Oscar Jr. Was Here

It's Worth Plenty

Sgt. Hook, in support of Chief Wiggles's toothbrushes and toys for Iraqi tots campaign, has another great "lyrical photo essay" (I like the term) up. (The song was actually first performed by Buffalo Springfield.)

Be sure to click on all of the links in the essay -- the photographs Sgt. Hook has chosen are great.

(His earlier photo-essay is here.)

703-519-6456

This is very amusing. Gotta love Fox News.

(via Allah. And how often does a non-Moslem get to say that?)

Short Story Symposium

Michael Williams of Master of None has posted the first Spherewide Short Story Symposium. I haven't yet had a chance to read the stories, but certainly intend to do so. I hope any interested readers will visit the symposium and comment on the stories. Happy reading!

Trivial Pursuit

What number between one and 100 has the highest value-to-syllable ratio?

(e.g., thirteen => 13/2 syllables = 6.5)

If anyone bothers to respond with the correct response, the first to do so will be linked, or, at least, publicly noted.

Update: Zombyboy emailed with the correct answer (90 => 90/2 syllables = 45) first; Jay Solo commented with it shortly thereafter. (I'm a bloggers' blogger, indeed.)

Thanks, guys! I may have to do this again...

Iraqi Freedom

On NRO, Andrew J. and Judith S. Kleinfeld write about Iraq's 20th century experiment with freedom, and they discuss the things we can do to help in its 21st century opportunity. Excerpt:

Iraqis have a second chance for individual freedom and democracy now, even though an earlier generation threw it away. Losing a war, as Iraq has, affords a superb opportunity for cultural and political reform, because it removes and discredits old authorities. What the Iraqis can do, like other countries — Mongolia, Poland, the Czech Republic — that have recently made existential choices to be free, is to find and develop a usable culture that supports individual freedom. The creation of a culture that supports democracy and freedom is an intellectual infrastructure-construction project that, unlike producing water and electricity, only the Iraqis can perform. We can contribute, as we did with support for cultural projects protecting freedom in postwar Europe. And during the transition from the old regime to the new, we can provide some physical security for Iraqis seeking to institute a regime of freedom. But all we can do, really, is lower the barriers for the Iraqis to reform their own culture. They will have to find their own stories and heroes of individual freedom. Freedom is the Iraqis' choice. No one can give a people freedom and make them keep the package. They have to take it.

Worthwhile reading.

The Alliance Gets Serious

Frank J. of IMAO has a great post on the Alliance's site on a way we can all, readers and bloggers alike, help support our troops. Excerpt:

Our troops are still out there, and their blood is still getting spilled. They're fighting for each other, they're for us, they are fighting for Iraqis, and they are fighting for the world as a whole. It is obscene that there are those who will use their deaths as propaganda against the very things for which they died. In the war on terror, the media is one of the fronts, and maybe it's one we're equipped to handle. The politically concerned of the blogosphere is thousands strong, but maybe, if we all work together, we can make enough noise that millions will hear us.

As Frank J. notes in the comments to the post, the Alliance's original arch-nemesis (and Alliance member), InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds, has been doing much along exactly these lines already.

This seems like something all supporters of this war can get behind, along with Chief Wiggles's toothbrushes and toys drive for Iraqi children. Bravo!

The Angry Left II

On The New Republic Online, Jonathan Chait seems to confirm Robert Bartley's thesis discussed below.

Bartley:

That is to say, base Democrats think of themselves as the best people: the most intelligent and informed, the most public spirited, the most morally pure. This self-image has become more than a little shopworn over the years, and now George Bush's conservative Republicans threaten to strip it away. Inevitably such Democrats are angry.

and

What's more, this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas.

Chait:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

and

The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.

There. That feels better.

Fading birthright it is, then.

Sgt. Hook Rocks

Sgt. Hook has a great photo-essay, of sorts up. Be sure to click on all of the links.

(via Right We Are!)

Bernard Lewis on Iraq

On OpinionJournal, Tunku Varadarajan visited Bernard Lewis and gives us some details. Excerpts:

The professor leaned forward, his face, briefly, a picture of fun: "Pay attention to the joke," he said. "The joke is the only form of political comment that is authentic in the Middle East--and for the most part uncensored." He then told a joke now doing the rounds in that part of the world: "Two Iranians lament the state of their country. Finally, one says to the other, 'What we need here is a bin Laden.' 'Are you crazy?' his friend gasps. 'No!' the first Iranian says. 'That way the Americans would come and rescue us.'"

and

Mr. Lewis has high hopes for Iraq. Why? Their "cultural and intellectual standards"--set high in the years before Saddam--have "miraculously, if precariously, survived his ravages." Also, the status of women is high in Iraq. As Mr. Lewis puts it--perhaps paraphrasing a desert proverb--"women are half the population and mothers of the other half." In the early formative years, it makes "a great deal of difference to have an educated mother." But his main reason for optimism is that "Iraqis have gone through everything, and are much less likely to be taken in by the fanatical groups in the region."

Although we "keep voicing fears that democracy won't work in Iraq, that's not what they're saying in the Middle East." There's a real terror there among the despots "that democracy in Iraq will work." Here, Mr. Lewis rests his case, as if to ask, Is there anything more to be said?

Very good stuff.

Belligerent Bunny Back?

Hurrah! Anna, the Belligerent Bunny, has a new post up, with bunnies and Wesley Clark. Does this mean that the long hiatus is over? I certainly hope so.

Note: Apologies to Zombyboy. This post was showing up twice. I deleted the second (apparently empty) instance and, accidentally, the post itself and your comment. One with which I agreed, naturally.

Good Advice

Paul at Sanity's Edge has another of his Dating Tips for Men posts up. (It's from yesterday -- I'm a little behind in my blog-reading.) Excerpt:

Don’t be desperate and constantly available; it’s creepy.

Women want a guy with a sense of humor. Funny is good. Smart funny is better.

Good advice, all of it.

The Angry Left

On OpinionJournal, Robert Bartley attempts to psychoanalyze the angry left. His thesis as to the source of their anger: “The party's most ardent adherents are angry because they feel they've lost their birthright.” Excerpt:

Beyond mere politics, the fading birthright becomes a matter of self-identity. It's possible, we've witnessed, to assert moral superiority while defending the Clinton perjury, sexual escapades, vanishing billing records and last-minute pardons. But politicians, pundits and intellectuals with this record shouldn't expect much moral deference from the rest of us. Indeed, inner doubts about their own moral position is one obvious path to anger.

Even without the Clinton problems, the Democratic Party has descended into a collection of interest groups not bound together by any ideals. So we see scions of inherited wealth berating the "rich," meaning those successful at earning their own money. We see supposed champions of civil rights standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent vouchers that might give a break to black children in the District of Columbia.

We see a highly qualified potential judge filibustered into withdrawal precisely because he's Hispanic, and therefore a threat in ethnic politics. We see that once a martyred president urged us to "share any burden," his brother now belittles the war that toppled Saddam Hussein throwing around reckless and irresponsible charges of "bribing" foreign leaders--his own personal past, by the way, having produced remarkably little reticence.

It's certainly an interesting theory, and the piece is worth reading in full.

The Wages of Blogging

The neatest thing I read today: vacationing in Manhattan, LCDR (Select) and Mrs. Smash had dinner with Peggy Noonan. Excerpt:

I thought that I was having dinner with someone famous. What a treat! But it turns out that I was telling the stories and answering the questions. She even brought her teenage son. Why? Because he wanted to meet me. Because he is, in her words, “a fan.”

I have fans? Why? I’m just an ordinary guy!

But that’s really it, isn’t it? I’m an ordinary guy, who was sent to a war zone. My war was, relatively speaking, boring and uneventful. But I wrote about it, people read it, and now I’m some sort of anonymous celebrity.

I'm very envious. Congratulations to LCDR Smash!

La Soudure

Mark Helprin, one of my favorite writers, has a provocative and thoughtful essay in the Claremont Review of Books on the war on terror militant Islam. Excerpt:

America has approached the war on terrorism as if from two dreamworlds. The liberal, in which an absurd understanding of cause and effect, the habit of capitulation to foreign influence, a mild and perpetual anti-Americanism, reflex allergies to military spending, and a theological aversion to self-defense all lead to policies that are hard to differentiate from surrender. And the conservative, in which everything must be all right as long as a self-declared conservative is in the White House—no matter how badly the war is run; no matter that a Republican administration in electoral fear leans left and breaks its promise to restore the military; and no matter that because the Secretary of Defense decided that he need not be able to fight two wars at once, an adequate reserve does not exist to deal with, for example, North Korea. And in between these dreamworlds of paralysis and incompetence lies the seam, in French military terminology la soudure, through which al-Qaeda, uninterested in our parochialisms, will make its next attack.

I very much commend this to anyone interest in the subject matter.

Update: On Tech Central Station, Lee Harris responds to Helprin and others. I hope this debate continues.

Manliness and Politics

On OpinionJournal, Jay Nordlinger has an interesting essay on the revival of appreciation for virility in the post-9/11 world and its political implications. My favorite bit:

Mr. Rumsfeld, it is true, is the anti-Clinton. We see this in his authenticity, his trustworthiness and his frankness. He is so direct, he practically assaults the modern, spin-accustomed ear. Mr. Rumsfeld freely uses what my colleague Kate O'Beirne has dubbed the "K-word"--kill. When a reporter asked him why U.S. forces were using such heavy bombs in Afghanistan, the secretary replied: "They are being used on frontline al Qaeda and Taliban troops to try to kill them." Oh.

Rather unexpectedly, Mr. Rumsfeld became a kind of sex symbol as the weeks and months after 9/11 unfolded. Women of all sorts were open about their attraction to him. On CNN, Larry King was moved to ask him about his new status as a heartthrob. "Oh, come on," said Mr. Rumsfeld. "For the AARP, perhaps. I'm pushing 70 years old." But that was beside the point--or maybe it was the point itself. Mr. Rumsfeld is, in fact, a throwback: to a time of crewcuts, stiff upper lips and moral clarity. He seems a character out of a World War II flick. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was more a Richard Gere kind of leader. Where Mr. Clinton feels pain, Mr. Rumsfeld is more likely to inflict it--on the country's enemies.

It's an interesting read.

Short Stories Sought

Michael Williams of Master of None is seeking short stories for a symposium that he's sponsoring. The deadline is next Tuesday, September 23.

I wish I had time to submit something -- it sounds like fun.

What's the Left's Version of "Sheeple"?

I normally avoid any intersection of Paul Krugman and politics, but I had some time to kill during lunch today. I’m pretty sure everyone who might be interested has already read Kevin Drum’s interview of Krugman on CalPundit today. While much of the interview struck me as paranoid and delusional, I’ll leave that to the better Fiskers of the Blogosphere. In addition, I’ll leave the economic critiques to the EconoBloggers out there.

What really struck me, though, was Krugman’s (and many of the other commenters’) assumption of irrational ignorance, not to mention bad faith, on the part of their (for the most part) fellow Americans.

The public still has little sense of how radical our leading politicians really are.... (Krugman)

But in each case the administration has reassured moderates by pretending otherwise — by offering rationales for its policy that don't seem all that radical. And in each case moderates have followed a strategy of appeasement....this is hard for journalists to deal with: they don't want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists. (Krugman)

I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country. How and when this moment will come, I don't know. But one thing is clear: it cannot happen unless we all make an effort to see and report the truth about what is happening. (Krugman)

It's one thing to hear him say that the Bush administration lies continually, it's another to read column after column in which he documents it. The lies are relentless, brazen, and indisputable. (Drum)

You know, this was not your ordinary average slightly misleading campaign, this was something off the scale, but most people just wouldn't go at it. And that's when I started saying that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the resulting article would say "Shape of the Earth: Views Differ." And then after September 11th it was really impossible, because people wanted to believe good things that just weren't true. (Krugman)

The scales are falling from people's eyes. (Krugman)

If you look at what the introduction is about a lot, it's partly about what these guys are doing, but it's partly about why reasonable people have such a hard time facing up to what they're doing. (Krugman)

And that's what it's addressed to, the intro is really addressed to the liberal or moderate who just can't believe that Bush isn't another Reagan, that this is something really much more radical even than that. (Krugman)

That's the nice thing about the Kissinger quote. I'm not sure he understands it either, but this notion that if you have this kind of revolutionary power you don't feel secure unless you have a complete monopoly of power, that seems to be the way it's playing out. (Krugman)

It's funny, some of the businesses in Alabama were supporting Riley's tax plan because they actually are starting to understand that a decent education level is more important to them than a couple of points off their taxes. (Krugman)

Yeah, and that's partly because people don't know. (Krugman)

I think most people are not well informed, and after all who is going to inform them? (Krugman)

I doubt that Bush understands that that's where it's going, but in effect he's allowing himself to be used by people who have those sorts of goals. (Krugman)

I'm pissed that intelligent people buy into this kind of crap. I'm really angry about how easily Bush has been able to swindle everyone rhetorically. And I'm most angry at the people who aided and abetted him. (commenter Mitch Schindler)

The average American, the average Rebuplican [sic], has absolutely no idea what lies in store if we continue on our current course. They don't even understand what the current batch of Republicans stands for. (commenter Timothy Klein)

911 so deeply traumatized America that you are accepting dictatorship for its comfortable illusion of safety -- we almost did that here, too, but luckily the government we happened to have in power in 2001 restrained itself and did not, for the most part, give in to its own worst impulses. (commenter CathiefromCanada)

Sadly, I feel that American voters' belief in easy answers and appeastement [sic] when told what they want to hear may just get Bush reelected in 2004....As we saw in Alabama, voters, when bombarded with half-truths (which the Republican money machine will continue to do) will strongly oppose a tax structure that is far and away better for their self-interest than the alternative. Perhaps many lower-class voters oppose taxation of the rich out of a moral belief in the evil of class warfare, or because they someday hope or expect to be rich themselves. Or perhaps they are being misled. (commenter Steve Judkins)

The second thought is that, in this media- and bumper sticker-driven culture, we who are justly troubled, scared, and furious about what is being done to our country need to find a simple and clear way of describing what is going on. (commenter Steady Eddie)

Some days I think that what we're looking at is an oligarchy with mass consent. (commenter Invisible Adjunct)

It'd be nice to trust the sincerity of good Christians, but so few of them know anything about Christianity, that is hard to do. (commenter emptywheel)

And, the rules are to get this paperwork paid for, the doctor, himself, often has to get on the phone and beg a clerk who hasn't seen more than a high school education (and, in our terms today, it means he or she is an idiot) ... (commenter Carol in California)

Kevin, you and Krugman perhaps ignored one of the reasons that the Bushies have succeeded so well, other than "it can't happen here," and in my view explains the defeat of the Alabama tax plan: racism. (commenter nolatab)

(Emphasis added.)

Some commenters disagreed. For example:

Personally, I think I can make a more informed decisions than the governement [sic] can with what to do with my money. However, you may not share the same level of confidence in yourself and have to put your trust in the likes of Krugman. (commenter Aric)

It reminds me of the Freeper “sheeple”-rants, e.g., of the Clinton years. Or is that a bad analogy? (Nope.)

Update: Pejman dissects the interview.

War and Taxes

I've posted previously on my puzzlement at complaints over the cost of this war.

Today (well, now, yesterday), David Frum explains the true source of the complaints:

So when the Democrats today uncork their whines about the Iraq money, understand that the issue is not Iraq – the issue is their still uncontrollable fury at President Bush for snatching all that lovely surplus money away from them in 2001 and sending it back home beyond their reach. And their fondest dream since 9/11 has been to use the war on terror as a justification for rescinding the tax cut and grabbing the money back so they can spend it – not on the war (for which no tax increase is needed), but on their domestic spending agenda.

When the day comes that higher taxes are needed to pay the costs of war, of course we should have them. But that’s not what this argument is about. The tax cuts that the Democrats are most eager to repeal are the tax cuts that go into effect in 2005, 2006, and later – tax cuts that have no relevance to the war today, but that cramp and constrain their spending ambitions of tomorrow.

This seems entirely correct to me.

Blogs around the World Update X

I've been updating the links on the Blogs around the World project for sites that have moved since I last visited them. I've noticed that many others have gone dormant without notice. I've left them on the list for now in the hope that they will be updated, but will eventually remove those that are not.

I've also added a few new weblogs:

I've added Rampurple, a blog by a young Lebanese woman (if I've read things correctly) in Kuwait.

Via Interested-Participant, I've added The Argus, a blog that focuses on news from the important and oft-neglected region of Central Asia.

Via Farrago The Flying Penguin, I've added M-Insight, a blog by 24-year old Tunisian Mohamed Marwen Meddah.

Finally, I've added KO, a blog by Khalid Omar who blogs from Karachi, Pakistan.

I hope any readers will pay these sites a visit. And, as always, if you know of any worthy weblogs that should be added to my list, I would very much appreciate a mention of them in a comment or an email. Thanks, and happy reading.

Corrupt Journalism

If you haven't already read this excerpt (from Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson) by John Burns, you really should. Excerpt excerpt:

In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. The point is not whether we protect the people who work for us by not disclosing the terrible things they tell us. Of course we do. But the people who work for us are only one thousandth of one percent of the people of Iraq. So why not tell the story of the other people of Iraq? It doesn't preclude you from telling about terror. Of murder on a mass scale just because you won't talk about how your driver's brother was murdered.

(Via InstaPundit, Kathy Kinsley, NZPundit; etc.)

Preliterate?

Preliterate, or just cryptic?

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huh? ok, ok, bed, dude. whee! yet ugh! ok?

Another Blogs around the World Sampler

The terrifying thing in all this chaos is that ordinary Zimbabweans have become so engulfed in their struggle for daily survival that they either don't know or just shrug their shoulders when you talk about the national disaster. For over two months The Daily News, the only independent daily newspaper in Zimbabwe has been banned by militant youths in towns like Marondera. People didn't know that this week it became illegal to keep large amounts of your own money in places other than banks. They didn't know that police have now been given powers to stop and physically search you in the streets if they think you are carrying large amounts of bank notes. How much more obscene can things get? Can you believe that you can actually be stopped, frisked and have your own money "confiscated" from you in the street?

@Zimbabwe News

Immediately you enter Saudi Arabia from the Bahrain/Saudi causeway you notice the heightened state of alert that the security forces are at. There are multiple manned check-points. Fortunately they didn't delay traffic that much. The sneaky thing about those check-points is that they are doubled up as speed traps as well! Fortunately I wasn't nabbed. The "etiquette of the road" in Saudi as is with other countries I guess is that the traffic from the other side warn you by constantly flashing their headlights for about 2km from the check-point, hence everyone just went at or below the speed limit!

I was only in Riyadh for a couple of hours for two meetings, so I didn't get a chance to speak to a lot of people, but from the people who I did speak with, they are well aware of this heightened security issue and the collective opinion amongst them is to rid Saudi of these extremists once and for all. They seem to enjoy no sympathy at least from the educated and business classes. While I was in Riyadh apparently there was a general terror alert going on, which explained the inordinate security measures I encountered.

@Mahmood's Den

Our other adventure for the day consisted of dinner at the Iranian truck stop. We’d heard the Persian food there was good, and it was pretty much the only non-Turkmen restaurant in Ashgabat we hadn’t tried yet. You get sick of the options here pretty quickly, so we have been meaning to try the Iranian truck stop for a while. Kir had been told that it was on the side of the road that goes to the Iranian border. We were expecting some version of a truck stop, much like the places they have on the road from Samarqand to Bokhara – long tables, your choice of rice or noodles, and cutlery delivered with your food. Instead, what we found on the side of the road was a gated complex that included a hotel, a mosque, garages, and a restaurant, all tiled to low like down-market versions of old Persian monuments, and landscaped with masses of roses and beds of grass.

The signage was all in Farsi, but we located the restaurant next to a small mosque. When we got in, a friendly Turkmen woman explained that they had no food today except for shashlik (shish kebab), soup, and salads. We’d come that far, though, so we decided to stay and have the shashlik. I was halfway through my fanta when the rice arrived. We hadn't ordered rice, but it must have been the side dish for the shashlik order. Two plates of rice. Perfect heaps of rice, with saffron on top, a little dried fruit, and a pat of butter. The smell brought me back to my childhood, and the rice that Zed used to make for our family dinners. Its flavor was so absolutely right - the screaming epitome of rice – that it very nearly brought tears to my eyes. I had forgotten I could even feel that way about food. I was worried that after the rice the meat would be anti-climatic, but it was really quite perfect.

@Central Asia Central

More Voices

More 9/11 stories on LGF.

Zombyboy has links and a challenge.

Via Combustible Boy, archived television footage.

Voices of 9/11

I'll be spending a substantial amount of time reading here tomorrow.

Thanks to Michele and the many contributors.

Cenotaph

Click on the picture to read the Esquire article, The Falling Man.

Excerpt:

THEY BEGAN JUMPING NOT LONG after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.

(Via LGF.)

You Know This Already

Reason #76,919 why I'm no InstaPundit:

I've been enduring an unusually busy work schedule, and have made all of three, um, uninspired posts in the last week.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds writes, "SORRY FOR THE LIGHT BLOGGING" after not posting for an eternity of 3 hours and 3 minutes, after which he proceeded to write five posts in the next hour and 37 minutes. Sheesh.

Anyway, things should be returning to "normal" around here in the next day or so.

Allah Sounds Unhappy

Says Allah:

Two collapsed skyscrapers minus Afghanistan and Iraq does not exactly put Allah in the black on his balance sheet. Oh yes, shahids, thank you so much for blowing up that U.N. building; tell me now, which totalitarian Muslim regime is Allah going to see crushed in exchange for that one? One step forward, 911 steps back.

Know thy Blogger

Instead of updating the old blog today, I did a little shopping.

CDs purchased:

J. Mascis + The Fog, Free So Free
Love and Rockets, Sorted! the best of
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Pig Lie
Yo La Tengo, Summer Sun
Dave Pirner, Faces & Names
Dinosaur Jr., Ear Bleeding Country, the best of
Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
Buffalo Tom, Asides from

DVDs purchased:

Tom Jones again (Albert Finney, Susannah York)
Charade (Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn)
Life with Father (William Powell, Irene Dunne, Elizabeth Taylor)
His Girl Friday (Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell)
My Man Godfrey (William Powell, Carole Lombard)
This Is Spinal Tap (Guest/McKean/Shearer/Reiner)
Topper Returns (Roland Young, Joan Blondell, Billie Burke)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Wilco, by Sam Jones)

In case you were curious... I've been going through the CDs and, so far, they've all been pretty good-to-great.

Help Wanted

When I refresh my browser on my home computer, my Blogrolling.com blogroll invariably disappears. To access my blogroll, I have click on "View Site" on the Movable Type menu to create a fresh window containing the blog in order to see the blogroll. This doesn't occur on any other computer I've used to access this website. Does anyone know why this happens and/or a possible solution?

Also, I received this charming comment in response to this post.

no one give a flying fuc* about some old bag that is obvously not teaching you how to talk right but instead is being a major pain in the ass for the govenment ! any ways if i havent made my self clear by now ...... i dont think you should be able to use a computer!

I think "amber canterbury" meant to comment on this post instead. In any event, does anyone have any idea what this means? Given the earlier question, it's true that I may not be able to use a computer, but, huh?

Thanks in advance!

The Cost of the War

I continue to read commentary bemoaning the high, even "unsustainable," monetary expense of the war in Iraq, and the war on terror Islamofascism generally.

This study, an interesting cost-benefit analysis of the (then future) war in Iraq, dated March 20, 2003, conservatively estimates the cost of the Iraq war at $125 billion.

The authors conclude:

In sum, the costs of containment dramatically outweigh the costs of war according to our analysis. This conclusion holds in economic terms, from both U.S. and Iraqi perspectives, and in terms of human lives. To reach a different conclusion requires a very different assessment about the relative costs of war and containment.

This study points out that, in 2002 dollars, World War II cost $20,388 per American, and the Vietnam war cost $2,204 per capita.

Assuming that the former study is roughly correct, for the cost of fighting WWII, we could pay for the equivalent of freeing 46 Iraqs. For the cost of fighting in Vietnam, we could pay for the equivalent of freeing 5 Iraqs.

Meanwhile, according to this article, we're currently spending about $17 per month per person in Iraq and Afghanistan. That seems like an extremely reasonable expense to me given the likely benefits.

Update: Darren Kaplan discusses the cost issue.

Ledeen on Iraq

On NRO, Michael Ledeen pessimistically elaborates on Wolfowitz's point mentioned below. Excerpt:

The best mafia killers are all operating in Iraq, from Mughniyah (constantly on the move) to Naccache and Zarkawi (both in Baghdad as of the end of last week). They are getting support from the three surviving terror masters in Damascus, Tehran, and Riyadh, as well as increasing assistance from our old friend, Libya's Muammar Qadaffi. In the last ten days of August, more than 3,000 terrorist operatives crossed from Iran to Iraq, despite recent Coalition efforts to "seal the border." Some of them have been detected by Iraqi security forces, who have found that the Iranians have co-opted members of some of the organizations we have nominated to govern the country. According to the London Times (August 28):

Members of two leading Shia parties in Iraq's United States-appointed Governing Council are helping to smuggle thousands of Iranians into Iraq in an illegal trade that has opened the frontier to terrorists, border police say...SCIRI and Islamic Dawa...set up floating border posts in the desert and were providing guides to ferry pilgrims past official border controls to reach the holy Shia cities...

Wolfowitz on Iraq

On OpinionJournal today, Paul Wolfowitz writes that those who think that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the War on Terror are wrong. Excerpt:

Anyone who thinks that the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror should tell it to the Marines of the 1st Marine Division who comprised the eastern flank of the force that fought its way to Baghdad last April. When I met recently with their commander, Maj. General Jim Mattis in Hillah, he said that the two groups who fought most aggressively during the major combat operations were the Fedayeen Saddam--homegrown thugs with a cult-like attachment to Saddam--and foreign fighters, principally from other Arab countries. The exit card found in the passport of one of these foreigners even stated that the purpose of his "visit" to Iraq was to "volunteer for jihad."

We face that poisonous mixture of former regime loyalists and foreign fighters today.