War Commentary

Prescient

A few months ago, T. M. Lutas made a bold prediction in the comments section of one of my blog posts:

Out of the 18 Iraqi provinces, 3 kurdish ones have their greatest security threats being foreign incursion from Turkey and Iran. Terrorism is successfully kept out. 4 arab provinces are under local management and we rarely, if ever, do anything there. That’s 7 down, 11 to go with the rest of the provinces in various stages along the road towards handover. I fully expect that when the balance is 10:8 instead of 7:11 that we’re going to see a sea change in coverage because “a majority of Iraq is under local control and relatively quiet” and all the MSM is going to realize that if they don’t get on the right side of this quickly, the deluge of broken credibility will very likely worsen and shorten their personal careers significantly.

I expect at least 3 more provinces to get handed over between now and the height of campaign season 2008. I’d like to think that at least 6 more would make the transition by then (obviating the need to explain Kurdistan’s special situation in the stats). The defeatists have to change the natural progression of Iraqi government and security institution building and do it soon or they’re going to be in deep trouble in 2008.

Well, he called it right.

Iraq’s army and police could be ready to take over security in all 18 provinces by the end of this year as the U.S. military moves toward a less prominent role in the country, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

“We look at it every month. We make recommendations. I think that if we continue along the path we’re on now, we’ll be able to do that by the end of 2008,” Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said when asked when Iraqi forces could take the lead in all provinces.

Harry and Nancy are no doubt very disappointed, since we refused to surrender to the enemy as they were demanding all last year.

Media Criticism

Hey…

Iowahawk has stolen my schtick:

Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.

“These people could snap at any minute,” says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. “We need to get them the help and medication they need before it’s too late.”

I think that we need to set up a national data base so we can know whether or not one lives in our neighborhood. Anyway, we know that the brutality of covering a war that’s being inexplicably won can cause many to snap.

History

What Happened Ten Thousand Years Ago?

…that caused the apparently contemporaneous development of agriculture on opposite sides of the world?

…fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old.

Media Criticism

True Hate Speech

Ralph Peters is less than impressed (to put it gently) with the New York Times and its apparent war against veterans:

in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.

The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” – as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

Anyone want to make book on whether there’s anything resembling even a recognition of how egregious this was (forget about an actual apology) from the “public editor”?

Political Commentary

Offense By Surrogate

Lileks has thoughts on the continuing slide of the Brits into a multi-culti PC hell:

“Pc Mahmood believes it was ‘not meant in a malicious way, just a bit of banter’. He told a sergeant, who was ‘really disgusted’, that he knew it was meant as a joke and did not want to make a formal complaint.

‘I just took it on the chin. But someone else in the room must have thought it was a racist incident, and reported it,’ the officer said.”

So the officer who got the

Political Commentary

An Ode To Laziness

I have often been accused of being “lazy.” Even by people who I know and love. Even, on occasion, by myself.

But what was the basis for the accusation?

Apparently, that I am not continually busy. That I often indulge in the very effective technique of “management by procrastination.” That I often do what needs to be done without breaking a sweat, and while waiting until the last minute to do it.

Once, in college (in the dark ages prior to word processors), I wrote a term paper, that I had known was due for many weeks, due the next day at the end of the semester, in an all-nighter, on a manual typewriter, with no notes, no citations, no…nothing. I had just been thinking about the subject for weeks, and the night before it was due, I sat down, and knocked out a twelve-page typewritten paper, with minor erasures, in a night. I got an A minus.

So I have mixed feelings when I hear that Fred Thompson is “lazy.”

Now, I don’t think that Fred Thompson is lazy. I just think that, despite the southern drawl, which many (mistakenly, as anyone who has worked with smart NASA employees and contractors in Houston, Huntsville and the Cape would know) think is a mark of a slow mentality, that he works smart, and cheap. Robert Heinlein once wrote that: “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

I believe that.

I don’t want a president, or a presidential candidate, who is frenetically scurrying around, appearing to be doing something, particularly two years before the swearing in. If he’s really a conservative (as he claims to be, though I’m not necessarily), I’m perfectly happy with a president who, when demanded to do something, just stands there. And as a libertarian, opposed to big government, I’m happy to have a president who will think before acting, and who believes that the first instinct should not be to pass yet another federal law.

I’m actually quite pleased with Fred Thompson’s campaign style to date. It saddens me that so many others, who would be otherwise disposed to vote for him, are not. I’m saddened that they think that he needs to stoke a “fire in the belly,” rather than simply employ the minimum resources needed to win the election. You would think that the warm-mongers would be pleased at Fred’s lack of energy and want to vote for him, to help save the planet. As an engineer, I’m extremely impressed with his efficiency. As a result, it’s very frustrating to know that, if everyone who would vote for him “if he only had a chance” would actually vote for him, that he’d have a chance. It’s kind of the reverse of Yogi Berra’s old saying that “no one goes downtown any more; it’s too crowded.”

So here’s where the mixed feelings come in. As an engineer, one needs margins. I’m concerned that he cut it a little too close. I’m afraid that in waiting just a little too long to get in, and in waiting just a little too long to finally go after the Elmer Gantrys and other pretenders to Republicanism and conservatism, that he’s just missed the boat.

Despite this fear, I will continue to support him, and hope that I’m wrong, into South Carolina and beyond. Because if so, he will prove to be the most parsimonious president in American history. And I think we could use not just a little, but a lot of that right now.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!