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September 01, 2005
 Sometimes, I find that there just isn't anything to say that hasn't been said. Some people, it seems, can't restrain themselves... for them no comment is too petty.
I saw a photo in the NYT today, of a search and rescue worker painting the roof of a submerged house in New Orleans with the red four - quadrant X, indicating in each quadrant the date the house had been searched, whether bodies had been found, and so on. It is a sigil of catastrophe, and I saw it many times in the weeks after 9/11, painted on buildings near my office in downtown Manhattan.
I'd hoped to never see it again.
September 06, 2005
Idle Brains
September 08, 2005
I haven't been writing much about Katrina, the harrowing of New Orleans, or the steps and missteps of federal and local authorties. But I have been reading quite a bit and, after commenting on a post over at Mr. Goldstein's place, realized that I had summed up the cause of my lowered written output.
I am, quite simply, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of warped, self - righteous, uninformed horseshit that I’ve been reading over the past week.
I haven’t written much here, lest I in my outrage contribute to the deluge of self - involved ignorance. There are arguments being made that have so much error deep within their distant foundations - - moral error, logical error, factual error - - that there is almost no way to address them; certainly, no way that is within my capabilities.
Mr. Goldstein has been doing an admirable job in tracking and countering portions of that unfolding narrative. My capacity for disgust, however, has been more than exceeded. My bemused astonishment at the energies that supposedly rational people will expend in order to ignore history, human nature, and the very world around them, has become a gut - level horror.
And all of it, supposedly, in the name of caring... a thin skin of compassion on a cauldron of thick bile.
The joy that I sense behind the political point - scoring that’s going on is beyond revolting. It gives off a stench that, for want of a better phrase, gives my soul the urge to vomit.
I’m no Bible - thumper, no Santorumite. But there is a festering wound growing in our national character, and it’s spewing pus all over the public square right now.
September 09, 2005
Argh. I'll save you the trouble of a click and me the trouble of writing. From today's WSJ:
'They Are All So Wrong'
Four years after 9/11, Washington keeps courting strategic error.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self - preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self - defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore - - purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats - - and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry - on ice - picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five - inches long.
For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine - gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.
The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years.
They are all so wrong. In violating established tradition and throwing aside advantage and elemental common sense, they waste American lives. And for what? What moral construction would allow anyone to spend more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan - - so far - - while insisting without major exception that cutting costs is a virtue? When is holding back from one's troops at war the reinforcements, armor and basic equipment they need a virtue rather than a sin?
Is it not the duty of the secretary of defense, his chiefs, and the wide array of generals to press energetically - - even to the point of resignation - - for whatever is necessary (not the minimum, but a safe surplus) to support the armies in the field? If they do not, who will? Had the president gone to Congress on September 12 and asked for almost anything, he would have been granted it. But he never did. This was a fundamental strategic error. If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart. And in answer to the rationale that the casualties of this war are relatively light, one does not decently measure casualties against those of previous wars, but in terms of whether they can be avoided.
Apart from the paucity of armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, the chief problem of prosecuting the Iraq war has been the size and scale of the force. Despite inaccurate claims of unprecedented speed in the advance to Baghdad, the three weeks of halting action it took to get there, with lines of supply that are to this day poorly protected, were both spur and instruction for the insurgency. In what is only apparently a paradox, the military objective should have been less the conquest of territory and echelons than of morale, and, to accomplish this, territory and echelons would have to have been subdued with the blinding speed, shock and awe of the Six - Day and Gulf wars. The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born.
We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere "thugs," when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand - year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two - and - a - half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people?
Ceaselessly, we court strategic error. At the end of the Cold War, assuming that history had concluded, we discarded too much military power. This continues through the present, rationalized by reference to transformation. But it is yet further error to believe that military - technical evolution can make up for the kind of deficiencies and poor strategic judgments from which no machine can save an army. Continual and remarkable innovation is both indispensable and expensive, but President Clinton required budgetary choice between innovation and everything else, and his successor has yet to disagree. The root of the error that offers transformation as a substitute for so much that is crucial is the conviction that having both would exceed reasonable military expenditures and somehow break the common weal.
Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation - building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy - - now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking - - to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific.
The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight.
When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once - again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life.
The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.
Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill - supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.
Mr. Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor, is Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Hillsdale College. He is the author, most recently, of "Freddy and Fredericka" (Penguin, 2005).
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
September 15, 2005
Yes, I'm still here.
Does anyone have experience with a Movable Type comment plug - in that doesn't suck too much and takes care of comment spam? One of those Turing Word style systems would be nice.
Because, you know, I feel like connecting with my public, and so on.
September 16, 2005
Now, we need someone to put 1,000 of these in a Prius and use them to drive across the country.
September 18, 2005
OK, so I suppose I should account for myself... like where I've been, you know, and why I've left nothing for you Astonished Head... uh, Heads to read but great piles of nothing, stinking up the place like Ninth Ward carpeting.
So anyway... I'm on steroids.
No, not the big head - inflating kind. Methylprednisolone, a corticosteroid brought to you by the makers of LSD.
I've written before about my amazing exploding face. Well... it finally got so bad that I procured some Rhinocort - - another steroid preparation - - but then discovered that I needed some oral steroids to jumpstart it. See, the insides of my nostrils had basically become a set of swollen red bricks. So the spray couldn't really get where it needed to go.
I'm breathing fine now. Unfortunately, methylprednisolone mimics a certain naturally - occurring andrenergic hormone... the same hormone that opens up the old schnoz when I go on a long bikeride. So I was awake for about 72 hours straight this past week. I also feel like I'm about to get jumped by some sort of predatory beast with illuminated retinas, sharp pointy teeth, and a rough tongue specially designed for licking off the thin nutritious membrane that surrounds my bones.
Which, of course, is exactly what I was trying to avoid when I quit pseudoepehedrine.
I don't doubt that this course of steroids and the atrocious histamine apocalypse that required it have contributed to my sour, unproductive mood. But the mood was only exacerbated by these things. The August blog doldrums slid straight into the steroid slump, and if I'm not careful the Big Winter Quiet will get me, too, and then suddenly it's 2006 and the last thing I'll have written about is what a loopy ponce Mr. Sullivan was about the whole FEMA thing.
But things will pick up. I know this to be true, because I've got a Wacky Plan.
September 19, 2005
Looking for something to read? The new Virtual Occoquan is up.
Get thee hence and read, because very little will be forthcoming from me today.
September 23, 2005
After having worked over twelve hours straight for free to fix a fuck - up that was almost entirely my fault, and after having had three Grolshes, here is a list of 20 things that I am sick of:
1. This laptop.
2. Assholes who pretend to talk about hurricanes when they're really talking about politics.
3. The Supreme Court (all of them).
4. Burger King.
5. The disposition of Andrew Sullivan's penis.
6. My cocoon.
7. Anyone with the historical sensibilities of a greasy piece of Saran wrap that's been half - heartedly draped over an old turkey leg that nobody really wanted; this, it seems, is damn near everyone.
8. The entire opinion writing staff of the New York Times. You all suck. Always. Shut up.
9. Newscasters of all networks who can't even ad - lib about an airliner's emergency landing in a way that doesn't make me mourn the death of Jack Paar, hate Jay Leno anew, and want to beat them with a copy of... no, screw the literary pose, just make that "a 2x4 with nails in it."
10. The small child that I carry around in the form of subcutaneous fat.
11. People who refuse to proofread.
12. Celebrities.
13. The entire Arabian Peninsula and any country remotely related to Persia.
14. Ill - informed "educated" people who would've been better off in trade school but now have blogs and won't stop writing.
15. The Pope.
16. New York.
17. Strongly expressed opinions formed in the vacuum of ignorance, inexperience, and self - importance.
18. The word "peace."
19. Criticism of US emergency preparedness from Europe, land of the Heat Wave Massacre (or, to be more specific, le massacre de vague de chaleur).
20. This list.
That is all. Now go about your damn business.
- - -
UPDATE:
I'm not really sick of my laptop. It rocks.
But yours sucks.
 If you're interested, here's a live radar loop of hurricane Rita bearing down on the Gulf coast. It's info - riffic!
Other than that... man, I got nothin'. Would that I, wretched pixel - scribe that I am, could move you! Would that I had the wracked indignation of a Sullivan, or the semiotic passion of a Goldstein. Oh, for even the mindless self - assurance of a mob of Kossacks!
But no.
No, these ill - maintained pages have become, yea, a thorn in my very cerebrum! They mock me with their emptiness and their poorly - formatted archives. And while it seems to languish in neglect, the HTML... the code, it moves. It seeks out others in my absence, like a bacterial culture in search of fresh agar. Yesterday I came across swatches of my code shilling for a manufacturer of large stainless steel tanks used for the storage and transport of dairy products.
Slattern. Whoreish code!
Oh, but I will have my way. I will replace this wanton site with something better... something mobile, and solar - powered... on a tricycle. In the meantime, I will have to do something to maintain interest... my traffic, it holds steady, but I am convinced that most of my visitors are not human, but rather some form of bot... more... more code sluts!
So I'm considering other options. I could become obsessed with a single blogger... attack him mercilessly... point out all his nonsense... all the stuff I don't like, which make me better!
But that's been done. Probably more than once. So that's out.
Perhaps I could blog while inebriated! Oh... never mind.
Or... I could focus one the one thing that convinces me that I am intellectually superior, and routinely mock everyone who disagrees with me under the guise of debate. Entertainment plus!
Nahh. Clearly, it's a proven traffic - winner, but I'd get bored.
Or... or... well, shit.
I'm out of ideas. This. This right here... it's the bottom of the barrel. Nothing down here but some corroding metal, and the sludge of what used to be a rampaging intellect. Clearly, years of drink and fatty foods have crippled my neurons. Soon, I shall only post the onomatopoeiatic sounds of drooling incoherance. ggbbl... slrrrsh... .pffffff...
See? It's started already.
And... wait.
That's it!
I shall blog my own descent into complete and utter irrelevance!!!
If that doesn't bring 'em in, nothing will.
Ooo! My pizza's here. Bacon, prosciutto, and lard! Off I go!
gibble
Do you read Fried Green al - Qaedas?
Well, why the bastard not?
Go, you freaks. Be like bi - partisan and expansive and whatnot.
Insularity makes baby Jesus cry, and shit himself.
September 28, 2005
"By God, that's the last time you'll catch me behind the courthouse with a chihuahua and a case of Molson, let me tell you. Nothing quite mucks up your run for the Senate like a drunken back - alley frenzy of cross - dressing dog antics."
- - Rep. Charles F. Choot (I - Idaho)
September 29, 2005
Via Ten Fingers 6 Strings: Governor Pataki boots the International Freedom Center off Ground Zero.
Fantastic. Another punch in the faces of those who want to use September 11 to show us all how it's All America's Fault while pretending to "educate" us.
My comments on the IFC can be found here and here.
Or, see the NYT's take on it here.
Idle Brains
September 30, 2005
The Ethics of Battlestar Galactica
I've found some sense at Mr. Sullivan's place. He didn't write it... on the Iraq torture issue, he usually sounds like this. But he did post it, so there's a small sampler box of Whitman's Credit on its way to him.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I'm afraid that, no matter what comes to light in the Abu Ghraib materials, you're still gonna be disappointed. There is far too much else going on right now domestically for the majority of average Americans (and sorry, but living in Provincetown, MA, you don't have a clue what we are thinking) to get all excited over something that happened 12 - 18 months ago thousands of miles away in a country brimming with folks trying to kill American military personnel and innocent Iraqis.
Oh sure, the Dems, the Wa Post, NYT, MSM at large, various bloggers and those predisposed to an anti - military and/or GOP animus will wring their hands, but most Americans will greet it with a yawn."
Last week, I watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, wherein (SPOILER) the series writers did a fine job of sympathetically portraying the savage abuse of Cylon prisoners. For those of you who are woefully ignorant of science fiction history, Cylons are the species responsible for a sneak nuclear attack that annihilates of hundreds of millions of human beings in some other portion of the galaxy, reducing them to a refugee population of less than 50,000.
We're not supposed to care if the Cylons are beaten, raped, or otherwise maltreated, because they're not human, and because of the aforementioned genocide. They're the Bad Guys.
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