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Welcome to "liberal Iraqi"

I wish you freedom, strength, happiness, and the hope of peace...in that order. Other arrangements don't seem to last very well.

 
Personality Tests and Their Fascinating Lies

I am not at all fond of the arrogance of the psychological experts who put together personality tests. Michael Totten is claiming that his recent test, affirming what an amazingly wonderful person he is, was a remarkably accurate assessment of his overall character. Michael is a spiffy fellow, but the test has no way of telling if he is actually despicable. As I see it any such test has three central problems; it is a static description of a chaotic condition, important questions regarding character cannot be asked, and the test wants to be taken.

Humans exist in a chaotic changing world with a functionally infinite number of variables. Arguably the central reasoning behind fascism is that the variability of human experience must be focused and redirected to serve the strength of the state. Of course this test is not the central element of a fascist takeover of the free world, but it must be remembered that it exists as a tool to simplify comprehension of humans. This is inherently dangerous in both its limitations and the limiting effect it has. In addition to the behavioral changes accepting the results has on the tested person, there is a more profound impact on the outlook of the behavior of those who accept the worldview presented by the test. The test must always be viewed with suspicion or it functions as a control on the people it attempts to define. Anyone who has worked extensively with advanced measurement tools takes it for granted that you routinely calibrate test equipment. I rarely see significant calibration descriptions associated with these tests; when it was compiled, what culture it was created by, what cultures it is intended for, what references it uses as a baseline, and so on. These tests attempt to define the human condition, a deliberately incomprehensible chaos.

How would Saddam Hussein do on personality tests? Do you honestly think there is a "Conniving Rat Bastard Fascist" metric? Central questions regarding decency cannot be asked, mostly because the important questions are too obvious not to skew the results. How many people would honestly answer how often they pulled the wings off of flies, when they did it every day one summer as a child? On any test where the results are out of their control, how often will intelligent evil people answer in ways that will affect them adversely? How often will any person answer harmful questions honestly? To make things worse, the more intelligent a person is, the less functional these tests become. Smarter people are better at rationalizing and the extremes of the human condition are inherently difficult to describe because there is so little normative data. For instance, Michael is pretty darn smart and recently told me he can talk himself into almost anything…goodbye accurate data!

Another problem of personality tests is that they are created to be passed. There is no way to fail in such test, which is a dramatic departure from real descriptions of the human condition. Humans fail, and how they recover from failure is itself a central aspect of the human condition. Instead of telling you to pull your head out of your ass, these tests quite routinely try to pipe sunshine to your eyes and make things out to be shiny and good. Part of this is that the creators of the test are interested in having their views accepted. Ambitious people make these tests because unconcerned slackers don't do anything. The problem is that there is only so much filtering that can be done to keep the preconceptions of the test creators out. If the test creators did not believe in their views, they wouldn't have made the test. Additionally, the test creators probably have a clear understanding that the test will eventually be taken by suicidal persons, so these tests aren't going to tell folks to end it all. Finally, the test has to pass peer review, so there is going to be an inherent bias towards making psychology experts feel like gods.

I am glad that Michael feels good about himself, and I do not want to take that away from him, but these tests should not be taken too seriously. The tests that count are not standardized and the very best ones are those that require you to define yourself. Michael understands this; otherwise he would be less proud of choosing his own political identity. It must be very difficult to resist the siren call of classification, but it really is the duty of free people to do so. Our capacity to create new definitions requires us to resist the conclusions of these tests.

 
An Open Appreciation of Steven Den Beste

Steven,

Thank you very much for your writing. Your examination of obscure energy sources is an outstanding resource that I use again and again. I am deeply sorry that the bastards ground you down, but I understand the phenomenon. As a science fiction fan, I have been purged on more than one occasion by just such individuals.

Like any addict I hope for more from you, but as an adult, I can accept that some things just won't come again.

If you had not spoken such truths, you would not have caused so many liars to attack you. Thank you for the courage you have shown.

Patrick S Lasswell

 
Thanatos and All That Stuff

My nephew Thomas (who has become confused about spelling his name for reasons I'll get into later) took a hit Friday. One of his close friends took a gun to school and killed himself. Like a lot of friends and families, my job is to help clean up the wreckage that decision created. While I don't normally bother my nephew, this time he asked for my help and wanted my words on the subject. Just to establish the ground rules; I won't be making out of date pop-culture references, making bombastic excretory statements, or demeaning the dead.

Out of Date Pop-culture Reference

You know that car in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, the really cool Ferrari? Up until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that they trashed a priceless auto in the scene where Cameron kicks it off the jack. The acting and the direction is so good that you really feel that this thing of great value, that provided such great joy, is lost. Matthew Broderick was on Letterman the other night and let the cat out of the bag. It turns out that the real Ferrari was only in some of the "beauty passes", shots where they established how perfect the car was in the audience's mind. It is one of the great moments in film and it works because almost twenty years later I was genuinely surprised to discover that the car seen in most of the movie was a fiberglass replica built on a Ford frame. The thing is that you really don’t know how valuable something is until it is gone, and a lot of the time you are fooled, even then.

The thing about folks is that most of us are actually performance internals with a fairly crappy shell that we interact with the world covering our actions. I have been some places and done some thing where I had the chance to figure this out. Time without number, I've watched directionless losers step up to the plate and do the real jobs better than the motivated winners. In desperate situations, or even just really hard ones, the people who don’t seem to have a singular direction often are the ones to grab the bull by the horns and do what needs to be done. I think this is probably because people with a massive agenda on their backs aren't quick at changing priorities to deal with new things that are important. With the weight of all those expectations, their window of importance gets crushed, and they lose sight of opportunities, significant changes, the future, and what is actually important. I guess character is what helps you keep the window propped open.



Uncle Patrick Wearing Wildly Unauthorized Headgear While Manning a Heavy Machinegun (Forget about not having a machinegun, you don't even have an unauthorized hat!)

Bombastic Excretory Statements

Kid, you haven't done shit yet. I've spent more time picking my nose while doing something critical than you've spent doing anything critical. I've cleaned more earwax out on deployment than you weigh. I've sweated enough in pressurized chambers performing high risk work for you to swim in. I've puked enough while accomplishing…ok, you probably get the point. The worst thing about all that is not the disgust, but the essential truth. The worst thing about being young is being unproven. Nobody trusts you because you have not shown you are dependable. Of course now we protect children so heavily that they never really get a sniff of dangerous important work. When I was eleven, I spent the summer commercial fishing with my dad. When he was fourteen, he ran away and joined the Marines to catch the last remnants of WWII. He got to go to TJ and help a mission there…but let's be honest, the risk of drowning or getting shot were pretty slim. I'm not saying that you didn't want to do anything significant, I'm just saying what we both know; people treat you like a kid regardless of how you spell your name, and that's crap.

This is one of the main reasons I joined the Navy, to accomplish something significant. I joined during the Regan late Cold War buildup and re-enlisted shortly after the Gulf War; both times when it seemed that I could contribute to something significant. One of the key reasons I dropped Aviation Officers Candidate School is because it became apparent to me that the Naval Aviation community was self-obsessed and not interested in accomplishing anything. One of the key reasons I left the Navy in 1995 was that the civilian political leadership showed pretty clearly that they were not interested in committing to accomplishing anything meaningful with military force. Funny thing, until I wrote that just now, the suicide of the US Navy's top officer when I left didn't make any sense to me. In case you are wondering, the military LOVES George W. Bush. Although he works them harder than anyone since WWII, W lets today's military accomplish more than any President has since WWII.

The most important thing I was able to accomplish in the military was to improve the lives of some of the people around me. I didn’t get to sink any submarines, I didn't win any medals for personal accomplishment, and I didn't gain much rank. Most of that was due to circumstances more than anything else. I still get people I worked with looking me up and thanking me for my time with them. One guy did attempt suicide while he was working with me, though. I didn't catch it for a lot of reasons; the most important was that he didn't talk to me when he made his decision.

Demeaning the Dead

Here's the thing: suicide is the most fundamentally selfish thing you can do. They have suicide hotlines precisely because talking to somebody else does a lot to un-ass the heads of a lot of people who are focused on their own problems. I don't know what my nephew's friend had going on in his mind, but I bet he wasn't letting a lot of other folks in on his problems, either. I could be well and truly full of crap on this, but I bet I'm not. I bet that my nephew Thomas would have done the right thing and stopped his friend however he had to. If that meant beating his friend up, a remarkably effective method of redirecting anger that is rarely given the consideration it deserves, he would have kicked his ass. Thomas, however he chooses to mangle his name's spelling, is a good kid, and sometimes that means throwing a punch in the right direction for the right reasons.

Everybody gets confused, angry, stupid, and screwed up enough to think seriously about ending it. My nephew was brave enough to ask me to talk him out of it, so here I am blathering on. I was in was in my late thirties before I un-assed my head and unscrewed my life enough to make a serious commitment to another person, so don't tell me I don't know about selfish. I made some sincere compromises in my life to be able to relate honestly and civilly with my lady. We make a very good life for each other. It didn't come easy and it took a lot of time. One of the ways we commit to each other and go on is to diminish those who give up. My nephew's friend is nothing to me but a traumatic event that occurred to my family.

What about Those Ground Rules?

What matters at the end of the day is that you lived your life with some kind of integrity, and suicides define abandonment of integrity. The assholes blowing themselves up in the Middle East are chickenshit sons of bitches that don't have the guts to make the world work. They accomplish nothing but pain. Real men heal. Real men build. Real men make things work. Real men make things safe for others. Real men break the rules if that means saving lives. Real men keep their windows of importance open and look around for different solutions. Real men ask for help.

 
Righteous Fury

Jason Van Steenwyk has one of my favorite blogs, and today he reminded me again exactly why.

...So my mom called me last night. She told me a friend of hers is a lawyer who's son was in Iraq with the Army, and he's taken an interest in a recent class action lawsuit by soldiers protesting the stop-loss policy.

Anyway, this lawyer told my mom that I can get out of another overseas tour by resigning my commission.

I told my mom to quote me verbatim: tell this lawyer he can kiss my ass.
[...]
I'm all for an honest critique. But why is this idiot trying to sabatoge the army by undermining its officer corps?

My mom said me going back to Iraq is unthinkable to her.

I told her what was even more unthinkable to me is losing.

I've adjusted myself to the notion that civilians have the option of being selfish with how they serve in their own lives, but I hope I never adjust to the idea that strangers get to be selfish about how I choose to serve in my life. Luckily, my wife accepts that I want to serve. She isn't wild about my doing a tour in Iraq, but she understands that I have a calling to serve. The rest of my family...let's just say that I know exactly where Jason is coming from...

 
Newly Released Enron Documents Hint at Oil for Food Complicity

An investigator looking at Enron's energy trading fraud has put in my hands a very disturbing find from the avalanche of data dumped into the public record. Documents recently released by Enron for one of their Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) trials reveal that at least one in-house corporate spy had an extremely good track record at predicting changes affecting UN sanctions on Iraq. The Enron legal team methodology is to release bulk drops of documents at the last moment they can avoid contempt of court charges. For instance, two hundred full storage boxes released with two weeks to review them.

The documents, Enron Specialist G. Britt Whitman's record of his predictions for the year 2001, show that on four separate occasions he was able to cue Enron's Crude/Products Trading unit about events that would affect Iraq's sanctions. While it would normally be within the scope of the analyst's job to alert the trading unit of events that would change the price of crude oil, the amounts of oil sold through subversion of Oil for Food were not enough to affect the general market price. The most logical reason to cue the trading unit, and reminding them of doing so, is if they have a direct financial stake in the effectiveness of UN sanctions on Iraq. Here are the four entries from Whitman's "Success Tracking 2001":

February 27
Group Forecast: UN will consider a new strategy to screen out small lifters of Iraqi oil.
Actual Occurrence: UN diplomats announced the plan later that day. The plan resurfaces in June during debate over "smart sanctions."

May 16
Group Forecast: British draft UN resolution to include "smart sanctions" proposals. Iraqis would resist and oil disruptions would result.
Actual Occurrence: Same day- Reuters reveals British plan. May 21- Iraq threatens to suspend exports if plan is approved.

August 6
Group Forecast: Chances of US strike on Iraq are low.
Actual Occurrence: CNN reported same the next day

September 26th
Group Forecast: Despite pressure from Pentagon hawks to target Iraq, the first wave of reprisals is likely to be limited to Afghanistan because of its clear links to bin Laden.
Actual Occurrence: First wave of attacks beginning October 7th focus on Afghanistan. October 7th edition of Newsweek reports that VP Cheney asks leading hawk Paul Wolfowitz to quiet down.

Could this just be coincidence, could it be that in late 2001 G. Britt Whitman was just trying to show off that he called some stuff that touched on the Middle East, could this just be routine? Sure. On the other hand, this is the company that shut down power to hospitals across California for energy trading scams. It is easy to believe that after they got nailed for stealing in California, where state bureaucrats made it almost impossible to get caught, they would start stealing where UN bureaucrats made it utterly impossible to get caught, Iraq.

Did Enron have a part in laundering money for Saddam Hussein and the officials on his payroll? At this point, their documents put that question in play.

 
I Feel the Need…the Need for Alternate Feed

My local radio station is using CNN as a source for audio feed for its news. That is a problem, because CNN does things like send audio bites to radio stations of the President talking to troops…and censoring the troop's response. Wildly enthusiastic troops greeting the President is not news that fits…I guess.

So the blogsphere has another challenge: make open-source, verifiable audio bites available to radio stations. I am uncertain how expensive this will be, but it seems a fairly straightforward exercise of news collection and web publishing. As a starting project I suggest we try to get a bunch of audio recordings of Bush visiting the troops this holiday season and publish them with attribution and details to allow the recordings to be verified.

If you want to help break the big media monopoly on audio feed, email me: pslblog at yahoo DOT com and tell me what you can do to help. Alternatively, you can send me a concise explanation why I am mad…mad…mad! (Like I didn't get that at the University!)

 
A letter to the news staff of KINK-FM 101.9 Radio.

The Sound of One Military Clapping

Yesterday on the KINK afternoon show, Sheila Hamilton played a sound bite of President Bush speaking to Marines at Camp Pendleton. I was puzzled because the normally complete news coverage on KINK missed half the story, the military's response to President Bush. Every eyewitness report I have read of servicemen meeting the President Bush in the last three years has noted the extreme affection the troops have for him, and the extreme fondness he shows for them. While this has not been covered extensively or well by most of the media, it is a phenomenon, it is verifiable, it has not been driven into the ground, and so it seems to qualify as news.

I personally do not care if you are not fond of the President. The KINK on-air staff has shown a fair willingness to at least attempt impartiality. (Comments made on November 3rd, notwithstanding.) The problem is that your demographic is the bluest part of the bluest part of the state, and they just don't understand why they lost the last election.

While I am not asking you to start channeling FOX NEWS, it is a basic public service to provide your audience with an awareness of the reality of Bush's relationship with military personnel. Although the military is not unanimously behind the President, they overwhelmingly support and approve of him. This administration gets enough things they do wrong covered; they deserve the one thing they do right to get some coverage.

 
In response to this post by Jeremy Brown, I offer a humble alternative:

In Defense of Abusing Socialist Revolution

Three critical developments since the death of Marx show the utter futility of pursuing Socialist revolution in the current era; John Nash's work on cooperation in complex economies, the expansion of economic roles available to individuals in diverse economies, and the historical consequences associated with the overwhelming number of socialist revolution that have already occurred.

John Nash's work on cooperative games as models for complex economic systems destroys the requirement for revolution by showing that cooperation can be beneficial to all parties, especially the worker. Mathematical proof that choices can be made, agreed upon, and improved over time by multiple parties with disparate goals to the benefit of all is a stake through the heart of socialist revolution. You can do what is best for yourself and the group for optimal results, John Nash proved this. The Nobel winning "Nash equilibrium" means that individual choices about personal contribution to group benefit have value. This is a concept that socialist revolutionaries throw away the instant they start to seek power; I am not sure that they have to, but I am sure that they have never reached power without abandoning individual needs.

Hairdressers and massage therapists are the death of socialist revolution. The existence of these non-essential occupations are not valuable (in the sense that they are not assigned a significant value) to socialist revolutionaries. Regrettably, in large and prosperous economies, occupations like these are available as independent businesses to individuals in unplanned ways. More to the point, the millions of hairdressers, massage therapists, web page designers, and such have vital reasons to oppose socialist revolutions that would disenfranchise their independent economic activities. It is impossible to believe that socialist revolution will come from a "Supercuts"; however it is easy to believe that the revolution will die there. Hairdressers talk about winning the Lottery, not sacrificing everything for socialism. While there are not as many hairdressers as traditional laborers; diversity of economic roles means that individual economic choices blur the differences between labor and capital to the point where critical mass is unobtainable by revolutionaries.

While socialist revolutionaries have become inured to recanting the horrific results of past revolutions, their cognitive dissonance is not shared by the masses. The tens of millions of dead, the ecological disasters of global proportions, and the brutal suppression of culture happened and are known by the "proletariat". There is no explanation available to socialist revolutionaries for why this time they won't put millions more up against the wall, especially when so many of their fellows and supporters are screaming for this to happen. There is a suspicious lack of discussion about the impact draining the Aral Sea and turning it's tens of thousands of square miles of arable land into a salt desert has had on global warming, or any of the other massive ecological disasters performed by socialist revolutionaries. Probably this is because scientists can do enough math to realize that there is no point in shaking down bankrupted governments with a pronounced tendency to kill inconvenient persons. The destruction of indigenous cultures practiced by socialist revolutionaries to suppress dissent is a documented historical fact that is being played out on a smaller, so far less lethal, scale, on university campuses here in the United States. We do not have to imagine the consequences of cultural suppression; we can go to any local campus and witness it.

All of this is why socialist revolutionaries are fair game for denouncing, ridiculing, and abusing at every turn. I am not entirely convinced that efforts to date to do so have been the most effective. It should be noted that the simpler and more wildly fraudulent your claims are, the more sensational they can be. People committed to telling the truth have more restrictions on their speech than those who abandoned honesty as the price of admission. I am interested in working towards improving this situation, and so I am going to work with the local chapter of Protest Warrior towards developing responses to the endless wave of protest here in Portland. I am not interested in violently confronting the socialist revolutionaries here, because I do not respect them that much. Ridicule, however, is a tool I plan on using a lot!

 
PETA Calls for Greater Sensitivity to Fish

In response I provide the following image:


I call it "Forty-two pounds of Kiss My Ass!"

Sport fishermen have done more to protect fish than PETA ever will because we love to fish and will pay to support our joy. The dilettantes from the dimension of lame cannot sustain their protective efforts because their joy is the denial of other's choices, an essentially parasitic function. Fish are better protected by those who derive their livelihood from them than those who salve their consciences by being scolds.

The fish I'm holding in the picture got that big by eating other fish, not tofu. I caught it after a struggle involving the cooperation of five vertebrates sapiens for over an hour. I was sensitive to the fish in question, otherwise it would have spit the hook out!

Hat Tip: Jeff Goldstein

 
Anti-Protean Nationalists

A tremendous intellectual failure on the part of American liberalism is the assumption of European tolerance. This assumption is predicated on a belief among American liberal intellectuals that all things European are superior. While it is argued that having more than a hundred different kinds of cheeses is conclusive evidence that France is a tolerant nation, it ignores a central truth that the French do not import another hundred kinds of cheese. While the Europeans are not entirely intolerant, they are not actually deeply tolerant. It would be more accurate to say that in the latter portion of the Twentieth century, Europe adopted the Dutch model of being benignly intolerant.

What confronts the European Union today in general and the Netherlands specifically after the death of Theo Van Gogh is the central hypocrisy that they are not actually promoting tolerance, they have instead banded together to enshrine benign intolerance. A huge portion of this is driven by the French realization that their cultural identity was disappearing under the onslaught of a massively more compelling culture distilled from the American melting pot. It must be tremendously galling for them to admit that American culture was approaching supremacy as an unintended byproduct of superior marketing research on Madison Avenue. The only way for them to combat the golden arches was to promote cultural isolation as a central facet of governmental operations.

Regrettably, the same governmental structure that keeps the 158th cheese of France competitive in the market also keeps sharply flavored Islamist intolerance active. There will be no assimilation as long as the melting pot is illegal in Europe. The price of cheese in Europe may be Islamist encroachment. There are solutions to this seemingly intractable problem, but they may require more courage and toleration than EU law allows.

 
Congratulations to Captain Van Steenwyk

Although I question the causality of his economic analysis in this post, I celebrate the root news. Now if he would ever get out of the hurricane magnet and visit his family, Michael and I could buy him a beer.

 
Boundaries of Tolerance in the Netherlands

Michael Totten is concerned that 40% of the Netherlands are not sufficiently welcoming of Islamic peoples, according to a recent poll. He says:

I understand their frustration. But they should hope Muslims learn to feel more at home in the Netherlands, not less. Dutch society is perhaps the most liberal on Earth. It’s not surprising that immigrants from a vastly more conservative culture feel alienated there.

The peoples of the Netherlands, a nation that's been welcoming for centuries, have done what they can to allow diverse groups to include themselves in their society. History shows them that not everybody belongs, though. Almost 400 years ago one intolerant group, who we call the Pilgrims, tried this culture, decided they didn't like it, and went on to build their own culture. Those folks did not get tolerant for a long time. As recently as fifty years ago, "Banned in Boston" was in common use, for instance. The Pilgrims decided to build something new to that was to their liking, and there was room and time for them to do so.

The Islamists are not interested in creating something new and their own; they are interested in destroying everything that is not old and theirs. I do not blame the many diverse people of the Netherlands for accepting the reality that not everybody belongs and that not everybody can change to accept others. Their history shows them that this happens. Regrettably, there is not time and space to allow the Islamists the chance to make something for themselves and to succeed or fail on their own merits. We do not have the luxury of ignoring the intolerant in a world where the technology to make WMD is readily available. There is no fence good enough to make genocidal intolerants good neighbors.

This is not on the Netherlanders to fix. Nobody from Amsterdam flew a jet into Mecca; somebody from Saudi Arabia flew jets into the most important buildings in New Amsterdam. The method the Netherlands are taking is the one they have been taking since creation. They are opposing totalitarian rule and inviting anyone who favors intolerance to leave. This is a method that works for them. I think it is time for us to respect their culture.

 
Sincere Concern for Democracy and its Antithesis

The lawyers the Democratic Party paid to observe the ballot counting all went away after the results were released at eight last night, but it took the volunteer Republican observers some time to figure this out because they were so busy observing the process and so used to the opposition being thin on the ground. The central thing to keep in mind about this is that the most optimistic Republican in the building only dreamed of getting 33% of the Multnomah County vote in his wildest flight of fancy. There never was a serious race to win in the Portland Metro area; there was only a contest to put in a respectable showing. The observers from the Republican Party were there to make sure that an honest election functioned. The lawyers from the Democratic Party were there to impose the form of an open election was observed. Once the initial results were released, it appears the process became irrelevant to them.

The Republicans in Multnomah County total about 89,000 of the 429,000 registered voters, slightly less than 21% of the electorate. President Bush got 27% of the county's votes in the initial results last night, not enough help to carry the state, but a respectable performance in this bluest of blue regions this side of Berkeley. The funny part about all this is that four years ago Nader pulled more than 5% of the county vote and Bush got about 21% here. The Republican candidate got a smaller percentage when Nader was in the race in Multnomah County. That has just got to suck a whole lot for some people.

Kerry just conceded and one can only hope that this loss will show the fundamental vacuity of injunctive interference in the electoral process. Playing pettiness games with the Democratic lawyers was a tedious and pointless activity that I hope will not be repeated in four years. The willingness of Democratic money sources to continue to shovel funds down rat holes in pursuit of non-existent rewards remains to be seen. The willingness of vastly outnumbered Republican supporters to show up and put in long hours to help keep things honest appears undiminished. Last night the Republicans had no problem producing as many polite, orderly, and intelligent observers as they needed to observe every aspect of the process. These were mostly just folks who wanted to keep things honest in a profoundly partisan county. The failure of the Democrats to keep anybody in the building after the initial results were released was the best indicator of their sincerity.

A brief note of congratulations to John Kauffman Director of Elections for Multnomah County and his superlative staff who have worked long hours in conditions made horrible by the interference of litigators without an abiding interest in the honest exercise of democracy. These people did their best to maintain their dignity and integrity under terrible stress. Last night, long after the litigious opportunists had departed the building and the last (drunk) procrastinator had staggered through the door to vote, he and his exhausted staff were still working hard to keep democracy functioning.

 
Observing the Election from a Tester's Perspective

Yesterday I learned that I trust my vote to clear eyed ladies who cast their first vote for Wendell Wilkie more than I do young lawyers in short skirts who cast their first vote for Bill Clinton. I also learned how to scare young lawyers in short skirts from the room with an even tone and a reasonable statement. I spent election eve at the Multnomah County Elections office observing the process and doing my part to maintain healthy stress on the system, and keep an eye on the lawyers trying to screw it up. While there I got to see the entire process, and the hash Democratic lawyers have made out of the system of observing it.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a systems tester currently between contracts who grew up in a fiercely partisan Democratic family. I did eight years in the Navy and left during the Clinton administration after a couple of pretty hard tours on tin cans. As a civilian, I leveraged my self-taught PC skills into a series of testing jobs at Intel and Microsoft. I've found enough bugs and written enough test plans to be able to spot deficiencies (bugs) in a process almost instantly.

After the election I will discuss the biggest single potential bug I saw, but the biggest existing bug in the election process I saw yesterday was the presence of lawyers as observers. Any test will affect the process being tested to a greater of lesser extent, but some testing methods are so invasive as to invalidate the results. Before the 2000 debacle, retired persons from across the political spectrum acted like tribal elders in preserving the traditions of the vote; in Oregon that system worked for generations. One thing good testers learn is that working systems rarely need to be messed around with.

Regrettably, this year Oregon became a swing state, and the tremendous amount of money flooding into the election economy resulted in the presence of lawyers from the Democratic Party showing up to observe the vote count. Oregon votes by mail and the ballots have been collecting for weeks and observers have been present watching the process to ensure that everything stayed above board. The observers from the Republican Party are predominantly mature ladies with clear eyes and a firm commitment to democracy. One lady I met yesterday was born before women got the vote and cast her first vote in the 1940 election. The observers from the Democratic Party are mostly young lawyers who have spent some time in DC. Because the Republicans showed up early with plenty number of people, the opposition lawyers made their presence felt by establishing boundaries where observers could and could not be and in what numbers and what representations.

The notion that democracy exists at the sufferance of injunctive relief is a new one that doesn't sit well with the sharp eyed ladies who have been watching the process for generations. One of the problems created by the lawyers is that many of the places where ballots are handled cannot possibly be observed from the newly defined observation locations, and the observers can only see one small set of the available ballot handling boards. In Oregon the mailed in ballots are contained within a secrecy envelope inside an envelope signed by the voter. At tables called "Boards" four people, predominantly retired ladies, from different political affiliations open the secrecy envelopes, review the ballots for quality of marking, and order the ballots for machine counting. If necessary, the ballots are enhanced, in accordance with state law supporting voter intent, by these people. As observers, our job was to count the ballots we can see being enhanced in order to note any particular trends and to help keep things honest. At the elections office, there are more than thirty Boards, and the observers can now only keep their eyes on at most eight of them from their newly imposed observation locations. In the interest of "fairness" we have lost transparency.

After watching the Boards for a while I went upstairs and relieved the fellow watching the front. Out front the people who had problems with their signature or their ballot were obtaining a ballot and voting. At one in the afternoon of the eve of the election, people were lined up halfway down the block with no shelter from the rain. Observing this process, I realized that the people engaged in voter fraud were most likely to be caught right at this stage. As a systems tester, I figured that the bugs in the registration system should be caught right at this point, and that the bad people bent on distorting the system should be rolled up by the police. Instead of a law enforcement problem, this was being handled as a bureaucratic function, however.

When the Democratic Party types surrounding me were gushing about the willingness of people to stand in line in the rain to vote, I let slip that I would feel better about the process if sometime in the next 20 hours somebody was hauled out of the building in handcuffs. It appears the notion that voter fraud should be punished acts upon Democratic lawyers like garlic does to vampires. If you are ever surrounded by Democratic lawyers, say in a clear voice your belief that voter fraud should be treated as a crime.

The great realization from yesterday's experience was that for the political operatives, reality was established only at elections. Those of us who test systems and methods more frequently, who are confronted with a more harsh reality than a malleable electorate, make political types distinctly uncomfortable. The central threat of non-activist bloggers discussing political matters from a variety of perspectives is that we are not accountable to that electorate and so we can make uncomfortable statements without fear of refutation. We can risk offending voters by arresting them for fraud because we have nothing to lose; in fact, we have a lot to gain from this behavior.

I hope that we have a clear decision tonight because the legalistic imposition of fairness has diminished transparency in Oregon, and probably elsewhere. They have muddied the water in an attempt to control the vote and the best result free people can hope for is that this effort was futile. I hope this election establishes a reality that lawyers cannot control the will of the people. A decisive win by Bush will re-establish the notion that power flows from the people to the government, without the consent of the trial lawyer's bar.

 
Combat Life Saver

I took an advanced First Aid course to get a First Responder certification in the last year. I took it to know how to deal with what happens in emergencies. The Questing Cat has a tremendous post viscerally telling what happens when everything goes to hell. Great post.

Hat tip: Citizen Smash

 
Power Chugging the Kool-Aid

Listen Here!

"Consider these facts..."

 
Dictatorships are Humanity in Retreat

One of the central axioms of military history is that more casualties are taken in retreats than attacks. People running away cannot defend themselves the way that people facing a threat do. The greatest genocides in human history have occurred under civil authorities in dictatorships. The recent uncovering of a killing field in Iraq where they found the skeletal remains of children clutching toys with bullets through their skulls drives this truth home. The thousands of Kurdish dead were not killed in a war; they were slaughtered to achieve political supremacy through terror.

The United States of America is in a unique position today; our way of life is proven through conflicts in military, scientific, economic, and cultural arenas. Culturally the United States is the supreme power on Earth; not because the Jerry Springer Show is good, but because it is an irrelevant fish in the largest ocean of competing entertainment offerings. Our economy is the largest in the world because opportunity is tempered by accountability to forge the strongest engine for sustained growth known to man. Our scientific achievements capture six out of ten Nobel prizes. The three most decisive military campaigns in history have been led by our armed forces in the last decade and a half; most impressively, these conflicts have inflicted a tithe of the expected civilian casualties. The greatest limitation to our ability to accomplish is our national will.

The nation that put man on the moon can bring democracy to the Middle East, if we choose to do so and maintain our commitment to that accomplishment. The peoples of Iran love the United States and are eager for our assistance in achieving lasting freedom. Even as we dither and listen to whines about civilian casualties in Iraq, ten times as many are dying in Sudan for lack of conflict. For people afflicted with dictatorships, pacifism is the strangulation of hope. Today we have the very real potential to simultaneously place within reach orbital flight for the common man in the United States, and real democracy for the rest of the world within our lifetimes.

We face a vote in two weeks where we decide as a people what we wish to accomplish. It is incredibly easy to embrace the pliant and comfortable sin of omission through withdrawal. Your friends cannot blame you for choosing to do nothing and hoping that things will turn out for the best because of your good intentions. I ask you to choose difficult and dangerous accomplishment instead. I ask you to help stop the retreat from humanity that is happening in Sudan and around the world. Face the dictators and show them what free people can do.

 
Deferred Rebellion Not Necessarily Better

My friend Michael Totten is worried, with good reason, that in the event of a Bush re-election, the nutbar left will actively work to overthrow democratic process in the United States in retribution. He quotes a commenter on another blog, Cicero, who works at a California university and has heard people talking about open rebellion. Cicero is voting for Bush but rooting for Kerry because of the potential for deterioration of the democratic process in the event of a Democratic loss.

I think I get where Michael and Cicero are coming from, I just don't agree with where they are. The prospect of dilettante academics taking up arms to resist the lawfully elected government does not fill me with dread. Actually, it kind of fills me with humor. I've met, up close and personal, college revolutionaries and USMC Sniper School Instructors. I know for sure who I'd put my money on in a stand up fight or an insurgency, and it isn't the ones wearing Birkenstocks.

The most effective anti-insurgent military in the world is who the revolutionary intellectuals would be rebelling against; and the patchouli rangers do not have the tactics, training, discipline, logistical support, coherence of goals, or the leadership to accomplish much more than self-immolation. A lot of people would go to jail, and probably some particularly destructive schmucks would earn themselves a lethal injection for treason. It would be an embarrassment, but I think it would be a small one. The most striking lack in the nutbar resistance is credible leadership; Michael Moore is not even qualified to carry Abbie Hoffman's jockstrap, and there simply is nobody on the left near the same league as Martin Luther King, Jr. Actors and Rock Stars have not shown a significant capability to influence the general populace to do more than sell tickets, and they are generally more concerned with that endeavor. Discussions of a virtual leadership on the Internet are simply laughable. People risk their lives for ribbons and tin, but not the honor of a chat room or a blog. Honestly, any revolution in the near term would be over very shortly after it got started.

I have a lot more enthusiasm for experiencing this disturbance under the leadership of George W. Bush because he has already exhibited remarkable forbearance under pressure with regards to the Islamic community in the US and the world. That is something worth taking into account. Regardless of the persistent underestimation of the President that the moonbat left thrives on, there is no evidence that Bush gets stupid under pressure. More importantly, the Pentagon will never overthrow Bush and establish a military Junta. If they tried it, Rumsfeld would have their heads on pikes in his office in a moment, and that may not be just a figure of speech.

The people who are serious about exploiting revolutionary idiocy, like A.N.S.W.E.R., don't care if Kerry gets elected or not, because he is not their kind of Stalinist. There is no good reason to believe that the people herding the moonbat left really care who is in charge since nothing less than a revolution will make it them. I think we should take the people who say there is no difference between Kerry and Bush at their word and acknowledge that the results of this election will do nothing to forestall any attempt at revolt.

Lately I've been hearing from people who talk about the need to throw a revolution every so often to keep things fresh. I have a lot of friends who are both decent people and incredibly disconnected intellectuals. I do not think they are organized because I do not have any evidence they have sufficient discretion to sustain a significant organization. I've seen these people fold up like a card table when they run out of cigarettes; I do not think they could talk to me for a half-hour under the influence of a bottle of wine without gossiping about how they are conspiring to install a new government.

Honestly, I think we would be better off dealing with this now than postponing it until later. We know this is coming, and I think we are much better off handling it as close to the memory of 9/11 as possible.

 
Penguin In the Water!

Those clever folks in the blogosphere have done their penguin best to herd one of their own off the ice and into the water to see if there are leopard seals about!



It's not like a blogger could do a worse job than most senators!

 
Imagine a World without Empowering Delusional Twits

(UPDATED)
Some years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article describing the hotbed of anarchist empowerment that is my former stomping grounds of Eugene, Oregon. One of the flyers they reproduced had a drawing of Winnie the Pooh by a bucolic pond playing with a butterfly with a title something like, "Imagine a World without Corporate Greed" or some such. The idea being that once we embrace anarchy as a collectivist expression of our individual capabilities we will live in a wonderland like Christopher Robin. Probably the Journal chose the absolutely most delusional anarchist flyer they could find to drive the point home; but let's be honest, they had a lot to choose from. There is a lot of idiotic thinking on the left that in the September 12th world we live in needs to be corrected.

Michael Totten is writing that the Left needs to get hammered by history for a while to knock off some of the useless detritus and pound the worthwhile remainder into some kind of shape. I agree with the principle, but think he is utterly wrong on the method, since he thinks this will happen during a Kerry presidency. Michael has been to the Sahara this year, so he knows what a desert is. In most major religions, you go to the desert to atone for your sins of excess and come back with the strength to make things right.* The desert scours your soul and makes you stronger.

Washington, D.C. is a swamp, not a desert. Being in control of the largest aggregate of money in the world, the U.S. government's budget, is no way to atone for your sins of excess. With all those billions flying around, it's pretty near impossible to recognize a sin of excess if it is hitting you in the face really hard. With all the grant money and government contracts to direct, and all those new friends telling you how wonderful you are, your soul is never going to get scoured.

The central failure of Michael's theory is that there is no incentive for a winning team to change. The only way to get desert tough, desert pure, is to go to the desert and that NEVER happens willingly. Nobody gives up their position on the Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy to go clarify their reality and come back with a stronger philosophical ideal. They stay at their jobs, pay off their houses, hire their friends, direct grants to their alma maters, and change in the direction of securing their position.

Michael wants his friends to change to a rational and aware position on the basis of logical thought and awareness of the real dangers of the world we face. This month at a party at Michael's house, one of his friends tried to explain to me that it was logical and reasonable to believe that the forged documents used by CBS were somehow an administration plant intended to damage the Kerry campaign through a series of articulations too bizarre to repeat here. Michael, your friends need to go to the desert to change, and they will not do so on their own like you did. That moment has left us. There is no way that you believe that Kerry is strong enough lead anybody out of the desert, and the only way he is going to lead anybody into the desert is if he loses badly in three weeks and his supporters are driven there.

The way the idiots with the Pooh flyer start imagining a world that actually exists and stop being useless twits is to be confronted with reality. Giving those people executive positions at Disneyland is not a good way to start.

*Communism is a major world religion that does not have this tradition. In Communist tradition, you get taken out back and shot or they chase you to Mexico City and bash in your head with an ice axe. The absolute lack of significant doctrinal progress in Communism is not quite as hard to explain as some would have you think.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Michael. I still think you are too attached to your friends or good manners to appreciate that the Left is going into the desert if they win this election or not. I honestly think that the Left has some chance of recovering relevance sooner if they lose this fight than if they win. A lot of that is because Bush is such a liberal Republican that to have any ground to stand on that isn't within reach of Bush's appeal, you have to go out to the very fringe.

The only traction the Pro-Choice folks are able to get is by fear-mongering about his potential judicial appointments. If they had something concrete to nail Bush on, they certainly would use it. The simple fact is that directly attacking the middle doesn't sell tickets, and that is the position Bush is occupying. The Left needs a candidate who occupies the middle better than Bush, and right now all they come up with is a candidate to tries to be everywhere.

 
Questioning the Timing of the Mt. St. Helens Eruption

The crack investigators at NRA News are on top of the partisan actions of this geologic feature near two battleground states. One savvy caller noted the violations of the Kyoto protocol by this seismic event, clearly indicating its partisan behavior.

 
Kerry Raises Questions Where Once Were None

So in the debate just now, Senator Kerry talks about being one of the first Senators in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He then spoke of going to the KGB offices and seeing the halls filled with files.

The questions he raises are: Why was it important to him to be the first into the KGB file room? What was important to him in there?

Do I think that Senator Kerry was a Soviet operative during the Cold War? Hell no…well, probably not… Actually, now I have a lot more questions about his involvement in various anti-war groups than I did before he opened his yap about going to the secure files rooms of the KGB. That was a deeply stupid thing to say regardless of his involvement with the KGB.

 
An Appreciation of Zombies and Mount Saint Helens

I watched "Shaun of the Dead" this weekend with my wife this weekend. It was a great movie for a number of reasons, the central one for me was the obliviousness of the average citizen. Great scenes of flipping through cable TV showed how even crucial messages can be lost when you are channel surfing. A few heavy hits on the self-absorbed behavior of people with cell phones are "fried gold" as well. If you see one zombie movie this year, you probably are a fairly well adjusted individual. You should see this movie anyway. Best British comedy in years and it is a real shame that this isn't saying much.

As a blogger, it was a revelation to me to look at my fellows in this perspective. The people around me are not particularly well informed or paying attention. My frustration in dealing with people who don't check Instapundit several times a day is reasonable. Most people are simply letting their routine and pettiness get in the way of understanding what is going on.

As an example of this, I live downwind of Mount St. Helens, which is showing every indication of being about to blow again in the next couple of weeks. Yesterday I went to Harbor Freight (six blocks away, to my wife's chagrin) to buy some filter masks and cheesecloth. To my pleased surprise, they were fully stocked. The clerk asked if I was going to do some painting. When I explained that the volcano within sight of the store was going to explode soon, he expressed surprise. It turns out that virtually nobody else in Portland had put together imminent volcano eruption and need to purchase filter masks and cheesecloth.

Thanks to Cam at NRA News for taking my call on this today. He says he wants me to call again. I did stop talking before I made idiotic mistakes, and I thank Cam again for graciously allowing me to do so.

 
Irrational Obsession Religious and Secular

Irrational obsession is not the sole property of Islam, and I hope the people horrified by today's murder of dozens of Iraqi children take the time to remember this. There are elements of Fundamentalist Islam attempting to corner the market, but there can be no monopoly on idiocy. There are people in the West actively competing for market share of stupidity. Although the most active groups are stuck with industrial age ideology, like a rust belt manufacturer, it is their good fortune to be competing with foreign rivals attached to late bronze-age ideology.

The key thing here is that the terrorists and their apologists have no rational view of history, and so they have no rational view of power. The greatest power is accomplished by free individuals working together to achieve measurable goals through a variety of creative ways. This is one of the reasons why Coalition military commanders are driving authority to junior officers, to let them use initiative to accomplish the peace. As long as we maintain the will to endure the vicious attacks of delusional idiots, both violent and rhetorical; Iraq will become free and great.

Hat Tip: IRAQ THE MODEL

 
Why You Are Losing the Election

An acquaintance of mine who is quite Left recently re-established contact with me by sending me a blog post of a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who took issue with President Bush's leadership. I emailed back a link to the overwhelmingly positive response by Guard troops heading to Iraq when Bush greeted them on their plane as it refueled in Maine. I also sent links to two other bloggers who had done tours in Iraq, were critical of Bush on a variety of topics, but could clearly distinguish Kerry's failures as a candidate. Over the course of a few emails, my acquaintance completely misunderstood what I was trying to tell him. He denounced Roger Simon for slamming various news sources, regardless of the validity of the critique. I did not correct him in his misapprehensions because by then it had become clear to me what the problem was; if he actually took the effort to understand me, he would have to admit that he was wrong.

From Rather's denouncement of bloggers as partisan operatives to any number of idiotic comments I have seen on articles I have posted elsewhere, there is a pattern of willful incomprehension on the Left. If understanding makes you wrong, choose not to understand. If the numbers show that your candidate is losing, fail to understand the numbers. If Christopher Hitchens shows your behavior contemptible, rail against Hitchens.

I suspect that what I am seeing is a cultural artifact peculiar to the Left. Generations of accepting propaganda that excused Soviet brutality have made cognitive dissonance a primary cultural identifier. You simply cannot be part of the Left culture while maintaining intellectual integrity. This has made the peoples of the Left a perfect tool for acquiring political power, as long as nobody pays attention to the facts.

In the information age, the ability to ignore facts is no longer a survival trait worth having. What we are seeing is the collapse of a failed culture that tied its identity to an unsustainable characteristic. In the lifetime of my mother, we have seen the death of the cultures of the isolationist Right and the racist Dixiecrats. Cultural failure happens, and what matters is how you deal with the transition.

Governor George Wallace, for all his many faults, crimes, and sins, is probably one of the best examples of how to recover from a failed culture. He re-examined his life and changed to make things better. This is not the end of the world, even if your friends are telling you to believe it is. Establish your friendships on the basis of how they help you thrive, not on their adherence to party dogma, especially if that dogma is suicidal.

 
Well He Looks Like a '70s Cartoon Character

Captain's Quarters today is following story brought up by the O'Reilly Factor last night, in 2001 John Kerry said that he had been present at the signing of armistice that ended the first Gulf War. So far, they have been able to place Senator Kerry in Boston at a charity function seven hours before the signing in Safawan on March 3rd, 1991. The record they have of Kerry's visit to Iraq shows that he did not arrive until March 16th.

At this rate, the only way the Bush campaign will be able to produce an October Surprise will be to have Daphne, Fred, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby unmask Osama bin Laden and reveal the junior Senator from Massachusetts. "And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you meddlesome bloggers!"

 
Rabble Rousing Stooge

I debated about publishing this; it is the first time I have called a candidate names in quite a few years. After weeks of intellectual analysis, I just have come to the conclusion that there are not two candidates in this election. There is a candidate and a cipher doing anything he can to get elected. Character matters and John Kerry has failed a crucial test of character by letting his campaign get in the way of his obligations as a United States Senator to treat our allies with respect. The junior Senator from Massachusetts did not attend a joint session of Congress addressed by the leader of our newest democratic ally, Awad Allawi. What flunked Kerry was not his snubbing so much as his deliberate insults afterwards. In light of this, the gloves are off.

Last week I wrote how hecklers never drive. Yesterday John Kerry proved me right. Awad Allawi, who Roger tells me was bludgeoned with an ax by a Ba'athist stooge in 1978, was heckled by John Kerry after his speech to a joint session of Congress. True to form, Kerry neglected to attend this historic session; he had more important things to do. While the leader of a free Iraq was thanking the United States, John Kerry was losing an election by rabble rousing.

On the plus side of all this is that Awad Allawi has experience dealing with stooges. Stooges are bullies who have abandoned their identity to those with more power. Once you know you are dealing with a stooge, all you have to do is show that you have power over them, and they will do almost anything you tell them. Awad Allawi, as leader of Iraq, has a significant amount of power over the man who will be elected on November 2nd. If Bush is elected, Allawi will use this power to work with the man in office. If Kerry is elected, Allawi will use this power to drive the stooge to doing what is needed.

Since the Republican National Convention, John Kerry has come out swinging. His attempts to energize the anti-Bush "base" have been vile and pathetic. Perhaps next week he will be throwing rocks at an anti-WTO protest to show his credentials. Rabble rousing is not statesmanship. Abandoning your obligations is not leadership. Insulting an allied leader who risks death ever day of his life for his efforts to bring better conditions to his people is not coalition building. John Kerry is not presidential; he is a stooge, and a pathetic one at that.

 
Going From Annoyed to Angry

I don't link to Jason Van Steenwyk's CounterColumn enough, although I read him about every day that the atmosphere is allowing him to blog. On those days that hurricanes are trying to eradicate him from the face of the earth, I check his blog anyway. Today he converted me from being annoyed with that twit Kerry to being furious with that son-of-a-bitch Kerry.

Ok. So you want other nation's leaders to expend political capital and treasure and send their lads to risk their lives along with theirs.

So why don't you act like it? Why aren't you trying to sell the deal?

Because right now you are calling the U.S. Government incompetent and arrogant. You're arguing that Iraq is sliding into chaos. You argue that thousands of terrorists are slipping across Iraq's borders and that it's become "a magnet for terrorism."

You dispatch your sister to tell Australia that supporting the United States in the war on terror puts them at greater risk than they were before.

You stand with a straight face and tell nations like the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Italy, who have each shed blood for the freedom of Iraq as part of the coalition, that they're members of "a fraudulent coalition."

You can't even be bothered to leave Ohio to speak with Allawi when he comes to the US to say "thank you." But you don't hesitate to all but brand this man--who lives in Iraq every day--a liar, and then have the chutzpah, the gall, the arrogance to tell him from afar that he's out of touch with the reality on the ground.

Yesterday morning I could understand undecided voters, this morning not so much.

Hey Jason, could you please set something up so that if the fourteenth hurricane to hit Florida this season finally manages to take you out something gets posted on your blog. I promise that everybody will say nice things about you. Even if you don't get up to Oregon to have beers with us. Really, at this point you are becoming a fugitive from the law of averages. On the plus side, at the current rate, your entire battalion will be volunteering to go back to Ar Ramadi because it is safer than dodging Hurricane Zebediah.

 
Kerry Refutes Totten

Michael, did you know that the Eskimos have over a hundred words for snow? There are terms to describe "rotten snow that is likely collapse if you walk on it." Now they can have a new word for "yellow snow that is rubbed in the face of centrist pundits:" Kerry.

It is like the Kerry folks saw your TCS article and built their campaign to dispute it. How in the hell can this dink suppose that he will build a meaningful alliance with anybody if he talks like this about people who like the US. "Coalition of the Backstabbing" is all he can assemble with this kind of foreign policy.

What's he going to do next week, bitch-slap Girl Scouts to get out the women's vote?

 
Health Care and the Cost Plus Monster

Roger L. Simon has initiated a thread on his blog that is well worth discussing, but instead of trying to fit a too-long comment, I will write a too-short essay. Additionally, by writing this in Word I can get my spelling checked and claim that I wrote this in 1972 when I submit it to CBS.

Our nation is currently facing a three headed monster with an insatiable appetite. Unlike the mythical Cerberus, though, this beast is not guarding Hades so much as dragging us down there. The first head is the insurance industry, the second is the tort bar, and the third is the medical services industry. These heads feed each other and drive each other's appetites.

The insurance industry makes a profit on the difference between the rates you pay and the medical expenses they pay for. By using actuarial prodigies, they have been able to increase profitability while accepting higher expenses. The key here is that if medical procedures are insanely expensive, insuring the risk of that procedure occurring requires more money. By driving down the acceptance of claims for insanely expensive procedures, they can net additional profits by not matching their actuarial tables to their payment schedules. But the more lucrative and safer method is just to take the same percentage on a larger bet.

The tort bar makes money the old fashioned way, they steal it. There are rural regions of the country where whole jury pools are owned by leading tort law firms. Many corporations settle for extravagant extortion rather than risk the jackpot justice of the rural south. Another magnificent fraud perpetrated is the class-action lawsuit where millions of people in a class receive lunch money and a few law firms get millions. The worst part of this is that there is so much money that long shot frivolous lawsuits are worth pursuing because there is enough venture capital to sustain them. Medical malpractice and drug failures employ tens of thousands of exceptionally well paid parasites.

The medical services industry, ostensibly the most beleaguered, is a connected head. Drug companies just add the expense of additional testing to the price of their product and make more money. In many ways the pharmaceutical giants are research finance groups more than they are research companies. Although lawsuits drive down their profits in the short term, in the long term they just drive up what the drug companies can charge.

These three heads are not at all friendly to each other, but they are connected to the same insatiable appetite that is bureaucracy. The executives in charge of each of these industries still want larger offices, more staff to control, and more institutional security. The key here is not to attack any one head, but to attack the appetite that drives them all. This is the way that Health Care can be affordable in the future.

 
Bush=Kerry

In perhaps the cleverest of political moves that appears to have escaped everybody's notice, the Bush campaign had already refuted the National Guard record story before it even came to light. You see, if officers were altering their service record, Bush is guilty of being a bad Guardsman and Kerry is guilty of being a fake hero. If officers are not altering their service record, Bush is a good Guardsman and Kerry is a hero.

It's like this détente between the campaigns and it explains perfectly why Bush never backed the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. If the Democrats had not launched Operation Fortunate Son, armed neutrality would have existed. As it stands, the Kerry campaign is forced to argue losing policy already refuted by their candidate just to take attention away from the question of the service records. If this is not just idle speculation, I may have to give credit to Karl Rove for being just as scary as he is portrayed.

 
The Hawkish Case for Totten

I am not sorry this post went so long. If Michael and I had been talking this out...we'd probably still be talking. Please read Michael's fine article first, and then my counter-argument.

I greatly respect Michael Totten for attempting to build a hawkish case for John Kerry, and I know he worked hard to build it. Nevertheless, I would not be a friend if I let the case he built stand unquestioned. As an intellectual exercise, his effort makes certain kinds of sense, it is all perfectly reasonable. The topic under discussion is not an abstract exercise in logic, though. We are discussing the direction, quality, and character of leadership of the United States and the free world. With that in mind, I am now going to take the friendliest meat axe in the world to his arguments.

Deflating the Anti-War Movement (a.k.a. Appeasement of the Chattering Class)

While it is true that many in the anti-war camp are active solely to oppose George W. Bush, it is also true that many people honestly believe that war is the single greatest evil in the history of the world. Regardless of the merits or sanity of this belief, it exists and for hundreds of thousands of people, the way they feel worthwhile as human beings is by opposing war. A lot of people who are very wealthy through no merit of their own actively seek out ways to show that they are of value by contributing to anti-war causes. David Frum in his book "The Right Man" describes an example the logic of these people with a quote from Barbara Streisand, "I know what I am talking about. I give a lot of money to environmental causes." The money you give makes the cause right.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people make their living from the largesse of people committed to the eradication of war; every tenured professor who is part of a "Peace Studies" department, for instance. Michael is presuming that a University department that has exactly zero metrics for the success of their graduates is going to be intellectually honest enough to re-evaluate the necessity for their existence. Electing John "Department of Wellness" Kerry to the highest office in the land is not going to do anything to diminish the anti-war industry in America or their need to secure funding. There are thousands of people who have no marketable skills apart from opposing war who are not going to retrain like crippled loggers just because logic dictates that infinite pacifism is suicidal.

Michael Responds: I do not argue that the "Peace Studies" professor will find a new job if John Kerry is elected. But the "Peace Studies" professor will not be a hero to liberals if their president gets in fight with Moqtada al Sadr or the mullahs in Iran. The "Peace Studies" professors were flatly ignored during the Balkan wars. The liberal heroes of the day were those who warned against the evils of fascism and the dangers of appeasement.

Patrick refutes: During most of the Balkan wars, the United States was not involved in the war, and so the press was not covering the professors who objected to it. This doesn't mean that they weren't saying inane things in their journals; they just weren't getting any notice. Additionally, it could be argued strongly that Peace Studies professors have little, if anything, to gain from following current events. Acknowledging the mechanics of the rude world outside has the disturbing tendency of destroying their discipline. While I suppose there is some satisfaction in the suppression of these people, it hardly seems worth electing Kerry to do so.

Flipping the Media Message

Michael wrote his article before the Rather meltdown, so I'm going to give him a pass on this, except to say that there are strong indications that the media needs a lot more confrontation to stay honest than they have been getting. Electing John Kerry does not make the media more honest just because they are less stridently opposed to the Chief Executive.

Michael responds: I did not argue that the election of John Kerry will make the media less biased. They will be biased in favor of John Kerry then as now. And because they will be biased in favor of John Kerry they will not wish to put a doom-and-gloom spin on John Kerry's efforts to stabilize Iraq. (He promised to pull troops out in four years, which is the same thing as promising not to withdraw them at all. If anything, he will send more troops.)

Patrick refutes: I can see how this could "grease the wheels" in Iraq. I am less certain that the mainstream media is going to survive the next four years intact, regardless of who is in office. Think about it this way, the faster the mainstream media disintegrates, the sooner centrist columnists will get high paid assignments. (OK, revealing my Democratic roots by holding out a patronage lure.) Honestly, electing Kerry to get positive spin on military actions is just adding another mouth to feed. Nothing is free.

Ending Bush Derangement Syndrome

A lot of people are insanely angry about Ronald Reagan and are taking it out on George W. Bush. Some people are insanely angry about Richard Nixon and are taking it out on George W. Bush. A few people are insanely angry about Calvin Coolidge and are taking it out on George W. Bush. There is a tremendous amount of transference in the political process, something that J.F. Kerry is not above taking advantage of. Electing John Kerry only defers therapy for another term; it does not treat the underlying cause. At what point in his campaign has John Kerry shown any desire to restore civility to the electoral process? The first step is admitting you have a problem, and that step becomes a lot easier on November 3rd if Kerry is on the dustbin of history.

Making the Hecklers Drive

Michael, the hecklers never drive. While there are all kinds of great stories about complainers who make good, this is not going to turn out like "My Cousin Vinny". For one thing, there is an infinite amount of distraction. The exhibitionists in New York this summer were not concerned about the genocide in Sudan; they were getting naked to support their AIDS funding. Instead of confronting clear and present dangers to the United States, the hecklers will focus on what will get them screen time. This is a class of people who define themselves by their acerbity, not their integrity.

Further, the shameful truth about liberals in power is that they have, repeatedly, turned their back on the world. For all the great experiments that liberals have tried and succeeded at, we have a disgraceful tradition of abandoning projects that got too hard or were incapable of success. Even though the need continued for some kind of action, liberals follow their enthusiasm too much. The continent of Africa exists as a bleeding testimony to the frailty of liberal conviction. Abandoning Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel to the fate of Rwanda, Somalia, and Zimbabwe is not going to be easy to explain, which is probably why John Kerry is starting now.

Michael responds: You say "the hecklers never drive." Ah. But John Kerry is a heckler, and if he wins he WILL drive and will no longer be allowed to heckle. People will heckle him instead. Those who blindly follow Democratic presidents will stop heckling because their man is driving.

Patrick refutes: I take issue with this. Sitting behind the wheel is not the same as driving. There is no proof that Kerry will drive if put in charge, which may be the reason the DNC started backing him last year. If Kerry had driven important legislation on a regular basis during his Senate career, there would be reason to believe him a driver. Kerry has no history of driving consensus in the Senate to accomplish meaningful legislation. This may be the reason we have heard nary a peep from the Kerry campaign regarding his record. In the 19th century, the United States could afford a Chester A. Arthur "go-along, get-along" presidency. The worst refutation of your case for Kerry as a hawk who can lead is his eighteen years in the US Senate.

Reuniting the Country

Michael is incorrect when he says that anti-Americanism has been on an upward tick since the Soviet Union imploded. Anti-Americanism has been on an upward tick since the Third Reich was defeated. Because the US was the healthiest power after WWII, it was the target of tremendous resentment on the part of those nations who took it in the shorts. The failure of the welfare state hasn't made us better liked, either. The American "way" is not the only way to do things, but it has the distressing tendency of being the most effective way. I hope that someday somebody else will come up and challenge the United States so everybody can do thing better. Until that happens, people are going to be blaming the United States for their failures. Electing John Kerry might well help the US in this regard, though the cure may be worse than the disease.

When Michael talks about US power being matched, he is flat dead wrong. Write this down Michael: the ONLY way that power is shown to have been matched is by total war. This is the ultimate antithesis of non-destructive testing. Civilization can take a whole lot more anti-Americanism than it can endure full scale military power testing. Bad news: China is buying the equipment to become a 21st century superpower. Good news: China is not changing the fundamental doctrine that would allow equipment synergy characteristic of US military interconnectedness. Potentially the worst news you have ever heard: China cannot admit that they are doctrinally flawed, and so they can only find out the hard way.

Ending the UN Fetish

I am not entirely convinced that the Democrats paid attention to the first rule of demon summoning: never call up what you cannot put down. The "UN approval" demon is not one that shows sign of returning to the nether regions it came from. I am even less convinced that John Kerry has the power and the will to exorcise this demon.

Checkmating the Radicals

I am not sure that John Kerry will be able to avoid putting radical leftists into positions; the ABB candidate is riding into battle on a hydra, not a horse. After the fight, there will be a lot of mouths to feed.

(Possibly) Breaking the Strategic Impasse

Harry S Truman had a world of trouble overcoming the title of the "Senator from Pendergast" because of his connections to the Kansas City boss who backed him. Even so, he had an agenda and integrity. John Kerry has an opposition candidacy, and he lacks both agenda and integrity. On November 3rd, regardless of the results of the election, all of Kerry's political capital evaporates in a frenzy of either recrimination or patronage. This is not a result that will drive military confrontation of terror sponsors and the extermination of fundamentalist sociopaths.

Michael, you did not convince me, and I doubt you convinced yourself. I have to give you credit for a game effort at an impossible goal. I respect you even more for the intellectual honesty to admit the weakness and derivative nature of the available arguments. It all seems a bit much to hope for an undistinguished candidate to discover unexpected greatness twice in a row.

 
Confronting the Islamic Republic of Iran

Would you prefer a conventional invasion of Iran or an exchange of thermonuclear weapons? Conventional weapon as slow and painful, thermonuclear exchanges are quick and excruciating.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is this room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This room is an amazing space that draws out your mind and allows you to consider the possibilities of how people interact with space.

In the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., there is a silver bird built by men of vision and flown across the Atlantic by a man of spectacular courage and will. This Spirit of Saint Louis showed the world what free men could do and inspired millions to go further and do more.

In Qom and Tehran are deeply corrupt religious fanatics who have been attacking my country by proxy on a retail basis for twenty-five years. Today they are telling us that their killing is going to change to direct supply on a wholesale basis. They are telling me that they are perfectly willing to turn that room in New York, the bird in D.C., and millions of people around them into radioactive ash because we will not submit to their authority.

I do not want to have my nation suffer the pain and burden of another invasion and reconstruction. I deeply regret that if forced to choose between art, accomplishment, and freedom or the control of corrupt religious fundamentalists with nuclear weapons, I will choose to protect the culture of my people by invasion.

 
From Here to eForgery

One of the guys who wrote the book on computer typography, Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer, has weighed in. The CBS memos are a fraud.

The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.

Of special note is the pseudo-kerning of the letter combination of "fr" not found on any typewriter or typesetter, but standard on current versions of MS Word:

The “r” is tucked under the “f” in the same way a Microsoft font does it. In 1972, technology available in the office, including proportional typewriters, could not do this. So it is clear that the only way this document could have been done is using a modern computer font, and the placement is pixelwise identical to Microsoft’s Times New Roman.

It looks like Dan Rather is going to go down in flames over this massive lapse in ethics. Goody.

 
Shabby Treatment of Wounded Guard and Reserve Soldiers

Congressman,

I bring your attention to the 9/11/04 AP report by Andrew Kramer detailing months of shabby treatment of wounded Oregon National Guardsmen who have been kept from their families due to bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency. These soldiers should be returned to their homes as quickly as possible for convalescence at full pay and with full benefits until such time as their recovery warrants a final disposition of their medical claims.

The valor of our Guard and Reserve troops has earned them better consideration than picking up cigarette butts on light duty hundreds of miles from home while paper-shufflers who have never heard a shot fired in anger dither over their disposition.

Our nation is at war, and we cannot afford to treat our wounded as a bureaucratic inconvenience.

Patrick S Lasswell
Portland, OR

Hat Tip: COUNTERCOLUMN

 
The letter in the post below was scanned into a .tif file and converted into a .jpg because my system was choking. That is what I consider to be a reasonable quality scan of an original military document.

This is what I consider to be a fraud intended to influence a national election.

Show us the originals, Dan!

 
Real Documents

Here is a copy of a Letter of Appreciation I got in 1992 from ComTraPac for exemplary service in setting up a retirement ceremony. The whole story is a bit more complex. In 1992 I was assigned temporarily to base maintenance of the base that housed ComTraPac. Rather than just get bored, I looked for interesting things for Base Maintenance to do. Mostly because I found real things to do instead of make-work, the other temporary duty sailors worked harder than they ever had. One area that had been largely ignored was the ComTraPac offices, and they actually had some interesting things to do.

In another of those instances where the Navy's Department of Surprise Parties and Practical Jokes to really make my life interesting, I got a short notice cross-country transfer. The NCO in charge of Base Maintenance, a Boatswain's Mate on a base that was 98% Sonar Techs, had been getting a lot of positive notice during my time assigned to him, and he was a good guy. I figure he got word to ComTraPac that the guy who had driven the positive changes on their facilities was getting screwed and could use a positive bullet on his next evaluation. The command structure of the base I was assigned to was apparently institutionally incapable of recognizing positive effort that was not part of their permanent staff.

I bring this up as an example of a document from the early 1990s that was from a major command using their best word-processing equipment to produce a serialized document for the record.

Here is a document, allegedly twenty years older that is proportionately spaced. It is a forgery, and a bad one that the AP and CBS claimed to be valid. The letters are evenly mono-spaced, not proportionately spaced. If you look at the word "flight" you can clearly see that the letters f, l, and i are proportionately spaced. Nobody had equipment to produce this kind of document for regular personnel actions in 1972.

Attention to detail!

Hat Tip: Powerline and Citizen Smash

 
Necromancy and Election 2004

A few days ago, I was thinking about great presidents and the current election, mostly by way of contrast. Arguably the best Republican president was Abraham Lincoln. He showed tremendous strength in our nation's darkest hour. The obvious choice between Lincoln and Bush is the one printed on a five-dollar bill, right? Well…except for that whole thing about Abe being dead for the last century… But the Constitution doesn't specifically prohibit Undead-Americans or people with massive cerebral trauma!

The real case against voting for zombies is not strictly constitutional. (Whoops! I just lost the Libertarian's interest.) The reason you don't vote for the restless dead is that they do not share a common sense of the present. The events that shape our current understanding and how the candidate responds to them are what we are voting on, when we decide to vote honestly. Abraham Lincoln did not experience September 11th, 2001 and did not change because of it. Although Lincoln's administration was formed in a crucible and came out strong, the strength required then is different than what is required today. Lincoln had an ineffective staff and mediocre military commanders to overcome on a daily basis. Today there is an abundance of extremely qualified staff and superb military commanders. Today the President faces different challenges, and acknowledging that difference is the crucial step to not voting for a memory.

Morbid grief is a common reaction to stressful change. Those stories of kooky aunts obsessing about dead husbands are classic examples of morbid grief. Living in a world of attractive memories is strongly tempting for people with limited prospects. Due to a combination of factors, the people of the United States have are very likely to engage in morbid grief. Victim culture is one manifestation of this pathology. Trial lawyers prey upon this cultural illness, and now it has become the dominant theme of one of our presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, this candidate represents the interests of the Trial lawyer lobby. While it might seem far-fetched to claim that we are on the cusp of becoming a nation of kooky aunts, the lack of a meaningful agenda by a campaign makes it difficult to distinguish a convention from a giant séance.

Electoral necromancy is not the answer to this year's decision, however tempting it might seem to the desperate. We need a President who is alive and in the present, however tawdry and confusing that moment is. The pace of change in the world demands a capacity to learn from the past, bury it, and move forward. Our nation is in a fight, and that fight is not the Civil War, the Second World War, or even Vietnam. Overcoming the siren call of dead ideals with integrity is a constant challenge and the key standard we must judge our President on in this time of change.

If George W. Bush has anything to recommend him, it is that his Vietnam-era service is not so distinguished that he must dwell on it. George W. Bush has shown at least some adaptability when it comes to burying dead ideals, alliances, and policies. If there were other candidates who had shown better commitment to the process of living, I would vote for them. Regrettably, the only other candidates cannot shake off the dead hand of the past.

 
Kerry's Ugly Divorce

One of the things the culture of the US Navy gets right more often than not is relationships between people on the same crew. The bond between shipmates is not dissimilar to a functional family, when it works. This is not about being a band of brothers; this is about being able to endure living with the same people through months of isolation, privation, and hardship, where each person has to do their part so that everybody survives. Water will find the weak point, so everybody on a boat has to keep the faith. Some of the time this just doesn't work, but most of the time things work as well as most arranged marriages. You have to spend a lot of time with these people; you might as well make the best of it. Even when things go badly, you stick with your shipmate and try to make things right.

Finding out a shipmate has been badmouthing you behind your back is one of the most chilling things you can ever feel. Finding out that they've been badmouthing you to strangers is difficult to describe. The closest I can come up with is the kind of sick emptiness that is common in ugly divorces. (Something else time in the Navy gives you exposure to.) Imagine having your spouse accuse you of child abuse in a divorce. To have a shipmate badmouth you for personal advantage is worse. The spouse making abuse accusations just to get the house, the car, AND support is the closest I can approximate. Finding out that somebody who you shared your life with is destroying your honor for transitory personal gain casts a pall on your future relationships and your understanding of personal ambition. It rips you up where you live, and a lot more when you really worked to maintain your honor.

John Kerry testified to the Senate in 1971 that his shipmates committed atrocities on a regular basis, and he did this to get his name in the papers. He sold out his crew, his fellow commanders, and everybody else who served in Vietnam so that he could be important in politics. Now he says that he wants to report for duty again and that his service in Vietnam was the proof of his integrity. From a sailor's perspective, this is like the slandering spouse pointing to the marriage as proof of their commitment to relationships.

This is not about partisan political process. This is about the consequences of an ugly divorce. What goes around comes around. The Swiftboat Veterans for the Truth are willing to discuss this up front and in the open. This is not about partisan political advantage, this is about making things right.

 
For Referance:
Patrick S Lasswell
USNR 1984-1987, EW Striker
USN 1987-1995, STG2 (SW)
Oregon National Guard, 1995-1998, 11B (Stopped drilling in 1996 for health reasons. Undiagnosed low thyroid.)