Smart is not the same as wise...

Orrin Judd:

It would be easier to feel sorry for the Democrats if they ever learned anything from their mistake--singular, because it's the same one almost every time. While the Republicans nominate the guy whose turn it is next, a well-known and battle-tested veteran, the Democrats repeatedly serve up a neophyte Northern liberal and then act stunned when he's not ready for primetime and voters dislike him once they get to know his political views.

There's lots one could say to amplify this. One is that being smart is not the same thing as being wise. And since a large part of being wise is having the humility to realize you don't know it all, and the humility to see things as they are, rather then what your theory says they should be, you can almost bet that anyone who people look at and say "he's so smart" is not wise.

"Wise" can't really be defined. It's just one of those things you know when you see it, if you are looking. When it comes to politicians, it's even harder to be sure. But a good bet is that a "well-known and battle-tested veteran" has probably had a chance to reveal any un-wisdom he may have.

Is McCain wise? I have various doubts about him, but I feel confident that he is far wiser than Barry or Hillary. For one thing, there's no doubt that he is a patriotic American, and that in itself is deeply wise. Because this great nation is herself "a well-known and battle-tested veteran," and the results have shown this a thousand times. Betting on America is the smart bet. Betting on Europe is the sucker's bet.

And if you are a liberal reading that previous paragraph, you probably instantly thought of all the reasons you despise this country (without having the guts or conscience to move elsewhere). You thought of all her supposed hideous faults, things that are taken for granted over the Brie and Chardonnay at San Francisco soirées, where guys like Obama go to raise big bucks. If you did, you are not wise. You are a fool.

Extraordinary delegation of authority....

Here's a cool piece on how WalMart (and other big-box retailers) performed prodigies of disaster-relief during Katrina...while Federal (and in Democrat areas, local) government did poorly. The secret was pushing authority into the hands of those on the scene.

President Bush missed a big fat opportunity, when things were being changed after 9/11, to strengthen local emergency-response agencies, instead of adding more federal bureaucracy.( I think he was rendered short-sighted from spending too much time in government, despite his successes in the private sector.)

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer -- and remembered as American business's answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

"A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level," was Scott's message to his people. "Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing."

This extraordinary delegation of authority -- essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year -- saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. ...

[....]

...This benevolent improvisation contradicts everything we have been taught about Wal-Mart by labour unions and the "small-is-beautiful" left. We are told that the company thinks of its store management as a collection of cheap, brainwash-able replacement parts; that its homogenizing culture makes it incapable of serving local communities; that a sparrow cannot fall in Wal-Mart parking lot without orders from Arkansas; that the chain puts profits over people. The actual view of the company, verifiable from its disaster-response procedures, is that you can't make profits without people living in healthy communities. And it's not alone: As Horwitz points out, other big-box companies such as Home Depot and Lowe's set aside the short-term balance sheet when Katrina hit and acted to save homes and lives, handing out millions of dollars' worth of inventory for free.

No one who is familiar with economic thought since the Second World War will be surprised at this. Scholars such as F. A. von Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have taught us that it is really nothing more than a terminological error to label governments "public" and corporations "private" when it is the latter that often have the strongest incentives to respond to social needs. A company that alienates a community will soon be forced to retreat from it, but the government is always there. Companies must, to survive, create economic value one way or another; government employees can increase their budgets and their personal power by destroying or wasting wealth, and most may do little else. Companies have price signals to guide their productive efforts; governments obfuscate those signals.

Aside from the public vs. private issue, Horwitz suggests, decentralized disaster relief is likely to be more timely and appropriate than the centralized kind, which explains why the U.S. Coast Guard performed so much better during the disaster than FEMA. The Coast Guard, like all marine forces, necessarily leaves a great deal of authority in the hands of individual commanders, and like Wal-Mart, it benefited during and after the hurricane from having plenty of personnel who were familiar with the Gulf Coast geography and economy.

There is no substitute for local knowledge -- an ancient lesson of which Katrina merely provided the latest reminder....

Young girl traveling...

Tom Maguire:

By way of Ace I am watching this video in which Obama calls for the day that a young girl traveling abroad can say with pride that she is an American - that, we are informed, is the change he is working for.

I know that message lights Democratic fires, but my goodness - is that what he wants to present to the general public?...

It's the usual—casual—anti-Americanism of lefty elitists. How I hate it. I live in the middle of it, and I DESPISE it. "Lights Democratic fires." Oh yeah.

As far as I'm concerned, that one clip should disqualify Mr Obama from being President. If Obama's the nominee, I hope John McCain takes that clip and rubs his face in it!

Elite snivelers from Harvard hate America because she is bigger and greater than we. Because she makes demands on us--demands for loyalty and duty and service. They are nihilists, and want to worship only themselves.

For the American citizen, to love and serve our nation is a requirement. (This is an analog, on a much lower sphere, of the requirement that we love and serve God.) It is not optional. And it has nothing to do with nationalism. America is not a nation, in that sense.

She is an idea, and an authoritative tradition. There are few other nations that can claim this. Maybe none. Actually, you can see which. Just chart which countries leftists really really hate. Ummm....Oh yeah, Israel. And they hate and fear what England used to be, though they've mostly killed her by now. America and the Anglosphere are now England.

He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.
      -- Abraham Lincoln, Eulogy on Henry Clay , July 6, 1852

Standing up to the hoodlums...

Heartening news in the WSJ about the biggest scam in the world, the asbestos litigation quagmire. A judge and a defendant are actually standing up to those vile thieves! Charlene was involved in the litigation when I first met her, so I've learned a lot about that criminal enterprise.

....A building materials company, W.R. Grace was among the firms swept up in a second round of asbestos litigation in the late 1990s. Having chewed their way through asbestos manufacturers, trial lawyers went after companies that had only a marginal asbestos link. By blanketing these firms with an avalanche of claims they recruited, the tort bar pushed at least 30 of these second-tier players into bankruptcy.

Most companies then followed the usual asbestos bankruptcy script. They cut a deal with the plaintiffs attorneys, handing over a big sum to pay current and future claims. Federal bankruptcy judges happily went along, because most view their jobs as getting companies out of bankruptcy quickly and few want the hassle of investigating tens of thousands of individual asbestos claims.

Enter W.R. Grace, and its lead attorney, David Bernick, a veteran of the tobacco and breast-implant wars. Mr. Bernick has taken the unheard-of position that federal rules of evidence apply even in bankruptcy court. He has argued that the only way Judge Judith Fitzgerald can make a legitimate ruling on Grace's liability is for her to decide first how many claims have scientific merit. This is revolutionary stuff.

To her credit, Judge Fitzgerald has allowed Grace to investigate those claims, and present her with its results. The stakes are enormous. At the end of this process, Judge Fitzgerald will make a finding on W.R. Grace's ultimate liability. The plaintiffs claim it is as much as $6 billion, a figure that would make Grace insolvent. The company claims the money necessary to cover legitimate claims is closer to $500 million, a number that would allow it to rejoin the land of the living...

Tax the rich!

Kruse Kronicle has a nice piece, based on Congressional Budget Office data, graphing how the Bush tax cuts resulted in the rich paying more taxes. And the poor paying less.

You probably already knew that, but he's got nice charts, and it is worth saving the link to use in arguments against Bolshies who claim that Bush "cut taxes on the rich."

....The 2005 total effective federal tax rate as a percentage of the 1979 rate:

• Top Quintile = 101.2%
• Fourth Quintile = 85.0%
• Middle Quintile = 76.8%
• Second Quintile = 60.1%
• Bottom Quintile = 14.3%

As I showed in a post last month, the top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of federal income taxes. The top 25% of taxpayers pay 86% of income taxes.

Finally, keep in mind the New York Times article two weeks a ago that pointed out that while the bottom quintile has $9,974 in income per household a year it spends $18,153. That means non-cash assistance (as well draws on savings in the case of retired or unemployed payers) nearly doubles the actual income of the bottom quintile.

Rather than populist outcry over "tax cuts for the wealthy," maybe we need to look at the whole package of consequences that come from tax policy. Is the final objective really to have all taxes paid by the top 1% of society?

Recommended destination....

I'm tagging along with Charlene to a Federalist Society conference at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

Awesome! I had no idea. I had vaguely imagined a library, with various historical documents and mementos in some glass cases. But it's a knock-out museum, located on a hilltop with sweeping views. (I guess there is library-like stuff somewhere, with scholars toiling over documents, but that's not evident to the visitor.) We had a great time. I recommend it highly, should you ever happen to be in the LA area.

Ker-bam!

By Thom Shanker. WASHINGTON: Videotape of the U.S. Navy mission to shoot down a dying spy satellite made available shows an interceptor missile ascending atop a bright trail of burning fuel, and then a flash, a fireball and a plume of vapor. A cloud of debris left little doubt that the missile had squarely hit its mark as it spent its final days orbiting high above the Pacific Ocean.

A different kind of doubt still lingers, though, expressed by policy analysts, some politicians and scientists, and not a few foreign powers, especially China and Russia: Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk has passed of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where? Or should they be worried about the latest display of U.S. technical prowess and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?....

"Should the people of the world be worried...." The way the question is put reminds me once again of the contempt I feel for the sort of people who make up the New York Times. (Shanker is their Pentagon reporter.) His loyalty and sympathy, as a member of the "coastal elites," is centered somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and a lot closer to Paris than to the nasty old USA. His heart is in Belgium.

When he writes "the people of the world," he doesn't mean, like, you know, the actual grubby little people. No. He means their owners, the ruling elites. They are the ones who might not want us to be able to shoot down incoming missiles.

So let me rephrase the question. Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the cops are on the beat, and carrying bigger guns than the hoodlums who think they own the neighborhood? Yeah, baby.

Should the people of China be breathing a sigh of relief that their brutal masters are feeling less pushy today? You betcha.

Should the little people of the world feel glad that the liberating spirit of Ronald Reagan has been vindicated today, at the expense of the "realists" who think that we have no "strategic interest" in their freedom and prosperity? And at the expense of the vile leftists who are in favor of tyranny and oppression?

It's no accident that Democrats and Euro-socialists and all the world's tyrants hated Reagan's vision of missile defense, and have fought it tenaciously from that day to now. They hate it because they hate the United States of America, at least when she is strong and proud and free. We are supposed to be humble and conciliatory and meek.

To which I say, Ha ha ha. You lose, sniveling worms. We shot a rocket—not from a stable platform—from a cruiser moving on the waves, and we not only whacked a satellite out of orbit, we hit one particular spot on the thing! To all the fake scientists and fake experts who have declared that this sort of thing is impossible, I spit upon your nihilism. It is ALL possible. Because we are Americans. We can do this stuff.

And thank you, President George W Bush, who made missile-defense and anti-satellite defense a priority.

The guided missile cruiser USS Shiloh launches an SM-3 during a ballistic missile defense exercise. (Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Navy)

Effete idiocy...

As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world. -- John McCain [link]

Well yes, Alaska National Wildlife Refuge IS pristine and beautiful. What rarely gets mentioned is that the lofty snow-clad peaks and Grizzly Bears are not in the area where the oil is. The area proposed for drilling is a coastal mud-flat. A mosquito refuge. A place nobody visits.

And the drilling proposal would only occupy a tiny portion of it, with no likelihood of harm to wildlife—we've already built an oil pipeline all the way across the state without any reported harm to wildlife.

"Pristine and beautiful" are only human values. Nature cares nothing for them. If we used Yosemite Valley as a dumping place for old cars, the birds and raccoons would not mind at all.

But people don't think logically about this stuff. Because "Green" is a religion. The perfect faith for the nihilist, since the Goddess cares nothing about us, "created" us with no conscious intent to do so, may wipe us (and our whole planet) out in the blink of an eye, without remorse, and is "worshipped" by leaving things "pristine and beautiful," which is defined as having no humans touching them.

I'm still liking Mitt the most...

We just sent a little donation to the Romney campaign. Now's the time our morsel will have an effect, if ever.

I still think Mitt's the best of the lot. (Here's a good case made.) And I still find him as a person somewhat hard to warm to. That doesn't matter to me personally; I don't make these decisions based on emotions. But, rationally, it's a problem in a candidate or president, both of which jobs depend on persuasion more than on correct decision-making.

My impression is, that if George W. Bush and Mitt Romney were my next-door neighbors, (and not in politics) George would seem like a regular guy who I could chat with as an equal, but Mitt would, while being unfailingly courteous, leave an feeling that he normally dwells on a higher level of existence, one you reach by the special executive elevator that goes only to the top floor. (NOTE: These are just impressions from a distance. No one who actually knows Romney seems to find him like this!)

It is interesting the number of people who just hate him on sight. I would be very curious to know how much that group overlaps with the group that instinctively hated Bush. (There is of course a considerable contingent of Leftists for whom American-successful-white-male-business-executive is the culmination of evil. I spit upon their nihilism. I'd ship them all to Cuba if I could.)

I looked back at this post, from last April, and noticed a good comment by Lyle:

Maybe he'll grow on us.

If choosing a president were the same as choosing a CEO, Romney might be the choice. He's smart, level-headed, and competent. He has presidential temperment and demeanor. He looks the part.

Maybe voice has something to do with it. I've heard Romney several times but his voice didn't leave an impression. In the sense that we're casting a leader as well as choosing a CEO, a commanding voice matters.

Imagine hearing President Hillary! alternately screech and drone for four long years. Or John Goober Edwards. But we've heard Giuliani's pragmatic briskness and Thompson's folksy growl for more than a decade, and both wear well.

"I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this"

Charlene saw this YouTube clip, posted by Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard's blog. It's an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's famous speech, A Time for Choosing.

Dean writes:

.. What I find most remarkable about the speech beyond its extraordinary content is the simple, straight forward language and the appropriately spare delivery. There were no clumsy applause lines, no laundry lists of silly promises meant to purchase the votes of certain citizens. Instead, it was just one man talking sense, honestly and from the heart, clearly without the guidance of either pollsters or focus groups.

Current candidates, please take note - the audience loved it. And 43 years later, it's part of history. Even the most moving paen to ethanol won't be so recognized.

To me what is especially noteworthy is how similar the fake-pacifism Reagan was fighting against is to what we deal with now, or what Winston Churchill battled against in the 1930's. The same speeches could be given any time over almost a century.

The same stupid idea, that by being "pacifistic," by not resisting the thugs and tyrants of the world, we will obtain peace, is as alive now as it was in 1938. Pacifism kills.

We "considered ourselves a vanquished people"

From A Revolutionary Christmas Story, By Lynne Cheney, NYT, December 21, 2004

AS 1776 was drawing to a close, Elkanah Watson, a young man in Massachusetts, expressed what many Americans feared about their war for independence. "We looked upon the contest as near its close," he wrote, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people."

There was good reason for pessimism. The British had driven Gen. George Washington and his men out of New York and across New Jersey. In early December, with the British on their heels, the Americans had commandeered every boat they could find to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. They were starving, sick and cold. The artist Charles Willson Peale, watching the landing from the Pennsylvania shore, described a soldier dressed "in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So disfigured was the man, Peale wrote, that at first he did not recognize him as his brother James.

In these desperate circumstances, George Washington made a stunning decision: to go back across the Delaware and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton. On Christmas night, he led 2,400 men, many of them with their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes, to a crossing point nine miles upstream from Trenton. As freezing temperatures turned rain to sleet and snow, they began to cross the river.

The task was harder than any of them had imagined. Men had to break through ice to get into the boats and then fend off chunks of floating ice once they were in the river. Getting cannons across - each weighed nearly a ton - was especially difficult. Downstream, two other groups that Washington had ordered to cross the Delaware failed in their mission. But Washington and his men persevered, until finally, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they were across and ready to march to Trenton.

They had planned to approach Trenton before dawn, but the difficulty of the crossing had delayed them, and it was daylight when they encountered the first Hessians. Still, the surprise worked, and in two hours, with few losses of their own, they captured nearly 900 of the enemy. "This is a glorious day for our country," Washington declared... [There's more.]

Thank you Lynne Cheney for this one! And we should be very grateful that, even in these last decadent days of America, we have public servants like the Cheney family...

Will anyone say, "Thank you?"

AP: President Bush has approved "a significant reduction" in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, cutting it to less than one-quarter its size at the end of the Cold War, the White House said Tuesday.

At the same time, the Energy Department announced plans to consolidate the nuclear weapons complex that maintains warheads and dismantle those no longer needed, saying the current facilities need to be made more efficient and more easily secured and that the larger complex is no longer needed.

"We are reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest level consistent with America's national security and our commitments to friends and allies," White House press secretary Dana Perino said...(Thanks to Orrin)

ZO, my question is, will any of those people who think America's development and one-time use of nuclear weapons was a bad thing now express gratitude for this reduction in our stockpiles? Hmmm?

I myself would say that it was one of the best things that ever happened. It immediately put an end to world wars, regional wars, and wars between developed nations. And also to some rather less-developed ones, such as India and Pakistan. They used to fight wars with each other, remember? And Israel no longer fights with Egypt or Syria, either. Remember those wars? They stopped once Israel had the Bomb. (Of course the Arab animals started proxy wars using terrorist scum to blow up pizza parlors full of women and children....but the total bloodshed was still far less than would have happened in wars.)

Two positive stories...

(Thanks to Orrin)

Triumphs for Democracy, By MICHAEL BARONE

The world looks safer, friendlier, more hopeful than it did as we approached Christmastime last year.

Then, we were on the defensive, perhaps on the verge of defeat, in Iraq. The Europeans' attempts to persuade Iran to renounce nuclear weapons seemed to have failed. Hugo Chavez was using his near-dictatorial powers and the oil wealth of Venezuela to secure the election of opponents of the American "empire" in Latin America.

Today, things look different. And they suggest, to me at least, that the policies of the Bush administration, pilloried as bankrupt by the Democrats after their victory in congressional elections in November, have served American interests better than most Americans then thought....

It will probably come as a shock to most people, even to those who follow the economy, that mortgage applications rose last month as a result of declining interest rates.

In the midst of the hysterical media-fed notion that a tidal wave of subprime-loan foreclosures was going to plunge the country into a recession, the fact is that the economy is still growing and Americans are still buying homes.

The torrid pace of recent years has slackened, but homes are being sold, banks are lending money and most Americans — even those saddled with subprime mortgages — are paying their mortgages on time.

Not everybody realizes this, however. The Washington Post, in a story about the administration's mortgage-relief plan, reported last week that, "Lending, which had boomed for years, ground to a halt." That has been the myth reported ad nauseam on the nightly network news shows, and apparently it has been accepted as a God-given fact....

I kind of imagine the people at the Washington Times just relishing any chance to poke a pin in the fraudulent pomposity of the Washington Post. Thank you!

Guided by the Spirit...

These mass shootings are a recurrent bitter frustration to me, because I know (I'm not the only one of course) what to do. I know how people should respond, to save lives. If everyone at that church had instantly started throwing things--chairs, shoes, keys, potted plants, books, pictures off the wall--the gunman would almost certainly have been quickly overwhelmed.

And I post this idea every time, confident that no one will take notice. Just call me Cassandra.

Here's a fascinating story about the security guard who brought down the killer...

...At about that moment, [Jeanne] Assam, 42, turned a corner with a drawn handgun, walked toward the gunman and yelled "Surrender!"

Bourbonnais said.The gunman pointed a handgun at Assam and fired three shots, Bourbonnais said. She returned fire and just kept walking toward the gunman pressing off round after round.

After the gunman went down, Bourbonnais asked the Assam, a volunteer security guard with the church, how she remained so calm and focused.

Bourbonnais said she replied:

"I was asking the Holy Spirit to guide me the entire time."

Update: There's more on Jeanne Assam here. she's not a hired security guard, but a member of the church and former police officer volunteering to provide security.

Interesting stuff...

UK Telegraph: Republicans winning new citizens for 2008 vote By Toby Harnden in San Diego, California:

Minutes after taking the Pledge of Allegiance, new American citizens are urged to register as voters by Democratic activists who see them as natural party supporters who could hold the key to the 2008 election.

But with increasing illegal immigration threatening the economy and security of the United States, many legal immigrants anxious to uphold the laws of their adopted country are moving towards the more hard-line immigration stance of Republicans.

Even in California’s Democratic-controlled San Diego, sizeable numbers of America’s newly-minted potential voters said that illegal immigrants should be penalised rather than given an easy route to citizenship as most Democrats advocate.

“For a long time, immigration was OK,” said Sara Wright, 49, a seamstress from Mexico who arrived in the US legally in 1986.

“But now, no more. A lot of really bad people come from Mexico and commit crimes....

I'm not sure how much this means. But the simple fact is that all the good things that immigrants come here for only happened because we have the rule of law. That's the real problem with illegal immigration. That's the first question to ask about any proposed solutions... does it uphold the rule of law?

And it is NOT being compassionate in the long run to undermine the laws that all our freedoms depend on. (A concept, alas, beyond most Catholic leaders.)

things to be thankful for...

We can all be thankful for our peerless military, and for the sight of happy schoolchildren in the Dora neighborhood. Thankful that Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces are even now delivering a crushing defeat to the murderous animals of al Qaeda. These children can smile because good and brave men took on the forces of evil.

A schoolboy waves at a U.S. soldier on foot patrol in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood on Wednesday.

HADI MIZBAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS Army Times Frontline Photos 11-21-07

— — — — — — — — — — —

Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division celebrate Thanksgiving in their tent at Firebase Wilderness in the Afghanistan Paktia Province. The soldiers had saved up cheeses, sausages, pretzels and other treats from home, which were sent out in care packages.

John D. McHugh / AFP /Getty Images. Army Times Frontline Photos 11-24-06

In reality, a mighty host...

Measured by the standards of men of their time, ... [the Pilgrims] were the humble of the earth. Measured by later accomplishments, they were the mighty. In appearance weak and persecuted they came -- rejected, despised -- an insignificant band; in reality strong and independent, a mighty host of whom the world was not worthy, destined to free mankind.
      -- Calvin Coolidge

"I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps"

You might want to take a look at a fudgy little video that John Hinderaker of PowerLine has posted...

...In the school district where I live, a concert is put on annually by the four high school choirs, plus a little kids' choir of elementary school children, of which my youngest daughter is a member. Participation in the high school choirs is competitive and their quality is high. A director for the concert is brought in from the outside, generally from a college. The concert begins with a couple of numbers by the kids' choir; this year, they started with a medley of The Pledge of Allegiance and America the Beautiful. The crowd--I live in a middle-of-the-road, non-elite area--loved it. The four high school choirs perform separately, and then at the end, they combine in a single large choir for a couple of songs. Most of the music sung is classical; lots of it is religious, often in Latin. As I said, the quality is high.

For the finale, they bring out the kids' choir to sing with all four high schools. This year, the finale was Battle Hymn of the Republic....

That's what's on the video. Gave me a lump in the throat. Maybe it's just because I live in this sinkhole of Lefty nihilism and anti-Americanism, and have put three kids through school without EVER hearing a concert of patriotic songs..... especially THAT patriotic song.

11th hour, of the 11th day of the 11th month

(This is partly a re-post of a Veteran's Day piece I did in 2005)

It's good to stop on Veteran's Day and remember that everything we have, we have because of war, because brave men fought in savage conflicts to protect and enlarge our patrimony. Often, when I'm feeling that my life is just too too difficult, I think about an Iraqi man I read about, who spent 17 years in a little crawl-space between two walls in his family's home, to avoid arrest by Saddam's secret police. War freed him, and war keeps us from suffering a similar fate, or far worse...

Remember, as you enjoy your holiday (or, like Charlene and I, you enjoy the huge privilege of being self-employed, and working hard today because the work is there) that you are not worrying about visits by secret police because a lot of good guys killed a lot of bad guys over the course of many centuries...

David Furst / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images

Soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather together to pray moments before setting off on a patrol of western Baghdad on Thursday. Army Times 11/8/05

American soldiers at a funeral near Saint-Mihiel, 1917




[link]

You all know how it's often a problem, when children are raised in prosperity, that they sometimes have no appreciation of how hard their parents worked, and how hard and dangerous life can be.

And our nation has a similar problem. Our ancestors performed miracles of endurance and suffering and courage, so we could enjoy wealth and comfort such as the world has never seen. But this very success has created a sub-culture of Eloi, weak and foolish creatures who burble, "War never solved anything," when it has in fact solved a host of their problems. They are sitting in unthinking comfort and security on the heaped bones of America's enemies. And they sneer and carp at our military, while—of course—not moving to anywhere where they are not protected by strong men with guns.

To anyone such as myself, who has read a lot of history, the military we have now is an astonishment. Never on this planet has there been such a combination of soldierly proficiency, of devastating weapons used with extreme restraint, and such care to protect civilians and to nurture chaotic lands towards democracy and progress. I recently mentioned a splendid book, House to House, by David Bellavia, about deadly struggle in the second battle of Falluja. But in most of our wars, we would not have done that house-to-house stuff. We would have just flattened a Falluja, like we did to Aachen. We could easily have destroyed that horrid place, along with many civilians and many terrorist murderers, and not lost a single American life. Instead, American and Iraqi soldiers groped through a nightmare of booby-trapped buildings and carefully-prepared kill-zones. And many brave men died.

They gave their lives to save the innocent. History will record that they are the true Christians of our time, the real "good Samaritans." While our fake-pacifists are just ice-hearted free-loaders, living in safety because blood is shed by real men and women whose boots they are not worthy to lick.

'Strider' am I to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly...

Good sense...

A friend sent the link to this NYT article by N. Gregory Mankiw , and remarked: "You might want to blog this if it doesn't pick up more circulation. I haven't seen anything yet. He refutes at least 50 Krugman columns on health care in about 5 or 6 hundred words."

STATEMENT 2 Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.

This number from the Census Bureau is often cited as evidence that the health system is failing for many American families. Yet by masking tremendous heterogeneity in personal circumstances, the figure exaggerates the magnitude of the problem.

To start with, the 47 million includes about 10 million residents who are not American citizens. Many are illegal immigrants. Even if we had national health insurance, they would probably not be covered.

The number also fails to take full account of Medicaid, the government's health program for the poor. For instance, it counts millions of the poor who are eligible for Medicaid but have not yet applied. These individuals, who are healthier, on average, than those who are enrolled, could always apply if they ever needed significant medical care. They are uninsured in name only.

The 47 million also includes many who could buy insurance but haven't. The Census Bureau reports that 18 million of the uninsured have annual household income of more than $50,000, which puts them in the top half of the income distribution. About a quarter of the uninsured have been offered employer-provided insurance but declined coverage.

Of course, millions of Americans have trouble getting health insurance. But they number far less than 47 million, and they make up only a few percent of the population of 300 million....

Mr Mankiw, I note, is a Romney advisor. I'd call that a good sign....

See the world...

From Victor Davis Hansen's blog...

....I spent some time in Iraq accompanying Col. HR McMaster who was on an inspection tour of the forward operating bases. He is a UNC PhD, former Hoover Security fellow, and author of an acclaimed book, Dereliction of Duty, on (the lack of) military leadership during Vietnam, as well as one of Gen. Petraeus’s top counter-insurgency thinkers.

I could not imagine a tour (some 30-40 days I think he is on) that would pose more risks—humveeing and coptering into all sorts of places, regardless of the recent 24-hour conditions. Over the years, in Gulf War I, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, he has seen a number of close calls, and walks with a limp from an injured hip (probably will have to be replaced). Full body armor, pistol, and M-16 to lug around can’t help the pain.

I would watch him negotiate with Sunni governors, police chiefs, and generals, then be debriefed by Marine and Army officers, then go on tour in Humvees or foot patrols. This would start at 7 am and end at 8pm. Then after the long helicopter trip back to Camp Victory, HR would eat and join discussion with fellow Colonels until after 11 PM.

We often talk loosely of the idea of a renaissance man, but colonels like McMaster come closest—I would add another Colonel Chris Gibson—to the idea that I have ever come across.

Something is going on in Iraq entirely missed by media. It’s not just that things are turning around, but rather Gen. Petraeus has assembled perhaps the most gifted group of Army officers seen in a generation—who feel they are going to snatch victory from the jaws of political defeat. I think they will pull it off and the entire political landscape here at home will have to readjust to it by early next year. The smarter Democrats will take credit by claiming their anti-Bush efforts forced needed change, the denser ones will just continue to deny, like Sens. Reid and Schumer, that any good is occurring at all.....

Life has many frustrations, but there are also some sweet moments. The thought of what a bitter pill victory in Iraq is going to be to fraudulent liberals gives me a warm feeling in my tummy like a shot of whiskey!

Another charming thing is that there are so many things that are not what the received liberal wisdom says they are. I suspect that guys like Col. McMaster are not just gifted in relation to army officers of the past, but also in relation to certain people who imagine themselves as the highly-gifted elite....academics especially. The academic world is not looking very impressive these days, and I don't expect history to be kind to it. Same with the realms of journalism, the arts, and the whole bi-coastal arts-and-croissants crowd.

Related to this, one of the oddities of contemporary American life is that liberals preen themselves on being well-travelled because they've been trekking in Nepal or have gone on a photo-safari in Tanzania. But people who are really well-travelled, who know intimately some place you've never even heard of, are much more likely to be found in rural or small-town America! Those people join the military, or thye oil companies, or do missionary work, and they really "see the world."

"No one will ever believe you..."

I liked very much this comment that Mike Plaiss made to this post about our having, from time to time, an idealistic foreign policy...

For anyone interested in a long-winded anecdote that is relevant to this discussion, here it is:

I used to teach English as a Second Language (ESL), and had the very good fortune to have many smart and intellectually minded students. We had countless conversations about world events, the countries they came from, etc. I did most of the learning in that class. I would even go as far as to say that most of what I think I know about the world outside the US came from those conversations. (I have dozens of stories a lot like this one.)

This was all right in the middle of the war in Bosnia (but before we got involved). In fact, I had several students from there, several from Eastern Europe, and a few from the Middle East. Debate had already begun in the US as whether we should get involved. All of my students, including the ones from Bosnia, were sure that the US would NOT get involved. One student from Syria, one of the teacher’s assistants, was pretty adamant about it – “Why would you? You have nothing to gain.”

I had developed a lot of credibility with this group because I actually knew where their countries were, and even a little bit about their histories. (Yes, it is sad to say that they were truly shocked that an American knew where Odessa was, as an example.) So it got their attention when I told them to not be so sure – the US may well get involved.

“Why?”, they asked. “To stop the killing”, I answered. The Syrian scoffed (loudly), and everyone was shaking their heads in disbelief, and a few were laughing. But, like I said, I had developed a lot of credibility with them by this point and they were all fascinated and wanted to know more about my thoughts. Keep in mind that all of these people had only been in the US for a few weeks or months, and I had language barriers to deal with, but I did my best to explain to them that this is the way Americans are. If we believed that genocide was, in fact, occurring in Europe (did my best to explain why that mattered), and that there was something we could do about, that we may well go to war to stop it.

Apparently I did a pretty good job because even the Syrian seemed convinced that this may be so. I could see the wheels turning in their heads as they re-evaluated their thoughts. Then the Syrian, who by the way was an extremely smart young man (he was in college and intended to go to med school), said something that I will never forget.

He said, “Well, then you have a bigger problem on your hands.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked, “What do you mean?” “No one will ever believe it. No one will ever believe you would go to war for such a reason. So if you do it (go to war), they’re going to come up with their own reasons as to why you really did it. This would be terrible for the United States.”

So yes, going to war, even for truly altruistic reasons, can do great damage to the reputation of the US.

Ah well. As Mencken, or maybe not him, said, War is God's way of teaching Americans geography...

It fits...

Powerline has this quote, from a new book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.

Some have called it the CIA's greatest covert operation of all time.
It involved deep penetration of a hostile regime by planting a network of agents at key crossroads of power, where they could steal secrets and steer policy by planting disinformation, cooking intelligence, provocation, and outright lies.

It involved sophisticated political sabotage operations, aimed at making regime leaders doubt their own judgment and question the support of their subordinates.

It involved the financing, training, and equipping of effective opposition forces, who could challenge the regime openly and through covert operations.

The scope was breathtaking, say insiders who had personal knowledge of the CIA effort. All the skills learned by the U.S. intelligence community during the fifty years of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union were in play, from active measures aimed at planting disinformation through cutouts and an eager media, to maskirovka--strategic deception.

It was war--but an intelligence war, played behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. Its goal was nothing less than to topple the regime in power, by discrediting its rulers.

Many Americans believe this was the CIA's goal during the 1990s, when the Agency had "boots on the ground" in northern Iraq, working with Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein. Most patriotic Americans probably hope that the CIA today has such an operation to overthrow the mullahs in Tehran, or North Korean dictator Kim John Il.

But the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation was none of them.

It was America's 43rd President, George W. Bush....

I'd say it seems to fit the facts we've observed over the last 6 years. Remember this quote, by Michael Ledeen?

...ML: Before we get into the details, I've got a quickie for you. I was reading a recent interview with Charles McCarry, the ex-spook who writes terrific books, and he said something quite extraordinary.

JJA: To wit?

ML: He said: "I never met a stupid person in the agency. Or an assassin. Or a Republican... They were, at least in the operations side where I was...wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat. Because they were the absolute opposite, in their own politics."...

Fascinatin', that befuddlement! The left hates the CIA for the same reason that it hates the US military. Because their very existence presumes that we have a country worth fighting for. They do not hate the State Department, because it is presumed to share the view of nihilists that there is nothing worth fighting for, that there is no "good vs evil."

Sweet Week

I love it every year. Fleet Week! At any odd moment you might hear a growl that slowly builds to a roar, and then an F/A 18 or two goes ker-WHAMM over your head. Awesome. The Blue Angels.

Cinnamon Stillwell has a blogpost that expresses just what the Weidners feel...

San Francisco Peaceniks in a Panic Over Fleet Week

It's that time of year again and Fleet Week has descended upon the city of San Francisco. For those who, like myself, appreciate the unabashed demonstration of military prowess, not to mention the spectacular air shows of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, it is a time to relish. And, of course, an occasion for gloating about the matter at one's blog.

It helps that self-proclaimed socialist supervisor Chris Daly's third attempt to ban the Blue Angels, due, he claims, to safety concerns (never mind that there's a higher chance of being hit by a car in San Francisco than an Angels pilot crashing), was soundly defeated by his more commerce-minded colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. Ah, the smell of victory in the morning.

Getting to watch the Blue Angels practice throughout the week is another perk for patriots living in the vicinity. There's nothing quite like the beauty of jets flying silently in formation, that sonic boom as they pass overhead, or the thrill of a jet zooming past one's very window.

But for local liberals unaccustomed to such icky displays of militarism and residents annoyed that their daily lives of leisure are interrupted by those who, in reality, make those daily lives of leisure possible, Fleet Week is a time of terror.

I know of one such fellow who was in a virtual panic last weekend to, as he put it, "get out of town before the Blue Angels arrived!"....

"Fleet Week is a time of terror." Ha ha ha. All our fake-pacists can just crunch on it with their Granola. Every one of those frauds knows perfectly well that they are protected by the world's strongest military, and by cops with pistols on their belts. And they want it just that way, so they can play their infantile games in perfect safety, and rely on the grown-ups to gun down the criminals, while they pretend to be "non-violent.". Parasites and freeloaders. Liars.

Here are some pix I took from Fleet Week 2005.

Special morning...

Photograph ©2001 The Record (Bergen County, N.J.). Photo Credit: Thomas E. Franklin, Staff Photographer .

Charlene and I went to the 6:30 Mass this morning. We've been trying to do so once a week. Afterward she jumps on a bus for downtown, and I drive home. As I was driving back I passed a fire station, and saw the firefighters lined up, raising our nation's flag. I felt rather awed. I wish I'd had a camera. I hurried home and put out our flag. One of the many thoughts in my head is that America is not just a country, like other countries. It is an authoritative tradition, handed down to us from our forefathers and from God. America is an idea. (I wrote about that here.) "The rights of Englishmen are derived from God, not from king or Parliament, and would be secured by the study of history, law, and tradition." The rights of Englishmen are what we fought the Revolution for, and their origin is exceedingly ancient, and mysterious, and not something created merely by men. And I think America makes demands on us, analogous (not the same, but analogous) to the claim made on us by God. And, analogously, we resist that claim in a thousand squirrely ways. We invent heresies, to put it bluntly. Certain people suddenly discover they are pacifists or internationalists. Someone this morning mentioned a prayer-intention for the victims of the disaster on 9/11. Nuh uh. It was not a disaster, it was a murderous terror attack on our nation and on innocent fellow-citizens. And an attack on our land makes claims on us. It requires that we put our own concerns second and rally to the defense of our country, even at the risk of our lives, or the loss of elections. And, analogous to the other, greater sphere, many people answer non servum.

decline and undecline...

I liked this piece, The Decline and Fall of Declinism... I've been hearing all my adult life about how America is soon to be outstripped by this or that more organized and efficient (ie: more socialist) alternative. Remember MITI? Remember—this will date me—"We will bury you"? Ha ha.

..Under the heading “The end of a U.S.-centric world?” the PostGlobal section of The Washington Post website recently declared that “U.S. influence is in steep decline.” It was just the latest verse in a growing chorus of declinist doom-saying at home and abroad.

In 2004, Pat Buchanan lamented “the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.” In 2005, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee concluded that Hurricane Katrina exposed “a hollow superpower.” In 2007, Pierre Hassner of the Paris-based National Foundation for Political Science declared, “It will not be the New American Century.”

And the dirge goes on....

...But the declinists were wrong yesterday. And if their record—and America’s—are any indication, they are just as wrong today.

Any discussion of U.S. power has to begin with its enormous economy. At $13.13 trillion, the U.S. economy represents 20 percent of global output. It’s growing faster than Britain’s, Australia’s, Germany’s, Japan’s, Canada’s, even faster than the vaunted European Union.

In fact, even when Europe cobbles together its 25 economies under the EU banner, it still falls short of U.S. GDP—and will fall further behind as the century wears on. Gerard Baker of the Times of London notes that the U.S. economy will be twice the size of Europe’s by 2021.

On the other side of the world, some see China’s booming economy as a threat to U.S. economic primacy. However, as Baker observes, the U.S. is adding “twice as much in absolute terms to global output” as China. The immense gap in per capita income—$44,244 in the U.S. versus $2,069 in China—adds further perspective to the picture....

All you have to realize about those China-is-the-next-superpower screeds is that these things are not linear. The techniques that will get you from per capita $500 to $2,000 are not the same as those needed to get from $10,000 to $20,000, etc. To keep growing a country must learn a new game at every stage, and each one is harder....and....less amenable to centralized control or stimulation.

There's another thing that we all should be aware of, and that leftists don't want to know about...

...While the declinists routinely remind us that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 15 countries combined, they seldom note that the current defense budget accounts for barely four percent of GDP—a smaller percentage than the U.S. spent on defense at any time during the Cold War. In fact, defense outlays consumed as much as 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s, and 6 percent in the 1980s.

The diplomats who roam the corridors of the UN and the corporate chiefs who run the EU’s sprawling public-private conglomerates dare not say it aloud, but the American military does the dirty work to keep the global economy going—and growing. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” as Thomas Friedman observed in 1999...

Despite the crap you hear to the contrary, America provides by far the biggest and most important slice of the world's "foreign aid." Our 12 Carrier Strike Groups, and all the rest of our peerless military, are what make growth and prosperity possible for China and everybody else.

The world's economy runs on trade, to an extent far beyond that of any other time in history. In the past, foreign trade was, for most countries, just frosting on the cake. 5% or 10%. Not any more. If someone mined China's ports now, their whole economy would go "poof!" and vanish.

We donate the cost of world peace. And world peace is exactly what we have, by the standards of those past time when nations went to war with each other. That doesn't happen any more; the "wars" we have now are internal conflicts and genocides within failed states. And the involvement of the US and her Anglosphere allies is in the nature of cops breaking up gang wars. The "War on Terror" has claimed less than 4,000 American lives. [Insert boiler-plate statement yes-every-death-is-a-tragedy blah blah blah.] In a REAL WAR you can lose that many in a single DAY.

And when (rarely now) nations actually do threaten war, as India and Pakistan were doing a few years ago, we lean on them. In fact, we don't allow them to go to war. We are the grown-ups, they are the teen-agers, and we are teaching them how we expect them to behave.

It's just the way America is...

Some interesting poll results...

Altruism, the Global Interest, and the National Interest...

....A large majority of Americans feel that US foreign policy should at times serve altruistic purposes independent of US national interests. Americans also feel that US foreign policy should be oriented to the global interest not just the national interest and are highly responsive to arguments that serving the global interest ultimately serves the national interest. Americans show substantial concern for global conditions in a wide range of areas.

It is often assumed that most Americans feel US foreign policy should be tied closely to the national interest, narrowly defined, and are opposed to the idea of making sacrifices based on altruistic purposes. Polling data reveal quite a different picture. In numerous cases Americans show support for altruism in US foreign policy independent of any impact it might have on US interests.

In January 2000 Beldon and Russonello asked respondents to rate a list of reasons "for the US to be active in world affairs" on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning "it is not at all an important reason" and 10 meaning "it is an extremely important reason to you personally." Altruistic reasons scored quite well.[1]....(Thanks to Orrin).

This is pleasant to me, because I despise utterly the "realist" school. I am, in Walter Russell Mead's indispensable classification, partly a Wilsonian. However, the trouble with an idealistic approach to foreign policy is that it tends towards soft-mindedness. Towards the sort of thinking that assumes that "soft power" and negotiations will solve all problems. (Which makes the name very appropriate, since few human beings have exemplified the debacles that result from mushy idealism like Woodrow Wilson.)

Unmodified Wilsonianism is catastrophic folly, and the sort of thing that got us into the present war. What's required, for the good of the world, is a combination of Wilsonian and Jacksonian foreign policy. What's needed, if we want peace, is to be willing to BOTH crush the forces of evil with stunning force, AND reach out to the needy (including the defeated enemy) with idealism and generosity.

Seismic shift?

Dean Barnett has a great article in Weekly Standard, The 9/11 Generation...

....Regardless of their backgrounds, the soldiers I spoke with had a similar matter-of-fact style. Not only did all of them bristle at the notion of being labeled victims, they bristled at the idea of being labeled heroes. To a man, they were doing what they saw as their duty. Their self-assessments lacked the sense of superiority that politicians of a certain age who once served in the military often display. The soldiers I spoke with also refused to make disparaging comparisons between themselves and their generational cohorts who have taken a different path.

But that doesn't mean the soldiers were unaware of the importance of their undertaking. About a month ago, I attended the commissioning of a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The day before his commissioning, he had graduated from Harvard. He didn't come from a military family, and it wasn't financial hardship that drove him into the Armed Forces. Don't tell John Kerry, but he studied hard in college. After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

A few weeks after his commissioning, the lieutenant sent me an email that read in part:

I remember when I was down at Quantico two summers ago for the first half of Officer Candidates School. The second to last day I was down there--"Family Day," incidentally--was the 7/7 bombings. The staff pulled us over and told us the news and then said that's basically why they're so hard on us down there: We're at war and will be for a long time, and the mothers of recruits at MCRD and at Parris Island right now are going to be depending on us one day to get their sons and daughters home alive.

When I was in England last week, I talked to an officer in the Royal Navy who had just received his Ph.D. He was saying he thought the larger war would last 20-30 years; I've always thought a generation--mine in particular. Our highest calling: To defend our way of life and Western Civilization; fight for the freedom of others; protect our friends, family, and country; and give hope to a people long without it.

It is surely a measure of how far we've come as a society from the dark days of the 1960s that things like military service and duty and sacrifice are now celebrated. Just because Washington and Hollywood haven't noticed this generational shift doesn't mean it hasn't occurred. It has, and it's seismic....

Oh, let it be so, let it be so. Sometimes things like this make me feel hopeful, and then other times I think we are trapped in a sort of ratchet, and that even though there may be upswings, each one is lower than the one before. And to make things more confusing, the upswings are often reactions to the bad things that happen, and so the bad things are in some way good things! I probably won't know what's going on until the Judgement Day.

Dean's article is sub-titled: "Better than the Boomers." Let it be so, let it be so...

I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days... [link]

"God Save our American States"

I've posted these before, but not for a few years...

From a letter by Abigail Adams to John Adams (who was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress), July 21, 1776:

...Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the multitude into King's Street to hear the proclamation for independence read and proclaimed. Some Field pieces with the Train were brought there, the troops appeared under Arms and all the inhabitants assembled there (the small pox prevented many thousands from the country). When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona [balcony] of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was paid to every word.

As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyful. Mr Bowdoin then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independence. After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen...

And also from a letter, by John...

I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means....--John Adams

Long arm of the law...

It's not a war we're in, just cops 'n robbers. And Unca Sam's the cop on this world's beat. So sleep safe, enjoy your Fourth of July, support our troops and our allies, and thank God for America...

Update: A reader e-mails that the photographer’s name was almost certainly U.S. Army Sgt. Greg Heath / 4th Public Affairs Detachment. He sent another photo of the same scene, which I may post soon...

Demographics is destiny, as Mark Steyn put it...

Fascinatin' stuff, by Robert M. Dunn in TCS...

....There has been a stunning decline in the fertility rate in Mexico, which means that, in a few years there will not be many teenagers in Mexico looking for work in the United States or anywhere else. If this trend in the fertility rate continues, Mexico will resemble Japan and Italy - rapidly aging populations with too few young workers to support the economy.

According to the World Bank's 2007 Annual Development Indicators, in 1990 Mexico had a fertility rate of 3.3 children per female, but by 2005, that number had fallen by 36 percent to 2.1, which is the Zero Population Growth rate. That is an enormous decline in the number of Mexican infants per female. The large number of women currently in their reproductive years means that there are still quite a few babies, but as this group ages, the number of infants will decline sharply. If this trend toward fewer children per female continues, there being no apparent reason for it to cease, the number of young people in the Mexican population will decline significantly just when the number of elderly is rising. As labor markets in Mexico tighten and wage rates rise, far fewer Mexican youngsters will be interested in coming to the United States. Since our baby boomers will be retiring at the same time, we could face a severe labor shortage.

There have been significant declines in fertility rates across Latin America, but Mexico's has been unusually sharp. In El Salvador, another country from which immigrants come, a 3.7 rate in 1990 became 2.5 by 2005. Guatemala is now at 4.3, but that is far lower than it was in 1990. Jamaica, another source of illegal U. S. immigrants, has fallen from 2.9 to 2.4 over the same period. Chile and Costa Rica, at 2.0, are actually slightly below a replacement rate. Trinidad and Tobago, at 1.6, is well below ZPG. For all of Latin American and the Caribbean, a rate of 3.2 in 1990 fell to 2.4 in 2005, a decline of 25 percent. This means less pressure on the United States from illegal immigrants from the entire area, not just from Mexico. A powerful demographic transition is well underway, and soon many of these countries may be worried about there being too few babies rather than too many. We may miss this labor, and wonder how we will replace it....

So who's going to pick the strawberries? Robotics might be a good long-term investment. It's a funny future we may be facing, with perhaps a "guest worker" program that pays people to come here, with competition for scarce resources from Mexico!

And if you wonder why "liberals" are so angry and defensive and brittle these days, you should realize that their world-view is still based ideas that no longer reflect reality. Including the idea that exploding populations are "destroying the earth," and that we should be having fewer children, and a smaller "ecological footprint," and similar anti-human rubbish....

Liberals (in the contemporary sense, not the classical) today are like people with a terminal illness who are in deep denial. But they feel these odd twinges and pains, which are getting harder and harder to ignore...

Flag Day

Jannette Elms holds a U.S. flag to show support for local service members during a Veterans Day parade in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sunday.
From Army Times Frontline Photos, about 10-15-05
Dave Scherbenco / The Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) / AP Photo

Clear thought...

Mike Plaiss e-mailed to tell me of a WSJ article, but only available to subscribers: "There is one today (not on-line) called My Only Son by Leon de Winter that could have simply been lifted off your blog. If you don't regularly get the WSJ make sure to pick one up today. You'll want to read this."

Well, as they say, "Information wants to be free." Several bloggers have reprinted the piece. You can find it here. I'll quote part of it...

Leon de Winter: My Only Son

During the past four years, 170,000 Americans have died in traffic accidents. For young people, traveling in a car is the leading cause of death. Over the same period, 3,500 Americans were killed in Iraq in a war against radical Islam. These statistics haven’t been properly contrasted.

Mobility is a must in Western society. It’s a prerequisite for affluence and it fosters a sense of freedom. No politician could ban cars or severely limit their use. Transportation is the nation’s lifeblood. Its inherent risks are inescapable for an open society.

So Americans manage to deal with the fact that tens of thousands of people will be killed each year on the roadways. But when it comes to the war against Islamic fascism, the nation may soon decide that 3,500 deaths over four years is too much. This for a great nation of 300 million inhabitants.

If that is the case, then the United States will have begun to undermine the moral foundations spelled out in its own Declaration of Independence. If America is unable to carry out a war of its own choosing in defense of liberty because the cost of 3,500 lives is unacceptable, then it will soon be unable to maintain its position and power in the world...

...How did we get to this point?

Western civilization’s pursuit of affluence, secularization and sexual revolution have all sapped its willingness to make sacrifices. Today’s parents often have no more than two children, some may have only one son. His life is so precious that it has come to seem unbearable for him to be killed in battle. In his study “Sons and World Power,” German genocide expert Gunnar Heinsohn investigates family size in various societies in relation to the frequency of violent conflict since 1500 A.D. His conclusion is disturbingly simple: The presence of large numbers of young men in nations that have experienced population explosions—all searching for respect, work, sex and meaning—tend to turn into violent countries and become involved in wars. He cites, as an example, the Palestinian territories, where many families have as many as four sons.

Most countries in which Islamofascism has taken root have experienced population explosions. Huge numbers of young men are searching in vain for a respectable future. They legitimize their frustration with a radical ideology that channels their dissatisfaction and finds roots in the ancient religious traditions of Islam.

Mr. Heinsohn’s explanation shows the extreme pacifism of today’s Europe to be more than a response to the horrific experiences of World War II. He sees Europe’s low birthrate as the basis for the remarkable period of peace Europe has nurtured since 1945. Europe’s sons have become too precious for war.

This same phenomenon is also happening in America. Large families are becoming scarce. As a result, the sacrifice of a second or third son to a violent death, a possibility since the dawn of civilization, is not possible because those sons simply aren’t there....

I'm not sure if de Winter is correct in his reason why we may be unwilling to endure the casualties of the War on Terror. But he's thinking clearly, which sure can't be said for most Americans. One of the ways people are muddled is that they don't even realize that, while we have averaged 620 combat deaths a year since 9/11, the normal number of non-combat deaths in our military is about 700 or 800 per year! (Accidents, disease, suicide, homicide, etc.) That's the price we pay just to have a peace-time military.

Almost everything our nation does costs lives in some way or another. something I've never seen mentioned by the people who shed fake-tears and claim that 3,500 deaths is "unendurable."

"As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts."

A D-Day Prayer, broadcast by President Franklin D Roosevelt...

My Fellow Americans:

Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

"For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home..."

So it was then, so it is now. Our soldiers are today's "Samaritans," who succor those in need, while elitists pass on the other side of the road. The difference is that then all Americans recognized the basic Christian goodness of our troops and the rightness of their mission. Now our country is divided, divided into Americans and poisonous nihilistic reptiles who miss no opportunity to slander our brave soldiers, and to suggest that their deeds are meaningless, or even evil.

A bit more on Memorial Day...

Penraker, good as always...

The media is trying to turn Memorial Day into Grieving Day.

It much more suits their downward look on life.

Last night I watched part of the National Memorial Day Concert from Washington, D.C. There was a long speech by two actors, reading excerpts from letters from soldiers. It ended with the woman crying.

Today the Post has an article about grieving parents.

Memorial day is not Grieving Day. It is a thankful remembrance of how great these guys were, not how pathetic their deaths were, and how bad we feel now that they are gone. It is not about us, it is about them, and the magnificence of their sacrifice.

Pathos is the highest form of human existence in the media's eyes. If it cries, it flies. If it bleeds it leads. If it inspires, it is forgotten.

The day should be inspirational, not a downer. There has been a subtle shift in the society. We love grieving. This is not healthy. Not healthy at all.

I don't watch TV, but I bet I can guess what "Grieving Day" lacks, that Memorial Day has. MEANING. We honor our dead heroes on Memorial Day, and solemnly affirm that their deaths had meaning, that they served a high and worthy purpose, that they helped to preserve our nation and constitution, a noble experiment that has transformed the earth for the better.

But the Leftizoids who are the press, and who infect all our public institutions, do not believe any of those things. They wish to portray our wars as pointless tragedies.

They did the same thing with 9/11, morphing it into a "tragedy," requiring grieving and "closure." (I think anyone who henceforth uses the word "closure" should be flogged.) Something like an earthquake or tsunami. Why? Because those things have no meaning. Whereas a brutal unprovoked attack on a great and good and peaceful nation does have meaning. Tons of it. And it demands a response. It demands we take its meaning seriously. And if you are a nihilist, like our fake-"Democrats" and fake Quakers and fake anti-war activists, that's existential trouble that must be avoided at all costs.

Memorial Day is NOT a time to grieve. It is a time for hearts to swell with pride and wonder at how lucky we are that heroes would give their all to preserve our way of life for future generations...

Because of their sacrifice...

From the President's Radio Address:

...On Memorial Day, our Nation honors Sergeant Christoff's final request. We pray for our men and women serving in harm's way. We pray for their safe return. And we pray for their families and loved ones, who also serve our country with their support and sacrifice.

On Memorial Day, we rededicate ourselves to freedom's cause. In Iraq and Afghanistan, millions have shown their desire to be free. We are determined to help them secure their liberty. Our troops are helping them build democracies that respect the rights of their people, uphold the rule of law, and fight extremists alongside America in the war on terror. With the valor and determination of our men and women in uniform, I am confident that we will succeed and leave a world that is safer and more peaceful for our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day, we also pay tribute to Americans from every generation who have given their lives for our freedom. From Valley Forge to Vietnam, from Kuwait to Kandahar, from Berlin to Baghdad, brave men and women have given up their own futures so that others might have a future of freedom. Because of their sacrifice, millions here and around the world enjoy the blessings of liberty. And wherever these patriots rest, we offer them the respect and gratitude of our Nation.

Memorial Day, 2007. "And the dead must be forgot"

From a Memorial Day address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (who was himself thrice wounded in the Civil War) The Soldier's Faith, May 30th, 1895

...As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

Three years ago died the old colonel of my regiment, the Twentieth Massachusetts. He gave the regiment its soul. No man could falter who heard his "Forward, Twentieth!" I went to his funeral. From a side door of the church a body of little choir-boys came in like a flight of careless doves. At the same time the doors opened at the front, and up the main aisle advanced his coffin, followed by the few grey heads who stood for the men of the Twentieth, the rank and file whom he had loved, and whom he led for the last time. The church was empty. No one remembered the old man whom we were burying, no one save those next to him, and us. And I said to myself, The Twentieth has shrunk to a skeleton, a ghost, a memory, a forgotten name which we other old men alone keep in our hearts. And then I thought: It is right. It is as the colonel would have it. This also is part of the soldier's faith: Having known great things, to be content with silence. Just then there fell into my hands a little song sung by a warlike people on the Danube, which seemed to me fit for a soldier's last word, another song of the sword, but a song of the sword in its scabbard, a song of oblivion and peace.

A soldier has been buried on the battlefield.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep dark grave:
"Did the banner flutter then?"
"Not so, my hero," the wind replied.
"The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
and the soldier asks once more:
"Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love--and remember me?"
"Not so, my hero," the lovers say,
"We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot."
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
"I am content."

Tattoo removal, a growth industry...

Andrea linked to a thoughtful blogger, Maclin Horton. A couple of small things I liked...

I Enjoy Being Right
I've been predicting for a while now that the tattoo fashion would lead to a profitable trade in tattoo removal.

My parents had a collection of cartoons from Punch that gave me many hours of pleasure in my youth. I think it was there that I saw one which has come to mind often since the fad began: a tattoo artist drawing something huge on a man's back and remarking "Of course it's the fellows who can take them off who make the real money." [Link]

And this is a thought I have often had myself...

One of my perpetual complaints is the treatment of the 1950s in popular lore, in journalism and entertainment. The way some of these people talk, you’d think they really do not understand that Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver were sitcoms, not documentaries, the silly pap of their time just as Desperate Housewives is of ours. Or even that physical reality was very much the same then as now: that colors, for instance, existed, and that human beings were physically the same creatures we are now, although they dressed differently. The usual view is that life was gray, repressed and miserable from roughly 1945 until 1964, when, as Philip Larkin tells us, sex was invented....

In "popular history," as in so much else, everything is adjusted to fit the perspective of us Baby Boomers. It's really stupid. All the "60's" fads were invented in the 50's or earlier, and just taken up into mass conformity in the sixties. And passed along into mass culture in the 70's, with hideous destructive effects...

Speaking of tattoo removal, there's a great SF book on fads, Bellwether, by Connie Willis. Very funny.

"You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you..."

To me, one of the chief evils of our time is that most people have come to expect a world of comfort and entertainment. A world where there's no need to make difficult choices, and above all, no need to seek Truth, and fight for it. This editorial from the NY Sun is a useful corrective. It tells of an incident in our Civil War, when the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, went to Washington to plead for Illinois to be spared its draft contingent...(Thanks to PowerLine)

...."The War Department's blue-uniformed sentries came rigidly to attention as the president appeared," Mr. Wendt writes. Lincoln, he says, gave them a friendly "at ease" and led his visitors through the "chattering telegraph operations room," where he knew everyone by name, to Stanton's "vast cave of maps and charts," where Stanton glowered beneath dark oil paintings of Generals Knox and Dearborn. Stanton was none too pleased to see the same Chicagoans whom he'd shooed out of his office earlier in the day return with his boss. Medill made a game effort, reading from his own newspaper about how no other congressional district had put so many men into the war.

For months, Mr. Wendt explains, the Tribune had "acknowledged to its readers that after four years of the most brutal fighting known to man, even greater sacrifices would be required. The armies were devouring men on a scale not known before in military history, as new weapons outmarched generals' old tactics." Draft riots ensued, particularly in New York. The Tribune required an entire supplemental page, Mr. Wendt notes, just to list Illinois casualties among the more than 13,000 suffered by the Union at Shiloh.

When Medill finished his plea, Stanton nodded to his provost marshal, General Fry, who "read the sanguinary statistics of four years of fighting in a loud, sonorous voice," while Lincoln listened with his head bowed. Stanton then rejected the plea, saying, as Mr. Wendt paraphrases it, that there could be no city nor section nor state asking for special favor, not even Illinois. Medill left the meeting pledging to remain silent about it until the war ended. It would be 30 years before he could bring himself to write the account that Mr. Wendt quotes at some length.

"I shall never forget," Medill said of Lincoln, "how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face. ‘Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. … Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. … Go home, and raise your 6,000 extra men."

Then, in Medill's own account, Lincoln turned on the great editor. "‘And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any [other] paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.'" Wrote Medill: "I couldn't say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn't have an answer. …"

Boom, and it's all gone...

Tim Blair links to blogger Joni, in the town of Greensburg, Kansas, destroyed by a tornado...

This is what my hometown of Greensburg, Kansas, used to look like. It's a small, rural town in Southwest Kansas. Last night, a tornado swept through the town, killing at least 7 people, and destroying most of the town. (News reports are saying 90% of the town was destroyed or damaged.) Every church in town, including the one my parents and my sisters' family attend, was either severely damaged or destroyed. The roof of the small hospital collapsed. My family lives a few miles north of town, and none of them were injured. Three family members worked in Greensburg, and will be dealing with the devastation left behind. Thankfully, several relatives and friends are known to be safe. I'm sure more details will come out as time passes. Right now, they are evacuating the entire town (what's left of it), for people's safety, and to enable safety and rescue efforts to go forward.

Please pray for Greensburg, Kansas, my family, and the surrounding community. How do you rebuild an entire town?

The picture of the town as it was before was very affecting to me. I've been in that sort of country town many times. I've never lived in one; it's hard for me to imagine what growing up in a small town would be like.

But still, I can picture it. I said to myself, there will be a train line, with grain elevators beside it. The streets will be a grid, and there will be one called "Main Street." And in one direction all the streets will be named after trees. Well, you can look on Google Maps, and there they are! And there are streets named after presidents, and after states. I guessed there might be a "Euclid Avenue," but I don't see one...

The fast-growing Southern California suburb I grew up in had a small agricultural town at it's center, like something preserved from an earlier age. It was in the process, in one sense,of being destroyed as thoroughly as if a tornado had hit, though many of the buildings were still there. There were housing tracts with one corner "notched," where an old farmhouse still stood, weathered, overgrown, with decorative trimwork that contrasted oddly with the 50's architecture all around it. And there were still many groves in my youth, citrus and avocado. And there were still old-timers around, and some barns, and funny little Caterpillar tractors that could disc an orange grove. The ground under the avocados was always covered in big crackly dry leaves, that would make a racket as you walked over them.

More pix here. Flabbergasting.

Not exactly heroic...

John at PowerLine has a good point about the Fred Thompson phenomenon...

...Second, the last five years have been a critical time in our nation's history. From 2002 to the present, men like George Bush, John McCain, and many others have been fighting a very difficult battle on behalf of our country. Not Fred Thompson: he preferred to leave the Senate to live the very sweet life of a minor television celebrity. There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it's not exactly heroic, either...

I really don't know anything about Mr Thompson, and since I don't watch TV I really don't even know what he looks like! But I do know that virtue isn't a matter of what you feel, or think, or believe. It only exists in what you DO. What you do with whatever resources you possess, whatever challenges you happen to be presented with. Most of us can't be among the heroes who hunt down terrorists. that's a job for the few. But the main front of the War on Terror is right here at home, where nihilists and appeasers wage ceaseless propaganda war against America, and against the whole idea that there's anything worth fighting for. And it would seem like Mr Thompson, as a respected celebrity, has been in a position to render important service to his country over the last five years... Your country, the best and greatest nation that has ever existed on earth, is under attack, and you fail to rush to her aid. What does that mean? What does that say about a person? .

Something for me to think about today...

From an essay by Daniel Larison, in New Pantagruel...

It has been one of the great, failed projects of conventional American conservatism to encourage the fiction that the Christian civilisation conservatives admire and the Enlightenment civilisation that destroyed it are part of a real continuity. For the purposes of this essay, I take it as a given that conservatism is, or at least ought to be, the persuasion and mentality that seeks good order and that in a Western society a conservative’s understanding of good order is unavoidably defined significantly and primarily by the Christian intellectual tradition in general and by the received teachings of the early Fathers of the Church in particular....

[....]

...However, this American conservatism was never entirely committed to rejecting the French Revolutionary model of society and its conception of humanity, at least not when similar ideas had already establish