Phone Courtesy

Here's an oddity of modern life that perhaps someone might be able to explain. It seems that whenever people talk on their cell phones they speak much louder than they would to people who are physically with them.

I don't know why this is, but it's especially noticeable, and bothersome, in restaurants where a diner who gets a call will share the conversation with everyone in the establishment. As soon as he, or she, hangs up, however, you can't hear a word he says to the others at his table.

Why is it that people think their phone conversations interest the rest of us?

Pinkerton Gets it Wrong

Jim Pinkerton writes an essay on Intelligent Design and manages to get much of it wrong. For example, he states that:

Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box, argues that it just isn't possible that random evolution could have produced the flagellum -- the propeller/tail -- on a bacteria. Such an organ, he concludes, is "irreducibly complex," which is to say, only a Master of Complexity could have created it.

But it's a fallacy to argue that just because one person -- or even all the people of an era -- can't figure out how something works, therefore such mysterious workings are beyond any human comprehension, ever. To take one humble example, years ago I saw Siegfried and Roy perform their tiger-based magic in Las Vegas, and was frankly astonished at some of the illusions they generated at the aptly named Mirage casino. I had no idea how they did their tricks, but since I knew that they employed mechanics, not metaphysics, to do their show, I was content just to enjoy it, marveling all the while at human ingenuity. And of course, if one waits long enough, he will get a peek behind the conjuring curtain, learning how tricks are done and also that like the rest of us, Siegfried and Roy suffer from Murphy's Law, too. And so it is with science: eventually, some scientist will figure out how the "trick" of the bacteria's flagellum is done.

This is an odd argument even if we ignore the inapt comparison to a magic show. Consider four reasons why:

1) Behe isn't saying that the bacterial flagellum is designed simply because no one can figure out how it works or how it evolved. He's saying that it shows evidence of having been designed because it has the property of irreducible complexity which is a typical characteristic of intelligent, intentional manufacture.

2) The problem isn't just that no one can produce a reasonable account of how a flagellum could have evolved by purely natural processes. The problem is that Darwinian theory itself provides no plausible developmental pathway for the gradual accumulation of parts necessary to have a functional flagellum. To offer hope, as Pinkerton does, that the explanation will be forthcoming at some time in the future is an intellectual cop-out. If the mechanisms posited by a theory do not allow for a plausible schema for the evolution of certain systems and structures then that should be allowed to count as evidence against the theory. If at some later date the difficulty is resolved then the theory will be rescued, but to posit future contingencies as justification for ignoring present difficulties is lousy philosophy of science.

3) Pinkerton undercuts one of the chief arguments against ID with his suggestion that we should just be patient and that someday we'll find out how nature accomplished its wonders. The undermined argument is that no one has proposed how the designer could have accomplished its work. In lieu of such an explanation, we're told, ID is insufficient as an account of biological complexity, but if Pinkerton's assurance that an explanation for the evolution of structures like the flagellum is a legitimate response to the difficulty of accounting for irreducible complexity, then it should be equally legitimate for the ID theorist to invoke the same reply about the mechanisms employed by the designer of living things. If ID theorists ever replied to the complaint about the lack of a creative mechanism in their theory with the retort that someday we might find out how the designer did it, they'd be justly hooted out of town.

4) Pinkerton's dodge also undercuts those who wish to argue that Darwinism is science and ID is philosophy. If biological phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of the theory are nevertheless to be accepted essentially on faith, that is, if no evidence is allowed to count against the theory, then Darwinism is not falsifiable and is outside the realm of science.

Having urged us to abandon empirical science and just trust that an explanation for how the flagellum could have evolved through purely mechanistic forces will someday be found, Pinkerton then makes this astonishing pronouncement:

And that's the problem with ID: it's simplistic. To argue that complex biological phenomena are "irreducibly complex" is to abandon the scientific quest. As Richard Dawkins, who boasts the bold professional title of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, explains in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design,

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there," and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there," or "Life was always there," and be done with it.

So the better mission for the ID-ers, should they choose to undertake it, would be to identify the Intelligent Designer.

This is another dodge. Pinkerton and Dawkins seek to deflect attention away from the manifest design of biological systems and structures and focus our scrutiny instead on the identity of the designer. ID theorists, however, need not accept the bait. To be successful they merely have to demonstrate that at least some biological systems and structures show evidence of intelligent input, and that it's more plausible that intelligence was at work in their creation than that they resulted from merely mechanistic forces and chance. If they succeed in that enterprise they will have effected a revolution in the science of biology which, we suppose, would be a good day's work regardless of whether they can identify the source of the intelligent input or explain how this agent accomplished its task.

Dawkins and Pinkerton are simply wrong when they assert that unless we can "explain" the original designer we have accomplished nothing in demonstrating that biological structures are designed. We need not understand the cause of something in order to study the effect. We don't have to be able to explain what causes gravity in order to study the consequences of it. We need know nothing about the causes of the Big Bang in order to examine the effects of those causes.

If it turns out that we find irrefragable evidence that man has been intentionally designed that would be an enormous discovery in itself whether we were ever able to identify the designer or not. The task of the ID theorist is to determine whether certain structures in the biosphere resulted from intelligent agency or whether they can be adequately explained mechanistically. To declare ID null and void simply because it cannot identify the source of the intelligence or the means by which the intelligence did its work is absurd.

If opponents of ID should have learned any lesson over the last ten years it is that it's not very helpful to their cause to rely on the arguments of Richard Dawkins.

Set 'Em Loose

Mark Steyn has two great columns on Gitmo. Here's an excerpt from the first:

Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Durbin, know what real atrocities are. Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out.

In the second he writes that:

[T]he more one hears the specifics of the "insensitivity" of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we're being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as "unclean". Fair enough, each to his own. But it's one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn't wear gloves to the bookstore. If that's "disrespectful" to Muslims, tough.

Steyn's point here is well-taken. Why are our troops required to debase themselves by acceding to the Muslims' belief that they are unclean? It's even more absurd that taxpayers must purchase the gloves to cover the "unclean" hands of their infidel sons and daughters. Our troops should not deliberately mistreat the Koran but neither should they be required to abase themselves in order to avoid giving offense to a bunch of semi-literate savages.

Nor should taxpayers be required to pay for the humiliation of their young men and women. Tax dollars buy the Korans, the prayer rugs, beads, Koranically-approved meals and all the rest. If American troops insisted that taxpayers cater to their religious preferences in such a fashion they'd be pounced upon by the ACLU and hectored about their need to develop a greater sensitivity to the doctrine of separation of church and state. Why does the same doctrine not apply to Muslim terrorists?

Recently, in Knoxville Tennessee, a Karns Elementary School principal named Cathy Summa prevented several ten year-old students from reading their Bibles at recess. They were told to put their Bibles away and not bring them back to school. Reading at recess is permitted in tax funded schools, of course, but evidently reading the Bible is not. Yet American taxpayers are required to subsidize five daily calls to prayer at Gitmo as well as all the other religious observances the killers are permitted. The terrorists have more religious rights than American school children do.

Steyn writes:

Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they're receiving. By any comparison - ie, not just with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot - they're getting better than they deserve. It's the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the "mustard-baked dill fish", "baked Tandoori chicken breast" and other delicacies.

Viewpoint has come to agree with those who think Gitmo should be shut down and the detainees either charged or released. We suggest that these 520 killers, each of whom would praise Allah for the opportunity to slay an American politician, all be shipped to the Capitol building in Washington D.C., marched out onto the floor of the House and the Senate while these bodies are in session, and set loose. Perhaps this will assist some of our esteemed leaders to perceive the shortcomings of their recommendations.

Dying Cultures

Historian Paul Johnson cites three reasons for Europe's current malaise and apparent decline. First are the resentments it harbors to the United States, second is its refusal to jettison socialist economic policies and the onerous welfare systems it has evolved, and third is its rejection of its own historic past.

Europe, Johnson writes, was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both. There was no mention of Europe's Christian origins in the ill-fated Constitution, and Europe's Strasbourg Parliament has insisted that a practicing Catholic cannot hold office as the EU Justice Commissioner. He goes on to say that:

Equally, what strikes the observer about the actual workings of Brussels is the stifling, insufferable materialism of their outlook. The last Continental statesman who grasped the historical and cultural context of European unity was Charles de Gaulle. He wanted "the Europe of the Fatherlands (L'Europe des patries)" and at one of his press conferences I recall him referring to "L'Europe de Dante, de Goethe et de Chateaubriand." I interrupted: "Et de Shakespeare, mon General?" He agreed: "Oui! Shakespeare aussi!"

No leading member of the EU elite would use such language today. The EU has no intellectual content. Great writers have no role to play in it, even indirectly, nor have great thinkers or scientists. It is not the Europe of Aquinas, Luther or Calvin--or the Europe of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Half a century ago, Robert Schumann, first of the founding fathers, often referred in his speeches to Kant and St. Thomas More, Dante and the poet Paul Valery. To him--he said explicitly--building Europe was a "great moral issue." He spoke of "the Soul of Europe." Such thoughts and expressions strike no chord in Brussels today.

In short, the EU is not a living body, with a mind and spirit and animating soul. And unless it finds such nonmaterial but essential dimensions, it will soon be a dead body, the symbolic corpse of a dying continent.

Well, of course. Secular socialism fails everywhere it's tried. It offers its citizens no lofty purpose. It possesses nothing with which to inspire. It offers people no meaning, no rationale for shared sacrifice, no justification for striving for greatness. Indeed, it cannot even define what national greatness would consist in. Most of all it ignores a fundamental truth about human nature captured in a statement of Jesus (Mat. 4:4):

"Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God."

Secular socialism seeks to manage the masses of people like zookeepers manage animals in a zoo. Feed and shelter them and they'll remain docile, pliable, and live out their lives in relative passivity. But men are more than animals. Render achievement and individual greatness impossible, as socialism does, and you deaden the human spirit. Rip the spiritual out of a nation, as secularism does, and you may as well tear its heart out also. Bereft of an animating faith in transcendence, men have nothing left to make all their strivings worthwhile. They have nothing left to make their lives satisfying and purposeful. Nations filled with such men find their collective will to survive oozing out of them like blood from an open wound.

The Great Pretenders

Of liberal nuttiness there apparently is no end. A bunch of anti-Bush folks met Thursday in a basement in the Capitol building to make-believe that they were having a hearing to impeach the President. Not all went well at the "hearings," however:

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his "candid answer."

The slide of the conspiracy theorists over the edge of sanity was evinced at Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the "hearing" on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."

Great fun, we're sure. Word has it that when they were done pretending to impeach the president they all repaired to the Capitol rotunda where they spent the afternoon playing cowboys and indians.

Mugabe's Reign of Terror

If this were happening in South Africa twenty years ago the international Left would be shrieking in outrage, but because it's being perpetrated by a black government neither the Left, nor too many others, for that matter, seem to care. It's as if blacks are not expected to be able to attain the same standards of civilized behavior as whites are held to.

Reduced expectations for blacks is an expression of racism of which both Left and Right are guilty. It's a way of saying that blacks just aren't capable of achieving the same understandings of human rights and free institutions that whites are. The odd thing about it is that blacks seem as prone to it as are whites.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

Good Intentions

An unfortunate sign of the times:

As a new journalism professor at American University, Alicia Shepard wasn't prepared for students demanding A's:

During the spring semester, they showed up at my office to insist I reread their papers and boost their grades. They asked to retake tests they hadn't done well on. They bombarded me with e-mails questioning grades. More harassed me to change their final grade.

. .. . My colleague Wendy Swallow told me about one student who had managed to sour her Christmas break one year. Despite gaining entry into AU's honors program, the student missed assignments in Swallow's newswriting class and slept through her midterm. Slept through her midterm! Then she begged for lenience."I let her take it again for a reduced grade," Swallow says, "but with the warning that if she skipped more classes or missed more deadlines, the midterm grade would revert to the F she earned by missing it. She then skipped the last three classes of the semester and turned in all her remaining assignments late. She even showed up late for her final."

Swallow gave the student a C-minus, which meant she was booted out of the honors program. The student was shocked. She called Swallow at home hysterical about being dropped from the program. To Swallow, the C-minus was a gift. To the student, an undeserved lump of Christmas coal.

. . . .John Watson, who teaches journalism ethics and communications law at American, has noticed another phenomenon: Many students, he says, believe that simply working hard -- though not necessarily doing excellent work -- entitles them to an A. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance," says Watson, "but on the basis of how hard they tried."

Sometimes, Mommy or Daddy complains. They're paying tuition, and they expect A's for their money.

On BrightMystery, the world's most patient math professor shares his exchange of e-mails with the mother of a student who didn't want to learn how to solve problems. That didn't fit his "learning style."

Anyone who has spent any time at the front of a classroom has had similar experiences. I have often wondered what background some of my college students had in high school that they could possibly entertain the expectations they do regarding what they are entitled to as students.

The Exalted Cyclops

Good thing this wasn't Trent Lott or else the sensitive, caring folks would've really been upset. Since it was a Democrat, well, then, that's different:

In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter.

As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. "The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation," Baskin said.

The young Klan leader went on to become one of the most powerful and enduring figures in modern Senate history. Throughout a half-century on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has twice held the premier leadership post in the Senate, helped win ratification of the Panama Canal treaty, squeezed billions from federal coffers to aid his home state, and won praise from liberals for his opposition to the war in Iraq and his defense of minority party rights in the Senate.

Despite his many achievements, however, the venerated Byrd has never been able to fully erase the stain of his association with one of the most reviled hate groups in the nation's history.

"It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation," Byrd wrote in a new memoir -- "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields" -- that will be published tomorrow by West Virginia University Press.

While Byrd provides the most detailed description of his early involvement with the Klan, conceding that he reflected "the fears and prejudices I had heard throughout my boyhood," the account is not complete. He does not acknowledge the full length of time he spent as a Klan organizer and advocate. Nor does he make any mention of a particularly incendiary letter he wrote in 1945 complaining about efforts to integrate the military.

Byrd's book offers a truncated description of his days with the Klan that does not completely square with contemporaneous newspaper accounts and letters that show he was involved with the Klan throughout much of the 1940s, and not merely for two or three years.

According to his book, Byrd wrote to Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor and "Imperial Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, in late 1941 or early 1942, expressing interest in joining. Some time later, he received the letter from Baskin, the "Grand Dragon" of mid-Atlantic states, saying he would come to Byrd's home in Crab Orchard whenever Byrd had rounded up 150 recruits for the Klan.

When Baskin finally arrived, the group gathered at the home of C.M. "Clyde" Goodwin, a former local law enforcement official. When it came time to choose the "Exalted Cyclops," the top officer in the local Klan unit, Byrd won unanimously.

Byrd asserts that his Klan chapter never engaged in or preached violence, "nor did we conduct any parades or marches or other public demonstrations" -- other than one time delivering a wreath of flowers in the shape of a cross to the home of a member who had been killed in a pistol duel.

Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter -- which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith -- that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a Negro by my side." Byrd added that, "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."

Byrd won the primary, but during the general election campaign, Byrd's GOP opponent uncovered a letter Byrd had handwritten to Green, the KKK Imperial Wizard, recommending a friend as a Kleagle and urging promotion of the Klan throughout the country. The letter was dated 1946 -- long after the time Byrd claimed he had lost interest in the Klan. "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia," Byrd wrote, according to newspaper accounts of that period. Byrd makes no mention of the letter in his new book.

Four years later, Byrd's Klan past became an issue again when he joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours as he argued that it abrogated principles of federalism. He criticized most anti-poverty programs except for food stamps. And in 1967, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court.

One irony in this is that Byrd's Democratic colleagues were declaiming a year ago about George Bush's unfitness for high office because of dubious allegations about missing some National Guard meetings as a young man, yet the Democratic party didn't see any reason not to elevate Byrd to Senate majority leader twice.

Why are blacks so loyal to this party?

Fate of an America-Free Iraq

This is the fate that the get-out-now crowd would impose on all Iraqis if their calls to pull out of Iraq were to be listened to:

KARABILA, Iraq, Sunday, June 19 - Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily populated by insurgents - like Falluja, where the anti-insurgent assault last fall uncovered almost 20 such sites. But rarely have they come across victims who have lived to tell the tale.

The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed.

In an interview with an embedded reporter just hours after he was freed, he said he had never seen the faces of his captors, who occasionally whispered at him, "We will kill you." He said they did not question him, and he did not know what they wanted. Nor did he ever expect to be released. "They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

The manual recovered - a fat, well-thumbed Arabic paperback - listed itself as the 2005 First Edition of "The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy," by Abdel Rahman al-Ali. Its chapters included "How to Select the Best Hostage," and "The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidels' Heads."

Also recovered were several fake passports, a black hood, the painkiller Percoset, handcuffs and an explosives how-to-guide. Three cars loaded with explosives were parked in a garage outside the house. The marines blew them up.

This is Mr. Fathil's account of his ordeal.

He was having a lunch of lettuce and cucumbers in the kitchen of his home in the small desert village of Rabot with his mother and brother. An Opel sedan pulled up. Two men in masks carrying machine guns got out, seized him, and, leaving his mother sobbing, put him in the trunk of their car.

They drove to the house here. They taped his face, put cotton in his ears, and began to beat him. The only possible explanation for the seizure he could think of was his time in the new Iraqi Army. Unemployed and illiterate, Mr. Fathil signed up after the American occupation began.

But nine months ago, when continuing working meant risking the wrath of the Jihadists, he quit. In all, 10 friends from his unit have been killed, he said. So have his uncle and his uncle's son, though neither ever worked as soldiers.

The men tended to talk in whispers, he said, telling him five times a day, in low voices in his ear, to pray, and offering him sand, instead of water, to wash himself. Just once, he asked if he could see his mother, and one of them said to him, "You won't leave until you are dead."

When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead. The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin. The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

His town has always been a good place, he said, but the militants have made it hell. "These few are destroying it," he said, his face streaked with tears. "Everybody they take, they kill. It's on a daily basis pretty much."

No word yet on whether his captors played loud rap music or turned the air conditioning way up like they do in real torture houses.

Leftist Low-Lifes

Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must read about Col. Nick Rowe. Rowe is a hero, but even more than Rowe, this account is about the kind of people who cooperated with the Communists during the Vietnam war. It would be interesting to know who, exactly, the people are who betrayed our POW's during the early seventies. It would also be interesting to know if Nick Rowe has any friends from his Special Forces days that might be waiting for Danilo Continente to be released from prison. Read the story at Belmont Club to find out why.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The case of the Downing Street memos that have Left-wing hearts everywhere all aflutter is beginning to sound strangely familiar. Even if the memos are legitimate they do very little to implicate Bush/Blair in some nefarious doings in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. We're not saying the memos are frauds, but they certainly are peculiar. Check out Captain's Quarters to find out why it seems we've been down this road before.

Quickening the Tempo

The U.S. led coalition in Iraq has launched a second operation downriver from Operation Spear. This second maneuver, code-named Operation Dagger, comes just a day after Spear and raises the question of how we are able to ramp up operations to such a rapid pace given the shortage of American fighting men in theater.Belmont Club offers this explanation:

So where do are US forces getting the the manpower to up the pace of attack? Overall US force levels are being drawn down. America has lost 18,000 men in theater to troop reductions after the Iraqi elections. According to Global Security Org, the total number of US troops in theater is expected to fall from 153,000 to 135,000. One possible answer is that America is understating the number of men in theater by excluding the Special Forces from the count. But even if the entire 10th Special Forces group were included, it would add only about 3,000 men to the total. The increase in tempo cannot come from having more Americans.

One other possibility is that the Coalition is throwing more cannon fodder, what the Daily Kos called "fresh meat", against the insurgents. Austin Bay notes that more and more Iraqi Army units are being used in operations. Austin Bay recently attended a briefing in Baghdad and reported that "In at least nine out of ten security operations, the new Iraqi military is providing half of the forces." That would permit the US to reduce the number of troops devoted to security operations and devote them attacks against the insurgents, where the Left assures us they would be lucky to break even against Zarqawi's men.

In either case, if the calculations of Fester and the Daily Kos are correct, the increased tempo cannot be sustained. Reason: if a player keeps losing chips at the table he will run down his stake. If combat results favor the enemy it necessarily follows that the more combat, the better for the enemy. Sooner or later, according to the predictions of the Left, the Coalition must retire bankrupt from the field.

In the near term, the operational tempo (billed as "violence", "instability" or "mayhem" in the media) will almost certainly increase for the following reasons. First, Iraqi forces are now coming online and they are not the "fresh meat" the Daily Kos claims. Though they may have shortcomings, Iraqi troops are far from totally ineffective and actually represent a net increase in coalition combat power against the enemy. Second, the cumulative results of two years of intelligence infrastructure building coming into fruition in the larger size of caches being found and in the number of "tips" which precede many of the recent captures and rescues. Third, the insurgent strategy of attempting to ignite a civil war as described in the last post, will generate its own backblast.

In other words, the Coalition is actually gaining and will continue to gain in strength. This does not necessarily prove we are winning because the enemy is also reinforcing the Iraqi battlefield with every combatant he can muster.

What we are witnessing is a race between the force-generation capabilities of two sides. Materially speaking, the enemy is bound to lose. Al Qaeda is openly rushing every available fighter into Iraq. But millions of Iraqis Sunnis, Kurds and Shi'ites who have no intention of being resubjugated, fueled by the oil wealth of Iraq can be counted on to resist them, supported by the most deadly military force in the world. On the face of it the enemy cause would be lost. But in the matter of the will to win the outcome becomes more doubtful. Iraq has become the recruiting focus of a generation of Islamists and Leftists while the United States public has won itself enough temporary safety to forget the dangers of September 11. The enemy's hunger -- almost desperation for victory -- stands in symbolic contrast to the desire among many Americans to close Gitmo. The war in Iraq has bought American homeland security in the most unexpected of ways. The enemy has learned to refrain from awakening the US giant, the better to defeat him in his sleep.

History seems to be repeating itself. Americans impatient with the pace of prosecuting the war are growing increasingly disenchanted. The inability of Americans to persist in a difficult enterprise over the long haul was the great hope of Ho Chi Min. It is also being counted upon by Osama bin Laden and his acolytes.

The North Vietnamese were able to outlast the American will because Americans eventually came to believe there was not enough at stake in Vietnam to justify the carnage. They were largely correct. It's not clear that they will come to the same conclusion about Iraq, but if they do they will be greatly mistaken. Moreover, if they ever do reach that unfortunate conclusion, it will be largely because the Bush administration has for the most part abandoned attempts to press upon the American people the significance of the conflict.

Nader's No No

Al Sharpton admonishes Ralph Nader to remember that there are words that whites like him are not allowed to use. Viewpoint wonders if there are any words prohibited to blacks or Hispanics, or whether racial and sociological taboos only go one way.

Never mind. We know the answer.

Operation Spear

Operation Spear has commenced in western Iraq:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. F-16 fighter planes dropped a series of 500 lb (220 kg) bombs on insurgent targets in western Iraq overnight as the U.S. military launched a heavy offensive against rebels near the Syrian border.

Nine of the powerful bombs were dropped, the U.S. military said, two of them targeting suspected rebel safe houses near the town of Qaim, an insurgent stronghold on the Euphrates river about 20 km (12 miles) east of Iraq's border with Syria. Four more were aimed at rebels as they fired mortars and assault rifles at U.S. ground forces near Qaim, and a further three were used to hit suspected weapons caches in the area.

The air power was in support of Operation Spear, the third major offensive U.S. forces have launched in western Iraq in the past six weeks with the aim of crushing insurgent activity in the Euphrates valley which stretches northwest to Syria.

"Operation Spear ... began in the early morning hours with the objectives of rooting out insurgents and foreign fighters and disrupting insurgent support systems in and around Karabila," Captain Jeffrey Pool of the U.S. Marines said in a statement from Ramadi, capital of the surrounding Anbar region.

Iraqi troops and U.S. tank and amphibious assault units were involved, he added. About 1,000 troops were taking part in all.

This is apparently what the buildup on the Syrian border to which Viewpoint alluded a couple of days ago was for.

Meanwhile, Arthur Chrenkoff has two versions of how the Australian hostage Douglas Wood was found. Wood's first words were "God bless America. You don't know how pleased I am to see you." Chrenkoff closes his post by observing that there is no word yet as to whether Wood's captors mishandled his Bible.

Where Are We Now?

In a gold bull market of course. From the link...

Collapsing confidence in the euro has become one of the principal factors behind the breakdown in the close correlation between gold prices and the dollar, suggesting gold may become something of a currency of choice this summer.

It's interesting that a struggle is currently underway by various entities to establish a one-world currency. Up until recently, the US dollar has been winning the war as most important things have been denominated in dollars.

Then the euro came on the scene and challenged the dollar hegemony and was doing quite well until a negative vote on the EU charter by the French and Dutch vote. Small wonder as the charter, as presented, steals national sovereignty from said countries.

On one hand, I am quite surprised as I expected the euro to do much better given the problems plaguing the dollar i.e. US trade and budget deficits, inflation, etc., yet the euro may rebound from all of this eventually. On the other hand, I have always agreed with a quote from Murray Rothbard that "fiat currency by any other name smells just as sour". And it appears that a general consensus is forming that agrees with him. The big investors who have lost confidence in the US dollar (with good reason) are now loosing confidence in the euro as well.

The article at the link above indicates that some of these players are choosing a third alternative as their "play of choice" and that is gold. Currently, gold is rising against both the dollar and the euro. A de-coupling is taking place whereby previously, as the dollar went up against other currencies, the cost of gold went down. That relationship is clearly demonstrated in these two graphs.

However, these graphs also show that, in the last several months, both the value of the dollar and gold are going up. The dollar is rising due to a lack of confidence in the euro and the price of gold is going up as a result of a bigger lack of confidence in the dollar.

It's ironic that all of this is happening since, as I mentioned above, there is an effort under way for a one-world currency yet the ideal one world currency has existed for the last 5000 years...gold. The problem is that gold represents an honest measure of exchange. The powers that be aren't interested in that. They want a measure of exchange they can manipulate and inflate. Remember that inflation is simply a tool that a government uses to transfer wealth from those that have it to those that want it.

Perhaps these thoughts will be influential if you're thinking about the best place to put your money where it will represent and sustain your true wealth as it is protected from a government's proclivity to steal it from you.

Also, if you're not thoroughly bored from my droning on endlessly, a response to 's Pirhanas in the Blogosphere below can be found at the Feedback Page.

Pirhanas in the Blogosphere

PowerLine's readers work over a recent column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman like piranha stripping clean a side of beef.

Krugman's article was erected around the claim that "Working families have seen little, if any, progress over the past 30 years." This assertion seems silly on the face of it, and a number of bloggers, including PowerLine, offered rebuttals. These posts elicited, in turn, comments from readers, many of which were quite thoughtful. One response in particular deserves special note. Responding to Hindrocket of PowerLine Dafydd ab Hugh replied:

You wrote that "the Census Bureau data show that for the category "Married-Couple Families," median income went from $46,723 in 1973 to $62,281 in 2003. (All numbers are in constant 2003 dollars.) That's a hefty 33% increase in real income."

With all due respect, Hindrocket, that's bullpuckey. The increase in "real income" would be hundreds of times that 33%, once you take into account the value of what you can now buy. Riddle me this:

* In 1973, how many households could afford a desktop computer with hundreds of megabytes of RAM? Ans: none.

* How many could afford a portable telephone that fits in a pocket? Or for that matter, how about a portable computer terminal? Ans: none.

* How many could afford to have genetic diseases in their children repaired by gene therapy? Ans: none.

* How many childless couples could afford in-vitro fertilization? Ans: none.

* How many could afford to have diseases diagnosed with Positron Emission Tomography or treated by laser surgery? How many could afford to have Lasik corrective eye surgery? How many could afford to have depression or anxiety cured or controlled by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox or Celexa? How many could afford to have their teeth repaired by composite resin fillings? How many could afford laser microsurgery, radio-telemetry surgery, foetal-abnormality surgery, minimally-invasive surgery, robotic surgery, or "beating heart" cardiac surgery? Ans: none.

* How many could afford to start their own "magazines" that could be read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people each week without even being distributed? Ans: none.

* How many could afford a luxury family vehicle suitable for offroading adventures? Ans: none.

* How many breadwinners could afford to telecommute? Ans: none.

* How many could afford a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino? How many could buy fat-free potato chips? How many could afford NutraSweet? How about lactose-free milk? How many could afford to go out routinely for Pad Thai, Japanese sushi, Armenian khorovatz, Ethiopian aleecha, Chorizo Argentino, Lebanese hummus and shawarma, or even a nice, simple blueberry bagel? Ans: none.

The point should be clear: it is impossible to legitimately compare buying power in 1973 with buying power today, for the simple reason that a huge proportion of what we buy today simply did not even exist thirty years ago. This is more obvious when you try to compare today's economy with the economy of the Middle Ages: the strides in technology and society are so staggering, they swamp any attempted calculation of monetary value: how many emperors in A.D. 750 could afford antibiotics?

Claiming that "working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years," as Krugman claimed, is so manifestly preposterous -- even before taking economics into account -- that I don't question his veracity so much as his sanity. Is he mentally ill?

We had a couple of additional thoughts on this question of middle class progress. For example, although it was around in the 70s, relatively few middle class families had central air conditioning back then. In our opinion, the air conditioning of America has done more to improve the quality of middle (and lower) class life than most of the items on Dafydd's tally. We might also add to his list access to health information like the hazards of tobacco and high fat diets which has made life better for those who avail themselves of it and act upon it. Moreover, anti-inflammatory and cholesterol lowering drugs like Ibuprofen and statins have greatly enhanced the quality of life of many middle class families in the last couple of decades. Nor should we neglect the emergence of cable television and VHS and DVD formats of entertainment.

We're confident that our readers can come up with more examples of how life is better for middle class citizens today than it was thirty years ago.

People like Krugman don't see all these developments as progress because they only consider economic advancement in terms relative to the wealthy. In other words, if the lives of middle class families are improving in numerous ways, that progress is negated by the fact that the middle class still doesn't make as much money as the upper classes. How else to explain a claim so clearly counter to the facts as Krugman's that the middle class has seen little, if any, progress over the last thirty years?

At any rate another good reply to Mr. Krugman's claim can be found here.

One of the beauties of blogs is that five years ago the only way to expose nonsense like the sort that Paul Krugman dispenses was to fire off a letter to the editor which would probably never get published or would be so severely edited as to render it ineffectual. No longer. Now when someone like Krugman writes something ridiculous, which seems to happen with astonishing regularity, it's immediately amplified and rebutted by the pirhanas in the blogosphere. We're all better off for it.

Who's Driving The Bus?

One can only wonder where the Bush administration is taking us.

First, there seems to be a bizarre reluctance on the part of the Bush administration to protect our borders. Case in point, the individual in this article is about as bizarre as the reluctance of the Bush administration to do something about the situation.

On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The full story can be read here.

I'm reminded of the pun that went: if the terrorists want to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the US all they have to do is hide it in a bail of marijuana.

Then on the fiscal responsibility front, things are getting equally bizarre.

From the link...

Why then, during a period of relatively rapid inflation, is the outcry so muted? Why is the government so quick to claim victory over an adversary that is so clearly winning the fight? I believe there are two primary reasons for this apparent paradox. First, in the 1970s and 1980s, when America was a nation of savers, most people easily perceived how inflation robbed them of their purchasing power. Today, American debtors sees inflation as their salvation, as rising home prices and equity extractions increase their purchasing power. Second, as the Fed deliberately peruses a policy of inflation as a means of repudiating government debts, as well as bailing out other borrowers, including hedge funds and homeowners, it can only do so to the extend that it conceals it true intentions from America's creditors. If the world's savers only knew the truth, interest rates would soar, bursting the bubble economy the Fed is trying so desperately to keep inflated.

As I've said before, if a group of conspirators gathered together to plot the destruction of America, they could not design a better master plan than what is currently taking place in this country today.

Another Top Terrorist Arrested

The use of multiple intelligence sources has led to the apprehension in Mosul of another top aide to Abu al-Zarqawi, a man named Abu Talha. The report suggests that questioning of underlings who had been arrested earlier led to information about the whereabouts of Talha.

Rumor has it that the information on Talha was extracted from these sources by subjecting them to round the clock recitations of the lyrics to early Beatles songs. Amnesty International is believed to be looking into the charges.

Real Torture

There's been a lot of talk about torture by American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and less well-known venues in Afghanistan. To the extent that real abuses have occurred they should, and doubtless will, be prosecuted, but the key word is "real."

Many of the accusations that have been leveled by such as Senator Durbin have involved things that, though they may make someone uncomfortable, hardly seem like torture. To call them that risks trivializing a word which should evoke horror. To put matters in some perspective, if the reader isn't too squeamish, he or she might go here to see the terrifying and gruesome face of real torture, real cruelty. It's something much worse than having to listen to loud rap music, or being kept in a hot or cold room, or having one's Koran handled without gloves.

Perhaps someone might pass on the link to Senators Leahy and Durbin.

An International Embarrassment

Apparently the Democrats have decided that the best way to discredit the current administration is to talk as if they, the Dems, are all raving lunatics. Indeed, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont illustrates the point while at the same time aptly describing the Left-wing of the contemporary Democratic party when he said of Guantanamo Bay that it's "an international embarrassment to our nation, to our ideals, and it remains a festering threat to our security."

Another fine example of the madness which seems to have seized the Democrats is Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat. Durbin essentially equated Guantanamo Bay with the Nazi death camps in which about 9 million people lost their lives, Stalin's prisons in which 2.7 million persons died, and Pol Pot's reign of terror in which 1.7 million Cambodians were systematically murdered.

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II:

"It took us almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history," Mr. Durbin said. "I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category."

Perhaps one of his aides will help the Senator to understand the difference between interning innocent American citizens simply because of their ethnicity, and interning terrorists captured while trying to murder innocent American citizens. The distinction is not a difficult one to grasp, and we're confident that Sen. Durbin, if it's explained to him slowly, will get the gist of it.

What was the treatment that elicited the Senator's fatuities? An FBI agent reported to higher-ups that he witnessed one al Qaeda suspect at Gitmo who was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating the complaint sort of like the Soviets and the Nazis did when allegations of abuse in their death camps came to light.

There were no details given about the prisoner in question. Why was this one terrorist deprived of the considerable amenities enjoyed by his co-detainees? The Senator apparently isn't interested in telling us. Perhaps context would spoil the effect he was trying to create which is to extrapolate from a single case of possible mistreatment to the conclusion that Gitmo is another Dachau and American troops are as bad as the German SS.

Meanwhile, the Senator is blithely indifferent to the fact that, whereas the death camps to which he has compared Gitmo killed millions and subjected millions more to years of starvation, pain, and inexpressible misery, not a single one of the five hundred or so Gitmo detainees have died and only a handful have made credible claims of poor treatment. The most significant allegations of abuse, in fact, have been five charges of irreverence toward the Koran.

Somebody should explain all this to Senator Durbin before he makes an even bigger fool of himself with his next round of pronouncements.