games. Then what happened? It didn’t even take Richt that long!

As far as the column itself, I couldn’t have said it better! Yet another thing I’ve always said is that “UGA is just intimidated by UF!” It’s not that they are a better team per say, it’s just that UGA is so intimidated & want to win SO bad that their psychology of the game and playing it just gets in the way. I even said it last year and they won, yet I didn’t this year and they lost. These are all the things that just add to what makes the annual game SO good. I don’t know WHAT can be done to change the mind set of the team and the GA fans, but something needs to be done. I don’t want to have to hold my breathe so much when it comes to watching the annual game, or talkin’ smack. I don’t like the fact that I do either, but it’s the whole mind set and intimidation thing. I HATE the Gators, and I hate them for rubbing the salt in our wounds EVERY year way more than they should have, because their team in general doesn’t deserve it! So SCREW all you Gators out there! This game means a WHOLE LESS than everyone makes it (in some respects). You won the game, GREAT, but take a look at your team all year long and then a good look at ours. GA IS A BETTER TEAM! Oh, and JT3, don’t feel like crap. You played an AWESOME game & you should be able to look back at the ENTIRE game and be proud of your game as a starting QB. I’m not sure that it’d be any different with Shockley, so no worries. We would have been duped when it came to the Nationals anyway (I hate to say it), but we’re still on top of the SEC East & on route to the SEC Championship. And if a team has to lose, you sure as heck don’t want it to be a team that you were expected to whoop up on. Only a sorry team loses an easy game (even though, there are those few times…), and at least we only lost in big games.

GOOOOOO DAWGS!!!!! SCREW THE GATORS!

And in case anyone wants to mention it: Bitter? Somewhat, YES! But UGA will get over it, UF however will not (when we win the SEC Championship, or even just the SEC East)!

Did I mention, this is why the SEC is SOOOO GREAT and why I LOVE it!

I’m a GA gal that grew up a UNC fan (thanks a lot, dad! Just kidding – I’ll always have a place in my heart for them. And thanks Bro for introducing me to UGA and why keeping up with & watching sports, ESPECIALLY college football [I’m a junkie] can be so interesting and so much FUN!), but my interests have really only ever been with UGA.

Lastly (I swear!), I apologize everyone that I talk to FRIGGIN’ MUCH!

Now THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is priceless. Thank you, GidgetJo.

 

CHRISTMAS DID NOT COME EARLY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Too bad, so sad. Jack Kelly says “Fitzmass” was hoped for but “Fitzween” was delivered instead:

The fever swamp Left had been looking forward to a “Fitzmas,” indictments by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that would deprive President Bush of Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, and would expose a White House plot to mislead America into the Iraq war.

What they got instead was a “Fitzween” that was more trick than treat.

The Libby indictment is Martha Stewart stuff. Mr. Libby is charged with having lied about from whom he learned that the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer.

Mr. Fitzgerald indicted no one for the crime he supposedly was investigating for the last two years, whether anyone had deliberately outed a covert CIA agent. There was no underlying crime, and there was no conspiracy to cover up what wasn’t a crime in the first place.

Mr. Fitzgerald made it plain in his news conference that his prosecution of Libby would not delve into the conspiracy theories treasured by the Left.

“This indictment is not about the war,” he said. “This indictment will not seek to prove the war was justified or unjustified.”

I feel sorry for Libby, whose life is ruined whether he beats the charges or not. But after him, the biggest losers are conspiracy-mongering liberals. They sent Fitzgerald out to hunt for bear, but all he bagged was a squirrel.

Journalists were doing their best to paint that squirrel as ferocious. One noted that Libby is the first serving White House official to be indicted since the Grant administration. Journalists will flog it as hard as they can, but this story seems destined to fade from public consciousness as rapidly as did the indictment of two Clinton administration Cabinet secretaries.

Quick, who were they? (Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who was acquitted at trial, and Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, who pled to a misdemeanor.)

The American people apparently agree the Libby indictment is no big deal. Only 45 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll think Libby did something illegal. And 56 percent think this was an isolated incident, not a sign of low ethical standards in the Bush administration.

Still, Fitzgerald should have had the common sense to take his stuff and just go home. No substantive crime arising from the alleged acts giving rise to his charge has been committed by his own admission. Prosecutors and judges, as a class, can be overly anal, and need to be reminded (often) of the doctrine of political question (this discussion is from Wikipedia):

In United States law, a ruling that a matter in controversy is a political question is a statement by a federal court, declining to rule in a case because: 1) the U.S. Constitution has committed decision-making on this subject to another branch of the federal government; 2) there are inadequate standards for the court to apply; or 3) the court feels it is prudent not to interfere. Recently, courts have held that Congress's impeachment procedures and the President's authority over foreign affairs, particularly the President's powers to abrogate treaties and commit troops, are political questions.

The doctrine has its roots in the federal judiciary's desire to avoid inserting itself into conflicts between branches of the federal government. It is justified by the notion that there exist some questions best resolved through the political process, voters approving or correcting the challenged action by voting for or against those involved in the decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter was an active and eloquent exponent of maintaining and expanding the political question doctrine.

That’s all this thing has ever been and the very nanosecond that Fitzgerald knew he was not going to be able to indict for the substantive crime at issue, the jig should have been up.

Go home, Patrick. Go home now.

 

SOUTH . . . SIDE !

I live on the Southside of Tallahassee and one of our major East-West thoroughfares is Orange Avenue. The taxpayers of Leon County are funding a major renovation of this two-lane roadway into a four-lane roadway and I thought it might be interesting to give a few photos of their current progress.

This is a picture looking eastward toward Jim Lee Road (Rickards High School is up a hill, to the right). The Jim Lee intersection is where the roundabout will be placed.

 

This is a view looking westward, showing the trench that represents a major upgrade to the drainage network:

 

And this is also looking westward, toward Monroe Street (further up but not seen is the southern edge of the FAMU campus where the new FAMU High will be built:

 

The interesting thing to me is that they are going to put in a roundabout at the intersection of Jim Lee and Orange Avenue. I'm not real sure about that decision, not sure at all, but it's a done deal.

 

I believe there's a 2007 completion date.

 

HONG KONG AND THE WEIRD LAST TWO WEEKS

The reservations have been made, flight and hotel paid for, and my passport is in hand: come mid-November, Hong Kong here we come.

Can you believe it? I can’t.

I’m hoping this will be my best vacation ever and I also hope to be able to do a good bit of blogging while I’m there.

Like many Gators, I’m still celebrating the Florida-Georgia victory. I like this image as a representation of how we’re still celebrating:

 

That's the work of a fark superstar among the Gators, Mr2cents.

Unfortunately, there was a Florida student beaten to death during that weekend and five Jacksonville kids have been arrested for the crime:

 

Loss spurs reflection, questions Gainesville Sun, FL - Nov 6, 2005

 

Suspects In Fatal Student Beating IDed In Second Attack News4Jax.com, FL - Nov 2, 2005

 

Funeral plans set for murdered UF student WAWS - Nov 2, 2005 Funeral plans are set for the University of Florida student killed in Jacksonville over the weekend. 23-year old Thomas Brown was ...

 

Tape captures fatal beating of UF student Sarasota Herald-Tribune, FL - Nov 1, 2005

 

Slain UF student wasn't type to fight Florida Today, FL - Oct 31, 2005

 

UF student fatally beaten after game Gainesville Sun, FL - Oct 31, 2005

 

Three of the killers caught on video tape had personal profiles on some website called My Space and it (along with their circle of friends, and THEIR profiles) made for some very interesting reading.

I’m also still dealing with the bad taste left in my mouth from the Harriet Miers niggerization. There is, for lack of a better phrase, an “open letter to the white people of the South” swimming around in my head over this situation but, so far, my better judgment has said don’t write it, let alone post it. But, there have been a couple of blog posts by some of the involved parties that immediately bring back the absurdity of the situation. From the Power Line gang we get a real gem of right-wing spin, published in the Washington Post: “Why Alito’s the man for the true conservative agenda.” Right. They might as well have said he looks like us, he talks like us, and he was “schooled” like us. And how could you not help but get all warm and fuzzy when Captain Ed, one of the blogosphere ringleaders of the niggerization, dares to write something like this:

The New York Times editorial board should consider putting its own essays behind the $50 sanity firewall, playing to its elitist core audience rather than the broader sphere of readers that engage in the political process. Today's editorial on referenda exposes Pinch's crew as the worst kind of elitists -- those who believe that American voters cannot be trusted with a democracy at all, but should instead rely on their betters to instruct them on how to behave[.]

Um . . . pot, meet kettle. You already know each other well and you might as well not even try to sit there and act like you don’t.

The worst kind of elitists, Captain Ed? Right now that’s clearly open for debate.

 

INTERESTING COLLEGE FOOTBALL STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE ANALYSIS

According to the NCAA, here are the numbers as of this week. Among the top 47 schools, I’ve highlighted the SEC schools in yellow, the ACC schools in gray:

 

			CUMULATIVE	OPPOSITION
RANK	TEAM	WINS	LOSSES	TIES	PCT
1	Oklahoma	51	23	0	0.68918919
2	Michigan	52	25	0	0.67532468
3	Stanford	44	23	0	0.65671642
4	Ohio St.	52	29	0	0.64197531
5	Arkansas	43	24	0	0.64179104
6	Florida	46	26	0	0.63888889
7	North Carolina	48	28