Or perhaps both. Ralph Peters has it exactly right. We have to completely overhaul our notions of national “legitimacy” and come up with some higher values than sovereignty when applied to tyrants.

Now here’s an interesting article from the WaPo.

It describes an Iraqi father who kills his son, because he’s collaborating with the Americans. He has the support of many in his town.

I’m not sure what the purpose of this article is, but if it’s to tell us how hopeless the situation is over there, and that we should just throw in the towel, and get back on track, figuring out why they hate us, and just try to understand them, let’s put things in a little perspective.

I mean, it’s not like we have no experience with guerrilla wars, or civil wars here. The notion of brother against brother, or father against son, is not exactly a foreign concept to an American, unless that American is utterly innocent of his or her American history.

Has anyone ever heard of William Quantrill, or Jesse James, or Cole Younger?

They were the prototypical terrorists, fighting for their “cause.” There was a reason that, in the years running up to the War Between The States, that the word “Kansas” was often prefixed by the adjective “Bloody.” Some of the most brutal fighting in the war (albeit not major battles) was in Missouri, and after the war, yes, months and years after the surrender at Appomattox, guerrillas (aka “The James Gang”) in Missouri fought on, and atrociously. If we’re to take the reporting of the press at face value, we should, of course, conclude that the situation in Iraq is hopeless, and that we will never pacify the region, any more than we could hope that Missouri is now a tranquil state, no longer with people literally at each others’ throats.

Well, I feel a new parody of modern reporting coming on, casting back all the way to almost a hundred forty years ago, perhaps even from the St. Louis Dispatch, which existed even then, but I’m tired. Perhaps, having provided some hints, someone else can take up the cudgel…

[Update on Friday afternoon]

Well, it’s not exactly what I had in mind, but Victor Davis Hanson’s column today is about Lincoln’s quagmire.

As some wag once said (surely there was a first person to say it, but I’ve no idea who), “Predictions are often difficult, particularly about the future.” Much ignorant fuss and feathers was made of the proposal to set up a futures market for dire events. There may be some intelligent arguments against it, but we certainly heard none emanating from the chambers of our elected representatives.

Look, the reality is that we already do this–we just do it inefficiently and ambiguously. What is a stock trade (either long or short) other than a bet on future events? The existing stock and futures markets already perform some of the function that was being proposed here (e.g., orange juice futures do a better job of long-term weather prediction than the US Weather Service), except that it’s done by surrogates, and it can be quite opaque. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the terrorists already had the capability to make money on their evil deeds, by shorting airline stocks, or even index funds, or going long on security companies and defense. Everyone who does a stock trade is doing it on the expectation of certain events or non events, so it’s hard to see how one can argue that this is moral, but that making the bet directly on the event itself is not so.

All that’s being proposed here is to make the predictions more transparent, so we don’t have to try to infer why certain stocks or sectors go up and down (as news reporters and stock analysts do absurdly every day–e.g., “Stocks rose today on the expectation that…or as a result of the president’s announcement that…”). Rather than making second-hand bets via stock picks, we can get right to the underlying chase, and get an unambiguous market opinion of the event itself.

Sadly, I suspect that if someone tries to do this privately, they’ll probably be shut down because it would be “gambling” (though it would be so no more than any stock market trade is a gamble). But if so, Caymans anyone?

Today’s Fox column (which actually went up last evening), was a reprise of my latest spoof of WW II reporting.

Response to it (via email–I have no comments section at the Fox site) has been mostly positive, like this one from Chris Cole:

Continue reading Historical Ignorance →

I’m a firm believe in the saying that when the government occasionally does the right thing, it’s almost always for the wrong reason.

Here’s an example. I’m not sorry to see it happen, on general principles, because I thought that what happened in Iran-Contra was mind-bogglingly stupid (though fortunately the Democrats were unable to make political hay out of it, because they were upset, and thought that the public would be upset, by the wrong thing–the funding of the Constras, rather than the dealings with Iran…), and I was underwhelmed by the Total Information Awareness deal. But I find it amusing that Poindexter has resigned over the event futures market proposal, which was arguably a good idea, and certainly not as bad as its idiot instant critics in the Congress made it out to be.

The Apollo XV lunar module landed on the Moon. This was the third to last manned lunar mission. I recall the mission because it was the one in which Dave Scott dropped a hammer and a feather to the surface, and they both hit at the same time.

We also thought of it as a Michigan flight, because Al Worden and Jim Irwin were both Ann Arbor grads. Worden was from Jackson.

I remember when I was in engineering school at Michigan that Worden came in and gave a talk to our systems design class. At the time, Apollo already seemed like ancient history, though his flight had only been seven years earlier.

Now it’s been almost a third of a century. How long until we do it again?

It’s a natural and evolutionarily inevitable phenomenon, that appear in a wide range of cirumstances. We are in a small-scale arms race in Iraq.

It will only end when we cut off the resources to those engaged with us, with the help of the Iraqi people. At some point, it will have simmered down to mere background crime. I suspect that, despite the fervent wishes of the Democrats, that day isn’t far off.

Dan Weintraub has the latest twist in the recall saga. The words “if appropriate” are rearing their ugly head again. The author of the 1974 amendment that added them (presumably a Democrat, though Weintraub doesn’t say), claims that he added them for the purpose of ensuring succession of the Lt. Governor in the event of a recall, rather than allowing an election. He’s going to court, and if he wins, it will be a choice between Grayout and Bustemante, with the second half of the ballot nonexistent.

Weintraub is skeptical. So am I.

Go sign this petition to get Daniel Pipes on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Let’s get some balance on it, despite the terrorist apologists at CAIR and in the Senate.

Go sign this petition to get Daniel Pipes on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Let’s get some balance on it, despite the terrorist apologists at CAIR and in the Senate.