Some people might have caught the site at an odd time within the last couple days. There are going to be some changes around here over the next few weeks. Right now, I'm announcing two.

First of all, for the astute observer, this is not being posted by R. Alex Whitlock, which is me, but by my Lovely Assistant Poster Girl [wave for the camera, sweetie]. I am heading out of town next week for a trip to Florida where I will have no access to the Internet. Rather than lose what I'm sure are a million zillion die-hard-except-if-you-don't-post-for-a-week fans, I've made alternative arrangements. I've written a few time-unspecific posts on subjects I couldn't articulate my thoughts on quickly enough for it to be relevent, and you'll be seeing those next week. I'll also post some links to previous stuff that I have written that I think is interesting or newsworthy. In any case, with any luck and the due dilligence of LAPG, I can keep you coming back at least a little so I won't be back down to eight readers when I install the hit-counter next week. Of course, any deviance from my expected million zillion readers will be rationalized explained by my vacation.

The other news is that I have thrown my lot in with Blogspot. I considered moving over to Moveable Type and doing what everyone else does like the lemming that I am, but at this time it simply doesn't make sense for me to do that. My first writing priority is and will always be my novel (until it's done), and one way to remember that and keep myself from getting too wrapped up into it is to accept Blogspot's limitations. I'm a perfectionist by nature, and as long as I'm on Blogspot, it'll never be perfect.. or close.

My reward for subscribing to Blogger Pro has been the loss of several old posts. I've contacted them about it but have not yet heard back.

Norway's Nazi children
During World War II, German soldiers serving in Norway fathered some 12,000 children by local women. Today these Tyskerbarna or 'German Bastards' are demanding compensation - not from Germany, but from Norway. What is the nature of their grievance?

Here's what:

Their mothers, branded 'German whores', had their heads shaved and were often sent to do hard labour. Their children were classified as 'rats' by government officials, who tried to get the Tyskerbarna transported, first to Germany, then to Australia. But Germany was in ruins and Australia refused to have them. So they stayed in Norway.
...
They became hate figures, regarded as dangerous and liable to form a fascist fifth column because of their 'Nazi genes' but also reviled as feeble-minded. In the tradition of Nazi science, Norwegian government psychologists concluded that the women who had fraternised with Germans were 'asocial psychopaths of limited talent, some of them seriously backward', and that 80% of their children must be mentally retarded. The verdict 'father was a German' was indictment enough to send children to mental hospitals, where many were tortured and raped. Others had their Germanness beaten out of them by foster parents. Some were allegedly used as guinea pigs in drugs trials of LSD, mescaline and other substances, initiated by the Norwegian military, Oslo University and the CIA. Many others ended up in children's homes, where they received no education to speak of and were released as bewildered adults in the early Sixties into a world with which they were ill-equipped to deal.
...
She recounted how, as a two-year-old living with foster parents, she had been chained up with the dog in the yard; how as a six-year-old she had been thrown in the river by a man from her village, who said he wanted to see if 'the witch will drown or float'. At the age of nine, drunken villagers near Trondheim branded her forehead with a swastika made of bent nails, and threatened to rape her.

The "German whores" were treated rather poorly in France, but nothing compares to this. One can imagine the anger and outrage of patriots at those who threw their lot in with the oppositions, but there are obviously limits to acceptable retribution. Every nation has black marks on their history. The US is no different. However, those that go so far out of their way to point out our historical shortcomings ought to keep situations like this in mind. The only nations that have not caused this kind of harm at one point or another are the ones that never had the power to. Where the difference comes in is whether or not they are trying right now to avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite factions in the US and Europe that are not outraged by this sort of thing (as long as it's the Arabs doing it to one another), think for a moment how the West and Middle East compare with one another.

Some will read this and say to themselves "See? We are no better than those we condemn!"

Would something like this even garner attention in Egypt? Could the wronged even file a lawsuit without fearing for their lives? Would it be met with anything more than a collective yawn? However, when we read this and we are outraged. That is the difference between us and them.

Thanks to Orrin Judd for the link.

25 %

My weblog owns 25 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

Found via Volokh Conspiracy.

It's a return to the RAW Cooking Quiz. Last quiz was over fire hazard safety in the kitchen. This one covers physical burns.

1. Multiple Choice: Frying butter that splashes up and hits your thumb hurts:
a) Excruciatingly
b) Tremendously
c) A little
d) Like a mofo
e) a,b, and d, but not c

2. True or False: Breathe, breathe, breathe
a) True
b) False

3. True or False: As your thumb is frying, it's useful to remember in Fight Club where Tyler Durden doused the Narrator with chemicals to create chemical burn in order for him to embrace intense, physical pain.
a) True
b) False

4. True or False: It helps to quell the intense pain of the thumb if you hit something. Hard.
a) True
b) False

5. Multiple Choice: You've heard that you should douse a burn with cold water because you will blister. Do you:
a) Use warm water as you've been told to
b) Say 'screw the blister' and use cold water for the most GLORIOUS FEELING OF RELIEF EVER
c) Use baking soda because that works on everything

6. True or False: Physical pain caused in the process of making dinner does NOT make it taste that much better for the effort.
a) True
b) False

7. True or False: Good girlfriends are impressed by battle scars from the kitchen
a) True
b) False


Answers:
1. E - And more!
2. B, False - Scream, yell, curse, repeat
3. B, False - Fight Club, while a great movie, is full of crap
4. B, False - It's benefit is negligible. It takes the pain away from the burn briefly and replaces it with a hurt hand. Then, however, both hurt. By the next day, you still feel the thumb but not the hand.
5. Choose your own answer. I choose B and would do it all over again.
6. A, True - At all.
7. A, True - Ahem... they ARE!

Next week's show: How am I going to top this? I hope I don't...

I'm not sure where Judd is coming from on this one. He gives ten pillars of modern conservatism and gives Bush a 10/10 ranking. I disagree.

(1) Pro Tax cuts

1/1

(2) Pro Social Security privatization

How far does walking the walk get you on this one? He hasn't done much yet or even proposed doing much. Nonetheless, he's gone further out on the issue than any president or candidate that comes to mind. 2/2

(3) Pro School vouchers

Bush sold us out on this one. His education bill has been passed. I wouldn't expect another overhaul this term. I can't give it to him. 2/3

(4) Pro Free Trade

Steel Tarrifs and Farm Bill. On one hand he creates a new tarrif cause the Europeans are subsidizing their steal, then he subsidizes our agriculture. He wants Fast-Track, but is he going to use it? I'm not convinced. 2/4

(5) Pro Military (especially in favor of defensive military technology--Star Wars)

3/5

(6) Pro Gun

Except when it comes to arming pilots. He seems to be turning around on this one, so 4/6

(7) Anti-abortion, anti-cloning, anti-euthanasia

5/7

(8) Opposed to legalization of drugs

6/8

(9) Anti Separation of Church and State

7/9

(10) broadly anti-government

7/10. I can't think of the last thing he did to be faily called anti-government since the tax cut, which doesn't count twice.

7 out of 10 is a reasonably impressive score, but hardly a paragon of conservatism worthy of the Pat Robertson comparison Judd makes.

The Chosen One (link unavailable)

Finally, Jewish comic book fans have a hero all their own. The latest issue of 'The Fantastic Four' comic book reveals that the angry orange man of stone known as 'The Thing' is a child of Israel. When the 6-foot, 500-pound Marvel menace admits his Hebraic heritage, an arch-villain responds, 'You don't look Jewish,' reports the Forward. Created in 1961 by Stan 'Spider-Man' Lee and Jack Kirby, The Thing was born Benjamin Jacob Grimm on the Lower East Side.

Okay, I'll grant them that The Thing is the the biggest superhero to be declared Jewish. The first? Uh-huh.

The Atom Smasher (formerly Nuklon) once passed up a chance to marry Fire because she wasn't Jewish and he was intent on marrying "within his faith." Rothstein, Adam Smasher, was a member of Infinity Inc. and is presently a member of the Justice Society of America (a collection of Golden Age heroes and those who took up the mantle of Golden Agers). He's presently a regular in the JSA comic book being put out by DC.

That's not the biggie, though. There is not only a character who is conspicuously Jewish, but he took the mantle of the "Protector of Jews" from his father and grandfather (who fought in Europe during Hitler's regime). His mentor is even a rabbi! I speak, of course, of Ragman! While Rory Regan, the man behind the rags, is generally secular, his mentor is a rabbi and Jewish history does run through the character. He even has one of the coolest powers (that a certain Spiderman villain later became known for) I've ever seen. Ragman appears occasionally in Batman comics. There was a RAGMAN mini-series in the late eighties or early nineties that ran eight issues that I hardily recommend. There was another miniseries in the mid-90's (RAGMAN: CRY OF THE DEAD, if I recall) that I never got ahold of.

(Found via Protein Wisdom)

There is a fascinating conversation going on between Bill Quick and Andy Freeman in his comments thread on this post. I recommend checking it out.

Orrin Judd's post on the "redshirting" of preschoolers lead to an interesting comment thread.

Samples:

From personal experience of being redshirted myself and having my oldest son redshirted by 6 days, my rejoinder to the Hyson-Stipek opinions (and as stated in the article they are no more than that) is that these educators are simply asserting average prognoses, without regard to whether individuals might benefit discretely." -Tom Roberts

"Brooke's point though is suppose we held Griffin backk a year and then he was in a gym class with a Robert Reich. Griffin could eat him for lunch, never mind what might happen plaking Kill the Guy with the Football." -Orrin Judd

"The best thing would be if everyone held their kid back, so you wouldn't have that problem. Hopefully, we could start a positive feedback loop where parents would eventually just keep the kids out of public schools all together." -Orrin Judd's brother.

I generally love "Live From The Future" styled writing, but NZ Bear's "Dispatches from 2014" left more than a little to be desired.

The Prof touts it as a "Cautionary Tale," but I read it last night and then again this morning and I am having difficulty appreciating everything that it's cautioning against. On one hand, it appears that he's cautioning against everything he is against, but he even does so against National ID cards (4/7/14), which he says he's not adamently opposed to (or "wasn't" then, then being now). He's not exactly cautioning us to not take our enemy seriously enough as he suggests we are taking it too seriously by allowing the government to infringe on our personal liberties to give it the tools to fight terrorism (3/22, 4/7, 4/20, 5/22, 6/28). Nor is he cautioning us about taking the threat too seriously because in his future we retreat to and from the world (4/14, 5/2, 5/19) and do not protect ourselves against the upcoming biological threat (4/19, 5/7).

I certainly get a feel for what he believes that we should do (act aggressively abroad, protect our borders, and sacrifice nary a freedom), but there is no acknowledgement as to what happens when these freedoms conflict with one another. For instance, what if it would be helpful (or even essential) for vaccinations to have the government have comprehensive information on its people so that they can react more quickly to contagious diseases? I personally don't know exactly what we should do and Bear's article doesn't help, but literarily suggests that totalitarianism hangs in the balance.

I understand that Bear's dispatches do not necessarily mean that he believes that totalitarianism is imminent. However, the literary device he uses adds to the sense of hysteria that clouds the debate more than it clarifies it. Someone could easily write a similar set of dispatches from a future in which we have a totalitarian government because we acted too aggressively abroad. Perhaps in the other dispatches, our failure to make certain sacrifices at airports caused bigger attacks down the line which caused sweeping changes that could have been avoided with smaller changes earlier on.

The point is that we simply don't know. Bear doesn't really lay out, measure for measure, how our decisions now would lay out the bleak future he envisions. Nor does he provide coherent alternatives (though, in fairness, it's a cautionary tale and he doesn't have to). To be sure, the format of the page doesn't lend itself to detailed explanations. He makes references to things that he doesn't explain, which isn't a bad thing except that it hinders his ability to lay out a case against the various things that he is against.

Ultimately, it feels to me like another diatribe of how we're slipping towards totalitarianism. Freedom requires eternal vigilance and we ought to be on guard against those who wish to take our freedoms away. On the other hand, libertarian-minded people of all stripes (liberal, conservative, anarchist) have been warning about the upcoming totalitarianism for as long as I can remember. Even with the Patriot Act, the war on drugs, the terrorists, the RIAA, and so on, we are still more free than we've ever been. Certainly after 9-11 there was a call for more government in regards to military and anti-terrorism units, but there was also another surprising reaction. Support for gun control is lower than I have seen it in a very long time. People are talking about wanting to give guns to pilots to take on to airplanes.

Maybe the day will come with the United States will be totalitarian in nature. Empires rise and empires fall. However, it won't be Americans that are a part of the revitalization I've seen in this country since 9/11 that allow it to happen.

I don't know that there are any specific views in Bear's dispatches that I disagree with from a political standpoint, but he phrases things in such a way that most people won't disagree. Reality makes things more complicated than a decision between allowing plastic knives on airplanes and giving terrorist visas. We need to have a calm rational discussion about these tradeoffs that does not involve either side accusing the other of favoring totalitarianism or being sympathetic to our enemies.

There were two shining moments in Bear's piece, though.

First, the priceless line: "Just some bureaucrats who think they're cops because they've forgotten who the real enemies are." (5/22/14)

Second, even in the totalitarian future depicted, they still can't keep The Prof down.

Don't get me wrong, I know that the survival rate of black pants staying black eventually drops to zero. If I'm lucky, they turn dark blue or grayish and are still wearable. If I'm not, they're greenish or brownish which only remotely match one of my shirts, which not coincidentally is my most warn. It's a supply and demand thing. Three pants can only be worn with one particular shirt, therefore the supply of the shirt drops and the demand raises. The pants, meanwhile, are overstocked and therefore their position ("demand") in the What I Will Wear Queue falls to the point of only being worn on those weeks where I haven't done wash in a long time and there is no salvaging my appearence. As it's a basic supply-demand economics thing, I suggest you consult Jane Galt for more details.

In any case, I can't even find the Formerly Black Now Blue pants. I did wash Sunday and I know at least one day I wore Formerly Nave Blue Turn Light Blue pants one day and jeans another. I have six Black Now Blue pants at least. Unfortunately, it seems that three of them have either faded further into being Blue Turn Light Blue or gone the way of all my socks' missing partners. Even worse than the Socks Void, they may he in my room under something. In which case, there is surely no hope...

HETERO-PEDO-CHIC: There's an epidemic breaking out! Take this from the New York Observer:
Listen up, fellows: Rich, bored teenage girls in New York City are on the prowl for twentysomething (and in some cases, thirtysomething) men. And this time, they?re not just arming themselves with fake ID?s. Young women barely past puberty?and before, ahem, the age of consent?are sashaying onto the Internet, researching adult life, and constructing elaborate alter egos designed to dupe men all too willing to believe their lies.

Consider Alexis. By 14, she was fed up with the dopey guys in her age group. This 5-foot-9 private-school student and class treasurer likes them older?much older.

At first, Alexis employed a simple alias: She would tell the older men she met that she was a junior majoring in communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Everyone bought the lie. It went well until a 24-year-old man asked her out, and mentioned that he, too, went to U. Penn.

"I, like, totally bugged out," Alexis said.

Hilarious, huh? Of course, there is an honest and coherent philosophy behind the social conservative blind eye to straight pedophilia and obsession with gay pedophilia. An email expresses it simply:
There is a difference too, according to biblical Christian principles. A boy seduced by an older woman is sinning, but a boy seduced by a man is seduced contrary to nature. The B-W relationship is a model of what he should end up doing (having sex inside of a relationship of sexual complementarity in marriage), a B-M relationship is not what he ever should be doing.
I disagree with this strongly. But don't you think that if this really is the belief of Eberstadt et al, they should simply say so and make their hostility to homosexuality as such more explicit, instead of attacking it under the veil of being opposed to child abuse?

I understand Sullivan's irritation with the double standard placed against gays when it comes to pedophilia. Eberstadt and company are seeing homosexual culture (and heterosexual culture) with very tinted glasses. At the same time, choose your examples carefully because social conservatives could read and get some silly ideas. Unfortunately, many of the silly ideas they could get are already in place.

This is almost the exact opposite of what Eberstadt condemns. In this case, it is not men who are taking advantage of young women, but rather young women taking advantage of men. It would only be an example of "pedo-chic" if the men were knowingly attracted to young girls, but from what he cites above the girls in question are going out of their way to conceal their age. If a man is sleeping with a girl who is fifteen and doesn't know it (because she has an ID that says she's 19), how in the world is that pedophilia? In fact, the opposite is what would constitute pedo-chic. Men who buy magazines that star women who are of age, but pretending to be younger, could correctly be accused of a victimless form of pedophilia. Common acceptance of this would constitute pedo-chic. If a legal woman is dressed in lace and stalkings or a catholic school girl's uniform, she is appealing to the darker side of the publication's audience because they are imagining that she is underage and they are vicariously (or imaginitively) gettin' it on with jailbait. There have been recent attempts to ban "virtual child porn" but any attempts would likely be unsuccessful because enforcement would be based entirely on motives and intent, which are practically impossible to prosecute.

So let's talk about the opposite, which Andrew cites above. Let's say that a man goes to a club that does not allow anyone under 21 to enter. He meets a sixteen year old girl there. She purchases a beer with the same fake ID she used to get in. One thing leads to another and they end up at his place. Under Texas law, he is still prosecutable despite the fake ID, that she lied to him, and the fact that she looked significantly older than she was. That is, in my mind, ludicrous. They generally don't prosecute those cases, but if her parents are irate or they feel so inclined, they have before. Sure, he didn't know, but he can't absolutely prove he didn't (you can't prove a negative) and he is guilty until proven innocent. Even if he is innocent, and honestly didn't know, they can still prosecute.

Katie Koestler, a date rape victim that stirred up a national controversy, once came to UH to discuss the topic. I have a good friend who has been a victim of date rape, so you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone who feels more passionately about what should happen to date rapists than myself. So Koestler had me right up until she warned that "silence is not consent." Like bloody hell it isn't! Well, that's not entirely accurate because silence is not consent if she struggles, is a mute, or drunk out of her mind (and he's not). Beyond that, if she doesn't give an indication that she is not alright, it is safe for him to assume it is. When challenged on this and asked if men should have to verbally ask and seek consent as to whether or not it is acceptable every step of the way, she honestly answered yes.

In the case of counterpedophilia that this article demonstrates, he can explicitly ask her how old she is and she can lie and still legally come out of it the victim. Applying that principle to Koestler's date-rape scenario, even if she explicitly consented "every step of the way" he would still be able to go to prison if she consented but didn't mean it (for what it's worth, if he is being overtly physically threatening, this principle does make sense, but Koestler didn't specify that).

Several years back I was at a convention showing off our No-Lyfe stuff and I met a pleasent young lady and we began talking. I was hesitant to make any indication of my age because I thought that she would probably stop talking to me if she found out I wasn't even twenty-one yet. I wasn't looking for a hook-up, but if I was I probably would have pursued it right up until she told me, to my utter shock, that she was fifteen. The age difference didn't matter to her as she was clearly interested even after finding out how old I was. In fact, she had assumed I was even older. What if she had lied? What if she had a fake ID? I could have landed in jail for a law that I didn't even know I was breaking. I understand that "ignorance of the law is no excuse," but in this case I would have been familiar with the law and still not known that I was breaking it. Because of the circumstances (I was in a happy relationship, she was honest), it didn't become that close to occuring, but the simple idea of it is haunting.

There are reasons that statutory rape laws are on the books. At some point, however, even kids must take responsibility for themselves. If the girls the article cites do engage in illegal intercourse, the man doesn't deserve to go to jail. He deserves an apology.

Ben Wasserstein's account in Slate on the recent citrus alcohol boom reminds me of an add campaign that a few of us came up with a while back. At some point I plan to actually make these ads in one form or another, but I thought I would give you a teaser.

For those of you in the cultural foxhole, heavy liquor labels (as well as some beer producers) are begining to market alcoholic drinks that taste as little like beer as possible. The problem is that if beer is a man's drink, then the avoidance of beer tragically sends signals that the drinker is somewhat less than manly. What if an ad campaign got some mileage out of this:


[MAN 1 and MAN 2 sit by the curb. MAN 1 looks very depressed]

MAN 2: What's wrong, Man 1?

MAN 1: My wife is threatening to leave me because I have erectile dysfunction. My kid doesn't want to go to the art museum with me anymore, and when my daughter decided to redecorate her room, she asked me to be her interior decorator. And I willingly bought a beige car. Beige! What was I thinking?

M2: Ouch, man, that's harsh. Look at the bright side.

M1: What bright side??

M2: Now that you've been utterly stripped of your manhood, you are free to guiltlessly enjoy Flamewater Cooljooce, Flamewater's new alternative to beer, whisky, and everything else remotely masculine.

M1: Hot diggity, you're right! Now I can enjoy alcohol like real men do without having to actually taste it!

[M1 tries to hug M2, M2 resists]

M2: [in background] C'mon, man, not in public, and put the drink on the other side from me...

ANNOUNCER: Flamewater Cooljooce, helping girly men feel better about themselves!

---

[YOUNG MAN enters LIVING ROOM with an arm behind his back]

YOUNG MAN: Mom, Dad, I have something I need to tell you.

Dad: What's that, son?

Mom: You know you can always talk to us.

YM: Well... [brings the arm that was behind his back in front, he is holding a bottle of Flamewater Cooljooce]

Dad: Son! Are you... sure?

Mom: Huh? Are you saying you're an alcoholic?

YM: No, mom. Look closely at the bottle in my hand. It's Flamewater Cooljooce, the malty beverage that tastes cool and refreshing, and as little like real alcohol as humanly possible...

Mom: Huh? I don't...

Dad: He's gay, Martha. He's telling us that he's gay.

YM: That's exactly right, Dad. I do not feel confined to society's vision of masculinity in my sex life or my choice in alcoholic drink. No beer for me, I'm gay. I enjoy touching and being touched by other men, as evidenced by the drink in my hand.

Dad: Son... I'm so proud of you for being able to tell us. That took real courage.

Mom: Oh, this is so wonderful. Suzie at the bridge club has a son who is gay. Maybe I can give you his number...

[Group hug]

ANNOUNCER: Flamewater Cooljooce, bringing families closer together and allowing men to announce to the world: I'm gay!

I am finally adequate at throwing darts. We have them behind the shed at work and during lunch break workers form assembly and the machine shop throw them. I never partook because I prefer not to embarass myself with my shoddy eye-hand coordination. I figure it would take hours of practice to get good enough that when they see me I look like someone with a modicum of talent that has never thrown before, as opposed to an fool who worthy of laughter. A couple days after work I would to behind the shed and practice.

Today I finally got it. I averaged a score of about thirty of so (throwing three darts) and that's good enough. The secret, it seems, is not to throw it so hard. Just look at what you want to hit and let it go. If you throw it too hard, as one particular guy does, it is destined to jerk too far down or to the write. If you let it just glide off of your hands, you may not hit exactly what you're looking at, but you'll hit the dart board. So, just look at the board, wind up, and let it fly. The force won't make as much of an impact, but you'll look more graceful by actually hitting the dartboard than you will looking good while throwing it.

There is an awesome metaphor for life in here somewhere, I just know it. Something like the Eagles quote (above in the Quote Header for a limited time!) in "Wasted Time" or the Bush-Gore 2000 election. Speaking of metaphors and writing, I'm going home to work on the novel, so there won't be any more posts tonight. I will probably have something tomorrow, though.

BTW, Stuart Buck hates posts like this one.

Somewhere in the massive collection I amassed a few years back, there is a Superman comic book where Supes was recruited to protect an alien culture from an aggressive neighber. The culture believed that violence was wrong, but was baffled as to what to do when confronted by a violent enemy. Since they were incapable of fighting back, they called on Superman because they had heard he was good at that sort of thing. Superman being Superman, he selflessly agreed to go out there and put the meanies in their place. After he had won, the aliens did not show him a bit of gratitude. He asked them if he had done something wrong, they answered that he had used violence. They abhored violence. It was time for him to leave. He would not be welcome back.

As Kagan articulately points out in his superb Policy Review essay how Europeans rely on the American militarism that they denounce, I couldn't help but think of the Superman comic. According to Kagan, the Europeans want to create a world where military might doesn't matter and every time we flex our muscles, we prove once again that the world has not arrived and that power still works. At the same time, someone still needs to keep the order and when diplomacy fails that someone is us. They don't worry about threats because they know we're there to take care of it when it does. We, on the other hand, are increasingly vigilant because when the dirt hits the fan, it will likely be us that (a) gets dirty first and (b) gets the dirtiest. They meanwhile can hide behind us. So what's to be afraid of?

I wrote on the subject a few days back, comparing Europe to a father well past his prime trying to order his much stronger sun around. Kagan uses the Mars-Venus analogy. In both cases through it's obvious that the Europeans fear our power because they don't have military power of their own and, in fact, no longer believe in its supremacy. The belief in multilateralism is as self-serving as it is magnanimous. I just hope they realize that their entire experiment rests on our ability to protect it.

Orrin Judd has a post on the subject as well. I'm not sure I agree with one point of his post, which is that Europeans won't be willing to work longer or harder in order to pay for a military. I don't think it's a matter of laziness or self-absorption, I think it's a matter of priorities. If they did work a 36th hour, they'd want it to go into some social program or another. Perhaps to the Palestinians. He's probably right that they won't raise funds to deal militarily with a problem in Bosnia, though. They've got us for that.

In between snide pot-shots at Bush, J.M. Marshall makes some good points about who the real winner with all the accounting scandals that are going on: Al Gore. The general conventional wisdom is that it helps the Democrats generically, but there really is a good case to be made that this specifically helps Gore in ways it won't help the others:

Gore ran on a people versus the powerful, anti-corporate-wrong-doing message. That sounds pretty good right now. And it would give Gore a strong 'I told you so' theme to go along with attacks on the various other ways.

Kerry, Biden, Lieberman and company are johnny-come-lately's on the issue. Gore was out in front on this one. Cynically, but present. If these scandals are still rolling out in 2004 and if the economy is in the crapper, people will be looking for answers and Gore may well look like the person that has them. Marshall uses this as an opportunity to jump on Bush's competence, but that's not really where he's vulnerable. In fact, Bush's competence has never looked better due to his handling of the war. Bush's vulnerability is his background in business and that he is surrounded largely by businessmen. A case could be made that Bush is incapable of changing the corporate environment because he comes from it. Being a career politician may never have looked better.

Of course, it's a long way off and I hope and believe that this will largely be behind us by then. Unfortunately, if the economy isn't headed to recovery by then then not only will Bush be in trouble, he'll deserve to be. Not because of any nonsense that he started this or that this wouldn't be happening if we elected Gore, but rather because he failed to get the market to rally behind him. My biggest fear right now is that there will be a rally to do "something, anything" to make this all better. There are obviously changes that need to be made but I fear we won't get a rational discussion about it as long as things are looking as they are. In the end, though, if Bush does the right thing and doesn't overreact and things aren't any better, the people will blame that tame reaction. From a political standpoint Bush will deserve to lose and the nation will deserve the reactionary populist damage Gore will inflict.

I still believe that we've seen the worst of it. The stock market fall yesterday was smaller than the day before and primarily due to serious drops in two companies that are knee deep in investigations. Unfortunately, the predicted recovery is looking far less assured then before, so I really don't know.

I accept Rylander's challenge to respond to James Carroll's Boston Globe column raising questions about the impending war in Iraq.

Having lived with Hussein as a mortal enemy for more than a decade, is the urgency of replacing him now a result less of real evidence of increased threat than of the ''us versus them'' mind-set that drives the war on terrorism? Is the cause of war something Hussein is doing, or is it something we are imagining?

Carroll is using specious, child-like reasoning in his framing this question. Imagine a child saying "My room has been messy and I've been smoking pot for the past month and you haven't done anything about it yet except keep warning me. How come you're grounding me now?" Just because we've been putting up with a lot from Saddam Hussein does not make his actions any more acceptable. People are getting the strange idea that we just woke up after September 11th and said, "You know, we've never liked that Saddam, we ought to just commit troops and money to oust him." There is a reason we don't like him. We've been threatening military action on the matter for as long as I can remember. Maybe it isn't Carroll's fault. There has been so much talk about if and how we will do it that we haven't really discussed "why" in a while. Let me say it slowly. Well, I'm typing it fast, but read it slowly or repititiously so that we don't have to start from square one every reason you conveniently forget what our problem with Hussein is:

Hussein is trying to develop weapons of mass production, presumably to use against us, and refuses to submit to weapons inspection so that we can assure that he is not presently doing so.

No, this isn't a new phenomenon. Yes, we put up with it throughout Clinton's administration. Carroll is right and there is a new imperitive to knock him out of power. It's not unilateralism for its own sake as he suggests, but rather the realization after September 11th that we are not inpenetrable and threats against our nation ought to be taken seriously. We did not take bin Laden seriously until it was too late. We do not intend to make that mistake again. Perhaps Scott Ritter is right and Hussein does not pose a threat. Perhaps he is wrong and Hussein does. The point is we don't know and Hussein isn't saying and we can't just assume that he doesn't have them until he does. Weapons inspections are the only way we can do that. In case Carroll and Rylander have forgotten, Hussein isn't letting them in.

Does the bellicosity of the Bush administration eliminate the alternatives to war? For example, ''containment and deterrence,'' which worked against the Soviet Union and have so far worked against Hussein, depend on the cooperation of other nations. Is Bush's chest-thumping war talk, even short of actual invasion, destroying that cooperation?

How do you define "working"? Yes, they are working insofar as Hussein has not lead an attack on our nation yet. Do we want to wait until he does before we can officially say that it isn't working? Arguably, our sanctions on Iraq has been a part of the "containment and deterrence" strategy that Carroll has proclaimed working. Am I then to assume that Carroll is in favor of the sanctions? I honestly don't know if he is or not, but I do know that support for it has been waning for some time. Why? Because the same people that oppose invading Iraq are arguing that the current sanctions are hurting the people of Iraq and are not working. Opponents of the war can't have it both ways. Maybe now that we're talking war they'll say that the embargo isn't so bad, but they didn't like them a year ago and if we don't invade Iraq (and it doesn't look like we're going to) they won't like them a year from now.

When the US goal shifts from one of moderating Hussein's behavior to the openly expressed purpose of ''regime change,'' what does Hussein have to lose? And when Hussein knows an invading US force is surely coming, does he not have to ''use or lose'' whatever weapons he has? Isn't Washington forcing him to respond with his worst?

The goal did not magically move. We're talking about a regime change because Hussein hasn't changed his behavior. It's become apparent that he's not going to. If he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction right now, then his worst isn't all that bad. Two questions ago he was saying that Hussein isn't a threat to us and now he's saying that we should fear his reprisal. Again, you can't have it both ways. Maybe Carroll believes that Hussein can hurt us but isn't, but that contradicts Scott Ritter whom he approvingly cites as an expert who says that Hussein isn't a capable threat.

What effect would a major American war against Iraq have on the broader conflict between Islam and the West? If Al Qaeda grew out of the humiliations attached to the Gulf War, what would grow out of the new humiliation of a massive US imposition on Iraq, including the necessity of a long-term occupation by the United States?

A religious crusader Hussein is not. A friend of Saudi Arabia and other regional nations he is not. They may dislike Iraq less than they don't want us to interfere, but there is no chance that they would go do the mat with us over a dictator they brought us over a decade earlier to push back. In any case, the effect that it has might even be positive. We're passed the point of getting them to like us. If we make them fear us, that should be sufficient. With the help of the Northern Alliance, we toppled the Taliban in the matter of a couple months. If we topple Hussein because he wouldn't comply with our requests, it will make the governments think twice before screwing with us. Will it make them hate us? They already do. Will they openly declare war on us? That's not likely. They need us every bit as much as we need them.

Many of these questions were asked in one form or another before we invaded Afghanistan. Robert Wright wrote passionately about how the Arab Street will rise against us, there will be a coup in Pakistan, and so on. It didn't happen. While we obviously shouldn't go out of our way to make them angry, it is simply bad policy to avoid taking measures for national security (even if they aren't of immediate importance) to make sure that we don't anger them. We're too big to walk on eggshells.

What does it say about the United States that we are about to become a ''first-strike'' nation? Abandoning multilateralism, have we abandoned diplomacy as well? Is war no longer a last resort, taken in self-defense, but a routine method of getting our way, since no one can stop us? Has the time come for us to reverse the National Security Act of 1947 and go back to calling the ''Defense Department'' the ''War Department?''

He talks about us getting "our way" as if we are a kid who doesn't want to drink Diet Coke and will whine about it until he gets the real thing. "Our way" is the security of our nation. "Our way" is the assurance that Saddam won't use us to make himself a hero in our region and ensure his immortality the way that bin Laden has. Multilateralism doesn't work when no one agrees with what you want to do. Europe doesn't want us to invade Iraq, but they also don't want us to sanction Iraq. Saddam isn't going to attack Europe, but he may attack us. George H. Bush's coalition is dead. We don't need Europe anymore so we don't have to listen to them anymore. However, the truth of the matter is that we are listening to them. We disagree. They are not in a position to tell us what to do. It is not a sign of a moral difficiency not to do what they tell us because their stake in this is not nearly as big ours.

Would a war against Iraq, with its risk of inflaming the ''clash of civilizations'' and its likely weakening of ties between the United States and our allies, make our nation more vulnerable to terrorist attacks? If the only real way to track down Al Qaeda and prevent future attacks is through the very multilateralism that the Bush war would weaken, isn't Bush still enacting the script written by Osama bin Laden?

War opponents said the same thing with Afghanistan. The answer was no. It still is.

UPDATE: Rylander responds

For now, I will just say this -- the comparison he draws at the end of the piece to the war in Afghanistan is specious. A lot of people who supported attacks against Al Qaeda and removal of the Taliban--myself included--nonetheless have questions about widening the war effort to Iraq at this time. It's not a reflexive liberal anti-war argument. Mine is a how far can we stretch the military, can we achieve a regime change, and what will it mean for the Arab-Israeli conflict for the United States to attempt to remove Saddam at this time argument. Sorry, Alex. I'm just not convinced yet.

Those are better arguments than the article that he sites, in my opinion. My question to him is if "at this time" then when? Do we issue more threats to be ignored? Do we wait for Hussein to have the capability of hurting us? The Israel-Palestine conflict can be assumed to be indefinite. I'm not sure how far we can stretch the military, but I suspect that the reason we haven't been doing much militarily lately (to Bush's political disadvantage, I might add) is to rebuild our capabilities.

As for the Comparison with Iraq, the comparison I was making wasin response to that *specific* argument. Carroll (in the form of inquiry) suggests that we shouldn't attack Iraq because it is exactly what bin Laden wants us to do and our mere interference may make them rise against us. That particular question was a form of the "Arab Street" argument made about Afghanistan. To be sure, what we did in Afghanistan and what we plan to do in Iraq are different in nature and I don't believe it intellectually inconsistent to support the former and oppose the latter. However, with respect to the argument that we shouldn't do it because it will enrage the Arabs, Afghanistan demonstrates a solid counterargument. We did what we did there over there strong objections and even they now admit it was effective and the Afghans are better off for it. They felt no kinship with the Taliban and they don't feel any kinship with Saddam.*

Scenario 1: Israel states that the use of the extra powerful weaponry was unintended and did not know there were that many people in and around the building.
There is a man aiming his gun in your general direction. He has fired several times killing those around you. You are pointing a gun at him, but he continues to shoot. You fire the gun, unaware of the bomb attached to his chest. The bomb kills the perpetrator and a innocents around him.

Scenario 2: Israelis knew that there would be casualties, but it was unavoidable.
There is a man aiming his gun in your general direction. He has fired several times killing those around you. You are pointing a gun at him, but he continues to shoot. In front of him is an innocent hostage. You only have one round in your gun, and if you try to shoot around the hostage the perpetrator will escape. Your gun is powerful enough that you could shoot straight through the hostage and kill him. The longer you consider it, the more times his gun goes off. You take a deep breathe and fire your powerful gun, immediately killing the hostage and perpetrator.

Scenario 3: Opponents of Israel state that the extra powerful weaponry was intended and they showed callous disregard for the lives of surrounding victims.
There is a man aiming his gun in your general direction. He has fired several times killing those around you. Two years ago you offered him nearly everything he wanted and he responded by opening fire. One by one, you watch your friends die. In a fit of anger, you pick up the most powerful weapon you have and blow him to bits, to hell with the rest.

What do these three scenarios have in common?

They begin with a perpetrator, aiming a gun, killing several of your people. He was surrounded by people and the death of those around him or those around you was inevitable.

That's all I have to say about the tragedy in Gaza.

Time: 1988
Place: Mack's house
Characters: My friend Mack and I

Mack: Did I show you my new GI Joe figure?
Alex: [looking at it] Oh, cool, who is he?
Mack: It's Tanker, man!
Alex: Tanker? This isn't Tanker, that's Tanker [pointing to other GI Joe figure on his display shelf]
Mack: No, this is Ultra-Cool-Night-Stalker-Tanker. That's just plain old Tanker.
Alex: So how are we going to play war with two Tankers?
Mack: I have three. Don't forget Desert Tanker!
Alex: Why are there three Tankers?
Mack: Cause this is cool Ultra-Cool-Night-Stalker Tanker, that's Desert Tanker, and that's regular Tanker.
Alex: Whhyyyyyyyyy?
Mack: I dunno. The same reasons there are five Cobra Commanders. They look cool.
Alex: But... but... then why did they make the original Tanker look so bland?
Mack: Cause, that's regular Tanker, this is Ultra-Cool...
[Alex explodes]


Time: 2002
Place: My parents' house
Characters: Dad and I

Alex: Who's playing?
Dad: Marlins and the Braves.
Alex: Oh, the Marlins changed their uniforms again. What's up with the Braves gettup?
Dad: I don't know, I think it's retro day or something.
Alex: Again? The Marlins are too new to even have a retro look...
Dad: I don't know. The Rangers were playing with "Washington" on their jerseys earlier.
Alex: I wonder how many uniforms they wear in a year.
Dad: Well, there's the home and away jerseys. Also don't forget the Sunday jerseys. They wear green for St. Patrick's Day. They have their spring training jerseys. I think they also have an Ultra-Cool-Night-Stalker jersey, too...
[Alex explodes this time because he DOES understand]

I had heard of Carol Gilligan, but didn't know much about her until I ran across this interesting article in The New Republic. I had figured Gilligan was a by-the-numbers pioneering feminist railing against the patriarchy blah blah blah. According to the article's author, Margaret Talbot, her theories actually transcend base gender and pull more heavily from childhood development and psychological theory.

In Gilligan's world, we are all born innately in touch with our feelings. It is only as the Patriarchy takes ahold of us that we begin to sacrifice ourselves bit at a time, and become their tools. For boys, this happens at the very early age of five or six. It takes longer to get to girls and they are affected at around ten or twelve. The boys burst in an emotionless fit of developing masculinity while the girls "wilt into diffidence." Gilligan's concern for girls isn't favoritism, of course, but that they are at least salvageable since their transformation occurs later and they are not as destined to grow into the patriarchy as men are. There is a hint of concern for boys, but mostly in the form of "testosterone poisoning" that Alan Alda once spoke of.

What struck me about the explanation of Gilligan's work is how familiar it sounded. Not just because Gilligan and her views are well known, but the overall feel of the idea was familiar in a broader context. It's the inverted Christian idea that we are all born of sin and only cleansed by God strangely inverted. We are all born authentic and sinless and corrupted by the world. It was familiar to me because I have recently read a book with a similar view by clinical psychology pioneer Carl Rogers. It is also discussed as one of the four doiminant philosophy's in David Keirsey's brand of Jungian Typology. For those of you unfamiliar with Typology, it's the division of personality into four keys, E or I, S or N, T or F, and P or J that make each person's "type" (INTJ, ESFP, ISTP, etc). Keirsey took Typology and subdivided the sixteen categories into four: SP, SJ, NT, and NF. Rogers, and indeed the entire school of thought that Gilligan is also a part of, would clearly be in the NF category.

NF stands for iNtuititive ("I" was taken by Introverted) Feeler. The NF's iNtuition is important because because the opposing force is Sensation. Sensation refers to the senses and our interaction with what is real and concrete. Intuition is defined more as the underlying themes of reality. For most N's, the them or idea trumps reality. For most types, it means they get lost in their own ideas from time to time. For extreme types, it means they can turn a cold eye to the world around them in favor of the way that they believe things should be. One reason why The Patriarchy is so ill-defined is that it transcends any specific people, but instead refers to the overall thrust of society that feminists argue is oppressing women. The NF's "F" is important because it elevates the importance of how we feel about something in comparison to what exactly it is from an pragmatic, morally neutral standpoint.

When combined, the NF "Idealist" (as Keirsey calls them) is most fixated on remaining true to our emotions and sense of authenticity. Our job is to be true to ourselves, true to others, and remain open and authentic at all costs. Therefore, the NF's are the type that most adores the innocence of childhood. Gilligan's fixation on young girls is based on the fact that they are so free with their emotions and the expression of them. While Carl Rogers is not so fundamentally simple, it could be argued that he is one of the forefathers of the "inner child" dogma of yesteryear (he denies it, but the shoe at least partially fits). In his book On Becoming Human, he pushes for psychologists to get people to unwrap the world around their patient to see the emotions that truly reside inside of us. He advocates interacting on a pure and simple level, dealing with one another honestly and entirely from our hearts. Any sacrifices we make to our feelings is ultimately a betrayal of ourselves. Rogers believes that we all do it (betray ourselves) and that one of the goals of the psychologists is to undo that as much as possible.

Gilligan's philosophy follows along similar philosophy, except that she sees a pattern to when this is happening and she attributes The Patriarchy as the cause. Boys sacrifice their authentic selves young because the Patriarchy demands their future membership. Girls sacrifice theirs when they are older and aware that they will never be a part of the Patriarchy. They accept their fates and wild. Gilligan's work is apparently long on diagnosis and short on prognosis because even by trying to get the young girls to hold on to their authenticity, they are only delaying the inevitable. The world will eat away at them until they submit. That's because part of the problem is a misdiagnosis of sorts.

My father, presumably a Patriarch, never walked up to me when I was five years old and said "Alex, you are too emotional. One day, you will have to join us and in order to prepare you for that, we must cut you off from your friends and emotionally isolate you." Instead, some boys said some mean things to me. When I cried, they did not react favorably. Therefore I learned that expressing myself came with a cost. When I was a chubby fifth grader, I asked a very beautiful and popular girl if she would "go with me" [go where? Dunno. It was the slang of the age]. She was nice about the rejection and all, but I also learned that I didn't like that feeling much so whenever I liked a girl I weighed the likelihood that she would like me up against how much I liked her. My measurements were off, but I learned. You just don't ask some girls out. You just don't tell some people that you like them. It wasn't part of a grand sacrifice that I was making. I just knew there were experiences that I didn't want to repeat.

It becomes a tradeoff. When I am in a room full of people with a dominant political philosophy that I don't share, I don't make it a point to register my protest and point out the many, many ways that they are dead wrong. There is a time and place for my opinion, and when I keep quiet I am not betraying my self of silencing my voice in a meaningful way. I'm just avoiding a tense discussion where at an inappropriate venue. It's called tact. One guy I knew quit a job because his boss yelled at him and it made him feel bad. You can only do that sort of thing so many times. Then you have to find ways to deal with it. Sometimes when you are angry with your significant other, it's best not to say anything if you know it's going to blow over. Sometimes you had better say something because it will bother you until you do. These are legitimate decisions that we make. They are value-based and therefore do not always have a clear "right thing to do" and "wrong answer." In the simplified Gilligan perspective, any denial of what we feel and how we think is automatically a betrayal of ourselves.

An a former job, I came in and worked on a holiday to finish up some chores that had to be done. Since it was a holiday, I would not get paid for it and was doing it as a benevolent gesture. Unfortunately, I forgot to clean my desk when I left so when I got in the next morning I got chewed out for having a messy desk. I told him that I had come in to work the previous day and he was unmoved by my benevolence. I could have screamed to the high heavens that he should have appreciate what I did, that I was underpaid, and that his priorities were messed up. Then I could have gone on the unemployment line. Instead, I ended up getting a raise a couple months later. You choose your battles. You don't pick every last one because you want to be true to yourself.

On a more personal and emotional level, I wrote Sunday night about a song in which a grown man cries on his daughters shoulder about his deceased wife. There are times when you need to be supportive and when being supportive means, at least temporarily, denying what you feel. Carl Rogers advocates psychiatrists telling their patients exactly what they are feeling. In some cases, that's probably helpful. In others, it's only going to make them feel worse. If young Johnny is seeing a psychiatrist because my mommy and daddy never stop yelling at him, the last thing he wants is the doc yelling under any circumstances. Some people don't deal well with anger and even if you're angry, it's better to let it go because it will make them feel a lot worse than it will make you feel better.

That's the way life works. I understand that in the NF Idealist world none of the "sacrifices" would be necessary, but that's not a product of any Patriarchial conspiracy or any other aspect of our specific culture. In fact, as cultures go, we are one of the more extroverted ones. Take a look at our television for a wide gamut of emotions expressed for the entire world to see. If you want to see expressed anger, tune in Jerry Springer. If you want to see gushy self-help TV, check out Oprah. It's no accident that both Gilligan and Rogers are American. It's unlikely that they would have risen to stardom anywhere else but the Patriarchial West.

Maybe boys do lose their childhood pluckiness at six and girls at twelve. Maybe they learn that it's not always okay to say exactly what's on your mind and how you feel. That's not a sacrifice at the Altar of the Patriarchy, though, it's called growing up.

Tired and warn out from cooking? Miss the good old meals like Mom used to make? Well, today's recipe is the cure for what ails you!

Ingredients
One (1) Telephone
Ten (10) Sequential digits used to call your mother
One (1) Mother who lives nearby
One (1) car

Estimated time: Varies (It will take me approximately two hours)

How to prepare:
1. Pick up telephone.
2. Push the buttons with the ten sequential digits designated in the second item of the ingredients list.
3. Ask mother politely if she will be cooking any dinner tonight and, if she is, could you come down and partake. Toss in a pinch of expressed malnourishment and hunger. Add apology for your growling stomach as necessary.
4. Get into car, drive to mother's house.
5. Partake.
6. Enjoy.
7. Thank her profusely.

Note: In certain circumstances, the "mother" ingredient can be replaced by a girlfriend or significant other where applicable.

Join us next week for... who knows? Something to do with cooking, I'd imagine.

I remember an old episode of the TV show Growing Pains where young Ben discovers that his favorite musician is, in real life, a jerk. The moral of the story is that you like a musician for their music, even if they personally do not live up to your expectations. I more or less follow that philosophy as I enjoy the music of Eminem and Cat Stevens even though one is a criminal and the other a Muslim of the bad sort. In both cases, whatever their personal issues, the music is good. What happens, though, when the music is built on a the very foundation of what you don't like about them? What if they are advocating it?

Steve Earle is testing that hypothesis right now. With good reason, Earle is practically a legend on the Texas Country music scene. I have probably heard over a dozen bands cover his "Copperhead Road" song, about the well-known secrets of a small town. One of my favorite songs is "The Boy Who Wouldn't Cry" about a boy who... well, you get the idea. Lyrics carry a lot of weight in Earle's music, as does politics. He has written some of the most powerful songs against the death penalty that I have heard to date. His music has such a raw emotional intensity that I can hardly imagine how I'll react to his next CD:

The controversial ballad called "John Walker's Blues" is backed by the chanting of Arabic prayers and praises Allah... Earle's lyrics describe the United States as "the land of the infidel." Those fighting Osama bin Laden's declared jihad against the United States and Jews are said to have hearts "pure and strong." ... The song says when Lindh dies, he will "rise up to the sky like Jesus."

So what does one do when the center of the music is the morally repugnant views of the artist? There is a very solid chance that the actual music will be extremely good. If anyone could write eloquently about a fascist philosophy's war against freedom, it's Earle. There is also something artistically and intellectually interesting about telling the story sympathetically from the villains point of view. At the same time, that flies against my stance on the conflict since day one, which is that there is no compromise and, thus, no reason to see the enemy in a sympathetic light. However, I doubt the CD is likely to elicit sympathy for anyone who doesn't already has it. Just about every American has made up his or her mind about this. I don't yet know what I'm going to do about the CD. I want to hear it, but I don't want to support it. I can't figure out how to do one without the other.

Another interesting thing is to see how the local music community acts. Cross Canadian Ragweed, which added a verse into the "If I Was President" song for Osama bin Laden, is one of the many that held Earle in extremely high regard. Every so often in a show, Texas Country musicians will play up Texas Country (or Alternative Country, if you like) and Earle's name is usually one of the ones mentioned. Entertainers aren't political beings to begin with, but this is something that is pretty hard to overlook or just say "That's just Steve being Steve..."

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has a the goods on Steve Earle's other shocking new tune!

UPDATE TOO: Eric Olsen weighs in, as I was hoping he would. He suggests that we all just cool down because, in the end, it doesn't matter what his personal views are. I am generally inclined to agree, but this one hits harder for some reason and if he is supporting the enemy, then it does matter to me. It has a qualitative effect on the song, to me, if he's trying to preach at me. I guess the difference is best explained by how if your friends makes a funny joke pointed at you, you can laugh. If you and he are on the outs, though, it isn't very funny.

Gary Farber reiterates * his annoyance with Ann Coulter, pointing specifically to this comment that she made:

I think it?s wonderful that these people are being taken away in cuffs and that people are angry about it. But to say that Bill Clinton had nothing to do with that, when half the people on TV saying it?s fine to lie, cheat, steal, it?s just about sex. Well, apparently a lot of people who run corporations think it?s OK to lie if it?s just about money.

I think it was incredibly corrupting for America.

To which Farber comments:
It's all Bill Clinton's fault. Any fault of a human, due to Bill Clinton's parsing, is his fault. No one before him sinned or erred or is to be blamed. All after him him can blame their faults on Bill Clinton. After all, if you pile your errs on Jesus, you can be forgiven, but if you put them on Clinton, you're blameless, since he is, basically, apparently, the anti-Christ.

Just so we don't go overboard. It's all on demon Clinton!

I have the peculiar animus towards Clinton of a former believer. I defended him for two years against the mean Republicans before becoming disillusioned with the fallacy that he had even a modicum of personal dignity and honor. That being said, Coulter is obviously wrong here. The link between sexual and political misconduct with the fiscal and accounting ethical lapses of late are tenuous at best. So why is it so appetizing for conservative eyes to glaze over and soothingly say "yeeaaaahhh" when their ears hear such rhetoric?

It's because Clinton has come to represent our own version of the Original Sin. For the near future, everything that goes wrong in this country that has an ethical basis will emanate from the Clinton years and his presidency. We will look to the pre-Clinton years as a Garden of Eden in which personal accountability was the rule of the day. Then came Clinton. Clinton will have invented ethical lapses and immorality in a way that it never existed before. He took the fruit from the tree of knowledge and learned, and showed us, just what it is people without shame can get away with. Every sin will link right back to Clinton and Clintonism and the moral decadence of those years where not only he did these disgusting things and got away with it. He did them and he got away with it, but most importantly the people defended him! Our innocence has been torn away from us and paradise has been lost!

Non-Clinton-haters will remember it differently. In his book about President Clinton and the entire impeachment proceedings, Joe Eszterhas comes to the strangest conclusion as to who was behind it all: Richard Nixon. He talks eloquently of how Nixon stole the nation's innocence and faith in government and how he jaded and embittered us all, creating the force behind Clinton's corruption and the Republican's vitriol. To Eszterhas, and indeed many liberals, Nixon's were the original sins on which all sins will be based.

Of course, Nixon and Clinton invented government and personal corruption any more than Reagan invented poverty. These beliefs are generally tools that we use to explain the world as we see it through our biased lenses. Alluring as the thought is, Clinton is no more responsible for the personal corruption of corporate leaders than Bush is. The idea that Clinton created an "atmosphere" of personal degradation is pure bunk. So too is the idea that Bush is responsible because he created a pro-corporate atmosphere that emboldened these criminals that had started long before Bush took office.

In Clinton's case, he was the symptom rather than the harbinger of our scandalous culture. With a less sensational culture, his personal misconduct never would have recieved the attention that it did or the investigation. At the same time, a society that was less star-struck and superficial would likely have never elected him in the first place. For all Clinton's moral posturing, the public never really bought it. He wagged his finger and nodded and winked, and we winked back. As long as times were good and he was considered a moderate, we were willing to put up with a lot. Even if he had been elected in a more serious culture, he would have had to react differently to cling to power. He would not have been able to move from "I did wrong" to "none of this is my fault" nearly as quickly as he did. There would have been some personable accountability that he would have at least had to fake. The flagrancy of Clinton's immorality (which in many ways the right's biggest problem with it) would not have existed and there wouldn't even be the temptation to view him as the epitome of everything wrong with our shallow culture. He would have instead merely been the flawed human that made some mistakes and owned up to them. If he hadn't owned up to them with shame, he would have with punishment. If the public had been nearly as morality-minded as the right likes to think it would have been without Clinton, they would have demanded his resignation. In the face of dwindling poll numbers, don't doubt for a minute that Gephardt and Daschle would have made a magnanimous trip to the White House to tell Clinton "It's time" (to resign), much as Howard Baker did with Nixon years before.

But we didn't care. The personal corruption that we lament as being invented by Clinton actually propelled him to power. We didn't care what he did, who he was, or what he stood for a long as we thought he was doing a good job. Our tolerance for personal excess was high and that cleared the path for his ascent to power. We may not have known that Clinton was as outrageous as he was, but in the end we forgave him and put it behind us as quickly as we possibly could, tut-tutting him when it's easy and he is of no use to us anymore.

So Coulter and Eszterhas are, in the end, both wrong. The sins of Enron were not borne of Clinton or Bush, but rather of greedy minds and a culture that tolerates personal fallability and admires corporate shrewdness, allowing both to be taken to their most ludicrous extreme. There is the solid chance that Bush is as hung over as the rest of us are from its excesses, or perhaps he, too, will become the left's new Original Sinner of Greed, gleefully overlooking all that we overlooked in Clinton because he kept the money rolling in.

*- Blogspot being blogspot, you can try going here and doing a search for "Ann Coulter is insane"

UPDATE: Gary was nice enough to write me, expressing some confusion with what I meant by connecting star-power with someone who was, in 1992, a governor of a small, unglamorous southern state. Regardless of his political status, Clinton has always had star power. He played the saxiphone. He told MTV that he wore boxers and not briefs (or vice-versa). The first time many people heard of him was in connection to a sexual scandal that would have killed any lesser candidate. Unlike with Gary Hart, by the time Clinton came along the public was willing to put up with personal indescretions in return for someone as articulate and cool as Clinton always was. I wish I could properly attribute this (if anyone can, please email me), but in 1996 someone commented that Bob Dole had all the characteristics of a strong leading man, but Clinton had the marks of a star. I believe that was true since the begining.

Friday I ran across an article in The New Republic about feminist Carol Gilligan. This quote jumped out at me:

But surely small children notice "angry voices" and the like because they are utterly dependent on their mothers and on the emotional weather that the adult world establishes for them. Children are always looking for storm warnings, or for more auspicious signals--Will we go out for ice cream tonight? Are Mom and Dad getting along?--because the vagaries of the adult world are mysterious to them and completely beyond their control. (Indeed, Rachel describes Jake as her "barometer.") It can be sweet and gratifying when small boys keep a close watch on their mothers' moods, but it is also a function of the essential powerlessness of the child. Relationships between equals do not generally elicit or require such vigilant monitoring. Gilligan writes admiringly of Rachel's refusal to shield her toddler from the tension that she was feeling at work because "to do so would have been to betray his love." But transparency is not the highest duty in relationships with children. There are some things that children do not need to know

This reminded me of a song that I used to like, until I carefully listened to the words. Now I hate it.

Psychoanalyze me however you like, but I am a sucker for sad love songs. The Sons of the Desert have a song called "Leaving October Behind" in which the narrator tragically lost his wife some years earlier, long before her prime. He's having trouble dealing with it every October, as the anniversary of her death approaches. Very sad. I should feel very sympathetic to the narrator because even though I can't imagine losing a wife, I can imagine imagining it and even that hurts. Yet he managed to lose my sympathy. He traded in my pity for my scorn. How could he possibly do that? He took it out on his daughter.

Thankfully, he didn't do it by yelling at her because he's upset about his wife. Rather, he took it out by crying to her. A lot. Here are some samples:

I think that Sara knows I'm troubled
By that scent, she reads my mind
...
It made me cry when I told [the new girl I'm dating] all about us
But Sara says there's nothing wrong with me
It just takes time
...
All things work for good
Has become my favorite verse
Sara told me that they would

Sonny, maybe she is reading your mind because she's seeing you cry and sob! I understand that he's hurting. I understand that it is difficult for him. At the same time, suck it up, man! Not in front of the kid!

Has it occured to him that this may be very difficult for her, too? She did lose a mother and instead of getting support, she's having to supply it. She's nine year old, and she is the one telling her father that everything will be okay. Does anyone else see anything seriously wrong with this picture or is it just me? There are times in a man's life when he needs to suppress the pain and anger and act normal. That seems to have gotten lost in the Oprahfication of our culture where failure to express how you feel, and to acknowledge everyone else's feelings and the expression thereof as entirely valid and indeed honorable, is that there are times when we need to protect our children from what is going on in our minds. Sometimes, even when you're miserable, you have to act as though you are happy. It's the old maxim "don't argue in front of the children" taken a few steps further. Don't sob in front of the children. Don't fall apart in front of the children. Don't force them to emotionally support you when they are barely able to emotionally support themselves.

Expression of emotion to children is (obviously) healthy up to a point. They need to know when you're angry at them or when you're sad for them. They don't need to know as a toddler that you had an infuriating day at work. They don't need to know at age nine that you are falling apart inside. You need to be their anchor. Not the other way around. In the case of this song, if she is sad about the death of her mother, who does she have to go to? Who can she rely on for support? Her friends if she's lucky, but not her father.

Maybe I'm a cold, heartless bastard, but the image of a grown man crying into the shoulder of a nine year old girl who has lost her mother doesn't make me sympathetic. It makes me angry. In any case, he doesn't need me to be supportive and strong for him. He's got his little girl for that.

As for Carol Gilligan: Rest assured, I'll get to her.

Nicholas Kristoff wrote a condemning column on Bush's practices as a major league team owner, calling it "the real scandal."

His ammunition:

I have a stack of court documents from Arlington that portray the "sordid and shocking tale" of the Rangers stadium, as one lawsuit puts it.

"It was a $200 million transfer to Bush and Rangers owners," complains Jim Runzheimer, an anti-tax campaigner in Arlington.

"A group of wealthy and influential people threatened and traded their way into an unprecedented takeover of government power and private property in an awesome display of greed and avarice," charges a lawsuit by the landowners, in what strikes me as a fair recitation of events. Another suit charges that the deal "can only be described as astounding, unprecedented and blatantly illegal."

In these three quotes, you'll notice a common pattern. The meat of it is provided by people who opposed the deal. Obviously, people who supported the arrangement aren't going to say such things, but there is nothing cited by a court, ruling, or anything else suggesting that the people quoted in the article are overreacting. I suspect if he could, he would. He did find one person who could be cited as objective, with conflicting loyalties between being opposed to the plan and being a loyal Republican.

William Eastland, a leading Republican in Arlington, is also outraged, and puts it this way: "You're using public money for a private purpose." Mr. Eastland was a Bush delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000 but still believes that the Bush group behaved shadily and against the public interest.

Even then, it's not uncommon for Republicans to be against these projects. The leaders of the opposition to every referenda in the Houston areas are conservatives. In the end, that's what it comes down to: liberal or conservative, they are opposed to the plan because they don't believe that public money should be funnelled into private enterprise. It's a view I am sympathetic with, but the opposing view is not inherently corrupt. In fact, it's usually endorsed by the people.

With rare exception, referenda on public funding stadiums pass. The people, the basic root of democracy, approve. Stupidly, perhaps, but the money is worth it in order to keep the sports teams from relocating to cities more willing to take from the public coffers. I have written very critically of these arrangements, but they are far more common than not. We refuse to call their bluff because they are not bluffing. Time and time again, we foolishly approve these measures. Arlington voters overwhelmingly did.

So how much is that Bush's fault? Did he threaten to move the team? I don't know, but I imagine it was discussed to entice voters to approve the measure. In any case, Arlington has no inherent right to a baseball team and the owners have the right to relocate if they can get more money (either through tickets or taxes) elsewhere. Bush had a lot of leverage because Arlingtonians wanted to keep the Rangers. He used that leverage for financial gain. Perhaps he could have, as Charles Kuffner suggests for other franchises, not even intended to remain competitive and not ask for the new stadium. I doubt Arlingtonians (and Dallasites and Fort Worthans) would have liked that plan in the least and that would have ended up hurting him anyway. As a businessman, it's Bush's job to avoid that. It's what businessmen do. There are certainly things that were done to make way for the stadium that it's hard to approve of on an ethical level. Lots were condemned solely to make way for the land. People were not properly compensated for their properties. However, Bush was acting in the interest of the Rangers. No laws were broken or loopholes even exploited. Everything he had to do was done through the city and county governments that he was working with. Maybe he could have been a nicer businessman and have acted on behalf of the people of Arlington rather than the sports team he was representing. However, Bush ran as a businessman and not philanthropist or the Mayor of Arlington.

Democrats repeatedly claim that Bush was a poor businessman. It's ironic that they would use one of his shrewdest deals to try to discredit him.

I went to my first ever "meeting of the blogs" yesterday evening. I go to meet a number of bloggers that I knew, such as Charles Kuffner (Off The Kuff), Ted Barlow (Ted Barlow), Rob Humenik (Get Donkey), Larry Simon (Amish Tech Support ), and Michael Croft, and Ginger Stampley. Most of them seem to have known each other for a while, but they were nonetheless very pleasent company and did not make me feel like an outsider at all. It did remind me that I definitely seem to be the only blogger in Houston that could be considered conservative. Larry Simon may be another one, though. I'm not sure how well I fit in with their plans for world domination.

A few non-polibloggers were in attendence as well, which often helps keep the conversation from getting ideological. Fellow techster Mike, Erica, Dave, and the delightful Elaine were all present and accounted for.

I look forward to the next one.

Regular posting will resume later on today.

UPDATE: Elaine took pictures. Here's two including myself.

This is a column I wrote for the Daily Cougar after a referendum on a new basketball arena failed. A new referendum was put on the ballot the following year, which passed.


Is McLane the devil or Bud Adams?
By R. Alex Whitlock
UH Daily Cougar
November 12, 1999

This may come as a surprise to many, especially to those who are familiar with my ideology, but I voted for the downtown basketball arena. Typically, I oppose corporate welfare. I consider myself pro-business, but that belief is a product of my greater support of the free market -- and that means curtailing over-regulation and corporate welfare both. In addition to that, I have a real problem with cities paying off owners just to keep sports teams. Ultimately, however, I felt that paying off Alexander was the least of existing evils. When we kissed Bud Adams good bye, it wasn't even a couple of years before we were clamoring for a new team.

Watching the Oilers leave was a very expensive proposition for a number of people, even though it was gratifying to tell Bud Adams to kiss off. To be sure, Leslie Alexander is no Bud Adams. Adams never delivered anything but disappointment. Alexander has delivered a total of five championships: two for the Rockets and three for the Comets. Alexander has been aggressively attracting star talent and promoting the team as well as the city. He has also given some charity to the city.
Those thoughts don't make my vote feel any less dirty. The politics of sports has gotten out of control. The free market no longer exists there because of rotten deals like the one I voted for.

You see, in a free market world, the players' salaries would keep increasing until it reaches a ceiling. At some point, it would not be profitable for owners to keep raising prices to pay for the latest thing out of college.
At some point (in a non-subsidized free market) the owners would not see a return on their $50 million investment in Joe Rookie as more and more fans refuse to pay $75 for a ticket in the upper, upper mezzanine. Unfortunately, they've found a way for the taxpayers to pick up the check.

As taxpayers pay for arenas, the owners can free up money to pay the ridiculous player salaries that we've come to expect. How do they do this? They threaten to leave. Pay up, or we leave town and it'll make you look bad. You don't think a team leaving a city looks bad? A Canadian friend once described his perception of Houston as a has-been city that went dry with the oil bust.
This was obviously the case since the Oilers left our fair city for Nashville. So pay up or good-bye.

This amounts to little less than extortion.

So do we give in to blackmail? That's what every city is being asked. Some defy the extortionist and pay the non-monetary price. We lost the Houston Oilers for that very reason. We might have lost the Astros as well. However, Drayton McLane Jr. was losing money because all across the nation, competing teams were being subsidized and it was impossible to compete? unless we built him a stadium. Bud Adams was making a handsome profit. So once again an owner is threatening to leave unless we build a stadium. As far as I know, Alexander is not losing money like McLane was (basketball has salary caps in place to prevent runaway bidding), but he has delivered a sense of pride to this city that had not been seen before and has not been seen since.

Is it worth paying him (by way of a stadium) millions of dollars for that pride? The voters ultimately decided no. I don't regret my decision to give the devil his due, but I sure am proud of the city that took a stand against the athletic extortion epidemic that has robbed this country of its senses.

I was knocking around HokiePundit's blog and saw a test to determine how much of a nerd I am. So I took the test and you'll find out the results over my dead body (or if you send me yours). I'll just say that the first thing that came to mind was that if I am that much of a nerd, how come my grades weren't better in school? There were a couple questions of particular interest that I thought I would comment on:

"[Do] your our own domain name?"
Well, not exactly. I plan to soon, but that doesn't count. If the results of this test are any indication, I might just avoid the whole domain thing so that I don't go above X+12% (Ha! Bet you thought I'd spill the beans with an approximation there, huh?). I do want to get married some day. I don't know how I'm going to explain X, much less X+12% to my significant other. Anyway, I do have a domain for a production company I work with where we take Japanese Animation and capture it from video, put it on our computers, rearrange the scene and make it fun... nevermind. The answer is technically no. Next question.

"Do you think Bill Gates is "kind of cute"?"
I don't swing that way, but any women who find Gates attractive are welcome to email me for consideration next time I'm sing-[SMACK] Sorry, dear. Disregard.

"Did you name your pet after a Nobel laureate?"
No, but the name Kafka is heavily under consideration for when I do get a dog after Franz Kafka. Kafka, however is an early-20th century Czech (Austro-Hugrian, actually) writer known for his existential, surreal sty... no. The answer is no.

Do you wear a digital watch with a calculator?
I WISH!!!! I mean, no I don't. Next time I go to Radio Shack, maybe I'll...

Have you ever browsed at Radio Shack?
I meant Best Buy.

It started with a column by Wendy McElroy. Andrew Olmsted threw in his approving two cents and Bill Quick linked with agreement. Juan Gato not only agrees, but points out that it didn't start with Wendy, he suggested it before.

These are all folks that I agree with more often than not and read on a daily basis, so I don't mean it disrespectingly when I ask have y'all really thought this out??

Don't get me wrong, I can understand the libertarian appeal of it. I really can. I am certainly more libertarian than not when it comes to the national government, so the idea that we'd all be better off if we just got the government out of the business of marriage altogether is aluring. Back to reality, though, the idea is inconsequential at best and very damaging at worst. It's the opposite of a placebo: it's a cure with dreadful side effects that are ten times worse than the illnesses it will fail to solve.

Let's start at the begining. What is the illness that this is the cure for? The problem is that marriage is on the decline, the divorce rate is holding steady somewhere above the "way too high" mark, and men are hesitant to get married because they're getting screwed in divorce court (despite the fact that they are the exiting party in about 1/3 of all divorces). As someone who does plan to get married, this is all very disturbing data and it would be wonderful if it could be rectified. Another problem is the ongoing debate as to what constitutes a "marriage." Can gays marry? How long need one person live with another before they become "commonlaw wed"? In comes the classic (and usually correct) libertarian solution. When it doubt about what government policy should be, get the government as uninvolved as possible. In theory, it might just work. However, in theory, we shouldn't even have these problems.

I'll talk about gay marriage first. I am a strong supporter of gay marriage. Not just civil unions, but marriage. The government ought to view marriage as a neutral term involving a contract between two people, not as a union before God or anything else. As long as we're dealing with consented adults, I fail to see why there is even an issue over this. Therefore, if privitization would solve this, I'm definitely willing to listen. The idea that it will help reminds me of how someone once suggested I become a writer: Go to Hollywood, write a couple successful movie scripts, and surely they'll publish you. The joke, of course, being that it's 100x harder to be a successful screenwriter than a published novellist. While privitizing marriage may solve the what-does-and-does-not-constitute-marriage quandary, the same people who oppose gay marriage will oppose this much more forcefully. Firstly, they will oppose it because it will "devalue" marriage since the government will no longer sanction it. Secondly, they would know the consequences of this occuring would include the rights of gays to marry, which for whatever reason they oppose.

So would it solve the problem of men being screwed over in divorce court? There is very little reason to believe that it would. The "contracts" that McElroy proposes would be de-facto marriages. The problems with divorce courts these days is not solely the law. The problem is that the enforcement of these laws is skewed heavily in favor of women. There is little reason to believe that the de facto marriage contracts would be enforced any differently than the existing laws regarding marriage. "Ahhhhh," the libertarians would respond, "but this way people get to define their own rules for the marriage." True, but the fact of the matter is that they already can in the form of prenuptual agreements. The procedural effect of the law is to force everyone to enter their own agreement, or at least a choice of several options. Prenuptual agreements are not always upheld by the courts, though, therefore it's quite possible that marriage contracts will be, either. It's also not clear that contracts devised entirely without paramaters should be.

If it were privatized, churches would likely devise their own contracts that their parishioners could use. In fact, they may be forced to use them if they are to be married in the church. For instance, a young Catholic couple could sign a contract that states that they are prohibited from divorcing. At some point, this becomes a serious civil rights issue because both parties effectively trapped in the marriage no matter what their partner does. Physical abuse and emotional abuse will no longer be grounds to leave. The legally protected right to seperate could be abolished. A fundamentalist Christian or Muslim could effectively relegate the woman to slavery. Sure, she signed the contract, but there are legally limits to the ways a person may sell themselves to another, and at some point those laws will have to be ignored or the government will have to step in. Once the government steps in, the advantages of the privitization are negated because they can then start skewing the contracts in favor of the women or the men or whatever the flavor of the day is. The Church of Christ contract would likely include a section allowing for divorce and remarriage, but ban copulation by any party in the future. The courts would then be forced to enforce this on a wide scale (there are a lot of Church of Christers out there). This could put the government right back into our lives in ways more obtrusive than before.

Only if we sign the contract, though. However, few people ever get married intending to divorce. That's the reason why prenups are not more common. The government, for all its faults, tends to keep hands off of the mechanics of a marriage. The marriage one enters is generally the province of those that enter it. Under a privatized system, they would either be signing up to their church's idea of what a marriage should be or they will be divising their own, if they can afford it. McElroy points out that refraining from marriage has become increasingly common on the part of me. Ironically, her suggestion would only discourage more men and women from entering a marriage. After all, why bother hiring him-and-her lawyers and negotiating tons of paperwork when you can just not marry and not worry about it? Why give the church you only attend Christmas and Easter an invitation into your life by using their marriage contract? Marriage rates would plummet.

Gato, Quick, Olmsted, and company may not see that as a problem, but I do. The legal entanglements of marriage in its current state is beneficial for keeping couples together. . It makes staying the path of least resistence during the tough times until they get better. I don't want the government viewing marriage sacramentally, as many social conservatives do, but I do want to, if not encourage, avoid discouraging the family unit. Study after study has shown that the state has a vested interest in keeping (most) families together when possible. Despite all its faults, the current system does that.

Besides that, there is marriage and there will always be marriage (conservative hysteria withstanding). While government oversight of the institution may not sit well with us, having a standard set of civil laws (with the option to alter them through prenups) is the least of possible evils. There is a lot that we need to change about it, but releasing any and all legal parameters from it is not the way to do it. Enforcing prenuptual agreements, giving fathers their day in court, and other changes are necessary. Forcing the drafting of legally binding documents that have jurisdiction over our private lives is not the way to do it.

UPDATE: Ginger Stampley also thinks it's a crummy idea and says so.

I am preparing to do an extended post on Wendy McElroy's suggestion that marriage be privatized. I ran across this study from Rutgers. Interesting tidbits of information:

* Men are more inclined to believe that sex between two people that have known each other for a short period of time is okay. Women are less inclined to believe that.

*- Men avoid marriage because they dig (and get sex) being single.

*- Men like living with women because they get a lot of sex without the trouble of having to find a new sexual partner.

*- Women that men meet at bars are more likely to garner short-term sexual interest, as opposed to the long-term marital kind.

Well, glad we cleared that up!

My former (and hopefully future) editor Derek Copold wrote:
I wouldn't get too cocky with regards to Europe. They can still throw some serious monkeywrenches into our plans. For one thing they make some respectable weapons systems, which just might find their way into the hands of our ever-growing list of enemies. A list growing thanks largely to the likes of Daniel Pipes.
and
They may not directly engage us, but they can make our life very difficult if they choose to do so by equipping our foes, the ones Mr. Pipes is so eager for us to fight on Israel's behalf.

First thing first, if Israel were to drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow, very little about our relationship with the Europeans would change.

How many times have people who have spent too long with one another (father and son, husband and wife) created arguments of little importance in order to avoid the big issues? As fervently as both sides feel about the Israel issue, I strongly doubt either is willing to threaten the other's national security over the issue. Instead, Israel has become a proxy for the larger issues we would like to avoid. Before Jenin and the recent eruptions of violence, our sides have been drifting apart. Israel aside, there are countless other issues that we disagree on that are collectively of far more importance. There is the International Criminal Court and other resolutions that would, if submitted to, neutralize and overturn our laws; There is Kyoto; There are the peacekeeping missions; There is Iraq. Each of these is a proxy issue, too, for their biggest issue with us: our independence.

Metaphorically speaking, the Europeans were, for a long time, the head of the household of the world. They had the biggest empires, the best armies, and the most power. Their biggest conflicts were with one another. In the late 18th century, we moved out of the house. It didn't go over all that well, but eventually they came to accept it. In the 20th century, however, the world has become much smaller and we find ourselves, once again, in the same world. At first, our presense and assistence was appreciated (WWI and WWII). We helped them rebound from a very dreadful war and rebuild, in many cases, from the ground up. It's becoming apparent that their "head of the household" mentality has never really left their psyches. When the dust had cleared and they recovered from their injuries, at least a part of them expected the seat at the head of the table to be open. It wasn't. We're sitting at it. The Asian powers and Soviet Union they could tolerate. We're are a much more bitter pill to swallow. We are their children. Yet, unlike a good son or daughter, we are not listening to them. We have not deferred to their experience and judgment and it's bugging the hell out of them.

What is going on now is a diplomatic shoving match to be the de facto leaders of the world. It is, however, just that: diplomatic. Europeans will not militarily challenge us or threaten our safety. That's not the nature of the struggle, nor is it a struggle they can win. What they have accumulated in wisdom and experience, they lack in virility. They are beyond wars and national borders. Like a bully who has clearly lost or at least lost the will to fight, they're asking "can't we all just talk about this?" They have fought most of the fight they have in them. Furthermore, they have been wrong so many times (regardless of how many times they have been right) they have abandoned the concept of right and wrong. The last thing they want to do is get into a fight with a superpower over what is right and wrong.

None of this changes the fact, however, that there is not room for them at the head of the table for them. Anyone who says they just want us to listen to them hasn't been paying attention to the conversation. When we act overseas and they believe we shouldn't, we are imperialist. When we don't and they believe we should, we are isolationist. In fact, the only time that they are actually pleased with us is when we are doing what they tell us to, such as in Kosovo and Bosnia. They only appreciate us when we are following their orders.

They, of course, have a right to their opinion. It's becoming increasingly unclear, however, whether or not they are advising us or ordering us to follow their suggestions. That's the big threat behind the ICC. If we were to submit to that, they would have the legal power to order us around. They would have a venue where military strength no longer matters. There are also other examples. To take an issue Derek strongly supports and eloquently defends: capital punishment. The Europeans want us to get rid of it. If they are suggesting it, then we respectfully disagree. However, with items such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights they want us to end it if we agree with them or not. We didn't sign on to that, so they are starting to make real threats to get us to stop. They're not expediting killers. They threaten repercussions if we kill the Frenchman would-be 9-11 hijacker. Can anyone honestly say that if we did submit to the ICC, they wouldn't use that, too, given the chance?

It's not about capital punishment any more than it is about Israel or any other single issue. Full capitulation on one issue would not change the underlying conflict. They believe they know what's best and we don't care.

Which brings us back to the metaphor of the independent man and his elderly father stuck in the same house. They talk about how we have no respect for the collective ages of the wisdom. They ramble incessantly about how everything would be so much better if we just listened to them. We try to be civil, but generally ignore them as they talk on and on to themselves.

It's easy to sympathize with the Europeans, though. They are, as we were, on top of the world. They individually thought they had all the answers as we do. We could, some day, find ourselves the one rambling to ourselves about how those upstart, arrogant superpowerful leaders of the Grand Republic of Belize have no respect for the accumulated wisdom of their elders. Personally, I hope the Belize Republican army puts us out of our misery first.

----

Origins of the topic and props where props are due:

It started out as a post in the comments section of the Brothers Judd blog. I thought about it on the drive home and I want to extrapolate on it. If you read this, you don't need to read the original comment as it will be included. Judd's permalinks are not working (mine are, though, at the moment), but if you want to see the original post for context go to his blog and search for "WRONG OCEAN."

Last week we discussed the importance of remembering when your stove is on, disabled smoke detectors, and patient roommates. This week will be more pedestrian, I'm afraid. However, pedestrian (ie easy) cookies is essential for bachelors! Plus, as opposed to a diet consisting of Hot Pockets, Mac'n'Cheese, and Ramen, you can tell the ladies that you are a cook with this very simple meal.

This week's RAW Bachelor's Cooking Dish: Ground Beef, Cheese, and Tortilla Lump... or GBCTL (prounounce it GibiCkiTLe... and try not to work up any spit doing it).