Yeah, it is all about oil, but not about oil companies. There's a difference, and Rand Simberg explains it.

Is managed health care racist? This story seems to indicate it is.

Iraq war rehearsal exercise scheduled for December. Exercise Internal Look has never been held outside the US before, now it will be held in the Persian Gulf. US Central Command's headquarters has already moved to Qatar.

No longer science fiction? Can someone tell me when transplanting faces ever was science fiction?

England's experience of more gun control and rising crime is explained.

While England has not yet reached the American level of murders, it has already surpassed the United States in rates of robbery and burglary. Moreover, in recent years the murder rate in England has been going up under still more severe gun-control laws, while the murder rate in the United States has been going down as more and more states have allowed private citizens to carry concealed weapons and have begun locking up more criminals.

The State Department comes through! My teenage son is going to Honduras with my brother at the end of January. We sent in his application for a passport on November 20 and got the passport in the mail today. Nine days! That's super service. Think I'll write Colin and let him know the New Orleans passport bureau is really on the ball.

The pacifist fallacies. Wayne (no last name given) at The Gutless Pacifist has posted a link to my three-part series on ending Saddam's regime without war and invites discussion along the following lines:

A very quick (crude) summary of the steps include:

1. Electronic broadcast and distributing small AM radios to increase the penetration of this communication method
2. Training various Iraq elements in non-violent resistance techniques
3. Supply food and medical aid to those who start resisting the current regime.
4. Pay Iraq officer corps elements to defect

MY QUESTION: Is actively planning the subversion of an existing political regime non-pacifistic? Are some of the 4 items I listed acceptable and some not?

Adding to my previous discussions on the shortcomings of contemporary pacifism, it seems to me that pacifists today have generally set up false dichotomies - that the choices we can make are between violence and non-violence, or between peace and war, and that in so choosing we are really choosing between sin and sinlessness. That is, Christian pacifists seem to propose that using military force is sinful, while refraining therefrom is sinless.

But none of us collectively or individually have such stark choices. In the context of the war, violence exists already. It is impossible to choose non-violence; our only choice is what type and amount of violence we shall use. And even if we had refrained from using violence against those who attacked us, we would not have gained peace. The violence against us would have only intensified.

Pacifists seem either unable to comprehend that fact or say it doesn't matter. On the one hand, many believe that US policy has caused Islamist terrorists to attack us, and that if only change our foreign policy appropriately, peace will ensue. But this is nonsense, of course, as our enemies' own words and deeds prove. On the other hand, some pacifists recognize that Islamist terrorists will continue to attack us but claim that actively to resist is sinful. Hence, it is better to be victimized by Islamist violence than to sin by fighting back.

However, the Islamists do not kill those only those who hold such views, being wholly indiscriminate in whom they kill. An individual may decide on his own not to resist, but he has no right to demand that others do likewise, nor any reason to expect that they will. So the choice not to resist can only be an individual one. Pacifism is by definition an individual choice, not a social virtue.

Even as an individual choice it is based on a fallacy: that in being personally pacific, one can be "non-violent." But this is impossible. Christian philosopher-ethicist Jacques Ellul in writing about violence observed:

Violence is to be found everywhere and at all times, even where people pretend that it does not exist. . . every state is founded on violence and cannot maintain itself save by and through violence. . . . Everywhere we turn we find society riddled with violence. Violence is its natural condition, as Thomas Hobbes saw clearly.

Ellul disagrees with the classic distinction between violence and force: it's lawyers who have invented the idea that when the state uses coercion, even brutally, it is exercising "force" and that only individuals or nongovernmental groups use violence. All states are established by violence. A government stays in power by violence or its threat and the threat is meaningless unless it can be and is employed.

The fact is that society depends on violence or its threat simply to exist. That's why there are police departments in every city. But there is no moral difference between the homeowner who protects his life or property with a gun and one who does not but summons a police officer. The police use violence or its threat to protect the law-abiding. The unarmed homeowner has merely "contracted out" his use of violence.

If using violence is sinful, the blunt reality is that there are no sin-free choices. We should not imagine that the choices we have in the terror war (say, in dealing with Saddam's regime) are between peace or war, violence or non-violence, or sin and sinlessness. There are only choices about the length and intensity of the war, the kinds and relative lethality of the violence - and among varieties of sin. if attacking Iraq would be sinful, so would not attacking Iraq. So would everything in between. And everything we are doing now, because they all alike are violent.

The fundamental fallacy of pacifism is that it holds peace to be the highest virtue and the ultimate aspiration of religious righteousness. There is no doubt that peace ranks extremely high as the aspiration of human society attempting to live as the Kingdom of God. But is it the ultimate virtue, the very highest one?

The ultimate godly goal of human society is justice. Peace follows from justice. In the ethical traditions of the Jews and Christians, justice includes punishment of wrongdoers but is primarily an ordering of society in which wrongdoings do not occur. Peace, therefore, follows from justice rather than causes it. As the bumper sticker goes, "If you want peace, work for justice."

But justice is definitionally social (the term, "social justice" is redundant), while pacifism is definitionally individual. Hence, pacifism is finally self-defeating. Pacifism can never obtain a peaceful society because pacifism can never first attain a just ordering of society.

To resist evil, not merely protest it, is an ethical imperative of Christian discipleship. The example of Christ shows that he did just that. The question, then, is not whether Christians are to contend against evil, but only by what means.

So the issue is not whether one can remain spiritually or religiously pure; we are already polluted because the entire social order is founded and maintained by violence. The issue really is which sins we shall commit, as German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized when confronting the evils of Nazism. He reluctantly chose to become involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler because he was convinced the it would serve a good greater than the evil of murder the plot would entail. But Bonhoeffer knew the sinfulness of what he was getting into. He wrote about the need in this instance to "Sin boldly, and trust in God's grace all the more."

Thankfully, few persons face the choice actively to participate in killing. We are instead born into world systems of government and politics that enable us to participate in war with little effort on indeed reflection on our part. Certainly we can imagine a better state of affairs, and the Bible offers vivid descriptions of what such a world might be like. But short of the eschaton, the basic state of human affairs will continue to be, sadly, the norm.

Hence, said liberation theologian James Cone, for Christians opposing evil the choice is not between violence and non-violence because violence is already present. The Christian must decide whether violence to overcome the evil is a greater evil than the violence of the evil itself. Unfortunately, Cone says, there are no absolute rules to decide the answer with certainty. Each case must be decided on its own merits.

Because of the power of state militaries to wreak great destruction, Christian thought has long treated the question of using military force as a unique category of the use of force, giving rise to the development of Just War theory. Many Christians claim that there cannot, by definition, be a truly just war. I have a certain sympathy with this view, as war can never he held to be a positive good in itself. Yet Just War theory has a bit of a PR problem because of its name. War is not the point, justice is. We hold that death and destruction can never be a just aim of war. A more just peace, obtainable by no other means, is the only justification for war. Might then we think of the problem as that of Just Peace, rather than Just War?

Quote of the day:
"Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. Under sufficient stress: starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy, the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up." Winston Churchill

"We love America. Go away al Qaeda," was what Kenyans yelled at Arabs near the suicide-bombed Paradise hotel in Mombasa.

The victims were nine Kenyans, some of whom were performing a traditional dance in front of the hotel for tourists, two Israeli brothers -- Dvir Anter, 13, and Noy Anter, 12 -- from a Jewish settlement on the West Bank called Ariel, and an Israeli man, police and Red Cross workers said.

"There was a terrible explosion. Then there were children looking for parents and parents looking for children. There was blood everywhere," said Sulami, who sat in a wheelchair with two cell phones on his lap, fielding calls from Israel. "This was our place, we felt secure in Mombasa. We have lost everything." . . .

Kenyans in the village this evening said the carnage would deliver a devastating blow to their already weak economy. It is unfair, they complained, that innocent Kenyans would again have to die for causes they had nothing to do with. Then they started shouting against Arabs, some of whom have settled here and own stores in the city: "We love America," they yelled. "Go away al Qaeda."

There's more. The article says that Islamic Internet chat rooms had entries warning of the Kenya attack, "according to Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a London-based bin Laden sympathizer." Charles Johnson provides the text of one of the messages:

Today, at 6:20 hours, there will be a surprise program, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen over our Qatari channel. Anyone who knows what I mean must tell no one so as to keep the surprise whose content everyone will love. Only God knows what I mean. The program forced me to write these lines at great speed and I ask God to forgive me and reserve Paradise and not Hell for me. The zero hour has come.

Nowhere else to run to

I am thankful I have nowhere to run to. It will soon be time to head off to family time for Thanksgiving. In commenting on this post, Andrew X wrote,

A man born in Russia wrote, "I ran from Russia to France to escape the communists. I ran from France to Cuba to escape the Nazis. I ran from Cuba to America to escape the communists again. And now that I am in America, I know that I will never run again".

It was his final statement that sticks with me. He did NOT say, "because a America is free and the land of milk and honey, etc".

What he said was, "Now that I am in America, I know that I will never run again . . . because if America falls, there will be nowhere left on earth to run to".

And that is why America must never fall, whatever it takes.

I invite everyone to read my essay about the American heritage of Mather, Franklin, and Lincoln.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

That Lincoln mentioned the other nations was not merely incidental. He understood what was at stake in America, the only nation, it is said, founded upon an idea. In history's ongoing struggle between freedom and tyranny, Lincoln believed that America was humanity's "last best hope," not as the world's economic or military superpower, but as the best example of what one nation, under God, with all its limitations, can be: a shining city on a hill, indeed.

If you think this is appropriate for 5-year-olds, you're sick. Actually, I don't how this "toy" is apprpriate for anyone. I suppose that next year Penney's will sell toy suicide-bombing belts.

Update: John Jenkins emailed me to say that the "Forward Command Post" toy linked to above is bogus; the link to is the item's protest page at antiwar.com. says John:

I just wanted to . . . mention something about that ?toy? that you linked to. From your post it appears that you are taking it serioulsy (and I could be reading you wrong) but that item is fake and there is no such toy. It?s a poor attempt at satire by antiwar.com, itself a poor attempt to sell an irrational, pacifist?s position.

So I Googled "Penney's "forward command post" " and found that Penney's online catalog has it listed. I also went to the company's web site's index page and used its search feature for the item, and got the same page. So this item is actually for sale by Penney's.

Phony War redux. William Safire says that Phony War II has been going on versus Iraq for a year.

What if the present period drags on and on? What if U.N. inspectors are manipulated and bamboozled by an Iraqi regime that was able to veto the tough-minded inspector Rolf Ekeus and get its preference, the see-no-evil Hans Blix? All this avid media attention on "after Saddam" would soon dissipate. Tyranny would then bob and weave and survive.

At the end of Phony War I, Hitler emerged stronger than ever. Phony War II is now a year old, and time is on Saddam's side.

On the other hand, I think that Phony War II is not a year old, it started last April.

A new blog for you to review. I know how hard it is for new bloggers to break in, so give Paladin's Pad a look. This is its first week.

The say the IRS cannot correctly answer income tax questions because the tax codes are so complex. My question is: How do they know whether the IRS's answers are correct or not? Who can tell?

An incredibly perceptive column by a high school sophomore is found here.

The Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, and the Terror War all get wrapped up very nicely by Rand Simberg who explains why this war is one we have to win, and he has a compelling vision for new New Worlds, since this one is already spoken for.

If the last bastions of freedom on earth were to fall, where would the oppressed of the future go? . . .

. . . many, whether to worship without hindrance in the manner that they choose, or simply to live their lives and seek their fortunes on a new frontier, will be happy to construct new nations and communities off world. Space may be to the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries what the Americas were to the previous four, and as far as we know, this time, there are no natives to displace. Instead, it will allow a thousand diverse societies to bloom, with no need, at least from a land or resources standpoint, to covet others' territory.

Unfortunately though, until we can rid man of the need to bend others to his own beliefs, conflict will probably remain, even in the face of vast material wealth.

The modernization of Islam is what Salman Rushdie urges, also in the New York Times today.

The Islamic world today is being held prisoner, not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open.

A letter from President Bush to the leaders of the Muslim world is printed in today's New York Times. It's really a column by Tom Friedman that says some things that need to be said. But more importantly, they need to be heard and taken to heart by Muslim religious and political leaders.

You say all this is happening because we support Israel. I know we need to do more to bring peace, but I don't think that nurse was shot, or that Bali bomb was made "holy," because we support Israel. I think it has to do with the rise within your midst of a deeply intolerant strain of Islam that is not simply a reaction to Israel, but is a response to your failing states, squandered oil wealth, broken ideologies (Nasserism) and generations of autocracy and illiteracy. Armed and angry, this harsh fundamentalism now seems to totally intimidate Muslim moderates.

Read all of it, it's really one of Friedman's best.

"A lethally foolish little man named Hans Blix" has got Tony Blankley plenty worried, and should have the rest of us just as worried.

It's not that the milktoast chief U.N. weapons inspector is not a premier member of the world's diplomatic corps - it's that he is. There is nothing wrong with Mr. Blix that isn't also wrong with the entire diplomatic instinct today ? at the beginning of year two in the Age of Terror. . . .

Even the New York Times reports that, of course, we can't expect Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors to actually find the weapons. But they may find evidence of Saddam's breach of U.N. resolutions. Meanwhile, Mr. Blix says he doesn't want to confront Saddam or search aggressively (what he calls an American trait). He admits that it is very hard for him and his team even to assemble and bring into action 35 Jeeps and 100 inspectors. He is bemused. He is patient. He knows his limits. What's a 74-year-old Swedish diplomat to do?

There are good reasons that sober observers of the inspection routines are skeptical that this team, headed by Blix, will be effective.

War against the infidels is what scholar Paul Marshall says al Qaeda and its allies are perpetrating (linked via Paladin's Pad). Our Islamist enemies are indeed waging a religious war and we need to recognize it as such. Now, blogosphere residents have know this for months and months, but Marshall indicates it is still a mystery to the oldline media:

Yet in fighting these enemies we ignore [their clearly stated] goals and filter their acts through a grid of western nostrums about alienation, economics, and the Middle East. We are told that al Qaeda's primary grievance is America, "the West," or freedom, or the plight of the Palestinians.

But though al Qaeda has made it crystal clear that, in its own view, it is attacking, inter alia, Christians, whom it calls "crusaders," as well as Jews (and Hindus and Buddhists), American analysts, inside and outside the government, insist that its agenda is not religiously based but is simply anti-American.

Thus when, in August, newly acquired bin Laden videotapes explicitly denounced "crusaders and Jews," CNN claimed that he was really targeting "the United States and the West," while CBS described his foes as "Americans," and the Associated Press asserted, without argument, that "Bin Laden has used the term 'crusaders' to refer to Westerners."

In September, after the latest massacre of Pakistani Christians, in Taxila, Pakistan's center of Christianity since the second century, the New York Times called it an assault on "western targets," and Reuters headlined "Pakistan attack seen aimed at West, not Christians." Meanwhile, the attackers themselves said, they "planned to kill Christians" and that they "killed the nonbelievers."

As I said in my 9/11 anniversary sermon,

The war we are in is literally a religious war, at least on one side. Our enemy is not Islam as a whole, because Islam as a whole does not oppose us. Our foes are violent radical Islamists, almost all of whom are Arabs. However, the majority of Muslims are neither Arabs nor radical. Our foes want to turn the entire world into what Afghanistan was before America liberated it this year.

And I also invite you to read or reread my September 2001 essay, Why We Were Attacked: Religious Motivations for Anti-Western Violence: "Thus, this struggle is not principally a clash between political systems. It is a clash of incompatible world views and irreconcilable ways of understanding the nature of reality itself."

The multiculturalist dilemma is that almost none of the rest of the world agrees with multiculturalism. And nowhere, says Steven Den Beste, is this more evident than in Islamic societies:

But multiculturalism faces a profound contradiction of having to defend the validity of Islam's own rejection of any concept of multiculturalism. Anywhere that Islam assumes political control, it ruthlessly stamps out all dissent, all diversity, and in particular any semblance of religious freedom, and does so using the harshest possible methods.

"Victory through telemarketing" is how Richard Heddleson characterized this Time magazine piece about psychological operations done by telephone with Iraqi officials:

One day in mid-September, the phone rang in the Washington office of a former U.S. government official with close ties to the Iraqi exile community. On the other end of the line was an old Iraqi friend, now living in Europe, whom the former official had met when he was stationed in the Middle East in the 1990s. There were some pleasantries; then the Iraqi cut to the chase. In the past two months, he said, four senior Iraqi security officials had contacted him and asked if he could help them establish lines of communication to the U.S. so that if war started, they could be on the winning side. The former official had contacted two old colleagues, now at the White House and the cia, and put them in touch with the Iraqi middleman.

Listen to government officials in Washington and London, chat with members of the alphabet soup of Iraqi exile groups, and you can come away thinking that such conversations are a dime a dozen. And they may be. In small ways and big ones, the U.S. and its allies are working like termites to undermine the rickety foundations of Saddam's rule. . . .

Exile groups insist that the traffic from within Iraq to their offices has reached a new high. An official with the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.) in London says, "We are getting a significantly higher level of contacts from regime insiders, including very senior ones in circles around Saddam." Sometimes, this official claims, such contacts have been in telephone calls direct from Iraq, something the I.N.C. hasn't seen before. Ghassan Atiyyah, a former Iraqi diplomat who edits the Iraq File, a monthly newsletter, in London, says his answering machine has taken messages from people inside Iraq telling him of the movement of weapons.

Lots of interesting stuff in this article.

The US Naval Academy has seized 100 computers the academy alleges were used by its students, or midshipmen, illegally to download copyrighted music files.

School officials confiscated the computers when students were in class on Thursday, an academy spokesman said yesterday. Students found to have downloaded copyrighted material could face penalties ranging from loss of leave time to court-martial and expulsion.

The academy was one of 2,300 colleges to receive a letter from entertainment industry organizations last month requesting help in cracking down on unauthorized file swapping. The record industry largely attributes the decline in CD sales over the last 18 months to digital piracy, and has brought increasing pressure on institutions in a position to identify and discipline the downloaders.

Antiwar = pro-violence? Photon Courier reports on violence comitted by the Left and concludes,

The rise of political violence is a serious threat to American democracy. Although not limited to the college campuses, the current wave of violence and intimidation has largely originated there. University presidents have often allowed leftist and "progressive" groups to take clearly illegal actions, such as stealing and destroying opposition newspapers, and to get away with it...indeed, they have sometimes acted as if their campuses were extraterritorial jurisdictions, in which the laws of the United States did not apply. And for years, campus "postmodern" philosphers have been arguing that speech is merely another form of action, and that free speech needs to be restricted in the service of "higher" goals. Once this philosophical position is accepted, then the use of actual violence to suppress differing viewpoints is arguably not very far away.

The Stars and Bars forever?

The Stars and Bars forever? I recommend Geitner Simmons' series about the Confederate flag in modern times.

I am a native-born Tennessean (Nashville native), now living one county south of Nashville in Franklin. AT the end of November 1864, the South's last hope for victory in the West was blasted asunder in Franklin. The Battle of Franklin was a catastrophe for the Confederacy. The CSA's Army of Tennessee suffered thousands of casualties in just five hours, more than either side had suffered in two days' battle at Shiloh. The Confederate dead was greater than the number of dead Grant had lost at the infamous battle of Cold Harbor. So decimated was the Army of Tennessee that two weeks later it was annihilated at the Battle of Nashville and the Civil War in the west was over.

I earlier wrote about my daughter's connection to that battle.

Like a lot of small Southern towns, Franklin has a statue of a Confederate soldier in the town square, mounted high on a pedestal. It was erected in 1899. Naturally, it faces south. A few years ago, a black man named Pat Steele filed a $4 million lawsuit against the city of Franklin to compel the statue's removal. While he was at it, he also asked for $44 million "for acts of discrimination against him."

"As a taxpayer, it is clearly unconstitutional for my tax dollars to maintain such a clear defecation on my soul and very being as an African American," he recently wrote in a letter of complaint to Franklin officials, several of whom he also lists in the handwritten lawsuit he filed without the help of an attorney.

The suit finally piddled away and died when it was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge. The statue is still there, of course, as it should be.

I see very few CSA flags round my neck of the woods. The flag of choice on people's car seems to be that of the mediocre Tennessee Titans, although with their unimpressive season so far I see fewer and fewer of those flags. Franklin sits in Williamson County, which happens to be one the wealthiest counties in America (meaning that I am seriously out of place here). Well over half the people who live here came from somewhere else and have lived here less than five years. The Franklin battlefield itself has disappeared except for a small patch of land around the Carter House, focal point of the worst of the fighting. The Carter House and its outbuildings are the worst-battle-damaged buildings in America still standing.

Non-Southerners do not comprehend the depth of resistance a lot of Southerners have to movements to strike down the Stars and Bars wherever it is found. I emailed Geitner a day ago or so about a controversy in Nashville when Vanderbilt University decided to change the name of its Confederate Memorial Hall to simply, Memorial Hall. (You know why - some students were "uncomfortable" with the name. I kid you not, that was the real reason the school used.)

Problem was, the building was built in the 1930s with a grant from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who claim the name may not be legally changed
without their consent, per the terms of the grant. Lawsuits have been filed. There it sits, I think.

One woman told me at the time that the anti-Southern bigotry in America has never gone away. "They are trying to take away our history," she said. "It's ethnic cleansing by another name." She does have a point.

Most people don't know, though, that the modern resurgence of displaying the Confederate flag really only dates from the 1950s, and was started by Southern Democrats in protest of integration and civil rights rulings by US federal courts. You may recall the tempest in a teapot in the 2000 campaign about South Carolina flying the Confederate flag over its capitol building, below the US flag. That practice was only begun in 1962 (plus or minus a couple of years) and was initiated by the then-governor of the state, Democrat Fritz Hollings, now the US Senator representing Disney, AOL-Time Warner and other megacorporate concerns.

But Confederate veterans of the War of Northern Aggression mostly had a different view. Many of them wrote that the flag, having once flown before ranks of briefly free and independent Southern troops, should be retired in honor, never to fly again unless the South was again independent. Memorials and monuments were fine, but the flag was too cherished in their hearts to fly again except for a people free. For decades after 1865, the only time the CSA flag was flown was in solemn anniversary commemorations or perhaps at funerals, and maybe not even then. (At funerals of CSA veterans, the flag was almost always draped over the casket.)

Actually, the Confederate flag most seen today is not the Confederate Stars and Bars. It the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was adopted as the battle flag by most other Southern regiments. This is the Stars and Bars, a national flag of the Confederacy, not a battle flag:



''The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and aspirations. . . . Lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, . . . take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished - a reunited country.'' Jefferson Davis

You can see a photo of the town square and Confederate statue at Franklin, Tenn. For some reason the image link would not import to this page.

More 8th Air Force memories are again offered on Sgt Stryker's site; this is the last installment.

More on the Jesus Driving question is posted by Sasha Volokh, including a link to your truly (thanks!). He also links to a good column by Jacob Sullum in Reason, who points out that the new WWJ Drive campaign wants people to forego SUVs for smaller (well, much smaller) vehicles that get higher miles per gallon. But, says Jacob, the problem with that approach . . .

. . . is that making cars more fuel efficient often means making them lighter, and therefore less safe in crashes. A 1989 study by researchers at Harvard and the Brookings Institution concluded that fuel economy standards kill thousands of Americans each year.

Getting people out of SUVs and into lighter vehicles means some of them will die in crashes they otherwise might have survived. What would Jesus say about that?

Which is a really excellent question. Like I said, Jesus was always concerned with people, not people's things.

Church of England says attack on Iraq is justified, if inspections don't work, reports the UK's Telegraph.

British and American plans to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein breaches the latest United Nations resolution could be justified even without the further backing of the UN, the Church of England decided last night. . . .

But the synod, which is meeting in London this week, nevertheless decided that any unilateral military action risked undermining the credibility of the UN. It unanimously approved a resolution saying that war should be a last resort.

In an often passionate debate, speaker after speaker warned of the dangers of war, but several argued that the Church would display a lack of understanding of international politics if it tried to tie the hands of Western governments.

"Die Another Day" is the Bond series in extremis. I'd like to be kinder to the new Bond flick than I probably will. It's the 40th anniversary Bond movie, and the 20th in the series, not including the spoof, Casino Royale, or the out-of-mainstream Connery reprise, Never Say Never Again.

I have seen every Bond movie, almost all of them many times. The first "grown-up" movie my parents took me to see was Thunderball, when I was 10 years old. I still remember my mother's discomfort (and my delight) at the, uh, cavorting, silhouettes of swimming lithesome lasses during the opening credits. But that was as risque as the movie got.

Thunderball had it all - Connery at the top of his Bond form, a major role for Q ("major" relative to the other movies, that is), the bodaciously bountiful bevy of beautiful Bond babes (I just had to see how "b" alliterative I could get there), and gadgets. Tball really introduced the famous Bond gadgets. And Tball's plot was entirely groundbreaking in its day but all to sadly believable now: a terrorist organization wants to smuggle an atomic warhead into an American city and blow it up.

(They are Western capitalist terrorists, though, because they want the now-laughably-small sum of $100 million to call it off. In 1965, though, $100 mil was major money, Now - a hundred million here, and hundred million there, and before long, you've got real money.)

Die Another Day (DAD henceforth) pays tribute to Tball when Bond uses the earlier movie's underwater rebreather to swim to the bad guys' lair. In fact, DAD pays tribute to several Bond films, being the 40th anniversary flick and all. Most obviously, there is the cameraman's and Halle Berry's, uh, loving, tribute to Ursula Andress, who appeared in the first pic, Dr. No. Same entree, same wardrobe, same knife. But Ursula's hair was much longer than Halle's, whose hair is much too short. (Hey, she's a movie star and I get to pick nits like that.)

There's also the phony alligator from Octopussy, the shoe-knife from From Russia With Love, lasers a la Goldfinger (used to much deadlier effect), and of course, the famous rocket pack from Thunderball. I only wish they could have worked Little Nellie and a big, helicopter-borne electromagnet in there somehow.

All that aside, though, there were some things about the movie that worked well:

The hovercraft chase scene was original and finely filmed. No digital effects, either, and Bond is "saved by the bell," the best snappy line he has in the whole movie.

The opening credits continue, at times, to tell the story in background after the opening sequence, a first for the series.

Do you remember the old TV ad where the shipwrecked guy washes up on a beach, walks into an exclusive store, and just before they start to throw him out, he flashes his Amex card? The staff immediately fawns over him like he was a pasha. He winds up with great clothes, a fine hotel room, a Michelin-class meal, etc. If you remember that ad, you will remember it fondly when Bond walks into the Hong Kong Yacht Club.

John Cleese as Q (not, not R) is a very fine replacement for Desmond Llewellyn (peace be upon him). Cleese didn't try to play the role as Desmond did, and he succeeds.

M is exactly the cold-blooded, uh, witch, she would sometimes really need to be in a real espionage service. But her recision of Bond's Double-Oh license to kill, early in the movie, is poorly scripted.

The sword fight is super, one of the best sequences in the movie.

The fight in the Cuban clinic is well done.

Unfortunately, all the movie seems to be is a series of action sequences that stumble to a conclusion. Moments that are meant to surprise, don't. We learn early that Bond is looking for a traitor in MI-6, but it is so obvious to us who the traitor is. There is a relationship between the very first villain Bond encounters in the movie and the main villain he faces later. What is it? There brain dead won't figure it out, those with the intelligence of lichen will.

The digital sequence of the collapsing glacier, and Bond's escape therefrom, does not work. It just doesn't. It's cartoonish.

There is also the world's slowest plane crash ever. How long can it take a burning, out-of-control, disintegrating C-5-type plane to fall from the sky? Weeks, apparently.

The movie tries to take itself too seriously. We are long past the point where Bond movies could be watched as serious spy movies, such as, say, Three Days of the Condor (which had no sequel, true). The producers and director need to keep their eye on the Bond-genre entertainment ball, rather than Serious Cinema. But it seems as if for DAD, they deliberately adopted a grim, humorless and occasionally anti-West approach. It works no better than glacier-falls.

At times, Halle Berry almost takes the picture away from Brosnan. One reviewer wondered whether DAD was the first Bond-buddy flick. For this movie, that's a strength, not a weakness, though.

Finally, I am sick and tired of Bond villains with bad satellites. Give it a rest.

The parts that are good are very good. But the parts that are bad are really bad. Overall, my rating is 6 out of 10 possible.

Progress in the terror war has been made, says Tom Ridge, soon to be Secretary of Homeland Defense. (Will that he abbreiviated HOMDEFSEC?) I meant to post this three days ago, but somehow I overlooked it.

Ridge said that since the administration began its war against the al Qaeda terrorist network after the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorist training camps have been destroyed, 2,700 suspected terrorists have been detained worldwide, terrorist leaders have been killed, their networks have been disrupted and $100 million in terrorist assets has been frozen. "By any reasonable measure, we've made substantial progress," he said.

Many responses to my WWJD posting, for which I am grateful. I wish I could respond individually, but I just can't. From Buck:

I liked your blog comments* on what Jesus would drive (an ass) and the origin and meaning of WWJD, I suppose Jesus would forgive the poor sinners and condemn the mighty and the rich.

Jesus would forgive the mighty and rich, too. Although Luke's gospel takes a pretty dim view of wealth qua wealth, I am persuaded that Jesus thought that atonement with God could be had by any person, rich or poor. After all, Lazarus (in John 11) seems to have been pretty well fixed, and Jesus raised him from the dead.

If Jesus appeared in America, then he'd be a vagrant and thought to be mentally ill, or at best a holy fool.

Not a vagrant, because a vagant is an aimless wanderer and/or a public nuisance. Aimlessness does not describe Jesus' itinerant ministry.

As for mentally ill, remember that C. S. Lewis observed that Jesus could only have been one of three things: a deliberate fraud, a lunatic, or who he claimed to be. Lewis said there are no other choices. Those who think he was crazy have yet to make a diagnosis based on his words and actions rather their their own predisposition to disbelieve his claims. Same with fraud. But I would agree that even in his day there were some who thought him foolish, albeit dangerous as well.

Now, if Jesus appeared in occupied Palestine, near his home, wouldn't that be something? Gen. Sharon would be in a pickle, wouldn't he?

If Jesus appeared in occupied Palestine, everybody would be in a pickle.

However, Jesus actually does appear in Palestine. This woman was Jesus, in some mystical sense, based on Jesus' words in Mt. 25.

The person of Jesus might get up a minority following in the Moslem lands. I'd as soon they got a little Jefferson and Jackson, not necessarily force-fed to them by the Pentagon.

Maybe better than a minority following. And remember, Germany and Japan got Jefferson force-fed to them and they seem well-behaved now.

Jinxing the James Bond series It seems that Halle Berry is so popular as Jinx in the new Bond movie, Die Another Day, that for the first time, the Bond series will spawn a spinoff flick.

The character has proved so successful, and Ms. Berry enjoyed playing it so much, that plans are afoot to create an entirely new franchise series built around the character, the first time that the Bond series has spawned a spinoff, a new trick for a very old dog.

The new Bond flick earned $47 million its opening weekend, the most ever for a Bond movie. I went to see it Friday night with my two teenage boys. They liked it a lot better than I did.

I'll try to post an informal review later, but my snapshot is, "mixed." Parts I liked, parts I didn't. I still say the best ever was Thunderball.

Then again, maybe it would be a Chevy Suburban. Courtesy read Chris (no last name given), another answer to the question, "What would Jesus drive?"



Update, Monday 11-25: Glenn Reynolds linked to a TCS column by Brock Yates, a Car and Driver editor, who is rather dim on the question, as you might imagine.

How do mother grizzlies vote? Says a WaPo article:

While under normal circumstances women tend to be more averse to national defense spending and military action than men, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the continuing threat of domestic terrorism have changed women's attitudes.

Female grizzlies with cubs are peaceful, too, until. . . .

Death for saying, "I like you" was the sentence adjudged on a woman by an Islamic court in Nigeria. She was found guilty of adultery for the utterance. The third person to be sentenced to death for adultery under Islamic law was . . .

. . .Fatima Usman, of Niger state, who one day said, "I like you," to a man who was not her husband.

And the fourth was Ahmadu Ibrahim, who remembers replying to this woman who wasn't his wife, "I like you, too."

Let it not be said that Islamic law is not an equal-opportunity killer.

"What Would Jesus Drive" is a nonsense question. Glenn Reynolds relates that earlier today he saw a TV chat show . . .

. . . involved the "what would Jesus drive" discussion. Let me offer a perspective:

Who cares?

And as for what preening churchmen think we ought to drive, well, my sentiments are unprintable. And I think it's pretty lame that people who would never in a million years let some preacher tell them who to sleep with somehow think it's cool when preachers start telling people not to drive SUVs.

Given the notorious inability -- and unwillingness -- of the religious racket to police its own members' behavior lately, I have zero interest in their opinions on the war, the environment, "social justice," evolution, or any of the subjects on which they desire to opine, and about which they typically know nothing.

(I found a humorous web site answering the question, "What would Jesus drive". But I will seriously answer this question before I finish. Also, I plead innocent to "preening.")

Glenn's point is a good one. As I wrote last month:

The dismissive way religious leaders treat other disciplines is inexcusable; no wonder that I have discovered that so many people in the Church and out have no patience for theology. "Official" theology as done today seems uninterested in the real lives of ordinary people, it seems to exist for its own benefit in a vacuum.

But let me inquire whether WWJD is even a relevant question. Despite the fad of WWJD bracelets a couple of years ago, the question in modern times comes from Charles Sheldon's 1896 book, In His Steps. Sheldon's book was a novel about a small group of church people who decided that in every decision, they would ask themselves, "What would Jesus do" in that situation?

The first chapter deals with one of the group's men, editor of a newspaper, who decides not to run a story about the result of much-anticipated prize fight, on the basis that boxing is two men trying to beat each other insensible in a sport full of corruption. (Boxing hasn't changed since 1896, eh?) The editor dumps the story because he concludes that if Jesus was editor, he would dump it, too.

That's where I put the book down and I have never picked it back up - not because I am a boxing-phile (it's a despicable sport) but because its fundamental premise is flawed.

The question the editor should have asked was not, "What would Jesus do if he was a newspaper editor?" It was, rather, "Would Jesus be employed as a newspaper editor?" And the answer, of course, is no.

I once tried to ask myself what Jesus would do if he were pastoring my church. But Jesus wouldn't pastor a church. He had the original itinerant ministry, having "no place to lay his head" but relying on the charity of friends. There is a long list of other things that Jesus didn't do, and that I do with a clear conscience. Conversely, there are things Jesus did do that I don't, also with a clear conscience.

It is impossible for me to live's Christ's life, nor can I meaningfully imagine Jesus leading my life . At best, I can hope to live a Christly life. But that makes the question not, WWJD, but "WWJHMD" - what would Jesus have me do? There is a particularity to my circumstances that Jesus never encountered, and to think that I can possibly say what he would do in my day, my place and my situation is arrogant, unless I use purely superficial situations.

Example: Last Monday night my wife and I went to Vanderbilt hospital be with a family whose five-month-old baby girl was literally her next breath away from death. The Gospels show that Jesus was responsive to that kind of tragedy, so far so good. But the breakdown occurs right there. Would Jesus have merely sat with the relatives (less mom and dad, who were with the baby in a medically restricted area) and simply prayed with them and offered purely moral support? Or would he have taken the girl by the hand and said to her, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!" (Mark 5:41).

I did the former, but I think Jesus would have done the latter.

IMO, for some clergy seriously to ask what Jesus would drive is to miss the entire point of Jesus' very life. Jesus wouldn't buy a car! He didn't even own a donkey; he had to borrow one to ride into Jerusalem. Jesus mostly walked from place to place. When necessary, he relied on transportation furnished by others - boats, for example. I have no problem imagining that Jesus would take a plane, train or automobile today. But if you offered to pick him up in a Ford Excursion, would he refuse? I think not!

After all, he counseled his disciples,

"Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person there and stay at his house until you leave" (Matt 10:9-11).

So should we ask, "What hotel chain would Jesus patronize?" Of course not, the question makes no sense. Jesus was always concerned with people, not people's things. I cannot imagine him excoriating SUV owners about their choice of wheels because that's trivial compared to Jesus' real interest: Do they love God and neighbor?

Do they (ref. Matthew 25:35-36:) feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty? After all, an SUV can carry more food for the poor than a Honda Prius. Do they show hospitality to strangers? A few years ago, my wife's hometown of Durham, NC, was buried under several feet of snow, far beyond what city crews and equipment could handle. Dozens of lives were saved by private SUV drivers, who alone could take dialysis patients to their clinics or pregnant women to delivery rooms, and who rescued stranded drivers. They were also the only vehicles that could deliver Meals on Wheels, for many people their only real meal of the day. This went on for many days. Were the SUV owners sinners or righteous? Hint: Jesus said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these members of my family, you did for me" (Matt 25:40).

Few people really need an SUV. Many just want one. And some misguided colleagues of mine, to the disgrace of their faith, wish to claim it is sinful for people to buy what they want, instead of what "preening churchmen" think they need.

God help us - the house we live in is on fire and they're arguing what color carpet to install before the place burns down. Christ have mercy!

Update: Why the answer might be a Chevy Suburban. . . .

Update: Joe Bob Briggs answers the question with finality.

"Put your body where your mouth is" is what I have said about the religious left, especially in regard to its insistence that the US should wage peace (how is always undefined) rather than compel Iraq to disarm.

Comes now this photo that shows graphically and tragically what I said before, that waging peace can be just as deadly as making war. This Christian missionary was waging peace, and I await similar devotion from "the comfortable classes" of Christians (as Reinhold Niebuhr called them), to do the same.

The Saddam - al Qaeda - Saudi connection is partly explained in this Christian Science Monitor article linked to by Bill Hobbs, who observes,

Ansar al-Islam is the same terrorist organization that U.S. Intelligence determined was testing chemical weapons in Northern Iraq earlier this year, apparently with the blessing of Saddam.

War against Iraq is not a diversion from the war on Islamist terror. It is the same war.

Ansar al-Islam, or "Soldiers of Islam," is a terrorist group allied with al Qaeda that attacked the Kurds in northern Iraq, who oppose Saddam's regime. It may be helpful to remember that al Qaeda is not a well-defined organization. It is a base group ("al Qaeda" means, "the base") of terrorists following the leadership of Osama bin Laden, but it has tentacle-like connections with other terrorist groups which have the same or similar goals, but which follow different leaders.

It is not possible for these groups to exist without state support. Now that Afghanistan is out, who is left? The likely candidates are Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

I was skeptical of the Iraq connection for a long time because Saddam is not a particularly devout Muslim. Iraq is a secular state in which sharia law is weak - the reason being, of course, that Saddam recognizes no law but his own word. Even so, Iraq was essentially secular for a long time before Saddam's ascension to the throne. Nonetheless,

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Saddam and al Qaeda may well hold one another in deepest contempt, but they share almost identical goals, even if from different motivations. Al Qaeda wants to kill us because, well, because they want to kill us. Saddam is a bona fide megalomaniac whom Eugene Volokh credibly imagines may be in the grips of a fantasy ideology concerned with being remembered for a thousand years as another Saladin, and Eugene isn't the first to think that.

The marriage between the Saddam and al Qaeda may not be made in heaven, but it is certainly one of convenience.

The Iraq - al Qaeda connection seems to be pretty well demonstrated based on information available in the public record. Certainly it meets the legal standard of "preponderance of evidence" if not precisely "beyond reasonable doubt." But having served in the Pentagon, I also know there is a huge amount of classified information about the connection that is not in the public domain. This information is protected mostly to protect the sources and methods used to get it. I recall in the Gulf War, when I was privy to a great deal of that kind of information, that there were some astonishing sources of information about Saddam's inner council and war plans. (And which foreign intelligence service that obtained the information for us was just as surprising.)

As for Iran, I claim no expertise. I yield to Glenn Frazier for that topic, because he has made a real specialty out of things Iranian. But Iran's direct support of Islamic fundamentalism and, uh, "militant" Islamism is practically self-evident. Some observers claim that Iran is the fount of all modern Arab terrorism. The border between Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Iran was pretty porous, and there was no scoffing months ago when Osama was thought to have fled to Iran.

As for Saudi Arabia, I have said before that it is less a nation-state than a family business, and it's a Mafia-like family in charge, at that. Comes now this revelation:

A congressional panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has found an alleged money trail between two hijackers and influential financiers in Saudi Arabia, but federal law enforcement officials are refusing to declassify their findings so they can be made public, U.S. government sources said. . . .

They also received information about the possibility that some of Bayoumi's money came indirectly from Saudi government officials, the sources said.

FBI agents had found the phone number of an employee of the Saudi Embassy in Bayoumi's apartment. Embassy officials yesterday confirmed that the FBI had questioned two employees of the embassy's Islamic affairs section about calls from Bayoumi.

Well, whaddya know?

Update: Indepundit has the Saudi connection covered like a rug, including a chain of custody of money from the Saudi ambassador to the USA to the hands of two hijackers who helped crash Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

Yes, this piece should be read by students of American politics, just as Glenn Reynolds recommended. Ron Rosenbaum compares G.W. Bush to Michael Corleone, but not in a way you might expect.

I also absolutely recommend his earlier column, Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee. If you like his stuff, an index of of his NY Observer columns is here.

The Total Information Awareness system ain't nothing! . . . At least not yet. So far, it's only an idea printed in an information packet to elucidate concepts to potential proposers.

Commentators are all over the map on this subject. Kim DuToit rails profanely against it in his usual, uh, pungent manner, and he has a couple of decades of commercial wide-database experience to back up his assertions. It's not data collection that bothers him, it's data mining. I won't try to quote him, but he explains the difference very well and with lay-term simplicity.

Jason Rubenstein seems less troubled by the proposed system itself as by the inevitable nature of the government bureaucracy that will run it. Or, as Steven Den Beste once observed, ""The job of a bureaucrat is to regulate, and left to himself he'll eventually try to regulate everything." Or put another way, the job of a spy is to, well, spy, and left to himself he'll spy on everything. Jason says,

What frightens me is this Dilbert Principle, the ability of complete idiots and dangerous fools to wreck things and to use systems for their own benefit. Both of these people [previously described] came with a full set of pre-supposed ideas that were mercifully spared from the ravages of rational thought (as Terry Gillliam might put it). Hey, are the ills of society caused by hordes of gun-toting Republican white men? Lets mine some data, shall we, and call these guys in for questioning. If they have nothing to hide, why should they complain? Is our economy in the tank because of minority welfare mothers who spend their food stamps on cigarettes and Olde English Ale? How about we mine some data and round 'em up, eh? Har har har!!!

However, the only blogger I have seen so far who has actually gone to the sources (government-written technical descriptions), instead of the rumors (meaning almost all newspaper coverage) is Lynxx Pherrett, who spends no little time with the source material, having previously concluded,

Why don't these folks [certain columnists] just come right out and say what they want?

The US government must be forbidden from collecting any dots.

If any dots come into US government possession by any means, the government must be forbidden from connecting them.

There, wasn't that simple?

Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, however, Orin Kerr, who pointed to the Markoff and TIA links, actually asks reasonable questions such as, "is it actually what many civil libertarians have been saying the government needs to do to fight terrorism?" and makes the following point:

It's hard to evaluate these arguments, I think. The article spends a lot more time discussing reactions to TIA than explaining what TIA actually is or does. But it seems worth noting that, at least based on the available descriptions of what TIA does, it's unclear why the opposite view (TIA as something civil libertarians have been calling for) isn't correct. As best I can tell, TIA is notable in one very important respect: it is essentially a database, rather than a means of collecting information. In other words, TIA doesn't actually gather information, "peek" anywhere, or "spy" on anything. Instead, it is a program that takes information collected elsewhere and looks for trends in the data that might point out something suspicious. It's a database of databases, not a tool for collecting evidence.

Unfortunately, I don't expect to see many other reasonable questions, or many people accept reasonable answers once the storm of editorials and ACLU press releases hits.

So who is right? As Lynxx points out, Admiral John Poindexter, the point man for TIA, has emphasized that his job at DARPA is to develop the technology, not the policy for using the technology. After all, one of the criteria is:

To protect the privacy of individuals not affiliated with terrorism, DARPA seeks technologies for controlling automated search and exploitation algorithms and for purging data structures appropriately. Business rules are required to enforce security policy and views appropriate for the viewer's role.

So who is right, the advocates or the opponents? I think the jury's still out, but like Jason and Kim, I hold a deep suspicion of all things governmental, even though almost everyone I know who is in government is a very fine person. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr explained in his work, Moral Man in Immoral Society, individual persons live generally moral lives, but high morality is difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups as a whole. Very rarely does a group of persons comport itself better than individuals do in personal relationships. When human beings engage in collective activity, Niebuhr said, they are overwhelmed by an inability to be as moral together as they are individually. The larger the group, the greater this inability is.

So I am, as of now, a mugwump on this issue. (A mugwump sits on the fence with his mug on one side and his wump on the other.)

Getting shot down can screw up your love life! Bomber crewmen's memories have been recorded and transcribed by Sgt. Mom over at Sgt Stryker's Daily Briefing are well worth reading. Like this one, that tells how getting shot down ruins romance:

". . . Our group lost 11 planes that day, April 28th, 1944, practically the whole group. We were the lead squadron, and they got five of our six. Frontal attach with fighters, and boy, they clobbered us, right as we turned on the I.P. Plane blew up, I found myself falling. Fortunatly it was the second time in combat I ever put my chute bundle on... and I remembered how bad that flack was over Berlin. I happened to look down at it, I thought "ach!" I picked it up, slid it up under my flack suit and strapped it on, and five minutes later I was using it. Radio operator was the only other one that got out, plane just blew apart. And I had a date that night with a young lady from London that was coming up to Cambridge to meet me (I'd been in London the night before) and I said "I have a mission tomorrow, my navigator is grounded, so when you get to Cambridge, you call and he'll tell you what time we'll be back." And I was probably sitting on my duff in Berlin! God, I was mad, I said "That son-of-a-gun's in there with MY date!"
1Lt. Chris Christianson, Bombardier

I knew a couple of B-17 crewmen, now both deceased. Roy Green was a waist gunner. When I was a boy he ran a Double Cola bottling plant. When I went hunting with my dad and Roy and other men, Roy would bring cases of Double Cola. Free soft drinks makes a good day for a 10-year-old kid!

One day he and my dad and I were playing golf. I don't recall how it came up, but Roy talked about the day his plane was shot down. Whether by flak or fighter I don't recall. Roy said because of fire, passage to the bomb bay, their preferred bailout spot, was blocked. In imminent danger of being immolated, he and the other gunner ripped off a radio-wiring access panel that opened to the outside. It was big enough to leap through, but Roy said there were antenna wires and connectors crisscrossing it every which-way.

The other man looked at the wires, looked at the fire, and leaped through the hatch. Roy said he watched as the slipstream grabbed the man and the wires cut him into five separate pieces. With his flight suit smoldering, Roy said he didn't hesitate. Out the hatch he went and "to this day," he said, "I don't know why I didn't get cut up, too."

By chance, Roy did not come down in Germany but in neutral Switzerland, the mission path having been close to the border. Interned for the rest of the war, Roy admitted that his captivity was quite tolerable compared to POWs in Germany.

Bob Timberlake was a B-17 pilot in 8th Air Force. He flew 16 complete combat missions over Nazi Germany. He only flew half of number 17, because a Focke-Wulfe fighter got him. He and the crew bailed out, but two crewmen didn't survive. Bob landed safely, near his copilot, who broke his leg upon landing. Bob stayed with him and shortly a farmer came out. Bob said he didn't try to resist. He and the copilot were deep in the heart of Germany and he knew that Nazi police or troops would surely be coming for them soon. The farmer took them on a horsecart to his house. He spoke no English, but his wife began to prepare them a large dinner. After awhile, a 15-year-old girl bicycled up. She spoke some English, having taken it in school.

Bob and his copilot wound up staying the night. The next morning the Luftwaffe took them into captivity. Bob always spoke warmly of the German family who was so hospitable to them even though they were the family's enemies. Bob was a POW for 10 months. He stretched the camp rules as far as he could go. POWs were required to salute German officers of equal or greater rank. So Bob grew a toothbrush mustache like Hitler's and every time he encountered a German officer he snapped to rigid attention, glared straight forward, clicked his heels together and threw his right arm up and out in an exaggerated Nazi salute. Then he would shout, "Guten morgen, Herr Offizier! Eet giffs me grosse happiness to greet you!" or some similar line.

Needless to say, the Germans were not amused. After awhile they pinned him down and told him he would be severely punished if he didn't shave off the mustache and stop the mockery.

Pretty special men, although they would have been the first to deny it.

Is Saddam really crazy? Rufus Jones examines some evidence.

Just this year alone, ABC News interviewed his mistress of 30 years, who reported that Saddam was a Viagra-popping, gazelle-eating hypochondriac who boasted of trying to kill his own son (his son, Uday, pronounced "you-die" is himself so crazy, that Maxim magazine reported he cut his crazy-teeth as a young boy, watching torture videos made by the Iraqi police as if they were cartoons). Likewise, The Atlantic's Mark Bowden filled in the crazy picture, reporting that Saddam has three meals a day prepared for him at each of his twenty-plus palaces, that the security-conscious germophobe requires visitors to have their clothing laundered, sterilized and x-rayed, and that in one of his palaces, he likes to retire to the library, which is stocked with nothing but books on Joseph Stalin.

But there is perhaps no portrait of Saddam Hussein that has more effectively explored the non compos mentis angle than "Uncle Saddam," a documentary by French filmmaker Joel Soler, which Cinemax will air on November 26 at 7:00 p.m. Soler ingratiated himself to Saddam's inner circle (including his personal filmmaker, his architect, and his interior decorator) by convincing them he intended to document the country's suffering under U.N. sanctions. The anti-American pose served as a credible cover since Soler is, after all, French. . . .

The film opens with a running list of Saddam fun facts that appear like hit song titles scrolling by in a K-tel commercial. His favorite uncle, the narrative tells us, taught him that there are three things that shouldn't exist: "Jews, Persians, and flies.". . .

Saddam is a fanatic about cleanliness, which he regards as no laughing matter, even if we do, since, we are told, "Saddam likes to be greeted with a kiss near the armpit"(indeed, we see footage of a steady stream of black-bereted minions with copycat mustaches puckering up to plant one between Saddam's armpit and areola).

Clueless "expert" alert! A recent New York Times article on the renewed weapons inspections in Iraq reveals that Russia and France had sold Iraq 100 pounds of weapons-ready uranium before the Gulf War, enough, says the Natural Resources Defense Council, to make 3 to 10 Hiroshima-type bombs, depending on the builder's skill. Then this incredible admission:

"We still don't know why they wanted nuclear weapons and what they intended to do with them," noted David Albright, a former inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group.

Can you believe that? Let me ask Mr. Albright these questions:

1. Why did Adolf Hitler want Zyklon B gas, and what did he intend to do with it?

2. Why did James Jones want poisoned Kool-Aid, and what did he intend to do with it?

3. Why did John Dillinger want a tommy gun?

4. Why did Admiral Yamamoto want torpedo planes?

5. Why did Tim McVeigh want enough fertilizer and diesel fuel to pack a Ryder truck?

6. Why should you want a brain, and what do you intend to do with it?

James Bond is rotting away says The Weekly Standar5d's Jonathan V. Last in a long critique (not a review) of the movie and a discussion of the entire 20-movie Bond series.

But the worst scene in "Die Another Day" comes in a sequence where Moneypenny finally has her moment with Bond and the two of them have at it on her desk. It's played for laughs, but it is the meanest, least chivalrous moment in the entire series. It calls to mind Barbara Bel Geddes's breakdown in "Vertigo."

If nothing else, "Die Another Day" will be remembered for this bit of ingenuity: The producers found a way to get product placement for three different cars. Jinx gets a Ford Thunderbird, the villain gets a Jaguar, and Bond gets his Aston Martin. The negotiations for how the duel between these machines was to proceed must have been dizzying.

So where does "Die Another Day" fit in the hierarchy? Somewhere beneath "Moonraker" and above, say, "Casino Royale."

Remember, in Casino Royale, the first Bond spoof (1967) James Bond was played by . . . David Niven! or was it Woody Allen? Actually, it was both!

Bond trivia time:

Last says that DAD "is the third Bond movie with a villain trying to use a satellite as a weapon."

1. Is this correct?

2. What were the others?

Hint: Last does not name them.

What is good government? Jeff Cooper tells this story (last item on linked page):

Mike Baker contributes the following observation from Florida. When asked for an essay on "Good Government" in high school, the winning response was as follows, to wit: "Good government! Good government! Sit! Stay!"

Stop the presses! Washington Post takes Rush Limbaugh's side! In the matter of Sen. Tom Daschle accusing talk show host Rush Limbaugh of fomenting violence against Democratic office holders, the Washington Post rides to to rescue of -- Rush Limbaugh! Here is what Daschle said:

"What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren't just content to listen. People want to act because they get emotional . . . and the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, against us and against our families, and it's very disconcerting."

At which WaPo media writer Howard Kurtz quotes some of the things Rush has said recently, then declares, "Golly gee. We've heard worse on 'Crossfire.' "

USA Today also quotes Daschle as adding,

"If entertainment becomes so much a part of politics and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics, and who are then so energized to go out and hurt somebody, that troubles me about where politics in America is going," Daschle said.

It's ptretty hypocritical for Daschle to claim that politics and entertainment should be separate. Anybody remember the Wellstone memorial pep rally?

"Pics from Blix of the bottles full of bugs. . . ." is how The Court Jester might have described it, and how Jason Rubenstein does too, in the most creative posting of the UN inspection team I have seen. Really.

"Water? I never drink it. Fish [censored] in it." W.C. Fields.

A friend forwarded this account of a US Navy warship's combat voyage to me. I do not know whether it is historically accurate, but as Winston Churchill said about the King Arthur legend, "If it's not true, it ought to be."

The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) as a combat vessel carried 48,600 gallons of fresh water for her crew of 475 officers and men. This was sufficient to last 6 months of sustained operations. She carried no evaporators. However, let it be noted that:

On July 1798, the USS Constitution set sail from Boston. She left with 475 officers and men, 48,600 gallons of fresh water, 7,400 cannon shot, 11,600 pounds of black powder and 79,400 gallons of rum. Her mission: To destroy and harass English shipping.

Making Jamaica on 6 October, she took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Then she headed for the Azores, arriving on 12 November.
She provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 64,300 gallons of Portuguese wine.

On 18 November she set sail for England. In the ensuing days she defeated five British men-of-war and captured and scuttled 12 English merchant ships salvaging only the rum.

By 26 January her powder and shot was exhausted. Unarmed, she made a night raid up the Firth of Clyde. Her landing party captured a whiskey distillery and transferred 40,000 gallons aboard by dawn. Then she headed home.

The USS Constitution arrived in Boston on 20 February, 1799 with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum, no wine, no whiskey and 48,600 gallons of stagnant water.

I can't figure out why us warships would be attacking English shipping in 1798, but it sure sounds like a US Navy expedition!

Update: According to the ship's official wabsite (linked above), the ship set out on its maiden voyage in July 1798.

She cruises in the West Indies [1798-1801], during the "Quasi-War" with France, protecting U.S. merchant shipping from French privateers. The CONSTITUTION is not engaged in battle with any warship, but captures/recaptures several privateers and victims of privateers.

The ship did see considerable and successful action against the Royal Navy in the War of 1812.

A cogent analysis of the American Left gets right to the heart of the issue.

Or note that the hard left talks endless about mistreatment of blacks in America, but conspicuously does not urge things, such as better schooling, that might help blacks. Why? Because (1) they do not really care about blacks, except as political tools, and (2) if blacks prospered, they might join the middle class and cease being usefully divisive.

Similarly, for Latino children our Marxians advocate bilingual education, which has a proven record of hindering the learning of English. Why? Latinos who spoke fluent English would marry people named Ferguson and become Americans. So much for class warfare.

And this is why Marxists, everywhere denouncing oppression, invariably practice it. There is no contradiction. They have no objection to oppression. It is central to their purposes. (Name a Marxist country that isn't oppressive.) Denouncing it is just politically expedient.

The abominable livings condition of some US forces in Afghanistan is explained in detail by Fred Reed. You won't believe this.

Down with "values!" Values education is a bad idea.

One day Oprah Winfrey asked her young female guest why she left her newborn baby in a trash bin. The new mother replied that she wanted pursue a college education. Oprah replied that not everyone would "approve" of the explanation, but, she said, "I understand perfectly." "I understand perfectly" is sort of the mantra of our age, a phrase that is supposed to show how compassionate and how tolerant of others' values one is.

Values. It used to mean that "value" meant to treasure something, as a verb, or as a noun it meant the monetary worth of something. Today it is used as a euphemism for personal preferences. In my kids' school system, the standards of conduct are presented as the school's values. The pupils' obligation to adhere to them is contractual, not moral.

My position is that the whole notion of values is corrupt. Whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy is not simply a matter of personal preference or opinion. These things are virtuous because they enable us to participate in God's nature rather than in corruption.

But opposing the notion of values is undemocratic. Everyone can have values, as many or few as they choose, and if ours are a little different, who are we to judge? Ronald Reagan retreated from calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" because he was accused of being intolerant and judgmental. Reagan later said the Soviets, murderers of tens of millions, had "different values" than Americans.

This line of reasoning was carried to its logical, absurd end by Saturday Night Live's Jack Handey, who joked, "Instead of having ?answers' on a math test, they should just call them ?impressions,' and if you got a different ?impression,' so what, can't we all be brothers?"

Values talk comes easily to our non-judgmental age, when being judgmental or intolerant is one of the worst social transgressions. Values are equal opportunity, being mere choices, and require no effort to attain. Just pick some and they're yours. Values are expressed in general terms: "I value education" or "I value family." (Even more inexact, "I value family values.") These are empty phrases that stake a claim on nothing substantial.

On the other hand, virtues are never matters of mere personal preference. Virtues cannot be claimed, but must be developed, and then only with difficulty. Virtues are undemocratic because they are not equally accessible to all. Some persons will be virtuous, others will not. Values are self-directed, concerned with what oneself desires, while thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas point out that virtues are always founded in the good of the greater whole.

The purpose of educating our children, whether in school, at home or in church, is not to offer them a values cafeteria, where they can pick and choose what they like. It is to help them identify whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy, things that are not matters of opinion. They are revealed at least in part in the nature of God and in God's word. We should inculcate excellence and virtue in our children and in one another. Education, wrote Professor Allan Bloom, is "the taming of the soul's raw passions, not suppressing them, but forming and informing them as art."

To tame the soul's raw passions is all we can do. We cannot eliminate them. But "values" tame nothing and bring nothing under godly rule. Learning and practicing the virtues, which lift our eyes toward higher things, reshapes our characters into the divine image.

In the widest sense virtue means the excellent perfection of a thing, just as vice, its contrary, denotes a defect or absence of perfection. For persons, virtue is a faculty of the soul that disposes us to act in conformance with the higher faculties. Thomas Aquinas defined virtue simply as, "an operative habit essentially good." Vices are also operative habits, but vice's habits come so easily, while virtue's habits require cultivation and deliberate effort to attain.

A detailed explanation of why the showdown with Iraq is not about oil is here.

If control of oil is the U.S. goal, better to stick to the status quo that prevailed before September 11. Before then, the United States was buying about 78 million barrels per day from Iraq, some of that being refined as aviation fuel and transformed into jet noise above the no-fly zones of northern and southern Iraq. Because there was no way the status quo in the Middle East could provide the United States with security - energy or other - the United States had to reassess its policies to prevent a future threat from a rearming and resentful Iraq, weakening and feckless Saudis, and apocalyptic-minded terrorists that offer a potential for a powerful blow to the world economy downstream.

What would Jesus drive? A Honda! Why? Because John 12:49 quotes him, "For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it."

Or maybe a Plymouth Fury. This site has all the theological justification, including a photo of Moses' motorcycle.

Later I'll post an essay on why the question, "What would Jesus do?" is really not a fruitful question.

Can't post tonight, I've been gone since early this morning and I just got home. I'm bushed and and can't write tonight. See you tomorrow.

This is exactly what I have been saying about theologians. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh notes that the University or Oregon Faculty Senate is considering as resolution against war on Iraq. Stipulating that the senate's bylaws permit the senate to make such a resolution, Prof. Volokh says,

But what puzzles is why any reader would give any special credence to a statement about the war just because physicists, English literature experts, law professors, and musicologists voted in favor of the statement. If this were a statement by professors who research international relations, or military strategy and tactics, that would be worth reading. But if the University of Oregon faculty puts its reputation (mostly earned by accomplishment in fields having nothing to do with the war on Iraq) behind a resolution on a subject on which most faculty members have no specialized knowledge, this won't increase the public's concern about the war. Rather, it will only undermine the public's respect for the University.

As I wrote last month,

It would be nice if once in awhile theologians would consult with a politically diverse, broad range of people expert in other field, such as arms control, international relations, military strategy and tactics, threat analysis, etc., before issuing such letters. The dismissive way religious leaders treat other disciplines is inexcusable; no wonder that I have discovered that so many people, in the Church and out, have no patience for theology. "Official" theology as done today seems uninterested in the real lives of ordinary people, existing for its own benefit in a vacuum.

Gay linguists are gone because it's the law, not bias. Now, you may argue that the law is biased, but that's another issue.

Several bloggers, Andrew Sullivan being the first I saw, and Glenn Reynolds being the latest, have chided the Army for discharging a handful of Arab-language linguists when a handful of linguists can make a difference. Glenn cites an NRO article by Deroy Murdock that tells a tale of the Defense Language Institute. There, two soldiers were found in bed together one night in the barracks. There was also romantic correspondence between the two men present in the room, and "photographs in which they displayed non-carnal affection." Both were honorably discharged. Says Murdock,

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says that six other high-level, Arabic speakers have been barred from defending America because they are gay. According to SLDN spokesman Steve Ralls, "none of these additional cases involved on-base conduct."

Okay, let's take this a step at a time.

The contention that the other cases did not involve "on base" conduct is irrelevant. The law is the law, no matter where you are located on the surface of the earth.

What law, you ask? Title 10, US Code, Section, Subtitle A, Part II, Chapter 37, Sec. 654. - Policy concerning homosexuality in the armed forces. The law was enacted in the early years of the Clinton administration. Obedience to it is not optional for the armed services. In the language of the statute we discover that the US Congress found:

The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.

You may agree or disagree with whatever intensity you desire, but it does not change the fact that this is what the Congress says. Please remember,

Section 8 of article I of the Constitution of the United States commits exclusively to the Congress the powers to raise and support armies, provide and maintain a Navy, and make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.

And that

Pursuant to the powers conferred by section 8 of article I of the Constitution of the United States, it lies within the discretion of the Congress to establish qualifications for and conditions of service in the armed forces.

Section 654 requires the services to discharge homosexuals as follows:

A member of the armed forces shall be separated [emphasis added] from the armed forces under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense if one or more of the following findings is made and approved in accordance with procedures set forth in such regulations: That the member has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts . . . .

There are limited and very specific exceptions allowed by the law (i.e., coercion), but "speaks Arabic" is not one of them, nor is possession of any other critical skill.

There is, however, an allowance that permits homosexuals to be retained on active duty if "separation of the member would not be in the best interest of the armed forces." Mr. Murdock says that the need for Arab linguists is so critical that it outweighs the clear intent of the Congress to exclude homosexuals, as defined in the law, from service.

I believe the Congress is correct, the DOD implementation of the law is correct, and the Army was correct in these cases. But this is an issue for which changed minds are extremely rare. I wonder whether Mr. Murdock would have been so energized to protest if the two barracks buddies had been cooks, not linguists. If someone says that not even homosexual cooks should be discharged for homosexuality, then national security isn't the point, is it? But this is not a civil rights issue, because, says the Congress,

There is no constitutional right to serve in the armed forces.

How do you know when it is time to go? My friend Dan Miller says it's when the following are true:

Your opinions don't count

You are as tired when you get up as when you went to bed

Respect is lacking

You've lost your sense of purpose

Communication has broken down

You have serious doubts about your ability to make a difference anymore

You find yourself avoiding others at work

You are chronically impatient with everyone

You find yourself starting to dread Monday morning on Saturday afternoon

The work or product does not line up with your values

However, as Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters once said, "Always go when they still want you to stay." Don't wait to go until they want you to go. Such leavings are never pleasant and it's much more likely you will leave angry and with wounded pride or ego. I have never had such a departure, but I have seen them, and they are not good.

It's a good thing I'm a Methodist because . . .

"What a mystery is this, that Christianity should have done so little good in the world! Can any account of this be given? Can any reasons be assigned for it?"

You are John Wesley! When things don't sit well with you, you make a big production and argue your way through everything. You complain a lot, but, at least you are a thinker and not afraid to show it. You are also pretty liked by people, and pretty methodological about your life and goals. You know where you're going. Some people find you irritating, so watch out for people leaving you out of things they do.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson