Unqualified Successes 2002 - At the time of the 2001 awards, this site had a few dozen readers and the Maryland Terrapins were getting blown out of the Orange Bowl. Things have changed for the better! This year's format is as follows: New categories will be marked with an asterisk. Repeat categories will have last year's winner in parentheses. Before any of my fellow bloggers get their hopes up, I should state that the Unqualified Successes are not primarily intended to be awards for bloggers. So if you don't win anything, it doesn't mean I don't love you. I might not, of course, but you can't tell from this list. (Mostly.) Thank you very much to everyone who takes time to read this site, everyone who takes time to send e-mails about this site and everyone who has been kind enough to link to this site or cite items from it. Now then!

Least Dispensible Weblog - Instapundit.com (2001: Instapundit.com)

Hawk of the Year - Perry de Havilland (2001: Christopher Hitchens)

Dove of the Year - Amram Mitzna (2001: Alan Bock)

"Turning Japanese" Award, for the Best Case of the Vapors - Tie, Everyone who was convinced the Capital Area snipers must be Al Qaeda terrorists (2001: Andrew Sullivan)

Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - The Talking Dog (2001: Mickey Kaus)

Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Brink Lindsay, CATO Hawk (2001: Glenn Reynolds)

Best Meme Insertion - "Chickenhawk" by whoever thought it up (2001: "Our Good Friends, the Saudis" by Virginia Postrel)

Best Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Julian Sanchez (2001: Samizdata)

Least Annoying Liberal - Patrick Nielsen Hayden (2001: Ginger Stampley)

War is the Health of the State Award, Executive Branch Division - President George W. Bush (2001: John Ashcroft)

War is the Health of the State Award, Legislative Division - tie, Rep. Charles Rangel and Senator-Elect Saxby Chambliss (2001: Charles Schumer)

War is the Health of the State Award, Fourth Estate Division - David Broder (2001: Peter Jennings [broadcast], every mainstream liberal columnist in America [print], Bill Moyers [political magazines] - no way I was putting myself through all that again, so a consolidated media award this time)

*War is the Health of the State Award, International Division - Ariel Sharon

*War is the Health of the State Award, Super-Colossal All-Time Grand Prize - John Poindexter

*War May Not Be the Health of MY State Award - Hamid Karzai

*Jumped the Shark Award - "Anti-Idiotarian"

*I Seen My Opportunities, and I Took 'Em Award - Kim Jong Il

*Blog Trend of the Year - Unretiring

*Baleful Blog Trend of the Year - Public de-linking

*To Call It the Baleful Blog Trend of the Year Would Be Evidence of Unconscionable Bias on my Part - the liberal blog new wave

*Arthur Anderson Award for Innovative Accounting - OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr, for his new, lower-cost "estimates" of the cost of conquering Iraq

Special Achievement Award - Antiwar.com (2001: Blogger.com)

*Food of the Year - Chili without beans

Tagline of the Year - "Harabist," Aziz Poonawalla (2001: "We can fact-check your ass," Ken Layne)

Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering (2001: Mrs. Offering [same one])

Longer Boats - About my item on Tolkien as British mythology, and why the Ring saga is so land-locked, Patrick Nielsen Hayden quickly wrote:

What do you mean, "where are all the boats"? In Tolkien's mythology, sailing is how you get to Heaven, more or less. Sounds reasonably English to me.

Mariners are a Big Deal in Arda, I'll remind you. One of them was so successful, he got turned into a star, and Elrond is his son, too. An entirely Age of the World (the Second, to be precise) was dominated by dauntless navigatin' men. Eventually they decided this naval power stuff was so spiffy, they'd just use it to conquer the gods. Trouble ensued.

Even in THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Aragorn enters Minas Tirith at the head of a mighty fleet, one of the most visually-dramatic scenes in THE RETURN OF THE KING and one I hope doesn't get lost on the cutting-room floor.

Just like Patrick to confuse the issue with facts. Still: It doesn't seem like much. Where is the littoral coastline? Where are the wondrous islands? Beowulf sails a lot. Sir Patrick Spens sails. Frodo not at all.

I'm wondering now if Treasure Island isn't "a mythology for Britain."

Libertarian Simplifies Your Life - Eric Mauro e-mails about Know-Nothings, neo-confederates and other disagreeable people:

I've been wondering about that as well, after the Lott affair. Lincoln would have got nowhere being a total abolitionist, but then again there were abolitionists at the time. This is a big problem with revisionism. If you believe in the essence of electoral politics, that the electorate always makes the best decision, then you have to accept that the racist constituencies of the 20th century were making the best choice they could be expected to. It makes it a little easier to accept the idea that presidents from Lincoln on couldn't effectively establish voting rights laws (although all politicians ought to be held accountable for any violence they incited). Admittedly that is awfully close to excusing their racism. Don't know where to come down on this.

I think this problem is easier for libertarians because we don't have to believe that "the electorate always makes the best decision." For us, representative democracy is a means, not an end. The electorate gets it wrong plenty. We just figure other systems would get it more wrong.

Unmixed Signals - Say this for the Bush Administration - it has sent a message to potentially hostile regimes that is admirable for its clarity if nothing else: Get nukes as fast as you can, one way or another. If you miss your deadline, like Iraq, you can be toppled with something close to impunity. If you act with dispatch, like Korea, you're golden.

The optimistic reading of the Korean scenario is exactly that North Korea is taking advantage of the Bush Administration's obsessio focus on Iraq to arm up and secure itself from the same fate. Kim Jong-Il has figured out how the Axis of Evil works: he who has nukes survives. The pessimistic scenario is that North Korea will attempt to extort money and concessions from Japan and South Korea with its weapons just as it extorted US aid with the mere prospect of a nuclear program in the 1990s. Korea is an economic basket case of its own making, unlike Iraq, and its Communist Party may be the one that decides to take everybody else down with it.

Ironies abound here. South Korea wants to practically cut the US out of resolving what Colin Powell assures is is not a crisis. US-South Korean relations are probably the worst they've been since the 1970s. Meanwhile, North Korea is trying to cut everybody but the US out:

"There is no need for the third party to meddle in the nuclear issue on the peninsula. The issue should be settled between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S., the parties responsible for it," said the North's ruling-party newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun.

(Link via Instapundit.) I've read, though I can't find a link now, that Japan seems similarly more uneasy about what the US may do in response to the Korean situation than what the DRPK itself might do.

Darn those ungrateful Japanese and South Koreans, your neos are saying now. But here's the thing: it's their ass on the line much much more than ours. We have 37,000 troops, maybe, with a lucky shot, one or two small cities and some steelhead streams at risk from North Korea. South Korea and Japan have their whole countries on the line.

A lot of libertarians say, rather casually, no one knows how to live your life better than you do, as an argument against bureaucracy, regulation and the shepherd-client state. This is obviously wrong at least some of the time. I have family members whose lives I could do a tolerably smarter job with than they've managed themselves. The real argument is different: If you fuck your life up, you suffer the consequences. If I fuck your life up, you suffer the consequences. I may be smarter than you, some time in some ways, but I'm not infallible. But a system where you pay for my mistakes and it's my job to make your mistakes for you is a bad idea.

As so often, interventionism is the nanny state applied to international relations. The consequences of our Korean mistakes will fall almost everywhere but on us.

Unqualified Offerings Unclear on the Concept - Bruce Rolston talks about Tolkien's desire to create a mythology for England. Okay, they talk of nothing else on the bonus DVD disks too. Here's my question . . .

Where are all the boats? What self-respecting island nation's mythology is centered in a thoroughly landlocked tale?

(Is this one Seablogger can explain?)

Blogwatch Auxiliary - A few goings-on . . .

Duckboyz? - The webfooted lad announces that he too will be taking in strays, like Asymmetrical Information and On the Third Hand before him.

Spleenville - Big ol' thread on Tolkien and the merits of fantasy. Reading the chief antagonist of the thread may be hazardous to those who have high blood pressure, the surname "Nielsen Hayden" or both.

Where is Raed - Salam Pax on the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra by candlelight. Plus, how close does Iraq think we are to war? and better uses for human shields.

Colby Cosh - Fun with French, one of those unaccountable paeans to the manual typewriter and Italian cultural insecurities.

Seablogger says, America: Empire, No; Monarchy, maybe. Also, new boat stuff.

Hot Buttered Death has lots of self-test results and, yes, a Two Towers review, among other things.

Thanks to retiring Washington Redskin Darrell Green. There was a period in the mid-nineties when Mrs. Offering and I managed to get to about one game a year at the stadium. The best thing about being at the game rather than watching it on TV was the chance to watch Darrell Green work an entire play. He liked to try to bait quarterbacks into throwing to his side by laying back a step or two off the receivers. When they did though, came that famous closing speed, and the leap. You wouldn't believe a 5'8" man could get up that high. It was his jumping ability that let him hold his own with much bigger receivers. Also his smarts. Twenty years, the last two full of indignities borne with admirable grace.

People Unclear on the (Invidious) Concept - Judging from this item, Charles Dodgson may not understand the "Being a hawk means never having to say you're sorry" principle.

Surely, on the other hand, Donald Rumsfeld does.

A Fanboy's Notes, Holy Shit Department - Jesse Walker informs me, and it's apparently confirmed, that Michael "Kavalier and Clay" Chabon is writing the script for Spiderman II. I should be embarrassed to admit how thrilling I find this news. Chabon's unused proposal for the first X-Men movie can be accessed from this page of his website.

Jesse is whiling away the intervening time with year end movie "best of" lists - for 1992, 1982 and 1972.

Department of Hunh - The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck. Pretty amusing. (Link via (woolgathering).)

Eschaton-ological Mail - My brief, carping item about liberal bloggers, especially Atrios, brought some mail, which is so far running about 2-1 against me. That is, I heard from three people, one of whom was Atrios, who was very polite, one from a leftist reader who wrote "I read one of his commenters joking about cutting out Lott's heart, pretty sad stuff." and one from Zizka, whose work I had occasion to cite back when we were all discussing Orwell. Zizka's e-mail is substantial and worth running in its entirety. I will, impolitely, interrupt it a time or two. My apologies to Zizka:

I wasn't on the thread you cited, but I'm one of Atrios' "extreme" commenters, or at least I try to be, so I thought I'd respond to your snippet pasted below.

I can't blame you for thinking that liberals and Democrats should always be open-minded and temperate rather than partisan and combative, because many liberals and Democrats think that too.

Where it came from I don't know, but what a dumb idea! In order to function at all, a political party or political tendency needs to have some partisans. If you don't have some fighters on the ground, you lose.

Nobody makes such a demand of conservatives or Democrats. George Will publishes about three moderate and zero liberal pieces a year, and no one screeches. Paul Krugman -- a moderate Clinton Dem, incidentally -- is equally partisan, and a pack of jackals howls at his door 24/7.

Actually "thoughtful Republican syndrome" is legendary among cynical observers on the right. A "thoughtful" Republican is any Republican who rolls over for Democratic proposals. Obviously any Republican who isn't "thoughtful" is . . .

I take Zizka's point that "In order to function at all, a political party or political tendency needs to have some partisans." But that doesn't make such partisans interesting. As a political extremist, I regard an ardent affection for either major party as akin to an enthusiasm for Theosophy. Bright people can certainly believe such things - I'll admit to a doubt that it's the bright part of bright people who so believe - and be worthwhile reading to boot. Yeats was gaga for Theosophy, of course, but still a fascinating thinker and writer. But his ideas on Theosophy itself are not what most of us go to Yeats for.

The demand that liberals should always be temperate and judicious can come from only one place, and that is the belief that there's something so terribly, terribly wrong with liberalism that its advocacy is just plain stupid. But if you believe that, you're not a liberal. (Kaus and Peretz claim to be liberals, but they aren't. They hate liberals).

Moderates are OK with me. So are cautious liberals, and so are tweeners such as yourself. What that means is that if you agree with me, I'm cool with that, and that if you disagree with me, I'll argue. Because I actually believe what I say I believe.

Actually, I don't recall demanding anything. Nor was I complaining that liberals advocate liberalism.

I've stayed out of the Atrios/ Hesiod controversy, but to me one thing the Democrats absolutely have to do is to keep pounding away at the fact that many important Republicans are far too close to the neo-Confederates. It's not just Lott, and it's not just that one thing Lott said. Ashcroft and Sessions come immediately to mind, but we've only just started looking.

And no, not all conservatives are racists. But the Republican Southern strategy panders to the racists, and everyone who plays along with that is tainted. (Are the Democrats tainted by their association with Sharpton? Yes, but Sharpton's just one guy. He's not the Majority leader, he's not a Senator, and as far as I'm concerned he's far less obnoxious than a dozen or so of the Republican neo-Confederates in Congress. You are free to disagree).

I can't agree that there is "just one guy" like Al Sharpton that the Democrats are beholden too. The question of "taint" is genuinely interesting. Something I've been meaning to write about since Lott-ergate is this whole vexed question of where one trolls for votes. Because the issue goes way back - to the very birth of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century out of the ashes of the Whig Party. The Republican Party would not have thrived were it not for a concerted and largely successful effort to coopt the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings were hardcore nativists, anti-immigrant and especially anti-Catholic. Lincoln and the early Republicans never proposed a systematic anti-immigrant program of the sort the Know-Nothings might have liked, but they played artfully on nativist resentments, with an eye to convincing this voting bloc to fear free blacks less than free Irish. At the same time, of course, the Democratic Party was attempting not just to succor its urban immigrant constituency but to frighten it with the prospect of competition from free black labor. Southern Dems similarly played on poor white fears of competition from free blacks, a tactic that had a century yet to run on it.

My point? Oh yeah, I'm supposed to have a point. In a democracy, "taint" is structural. Parties are essentially constituent service organizations and any given constituency is going to have its disagreeable atavisms, e.g. the widespread antisemitism among african-americans and homophobia among rural whites. Politics also abhors a vacuum, so every constituency is going to get at least lip service from some party. There are votes in it.

The question becomes, how do you honorably troll for votes among people with disagreeable beliefs.

Last, we have the "just as bad as ...." canard. As I understand, the posters on LGF routinely propose nuclear genocide. Limbaugh and Coulter routinely misrepresent facts and seldom retract anything. Limbaugh, Coulter, and the Freepers routinely accuse liberals of treason. Coulter and the Freepers routinely toy with death threats. Please detail what it is that you've seen on Atrios' comment section that approaches any of this.

Atrios's own e-mail included an interesting formulation on the matter. He wrote:

I don't think rabid partisanship - i.e. "all republicans are evil" (or "all demonrats are evil") is comparable to rabid bigotry " all muslims/arabs are evil." I don't thnk Rush Limbaugh is a bigot for the things he says about liberals, for example.

I don't mind LGF's commenters when they're talking about how liberals want to destroy america and replace it with an ISlamist theocracy - this is just juvenile, if ridiculous, stuff. I mind when they think all muslims should be rounded up in camps or nuked for the sins of some of their members.

I take Atrios's point here. Certainly there's a bright line between "members of a political party" and "members of an ethnic group" - you're not a member of an ethnic group because you believe things. You're a member of an ethnic group because you got born into it. I don't think the distinction between "members of a political party" and "members of a religion" is as clean, since belief and ideas about the proper ordering of the world are in the nature of both.

I'll note also that I wondered if Atrios' site was "on its way to becoming a Democratic Party version of Little Green Footballs" since, hey, why include weasel words in the first place if you're not going to use them later. That said, I agree with Zizka that there are two key differences between the sites now:

First, none of Atrios' commenters that I've seen wish violence on "you, and anyone who looks like you," which is not the case on LGF. Second, Atrios doesn't moderate his comments. Charles Johnson does. The fact that Johnson is reportedly zealous about deleting comments he considers to be antisemitic while letting stand comments that are bigoted toward muslims gives him a level of personal responsibility that doesn't attach to Atrios. (Note: Somehow the LGF Avengers did not go into action after my original post, no doubt due to my sheer insignificance. I'll be grateful for their continued discretion.)

Having just spent way too much time among the Eschaton comments, I found some really worthwhile stuff among the dross, too.

Oh the Irony Item - Reading this Airstrip One item a symmetry finally hits me: American WWII revisionists generally accuse Roosevelt of being overly attached to Churchill. At the same time, British WWII revisionists suspect Churchill of being overly attached to Roosevelt. This isn't one of those cases where "They can't both be right," but it's still interesting.

Splash! - Electrolite finds - quite the headline.

He's also got a great Tolkien roundup with links to further reading. And Avedon Carol now has a Sideshow Annex devoted to Issues Mesoterran.

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Primarily for fellow MT users . . .

I've been meaning to brag about my Movable Type fu. Last month I decided to really learn MT, beyond just the minimum needed to get a blog up and post to it. In the course of doing so I completely redesigned my Nobilis site (dedicated to the game by R. Sean Borgstrom). Unqualified Offerings is . . . unadorned, by design. Here content is not just king - it's the whole damn kingdom. I wanted a bit more ornament for the Nobilis site. I also had the notion that I could use MT as a content manager to produce something that looked very much like a traditional website, not a blog. That turned out to be true.

By manipulating style sheets, template modules and index templates I was able to produce a traditional welcome page, as for a static site. From there the reader can choose either a weblog view or a "trad view." It would have been possible to eliminate weblog view entirely, but when you created the first ever Nobilis weblog ego reasons militate against this.

There are things Movable Type doesn't do, in the version I'm using at least, that I wish it did. For instance, you can set up a multi-category archive using BOOLEAN statements. I created a "campaign-free blog" using this technique so that people who don't want to read minutiae of our particular game don't have to. But I wish I had an "ALL EXCEPT" ("NOT") option for categories. I'd appreciate some more robust sorting options for the category index. But I was very pleased with what I was able to do with the available options.

Anyway, pretty cool huh?

Controversies Too Stupid to Waste Much Time On - There are a handful:

Bill Frist's pencils. Much has been written about this one, god knows why. Remember when Mencken said "A belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms?" It was for occasions like this.

Patty Murray, traitor. Murray is a dumbass and has the liberal Democrat's inveterate faith in economic intervention anywhere, at home or abroad. Thus she imagines that Bin Laden must be building "day care centers" because she herself would like to build day care centers. But the conservative attempt to puff up routine big government encomia (more foreign aid will make us secure!) into the next thing to aid and comfort to the enemy is a) a transparent attempt to gin up any controversy whatsoever around a Democrat in the aftermath of Lott-ergate, b) absurd and c) despicable. Tony Adragna points out that the gist of Murray's remarks accords with statements made by President Bush himself months earlier.

Robert Byrd's "white nigger" remarks. Yeah yeah, Byrd's an ex-Klansman and a pork-barrel artiste. But he left the Klan, didn't he? His blitherings a couple of years ago about how there are "white niggers" was just a ham-handed attempt by an old guy to come to terms with his changed understanding of the world. Anyone who hasn't heard people of Byrd's age - people of good will if imperfect adjustment - make similar statements in almost the same language simply doesn't talk to many people. The irony is that Byrd was trying to say he understands that the sort of racism he used to subscribe to is wrong. There was never anything to this controversy but partisan hooey.

Bill Frist's "Marion Barry" remarks. Again, too stupid for words. Barry was the deserving poster boy for a particular kind of bad urban government and people have pointed out that Frist's opponent was chair of the District Affairs Committee when the remark was made. This is straight "town mouse versus country mouse" stuff, the oldest and most enduring political divide known.

Everybody's a Cynic - Your Talking Dog all but declares that since more violence and terror will benefit both the Likud campaign and the thugs who still control Palestinian strategy and tactics, that there will be more violence and terror in the run-up to the Israeli elections. Why do I say everybody's a cynic? Because I think he's right.

TD thinks Likud is in actual trouble

. . . so look carefully at other developments affecting Likud, such as the resignation of Moshe "Musa" Alperon from the Likud Party; as you will recall, Mr. Alperon has reputedly been involved in criminal activities, and has been involved in questionable campaign activities leading to an investigation that involves high ranking Likud figures; there is also an investigation of MK Haim Katz on Likud vote buying allegations. And there is this story of a general malaise in the Likud Party. Man, if the LOYALISTS are not so sure about Likud, what about the rank and file citizenry?

but you know how these New York liberals underestimate the chances of right wing candidates - Nixon, Reagan, Giuliani, Sharon?

Remedial Greek - Strangely, classicist Victor Davis Hanson seems to forget the whole hubris thing when his attention turns to the present day:

Something strange is happening, as if all the old conventional wisdom proves daily insolvent. Each hour Saudi Arabia appears a more untenable ally, panicky as the light of truth shines into its deepest recesses. The Arab street sinks more and more into irrelevance, as lunatic as it is impotent; its anti-American hatred is to be welcomed rather than feared, given what it presently represents: gender apartheid, religious intolerance, tribalism, and anti-Semitism. Middle Eastern leaders may shake fingers and talk tough, but they have no moral credibility and still less power — and, like former Eastern European Communist hacks, are likely to become the flotsam and jetsam in a tidal wave of change.

Hey, what could go wrong!

People Unclear on the Concept - Tapped, part of an intra-left blogger brawl about race and the Democratic Party agenda that involves Atrios and Hesiod among others, asks

But then, inevitably, we come to the question of what's acceptable non-racist policy from a conservative or a Republican. (If you think it's impossible to be a conservative or a Republican without being racist, you might as well stop reading here.)

Okay, not completely unclear on the concept. Because I suspect Atrios and many of his followers haven't the slightest inclination to concede that there is an "acceptable" conservatism. He and his confreres seem to be pursuing a pretty scorched-earth partisanship. And the reader comments to his posts makes me wonder if Atrios is really "the left wing Instapundit" or if his site is on its way to becoming a Democratic Party version of Little Green Footballs.

Notes from Under the Christmas Tree - Reactions to the good stuff I got for Christmas:

Fellowship of the R - okay, enough Tolkien talk for awhile. Mrs. Offering actually bought the collector gift edition or whatever it's called, the one with the bigass bookends, because it was the only version of the extended-edition DVD in stock. But I have nothing to add on the topic. See items and links below.

Spiderman DVD - Whee! Looking forward to seeing how good the bonus material is. Haven't done so yet.

Fables graphic novel - This rocks. It reprints issues 1-5 of a Vertigo comics series written by Bill Willingham about fairy tale characters and their underground society in New York City. The Adversary has conquered the homelands. Now King Cole is the mayor of Fabletown, his executive assistant, Snow White, actually runs the place while Bigby "Big Bad" Wolf is pretty much the Fabletown sheriff. In the first storyline, Snow White's sister, Rose Red, turns up missing, maybe murdered. Is it Bluebeard, her fiance? Her boyfriend Jack (of beanstalk fame)? Bonus for libertarians: King Cole's government lacks the authority to tax!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - You have to love a pulitzer prizewinning novel whose afterword ends with a thanks to Jack "King" Kirby for influencing everything the author ever wrote. Like Colby Cosh, who seems to have gotten the same book for Christmas, I'm finding that it actually lives up to its reputation so far. (I'm early in part two.)

CDs - Buddy and Julie Miller's first official CD as a duo and Buddy's most recent solo CD, Midnight and Lonesome. This is real hillbilly music, albeit by two people who spent time in an acid rock band. They're part of the Steve Earle-Emmylou Harris-Lucinda Williams mafia. Curiously, almost all the songs on Buddy's solo album are written by Julie. She also wrote almost all the duet record material. Fabulous stuff. If I could afford the bandwidth and the possible legal woes I'd make the mp3 of their duet on "Away in a Manger" available too.

I also got Johnny Cash's American Recordings III and IV - yes, it was an Americana Christmas here at the Highclearing.com World Headquarters. Cash's voice is weaker on IV than on III. III also has his cover of U2's "One," which is pretty darn good.

UPDATE: I forgot to link the link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, which I regret. Certainly I should have linked to Colby and meant to. In fact, I woke up this morning wondering, did I forget to link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, because that is a major violation of blogger etiquette, even if not linking to Colby were a product of absent-mindedness rather than malice. Not only do I try not to do that sort of thing, but I would certainly never want to do it to Colby Cosh, whom I admire for practically everything except his execrable taste in music. Happily, blogging lets us correct these errors. (Rumor is it would even work for Gary Farber.)

Speaking of Bruce Baugh, his site has an example of what happens when a real writer gets ahold of a real topic - why it's so much harder to write about happiness than unhappiness.

Oops, Missed citing this Aziz Poonawalla essay on Tolkien's method

The essence of allegory is a homomorphism - a one-to-one mapping. The Ring is nuclear power. Sauron is Hitler. Hobbits are the English. Aragorn is Churchill. The disdain that Tolkien had for this kind of decimation of themes to mere analogy is clear in the Foreword, because it takes something timeless and forces it into a very limited temporal window. This destroys the lessons and utility of the themes themselves.

The true themes of LOTR, which are applicable to any time, are these, to name just a few: We are our own worst enemy. Evil within must be defeated before the evil without. Death. The simple heroism of ordinary people. The Pandora's box of technology. The necessity of wisdom. The vulnerability of the wise . . .

and his extended-edition Fellowship DVD review;

and Stephen Chapman's DVD review;

and Bruce Baugh's with-spoilers review of Two Towers and without-spoilers version. Excerpt:

As I remarked below, there are changes made for the film that I wish had not been made, and which sometimes interfered with my enjoyment. But since seeing TTT I've talked and chatted online and exchanged mail with friends who haven't read Tolkien, and asked them about their reactions. I have fun sometimes drawing on what I learned in historical-methods classes about phrasing questions in neutral ways and the like, because I really like knowing what others think apart from whatever I might be able to manipulate them into saying.

The reactions are quite consistent from my not-yet-trilogy-reading friends. And...they're really pretty much the same as the ones I have to the books . . .

Bruce's conclusion: Peter Jackson really has gotten Tolkien onto the screen, the essence of the thing, however much fans may quibble with the details.

More of the Rings - Good to great writing elsewhere about Tolkien, Towers, fantasy and meaning. Diana Moon posts (substantial) "impressions" to Letter from Gotham. Some of them are at serious variance with mine. She brings up interesting questions about the Christianity of Tolkien's trilogy or lack thereof:

Lastly, I was struck by the utter absence of Christianity in these adaptations and I wonder if that is the case with the books as well. The film was very violent; even the scenes that were not violent were pregnant with the possibilities of violence: the violence of nature, and of men both. This is not a criticism. Nature is violent. Human beings are violent. It's the job of artists to point this out. But in Christianity there is always the flickering possibility of redemption through belief in Christ. In this film, I don't see such possibilities. And I'm not sure whether this is a perversion of Tolkien's message or an accurate representation of it.

I should let a real Tolkien scholar handle this one, or a real Christian. (Eve? Care to oblige?) It's true that the Christian religion itself is absent from the books. We all know of Tolkien's famous disparagement of allegory too, and the Ring doesn't fit any neat retelling formula. Since I'm a blogger, and thus incapable of leaving matters to the more qualified, I'll wager that the Christian quality of the saga inheres in the centrality of abnegation to the storyline. The One Ring represents Temptation and power of a particularly worldly kind, the kind that must be not only resisted but foreclosed. The ring tempts its wielders to make themselves into gods. The Catholicism perhaps lies in the importance of mediating Authority. There is a unitary truth (Ring bad, among other things) known to wise interpreters. Gandalf and Elrond are right. They are reliable guides for the ignorant. It's not for Frodo to have a direct apperception of the truth about the Ring, to form his own relationship to and opinion of it. It's for Frodo to understand what Gandalf conveys and to freely recognize and accept the obligation this implicitly lays on him.

People who have read the books more than once can surely do better than this.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol is hosting a brilliant colloquy on the uses and misuses of fantasy as a guide to politics on the Sideshow. The capstone is a long letter from a Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which is too good not to quote:

The better a story, the more likely it is that people are going to elicit a wide range of readings from it. Glenn Reynolds reads the "King of the Golden Hall" chapter of THE TWO TOWERS as a reminder that sometimes it's necessary to stand and fight. Well, sometimes it is. For me, the moral center of THE LORD OF THE RINGS is Gandalf's advice to Frodo: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." Cue Saturday Night Live routine: "Stop! You're both right!" Eric Tam says this sort of thing demonstrates that "such hermeneutics can cut many ways." I daresay this is true. But it accords oddly with his claim that moral simplemindedness is an essential characteristic of fantasy.

On Seablogger, Alan Sullivan is writing a whole series of essays about Tolkien, starting with a personal recollection of his long love of the trilogy that touches on both Christianity and politics. More are promised.

Sticking to politics, Tolkien and the Present Moment for a moment, Antoine Clarke seems to me to get it perfectly in this Samizdata item.

Tolkien would possibly see as more complicated: the US acting perhaps like the doomed kingdom of Numenor. The US military hegemony as analogous to Galadriel taking the One Ring:

[Sam Speaks]
"But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folks pay for their dirty work."

[Galadriel replies]
"I would" she said. "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!"

. . .

The US empire to come is unlikely to be as restrained as the British Empire, because of the socialist ethos of state imposed education, and crusades such as ridding the Third World of cheap (child) labour, the War on Drugs, the War on Tax Evasion, trying to impose a worldwide age of sexual consent, banning alcohol before 21, but making it almost compulsory thereafter, the imposition of American patent law worldwide, and of course, global weapons control.

In other words, although US global supremacy starts better than the Soviet dream of a worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it could end up the same...

And he quotes Galadriel again:

"That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!"

And in the not-to-be-missed category, this Straight Dope Message Board thread that Teresa Nielsen Hayden found, which starts with "What if Ernest Hemingway had written LOTR" and spirals into increasingly brilliant insanity. TNH's own lengthy excerpt item on the Straight Dope thread has 83 comments as I type this. They are themselves sure to be worth several laughs.

Previews of Coming Attractions - Coming Tuesday, Unqualified Successes 2002! - this site's annual awards presentation. New categories. New winners for old categories. Surprises galore. (I'm assuming . . . ) Last year's winners are here.

A Fanboy's Notes: Essay Topic - Compare: Samwise Gamgee from LOTR and Iran Deckard, wife of android hunter Rick, in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Two Towers - Just got back. This is the quickie reaction. More may come later.

No, it's not as good as the first one. Part of this is Trilogy Middle Syndrome. Part of it is that the script is less surefooted - Sam's voiceover speech during the twin battles at Helm's Deep and Isengard falls off the Edge of Grandeur into the Abyss of Corn, and the coy metafictional discussion about stories between Sam and Frodo at the end strikes me as, well, a gratuitous fanboy touch. (For all I know it's in the book and faithful as hell. Too bad.) Everyone in my group also felt that the assault on Isengard was staged and shot in such a way as to make the ents look too small. Ents should be big fucking majestic things.

The biggest problem is Frodo. As a character, Frodo is largely done after the first movie - by the end of it, he's made such decisions as are his to make: to put himself through hell for the sake of others; to dare ruin and death, foresaking comfort; to sacrifice even such protection as he was vouchsafed for their sake and the sake of his quest (excepting Sam, whom he can't shake). What made the first movie work, as I argued last year, is that it got across how much it hurt to be Frodo. But now we know that. The decisive movement hereafter belongs to Sam, and we're still on the way to that. Peter Jackson and his script collaborators seem to intend Sam's speech at the end of TT to point the way for us - it's just not done as well.

Frodo's role from the end of the first book/movie on is to subside. There may be subtleties that another actor than Elijah Wood could bring to his descent. But Frodo is already on his way to becoming object rather than subject, the wishbone Sam and Gollum try between them.

Gollum! Yes, every bit as good as I had read and heard. Everything from the movement to the voice to the script is perfect here. It's so good I find myself genuinely sad the little bastard isn't going to make it.

The battle at Helm's Deep was quite fine. Quite as good as Branagh's Agincourt in Henry V? Eh. But up there. I wasn't disappointed.

Still very much looking forward to the third movie. Biggest problem there: I got the special edition DVD for Christmas and Mrs. Offering and I watched it last night as a refresher. So after part one last night and part two tonight, I fully expect to see Return of the King tomorrow. So far.

Season's Greetings - Happy New Shirts at Work Day, Loyal Readers!

And a Child Shall . . . - You know how they say it's not Christmas until your toddler has painted herself, her crib and whatever can be reached from the crib with her own poop? Well it's Christmas now!

And a Merry one to all. Peace on Earth. Good will too.

Foreshadowing, Your Key to Quality Literature as they said in Bloom County. Now, I want you to think of two things from the Gospels. First, the Last Supper, which is the basis for the Eucharist. Take of this bread and eat, for this is my body. Take of this wine and drink, for this is my blood.

Then think about what a manger is.

It's a Miracle - I've lived in the Washington DC area for just over a quarter-century and I can not remember a single white Christmas before tonight. God bless us, every one!

Game Night at Victor Davis Hanson's House - Eric Mauro says that he was inspired by Gene Callahan's "Lessons of History" essay to draw this cartoon.

Joe Strummer is Dead - One of the two heads of the Clash monster (with Mick Jones), Strummer died of a heart attack at his farmhouse in southwestern England yesterday. Here's CNN's story.

"You were silly like us," Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats. "Your gift survived it all." That will surely do for Strummer. He had the substantially dumb politics of the 70s-era euroradical. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spat it out after seeing the Sex Pistols. The Clash was a political band, and it mixed its "good" positions - opposition to the drug war, anti-racism - with the usual dumb ones like Marxist wealth redistribution and a fondness for left-wing dictators. At the same time, they were the rare leftie band that made at least gestures in the direction of true moral equivalence politically. (The "moral equivalence" against which neoconservatives rave was never really equivalence at all. It was a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which the sins of the East were justified by the sins of the West but the failings of the West were somehow not justified by the failings of the East.) "Washington Bullets," a song decrying foreign intervention, contained the lines

If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed
Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist

The same song found room to critique China's arms trade and even to praise Jimmy Carter for letting Anastasio Somoza fall.

The Clash were honest with themselves even when they were wrong. In "Safe European Home," the ferocious kickoff to the ferocious Give 'Em Enough Rope LP, young radicals (the band) go to Jamaica only to find that it doesn't live up to their fantasies, nor do they themselves:

I went to the place
where every white face
was an invitation to robbery
Now I'm sitting here
in my safe European home

And the music! There was such a thing as punk rock. It was like a waterspout erupting under your feet and coursing up through you and out the top. The Clash had it down. They lost me with Sandinista, which many Clash fans loved, but which I found endlessly noodling. Too much dub, not enough reggae. A prog rock album as far as I was concerned, with about one and a half records worth of material meandering over three discs. Combat Rock was something perilously close to that vexed term, a sellout.

But there were months after the release of London Calling in 1979 when it seemed pointless to play any other record. Give 'Em Enough Rope was a shorter, louder masterpiece too. Joe Strummer was a big part of it all. I haven't heard to much of his recent music (as Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros) but you can watch a 1999 concert at Prime Ticket.

I owe the man.

Clausewitz Had It Backward - I think it was Joe Haldeman who first suggested this, that actually, politics was the continuation of war by other means, not war the continuation of politics. The US government's Iraq policy would appear to bear that out. Right now the media is full of speculation about when (in some naive quarters, if) the war with Iraq will begin. But not only have we been at war with Iraq for months now, as this useful item by pro-war blogger Donald Sensing, a former paratrooper, makes clear, we've actually been at war for a dozen years. Whatever 34,000 sorties a year is, it's not peace. Nor is a sanctions policy that a rational observer would conclude the US never intended to be lifted short of regime change, regardless of cooperation or lack thereof with the UN inspections program. It may be wise policy or foolish policy. What it isn't is peaceful policy.

There's a phrase people sometimes use - I occasionally use it myself - but it's wildly misleading: "Gulf War I." As distinct from what happens next month. But it implies that "Gulf War I" ended at some point, which it didn't, really. It was continued by other means for awhile. No one outside the United States is fooled by this. We mustn't be either. Even if you favor this war you should understand how long you've been waging it.

Loathsome Toad Watch - Free to run for President, Joe Lieberman runs for the sewer:

Lieberman seeks video game hearings
Gore "offensive to our most basic values"

Don't worry, Avedon. He's not talking about Al.

Time for a Gerard Jones citation, I think.

Link via Franklin Harris. The Cinescope article itself is by blogger Mike Whybark.

Speaking of Physics, Chad Orzel has great items on the physicist as jack-of-all-trades, and "fermi numbers," a longtime interest of mine.

Ironies of Physics - A warm spell before Christmas, so we have to turn the heat up. When it gets colder again we'll turn it back down. When it gets real cold we have to set the thermostat as low as 62F at night. It being up in the 40s tonight we'll have to keep it at 66. Nights in the low fifties we have to jack it all the way up to 68.

Why? Unqualified Headquarters appears, to the untrained eye, to be an aging, poorly-insulated split level in a modest neighborhood. (To the trained eye it appears to be a yurt.) The thermostat is near the back door. Heat rises. So:

o The rec room is a lost cause until March.
o Little heat stays by the back door, so the thermostat's thermometer is slow to rise and the heat slow to cut off.
o Most heat rises to the bedroom/office level.

So the colder it gets, the colder the dining room stays. If you set the heat high, it never cuts off. So you set it low. But if it warms up outside, it warms up in the dining room. So if you keep the heat low, it never gets cool enough to ignite, and the upstairs freezes.

Something tells me this is a bloggers don't have editors post. But hey, it's the weekend.

Hello Out There - If you've cited Unqualified Offerings recently, thank you. I may not know it, because my freaking referrer stats are messed up. I see tallies, so it's adding up and the logs are logging, but no names by the tallies. Obviously a problem with the database software. Still not fixed, though, since Monday. I'm switching hosts next month. Wonder if it will be fixed before then.

The Way the Future Wasn't - Reader Steve Cook claims, plausibly, that in "A Brief History of the Future" I confused TL Sherrod with Isaac Asimov:

Jim, I think you may be mixing up the endings of "E for Effort" and the Isaac Asimov story "The Dead Past"; if I recall correctly -- and no promises; I haven't read _E for Effort_ in some time -- "E for Effort" ends with them getting their _Alexander the Great_ movie made after blackmailing a bunch of rich people and the inventor (or possibly the narrator, who was more of a wheeling-dealing Hollywood type) marrying the secretary. "The Dead Past" features an academic obsessed with answering a question about, I believe, Sumerian practices of worship; the technology of viewing the past in that story is not a new invention, but something that is kept under strict controls by the government, and the protaganist hooks up with young physicist who manages to create a kit version of the time-viewer; the physicist's uncle then distributes the plans, leading to
the final scene you remember.

The funny thing is that I found myself forcibly reminding myself that "E is for Effort" was not by Isaac Asimov when I was writing the essay. Clearly "The Dead Past" made an impression. And it makes sense that an Asimov story ends with the words of wisdom coming from the government man.

Now I can't remember "E is for Effort" at all, and I'm sure I read it. (Barry Malzberg made much of the story in an essay collection called The Engines of the Night, too.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home. Sign me up.

Andrew Sullivan

I believe this just might be the other shoe:

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, ``The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,'' set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

(Link via Micah Holmquist.) Sure it is. Sure it will.

People, in the immortal words of the late George Allen:

The future is now.

Recommended Reading - Matthew Hogan explains why Oppressed People Suck and why that's no excuse for you. Julian Sanchez considers the possibility that George W. Bush too is a rational actor. And Dr. Manhattan tackles the connection, or lack of connection, between Thimerasol and autism.

Your Official Creep of the Day courtesy of Associated Press.

Sometimes the Slope Really Is Slippery - Your Talking Dog reads the foreign press and learns unsettling things about - here. TD is also your source for Israeli election coverage by a New York lawyer. Today he writes

Unfortunately, despite their rhetorical support for him, your TD remains convinced that the shakedown artists in charge of the Palestinian territories (and the terrorists therein) will increase the violence to PREVENT Mitzna's election -- and God help us if Mitzna and Labor start to improve in opinion polls.

I do too, alas.

It Didn't Start with Lott-ergate - The very good Charles Paul Freund on the very bad Woodrow Wilson, the man who brought Jim Crow to Washington.

The thoroughgoing awfulness of Wilson is one area where I have no difference with the paleos whatsoever. And, piling on, the Woodrow Wilson birthplace in Staunton, Virginia, stinks as a piece of curatorship compared to Monticello. In what way? The Monticello staff has been obsessive about recreating Jefferson's great home down to its last detail. If there's a book on a bookcase, it's because contemporaneous records indicate Jefferson owned that book in that edition. If there's a blanket on the bed, the pattern and fabric match what Monticello records indicate Jefferson had. (Monticello is also forthright about the role of slavery in supporting Monticello, without being unctious about it. And the shuttle bus drivers will happily discuss Sally Hemings with you. They don't know either, though they assume so.)

By contrast, the Wilson birthplace curators are content to fill the place up with period stuff. There was a very cool German tricycle where handles rather than pedals provide the motive power. Wow, I asked the tour guide, little Woodrow had one of those?

"We don't know," she said. "But they were popular back then."

The books also were just books from the turn of the century. A copy of Chapman's Homer open on the desk in no way indicated that Wilson or his parents had read Chapman's Homer in that house. It was all simply a matter of, Look! Old stuff! And a President was born here! (Note: All this was true in the late 1980s. Perhaps they have made giant curatorial leaps since then.)

There's a small outbuilding where the Wilson family slaves lived during Woodrow's childhood days. He clearly missed them.

Can You Keep a Secret? - Look who's baaaaaack...

(Link via Letter from Gotham.)

Strange Days - If I read this column right, Jonah Goldberg thinks he isn't a neocon. He doesn't think David Frum is one either.

Eerie Prescience Watch - They all laughed when I wrote last summer that "What the left lacks is an Instapundit." Now it's got one. (One more time: "For Good - or Evil . . . ")

It's striking how well Atrios fits the model:

o Comes to wide prominence (i.e. beyond the blogosphere) by doing energetic work on a story of great interest. Check.
o Story is such that said work inspires enormous gratitude. Check.
o Not a one-trick pony. Has other things to write about. Check.
o Generously supports less widely read bloggers with allied viewpoints. Check.
o Posts fast! Check.
o Posts lots! (Lotts.) Check.
o Frequently infuriates ideological opponents. Check.
o Secret Freemason. Ch-um, shhhh!

A Fanboy's Notes, Effendi - Bruce Baugh offers an excellent meditation on mutants, Marvel and metaphors. 'Nuff said?

Also, and this may shock people, he offers good reason to believe of the RIAA that "they are lying lying lying about the impact of piracy."

Mad as Hell. Will He Take It Any More? - Radley Balko has an item that is almost stunning in its hopefulness. This could be a genuine turning point in an otherwise dire history.

Libertarian Candidate Suffers Lopsided Loss - I'm getting killed in the voting for the Koufax Awards. I blame liberal bias! Actually, I'm an interloper anyway, since the Koufaxes are supposed to be for leftie bloggers. Solid liberal Atrios was running away with my category last I checked (best series), and surely he deserves it, for all that he is a hairy-backed grifter who has left a string of broken hearts and illegitimate children up and down the Mississippi River.

Look Over Here - Due to Blogger problems, Diana Moon has relocated Letter from Gotham for the time being. Find it here. Plenty of new material including a worthwhile one on T***t L**t.

I robbed Franklin Harris of a link last night due to an editing error. I quoted him but forgot to add the citation. Franklin, I'm sorry. Loyal readers, I heartily endorse Franklin's blog, the finding of which was genuinely exciting to me. Read Franklin Harris every day, like I do.

A Brief History of the Future - What's the big idea? I see three, and they interact in potentially dire ways.

1) The Stars My Destination. At the end of Alfred Bester's classic novel, Gully Foyle distributes the super weapon, PYRe, throughout earth's civilian population, putting a fission-class explosive that can be detonated with a thought in individual hands. Either humanity will learn to handle the power, Foyle says, or it doesn't deserve to survive. Why this matters: Nonproliferation is dead, even in the militant "Bush Doctrine" version. Nukes, gas and germs are mid-twentieth century technology at most. As Donald Rumsfeld keeps telling us, you can mix germs in a trailer. Nukes are hard to make, but there's a lot of theoretically working ones out there to buy, even if some are fixer-uppers.

I'm not talking just about proliferation among states, either. I mean this stuff is coming within the reach of you and me, or at least our Moose Lodge, whether Saddam dies peacefully in bed or before a firing squad.

2. E for Effort is a short story T.L. Sherrod wrote back in the forties. Two men invent a machine that can view the past. You can't go there, but you can see anything. They figure it will help unlock unsolved riddles of history. The government man at the end rebukes them. Don't you realize what you've done, he asks? What do you think the past is, anyway? The past includes last year, last week, yesterday and five seconds ago. The men have invented the ultimate surveillance device. Now you can spy on your spouse, your neighbors, your coworkers, anyone.

Total Information Awareness, hello. And a shoutout to the counter-insurgency, too. You probably know by now that a group has posted some of Information Awareness Office director John Poindexter's personal information on the internet. (Radley Balko's reaction to this is mine too.) Nothing personal, though. The John Poindexter Awareness Office site promises to "seek total information awareness about the personal lives, purchases, relationships, entertainment interests, reading habits, and travels of each and every employee of DARPA." (Link via Gene Healy.)

As lefties keep pointing out, DARPA's TIA program mostly aims to correlate capacious commercial databases that already exist. You and I can already buy books that promise to let you Get Anything on Anybody, and the technology is only going to get better and more widely available in the normal course of things. (Watch that phrase, normal course.) Tom Sherrod looks like one of about three genuinely prophetic science fiction authors. (For another, check out Clifford Simak's story, "Huddling Place," and ask if we aren't already half in that world.)

Welcome to the post-privacy era, which I believe David Brin has actually been writing about for some time.

3. Starship Troopers. No, not the movie! What are you thinking? Remember those potted histories of the passing of the age of chivalry? Remember why handguns got the slang term "equalizer" applied to them? Supposedly the ability of any man to kill any other man with firearms made armor useless and reduced the power of the small minority that had the money and desire to outfit themselves as knightly warriors. (Some folks nominate the longbow for this honor and say it was over for chivalry after Agincourt.) Second-Amendment purists argue that its importance is that it provides for the people to keep arms they can use to overthrow a tyrannical government.

So what happens when it all changes? What happens when one class gets to wear MIT's battle suit of the future and the other has to make do with Bushmaster XM-15s and dark shirts? Afghanistan and Waco both suggest how disparate capabilities have already become, and who can afford to equip the new knightly class? (The state has been intent on keeping the best toys to itself since shortly after the civil war, with the first measures against private ownership of gatling guns.)

Here's where it gets messy.

Proliferation augurs a world in which the nation-state cannot perform its second-most basic function - ensuring the physical security of most of its citizens. Any small group with a grudge or a bad hair day will be able to kill large numbers of people cheaply and conveniently. That could lead one to suspect that the nation-state is dead already, but hasn't quite caught on. But that brings us to the state's most basic function, which is to perpetuate itself. No way will it go quietly. For its own protection, it has recourse to shiny military technology that only it can afford, and it has Total Information Awareness. Both of these tend toward positive (from the state's perspective) feedback loops - the greater the advantage in information and violence, the more you can command a revenue stream to get both cooler weapons and fancier spy systems.

What's the obvious counter to the state's overwhelming advantage in guns and armor and target acquisition technology? Uh huh. Gas, germs and nukes. Who tends to get caught in the crossfire? Yes, us.

That leaves the surveillance front. Here the implications go way beyond politics (which is just the disposition of power), but let's stick with politics for just a second. You can be damn sure that to the extent that projects like the JPAO are successful, the state's reaction will be sheer fury. As Samizdata never tires of pointing out, they tell you surveillance is nothing to get upset about, but try pointing a camcorder at a cop sometime and see what kind of reaction you get.

Fury plus power equals repression. One plausible outcome is a savage twilight struggle between spooks and phreaks. A little of that already goes on, but the spooks won't be playing any more, and the phreaks will get pretty serious themselves. To make its life easier, the state has a tendency to prohibit things that are not commonly understood as crimes, but that make the state's job harder - like, oh, paying cash for expensive things, buying lots of grow lights, stuff like that. So in the course of defending itself the state may do a few things: It may create a new information caste system, comprising a class of people about whose private lives everything is an open book - we might call these people "ordinary" but we won't be able to follow it up with "citizens" - and another class about whose private lives the first class are forbidden to investigate or report. The second thing it may do is apply all sorts of restrictions to information technology and information exchange that don't (quite) exist yet.

If that happens, we all get very, very poor.

All this will be in the name of protecting us. If the information clampdown comes it will leave a whole bunch of educated folks underemployed and alienated from meaningful work. Viz. Mohammed Atta. Now see big idea One.

Note that, while I'm a libertarian and instinctively suspicious of the state, I'm not remotely arguing that the non-state actors that will arise are your friends. The first ones - Aum Supreme Truth and Al Qaeda - certainly are not. But the state's not your friend either, and it's going to be decreasingly able to convince you it's of much use. It will try its best, though, even if it kills you.

Done! - That's it. I'm all Lotted out. (And there was much rejoicing.)

UPDATE: Kidding. Just learned that Rand Simberg has taken a break from lame WWII-themed parodies of war skeptics to write an honest-to-god screamingly funny Lott revelation. You must not miss this.

Advantage: Radley Balko! - Gene Healy and CNN's story on the BET appearance make it clear that the Agitator called it right days ago:

So long as the GOP is led by Lott, the GOP is paralyzed.

There is, for example, a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made against racially-motivated set-aside programs for federal contractors.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of not only extending welfare reform, but given its success, of cutting back benefits even more.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of ending thought-policing, soul-exploring federal hate crimes statutes.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to made against the growing support for slavery reparations.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

The official vote is scheduled for January 6, 2003. That's a dangerous amount of time to wait. One possibility is that the furor dies down enough that Lott is able to calm enough Republican senators to keep his phony-baloney job. That would be the best of all possible Democratic Party worlds. Another is that the unofficial decision date gets moved up to before New Years.

I've made it pretty clear over the past year that I have little use for the Republican Party. But if Trent Lott hangs on, Republicans won't even have any use for it themselves.

Here It Comes - Gene Healy listened to all of Lott's appearance on BET tonight (so much for Heinlein's thesis that people act always to make themselves happy) and is already preparing for the worst. ("I get the distinct feeling he’s going to demonstrate his spiritual growth by lightening my paycheck.")

Says Gene, among other things:

I don’t think for a minute that Trent Lott wants to see the reinstitution of state-enforced segregation. Nor do I think he’d sacrifice his seat making a principled stand against it, if Jim Crow suddenly became popular again. When it was popular and considered acceptable in the South, he was for it. When people awoke to its injustice, and it rightly became anathema in American political life, he was against it. In neither case was he guided by principle. Trent Lott doesn’t have principles—he has interests. Or “interest,” in the singular, more appropriately. His interest is staying in office.

There's more.

On the credit where credit is due front, Mrs. Offering e-mailed me a quote from Maureen Dowd that I can't find in her latest column. But I trust my wife who said Dowd wrote

Trent Lott says he'll appear on BET for an hour to discuss his hopes and concerns for African Americans. I have to ask. Hasn't Mr. Lott made the black man suffer enough?

That's a paraphrase, alas.

UPDATE: Reader Chip Taylor comes through with a link and a roadmap. "Eighth and ninth paragraphs" of this column, he writes:

"For a full hour, I will talk about my hopes and dreams for the people in this state and this country, regardless of their race, and to make sure that African-Americans have the opportunities that they deserve," he promised the press in Pascagoula.

For the love of Amos 'n' Andy, hasn't Mr. Lott punished the black man enough?

Thanks, Chip!

For the Defense - Various folks have dissented from the otherwise universal opprobrium directed toward Trent Lott, for various reasons. A lot of people have an understandable distrust of universal opprobrium. Others have other reasons.

From the land of curling and punting on third down, Colby Cosh warns US conservatives

. . . is there not something nasty and ill-considered, bordering on the manic, about the blogosphere's collective demand for Trent Lott's head? The argument against him generally takes the form "I know he's not a racist; I know he didn't mean it; but he's got to go anyway, because his comments are going to be used against him by the Democrats." Isn't this tantamount to accepting your political enemy's standard of judgment in such matters? And if you accept such a standard, how can you defend someone worth the defending, when the time comes?

Colby has a lot more to say that's worth reading. I think, though, that many right-wing webloggers seem anything but sure Lott is not a racist. Also, watching the story develop over time, I got the impression that the tactical concerns came second, and an instinctive revulsion first. That's true even for the worst of them. (Hold that thought.) And while it's cheesy of me to pull latitude, it's possible that even a brilliant Canadian conservative like Colby doesn't, on some level, quite grok how fraught the US race problem is for all sides.

Speaking of the worst of them, Gene Callahan doesn't like what Lott's most vociferous right-wing critics stand for - war and domestic surveillance, chiefly. I actually prefer the way he put the matter in an e-mail to the column itself, so I quote the e-mail with permission:

That's not what I meant to say. It's more like this: Let's say we're in Germany circa 1938. It comes out that Hitler likes to torture frogs. Suddenly, all these people who had been pretty quiet about him explode with fury: "The frog torturer must go!"

Now, I'm against frog torturing. But, with everything else he was doing, my response would be, "And you're upset over THIS?"

And I don't mean to trivialize the evil of Jim Crow. But, as I pointed out, it's pretty clear that Lott is not actually trying to re-institute Jim Crow. The very worst interpretation of his remarks is that he misses it but isn't trying to do anything about the fact. And my question is, "What have we come to when eviscerating the Constitution [e.g. USA-PATRIOT, Total Information Awareness, resolutions authorizing a Presidential decision to use force as opposed to declaring war, e.g. - UO] is a matter for polite discussion but this bad -- but absolutely meaningless to any policy -- remark creates a tempest and calls for resignation?"

Gene sells some of Lott's critics somewhat short here. The neolibertarians on his list have been pretty vociferous in their criticisms of the domestic security innovations of this administration and congress. I'll grant that I don't like their views on the prospect of war. Meanwhile, most of Lott's neoconservative accusers not only favor the most expansive, least subject to constitutional checks and balances sort of military action, they've also been among the foremost apologists for Bush's slalom down the slippery slope of "homeland" tyranny.

For my part, I'm just glad these folks got one right for a change.

Meanwhile, Gene's editor, Lew Rockwell, seems to think that Lott's problem is that his post-furor statements weren't whiny enough. In "What Lott Might Have Said," Rockwell fills Lott's mouth with, among other things, self-pitying resentment worthy of Nixon:

I grant that my comments were highly unusual in American public life. Even more intense than the race taboo is the rule against expressing any regret for the astonishing centralization of power in America since World War II. Question that, and you will have few friends, and legions of opportunistic enemies. Such is the fate of any dissident living under Leviathan.

Obviously, Rockwell is speaking for himself and his particular movement more than for Lott here, since there's no evidence that Lott has any particular problem with the centralizing of power. I share Rockwell's distaste for "a managerial regime that intrudes itself into every aspect of public and private life, often in the name of quelling racial conflict but in fact only creating more," but there are all kinds of reasons his site dropped off the regular reading list for me, to the extent that I risk forgetting to catch pieces by writers I enjoy like Gene Callahan and Joseph Stromberg.

I outlined my complaints about lewrockwell.com back in April. But now there's an update. As part of LR.com's coverage of the Lott fracas, they've republished a gushing letter of support to the State's Rights Party from heterodox right wing thinker Murray Rothbard. Rothbard led a fascinating, fiesty intellectual life. He's particularly an enduring inspiration to hard-core anti-state, anarcho-capitalist types. His uncompromising thesis that all governments are fundamentally gangs is one I accept to a degree greater than certain of my readers would be comfortable with.

Just as Rothbard ended his peripatetic intellectual journey in the arms of the paleos, it appears that he began with them too. The letter says, among other things

Although a New Yorker born and bred, I was a staunch supporter of the Thurmond movement; a good friend of mine headed the Columbia Students for Thurmond, which I believe was the only such collegiate movement north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Apparently all governments are gangs except southern state governments. This tenet of hardcore Rothbardianism is the one I've had the hardest time quite grasping.

I find the letter distasteful in the extreme, but keep in mind that it was written in 1949 by a 23-year-old. Problem is - and it's a big one - it was republished, clearly intended as an example of wisdom, in 2002 by someone considerably older.

One important caveat: It doesn't bother me that good writers choose to write for LR.com. It carries some worthwhile articles and links to some pieces worth reading. I even, on Gene's advice, offered them a chance to link to one of my own items within the last few months. (They declined.) In the immortal words of Jesse Walker, nothing is beneath the freelance writer.

As part of their grand strategy to increase liberty for all, paleolibertarians have embraced the confederate cause. To get an idea of what that means, let's go to the League of the South's Michael Hill on the Lott controversy:

14. And here we go, all you Confederate Southrons-Slavery is an institution ordained of God and regulated by His Word! It is not therefore “evil!”

Mr. Hill also informs readers that

"2. Sodomy is an abomination to God!" (And a hell of a lot of fun. - UO]

"6. Sex outside of marriage is the sin of fornication!" (So, to be on the safe side, Mr. Hill, go fuck yourself.)

"Whew! Now that we’re through shouting we can pause to reflect on just one more little factoid-your government here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is the biggest C[ultural] M[arxism] pusher of all. Go ahead, try and name just one of my Fourteen Points that Uncle Sambo doesn’t either legislate or otherwise tacitly support." ("Uncle Sambo?" Go fuck yourself twice, okay?)

Short. Also Sweet. - From Franklin Harris:

RE: Lott. It's very simple. If all he means by praising the Dixiecrats is that we would be better off today if we had true federalism, an apology isn't necessary. If he means anything else, an apology isn't sufficient.

Flushing the System of Trent Lott stuff is what I plan to do for the rest of the night. Bear with me, please. It'll be over soon. (Unless I get word of a link between Trent Lott and Jamaat al-Fuqra . . . )

The Comfort of Familiar Things - Someone named Kevin Walker of something called the Claremont Institute keeps sending bloggers invitations to link to whatever chin-puller they've most recently posted on their (non-blog) site. I've seen enough of them now to be able to say definitively that if you enjoy utter rehashes of current center-right conventional wisdom, and are averse to either original thought or fresh perspectives on familiar thought, the Claremont Institute is for you. Here's a piece on Republicans and health-care politics that may be the archetypal Claremont article.

Note to the Claremont Institute, not that they are likely to see it: I've done what I can for you, fellas. From here on it's up to you.

A Fanboy's Notes - RGB Bill Dowling writes about Marvel's 80s-era gay-free cosmology:

You know, I heard about that policy as well (it was attributed specifically to Jim Shooter, then editor-in-chief) and actually at the time found it to be intellectually consistent and appealing. It struck me that it was particularly a good idea not to have homosexual Mutants (like Northstar).

My reasoning was that Mutants are essentially homosexuals in Marvel. They are discriminated against, have laws passed against them for performing acts natural to them, and people cringe in fear that even their children might be one. Marvel is almost ham-handed in the way they present the Mutants as Minority in their comics, but the way it's handled is clearly more analogous to homosexuals than to races. No one ever worries that when their son reaches puberty he'll become black.

So in a literary world in which you're constantly exploring the homosexual condition through analogy, it doesn't make sense to then have a limited subset of those analogues actually be homosexuals.

My first reaction is: almost ham-handed? But that's just me. More than all their other transgressions, it's the thudding use of "anti-mutant prejudice" that has done more to ruin my enjoyment of Marvel Comics than any of their other sins. (It's actually handled pretty well, though, in the first couple volumes of Ultimate X-Men.) Among other things, isn't it absurd that the vox pop can tell the mutant supers from the non-mutant supers? And isn't the pseudo-science Marvel explains mutants with somehow more absurd than the pseudo-science it uses to explain most of its non-mutant characters? (A mutant gene, common to all mutants or something like that.)

Bill's thesis is intriguing, though, and I might even be tempted to place it above my own - "anti-mutant prejudice" actually stands in for the adolescent persecution complex and thus a narcissistic treat for Marvel's (at the time) adolescent readership.

Department of Corrections - I misidentified the Matthew Hogan item that Radley Balko responded to in my piece of last night. Radley was actually criticising one entitled "Lott, Racism, and Neocon War Party Hypocrisy." In making this correction, one thing that jumped out at me was that Matthew ascribes bigotry and "early Third Reich style" to "some neocon and fellowtraveller rhetoric." (My emphasis.) That's not the same as saying all hawks, even the ones on the expansive plan, are anti-arab/anti-muslim bigots. A key difference, I think.

My earlier concerns about the language used in some Stand Down articles stands. So does my admiration and respect for both writers.

Lott to Say - The Smoking Gun found what I couldn't - a copy of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform. The Smoking Gun rocks.

It's dispiriting to see so much talk of constitutionalism and individual liberty and opposition to enlarging the federal police power - all things that mean a great deal to me - so...befouled by their inclusion in this document, one whose fourth through sixth points make it clear that all those principles meant to them was the power to bring the full weight of state and local police power down on black chests. It's a theme, the contamination of your beliefs by odious people who hold a version of them, that I've had occasion to consider this weekend at length.

One thing alone cheers me up: their patent insincerity about constitutionalism and individual liberty and federal police power. Reading this document, you can be pretty sure that a Thurmond Administration would have enthusiastically swung the power of the federal government toward preserving segregation. You can imagine Thurmond directing J. Edgar Hoover to deal with "outside agitators," resegregating the army and passing latter-day "fugitive slave" laws to force states outside the region to support southern efforts to retard or reverse civil rights. (Viz. the Dred Scott decision, which, taken to its logical conclusions, would essentially have re-instituted slavery in the antebellum North.)

Spree Graphs - Iran Brown is the name of the thirteen-year-old boy whom Lee Malvo or John Muhammad shot in front of Bowie elementary school. He and his family met the press Thursday to talk about his ordeal. The Washington Post has two stories, both by Tamara Jones. See here and here. Oddest passage:

Iran glanced up at his mother for permission to answer a reporter's question about whether he felt angry about what had happened to him, but his mother shook her head no, and the teenager fielded a question instead about what he wants out of life.

Iran's a pretty nice story, though not without continued suffering:

Because his shattered spleen had to be removed, Iran will have to take penicillin every day for at least two years to offset the danger of bacterial infection, [Doctor] Eichelberger said. That risk decreases as patients age, he explained.

Meanwhile, Una James, mother of Lee Malvo, is back in Jamaica as of yesterday. the Post says she "may be permitted to return to the United States to testify at his trial, according to U.S. immigration officials." Or she may make her way back to the United States well before then.

She does seem to be a pretty sound judge of character, according to this earlier story:

"Mr. Muhammad is the devil," James told her son's lead defense attorney, Michael S. Arif, during a four-hour conversation Wednesday at a detention center in Bellingham, Wash.

That story also has some useful new information about the timeline of the trio's travels.

According to the order, James admitted paying $5,500 to Muhammad, an acquaintance from their previous home in Antigua, to provide her and her son with fake identification and airline tickets for separate journeys to the United States.

Una James arrived first, in June 1999, and sailed through the immigration inspection at the Miami airport, the document said. Several other accounts have placed her arrival date in 2000. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified.

James applied for asylum, saying that she feared for her family's safety in Jamaica because her niece and nephew were victims of a politically motivated killing, the document says. But, it adds, "at some point she was told that Jamaicans are seldom granted asylum," and so she withdrew the application.

She paid a Florida man named Jeremiah Neal $2500 for a sham marriage. After the December 2001 arrest in Bellingham, Washington, where she went to pry her son from the clutches of John Muhammad, she delayed deportation proceedings by filing a false claim that her marriage to Neal had ended because of abuse.

Her immigration hearings were delayed while authorities examined that petition. Last month, James withdrew it.

"She conceded that most of the information she provided . . . regarding Neal's violent abusive treatment of her was untrue. In fact, [his] only mistreatment consisted of extorting money from her by threatening to turn her in to INS, and occasional verbal abuse," the document said.

Note: That's still not a nice way to treat someone.

In fiscal news, Northern Virginia counties are seeking reimbursement from the state and federal governments for the cost of the investigation and trial prep.

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) said he had asked the state's congressional delegation to try to recoup from the federal government all or part of the $3 million in state money spent during the investigation.

The Post also has a useful summary of what is known of Muhammad and Malvo's pre-October movements. There's not a ton of new information in it and it settles few of the unresolved questions:

1. We still can't say whether Muhammad and Malvo shot Jerry Taylor in Tucson in March 2002.

2. We still don't know how Muhammad found out his wife was living in Clinton, Maryland, or even for certain that he did.

3. We still don't know if there was a purpose to the late September "return trip" to Baton Rouge, the one financed by liquor store robbery/murders, or if Muhammad met any of his "about thirty cousins" in the area on that trip.

4. There's no analysis of any possible political component to Muhammad and Malvo's motives.

No War War - A disagreement flared over the weekend between two of the starboard-side contributors to Stand Down, aka No War Blog. Radley Balko objected to the language and inferrals in a post by Matthew Hogan. I admire both writers a great deal. I don't think Matthew's item was as egregious as Radley did, or that it implies as much ethnoreligious hatred on the part of the hawks as Radley seemed to think. I agree with most of Matthew's thesis about the twinning of the forces of contempt and pity. But I do think Matthew resorts to some jargon (e.g. "the War Party") that doesn't really further the stated mission of Stand Down. Stand Down is supposed to be the place where we work to convince Iraq War skeptics. I don't think Matthew's language is maximally tuned to that end in the piece in question.

A Fanboy's Notes - Franklin Harris has been all over the "controversial" new take on Marvel Comics' moribund "Rawhide Kid," the Western character who will be portrayed as gay in a new six-issue miniseries. Lots of publicity for Marvel, lots of media attention. But Franklin notes that there's way less to this than the uninformed media imagine. There have been openly gay characters in "Big Two" superhero comics since the 1980s, and Franklin suggests that, if anything, the level of hackery expected on the Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather miniseries - no, really, that's what it's called - augurs a retrograde move.

Unqualified Offerings can actually pitch in a factoid Franklin didn't include. For a brief, ridiculous time in the mid-1980s, Marvel Comics officially held that there was no homosexuality in the entire Marvel Universe. That postponed a planned "coming out" for the mutant hero, Northstar for years.

Speaking of gays, revamping and superheroes, if you like any of that stuff, do not miss the fine comedic novel, What They Did to Princess Paragon, by Robert Rodi. The book is hard on comics fandom and comics publishing, but it's too full of accurate detail for Rodi to be anything but a fellow fanboy. Indeed, this publisher of a long-running Wonder Woman fanzine writes that Rodi was one of her big readers.

Black Hole - The Post reports that Treasure Planet is a monumental financial flop. Too bad. The entire Familia Offering loved it, as previously reported.

Meanwhile, James Bond is making a fortune after being almost left for financially dead three years ago. The adult members of la Familia Offering failed to see it tonight as the theater was sold out. So we went Christmas shopping - together - for the first time in dog years and hugely enjoyed ourselves.

Objectively Speaking - Almost forgot to note that Glenn Reynolds followed up his initial post on "objectively pro-Saddam with an amplification and partial response to his critics. (Like, um, me.) He's kindly calls my own argument "reasonable." But I can't agree that what he calls the "not-so-reasonable" argument (from Hesiod) is unreasonable at all:

Okay, that's the reasonable argument. Here are the not-so-reasonable ones. Hesiod emailed me that by supporting war on Iraq I was "objectively pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Arab," etc. This is just dumb. People who oppose war on Iraq want to cover themselves by setting up a false dichotomy: war on Al Qaeda or war on Iraq. But, since there's no reason that one conflicts with the other, that won't wash. Indeed, I think it's more likely that the two reinforce each other.

Whether it's a false dichotomy or not is very much TBD. The argument is certainly reasonable whether it turns out to be the case or not. It comprises causal assertions grounded in plausible psychology, politics and logistics. Start with the last. The country has only so many qualified intelligence analysts and translators. It has only so many trained elite troops of the kind who can usefully harry Al-Qaeda in its various lairs. Those that are shifted to Iraq are not available for duty in Afghanistan, Yemen or whichever parts of Pakistan we're secretly operating in. Bin Laden clearly desires a "clash of civilizations" between a militant Ummah and the "Jew-Crusaders." He has been making hay out of our Iraq policy for a decade already, and had what I think we have to call some definite recruiting success. It is, to say the least, reasonable to conclude that more US force will inflame more potential recruits and convince more and more Arabs and Muslims that they have a choice - these bastards who look and talk like me, or these bastards from way the hell and gone. That's good for Al-Qaeda. The purpose of political terrorism for a century and a half has been to provoke repressive countermeasures, so that more and more of "your" people will feel forced to choose you over your enemy.

None of the above is the provable outcome of what has yet to happen. But every bit of it is "reasonable." I rate it as for damn sure more reasonable than the fanciful notion that conquering Iraq will usefully humiliate the Arab world or Islamic culture or whatever into a calm acceptance of our wishes. I expect the Iraq war to be a recruiting bonanza for Al Qaeda, and to push us that much closer to the clash Bin Ladenism (and Weekly Standardism) so desires. I believe that a conquest of Iraq increases the chance that Al Qaeda gets its hands on Iraqi bioweapons or chemical arms from an unlikelihood to a near certainty in the chaos surrounding the war.

Those are reasonable if not certain objections. And from that perspective, the hawks are as "objectively pro-Osama" as the doves are, in the hawkish gestalt, "objectively pro-Saddam."

Glenn also references Micah Holmquist's objections about the incentives US policy gives to foreign leaders to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but has no real answer to them. What Micah has been doing for some time is looking at the dynamics of proliferation from the perspective of the potential antagonist of the US. Glenn writes, "That's the kind of thing I'm talking about," which seems to mean that he takes Micah's exercise in role-playing to mean he's on their side.

I've previously written that Micah expresses more sympathy with the country's antagonists than I'm comfortable with. But guess what? It doesn't matter. What matters is whether Micah's empathy gives him and us a clearer picture of how potential opponents will think these issues through. In fact, it does. If anything, what many would call Micah's "anti-Americanism" makes him especially useful to us pro-Americans - it makes him better able to imaginatively inhabit our actual and potential adversaries. The insight benefits us, because you can craft sounder policies when you know what your adversary actually thinks and wants.

(That's not to say you give them everything they want or agree with everything they think. It is to say that you're acting from knowledge rather than ignorance, or worse yet, prejudice.)

Fenian Mail from Some Flounders - Twin e-mails further the discussion of Iraq, Ireland, blowback, insurgency and terrorism foreign and domestic. More from Michael Croft, who has studied the subject in detail:

Tom Barry was not in favor of Sean Russell's bombing campaign of 1939. He favored what was known as the 'Barry Plan'. He wanted to send a heavily armed force across the border into the north, seize a town, and hold out as long as he could. Then, he'd flee back across the border with the Brits in hot persuit. They'd cross the border after him and he'd precipitate the resumption of the armed struggle, which the British would lose. That was the plan in the 1930s, anyway. Barry's tactics in 1920s-1930s were purely based on light infantry. Instead of this, the Army Council went with Russell, which had unfortunate consequences for the Irish Republic in WWII.

I am not 100% certain it's fair to consider Barry as having any role in the post 1969 IRA, which is a northern resurgence of what was previously a southern phenomena which had all but died out when the British reinvigorated (AGAIN!) it with ham-handed policies and one-sided 'policing'.

Tom also had nothing to do with the London Dynamiting Campaign of 1883-1885 orchestrated by O'Donovan Rossa (and other United Irishmen), as he was not to be born for more than a decade when it concluded. Tom's memoirs aside, he really did fit into a historical continuum that had approximately one serious rising in every generation from the late fifteenth century.
"England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity,"

I'd recommend Tim Pat Coogan's "The IRA" or "The Troubles" for a good understanding of the IRA from the time Michael Collins formed it out of the IRB to the present.

In general, I would consider domestic terrorism to be terrorism instigated by members of a society to achieve goals that are related to a country's internal affairs, such as bombing an abortion clinic, church, or federal building. I would not consider terrorism instigated to achieve goals that are related to a country's dealings in another country to be domestic terrorism. I'd call that international terrorism. And I suppose to be complete, Foreign terrorism would be 'some other poor schlub's domestic terrorism'.

Of course terrorism is one of those three person words. I'm a freedom fighter, you're an insurgent, he's a terrorist...

Rebellion is only treason when it is in the third person, as in "their rebellion". Whenever rebellion is in the second person it is always justified, as in "our rebellion". "Ben Franklin to John Dickenson, 1776, the Musical...

And from Matthew Hogan, author of the article that started this thread:

If you ever get the time to check, I was careful to use "British Isles" to describe Barry's personal activity area. As my last name will indicate, I'm hip to your writer's concerns and viewpoints.:-)

The old IRA was much nicer than the later thugs and Collins and Barry were not lefties or righties. I actually like the two a bit. But they unleashed the dogs of war and are the direct inspiration for today's pinko nihilism {"saints preserve us", crossing self repeatedly :-)}.

And yes, the old IRA shot civilians and did do violence in England (burned stuff mostly) including London, though in the last case it was killing the British Empire's chief of staff. As always such thuggery is sanitized in retrospect but the Collins-Barry axis was much more restrained than today and probably did alot less than the excesses in the course of our own Independence Revolution.

The point though is that the next threat from a war may come from those you train and excite and corasen in the previous one particularly if it was an Empire expansion in Iraq, and who spot and get enraged by other abuses your side does. As noted Collins and Barry's people also fell out (though personal respect wasnt lost even after the grave). But it says something about the corasening that one of the incarcerated in the Irish civil war went on to help form Amnesty International. And that more Irishmen were summarily executed in Kilmainham Jail by an IRA-founded Irish government than by the British in trying to suppress the rebellion. Also the people Collins/Barry inspired... Mao, Shamir....hmmmm.

Two Out of Three - Cardinal Law...Henry Kissinger...and...Trent Lott apologizes again.

"I'm not about to resign for an accusation that I'm something I'm not," Lott, a 30-year veteran of the House and Senate, declared.

He talked about his own upbringing during the half-hour new conferences, describing himself as a sharecropper's son, who "along with the South" had learned from his mistakes.

"In the days and months to come, I will dedicate myself to undo the hurt I have caused and will do all that I can to contribute to a society where every American has an opportunity to succeed," Lott said.

Translation: I've got to save my phony-baloney job, gentlemen. I am willing to get rolled by the Democrats month in and month out on budget matters, racial preferences and judicial nominees for the sake of what passes for my political survival.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Around and about...

John Quiggan, Australian liberal blogger guy, addresses Trent Lott, Orwell and Instapundit, productivity growth and the possible VX gas transfer UO wrote about last night. Start here and scroll down.

Cold Fury "objectively" sticks up for Glenn Reynolds. There is a great deal about the problems of "nonviolence." (Problems of violence are not addressed, but you can't fit everything into every single blog post.)

Population One finds kids learning the wrong lesson in civics class. (Or is it the wrong lesson?)

Micah Holmquist does not stick up for Glenn Reynolds.

Jesse Walker on suburban utopias (for real).

Virginia Postrel has decided that blogging means updating your website regularly. She has gavel-to-gavel Trent Lott coverage and an item on Clarence Thomas that points back to this classic Reason article by Edith Efron from 1992.

Timing - This Washington Post report may even be true:

The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. They said government analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey.

If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq.

If it is, remember the iron law of geopolitics: Being a hawk means never having to say your sorry. Sometime in the last month or two, the story suggests, while the Bush Administration was pressing for UN authorization to