Sorry for Being Away

I would have posted more recently, but my mouse went kaput and I had to buy a new one. It has come to my attention that while Mac makes, in my opinion, better operating system software, and more secure and less buggy software, and presumably better towers (in lab, we once had a Dell that melted down 2 months after the expiration of the warranty), Mac makes inferior mouses and, to some level, inferior keyboards (they don't offer spill protection).

That is all.

The "Appeasement" Slur

I'm sick and tired of hearing folks like Joey bemoan "appeasement."
Apparently, if someone is pursuing a policy we don't like, we should never negotiate, never consider their point of view, never do anything but force them to submit to us by any means necessary.
(And of course, everyone else must always appease us).

No, I'm not saying that we don't sometimes have to stand up to other countries.
But can't we consider the issue based on the merits of particular cases, rather than based on universal slogans like "appeasement never works?"

That is all.

A New "Soldiers-in-Iraq" Scandal

All of this concern over the mud-wrestling scandal is stupid.
Slap 'em on the wrists and get on with it. This isn't a big deal. This isn't tying naked men up like dogs and forcing them to simulate sex. This truly is a mountain out of a molehill.

That is all.

An Interesting Article by Ilana Mercer.

Referenced in my previous post, here again is an article by Ilana Mercer that seems to offer evidence that the Bush administration has been les than honest about the reasons we went to war in Iraq.

That is all.

Ouch!

A take-down of Fox News by the inestimable Kevin Michael Grace.
Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Ilana Mercer for the reference.

A previous post of mine linking to an article explaining why Fox News is a good thing to have around.

That is all.

Ledeen's Faith in Iraqis

Michael Ledeen is confident that the Iraqi shiites want a secular government becasue they don't want the government to be run by the mullahs.

I'm glad that he interprets Sistani's position so very
accurately.

That is all.

Babs Lerner is Back!

(Note: This piece was in Draft Mode for more than a year before I finally got back to it and published it on April 1, 2006).

And once again, she's shillin' for Chalabi! (Note: This is a more detailed version of this post).

Let's analyze a few of her points:

(1) Chalabi is popular because he is on the winning list.
The problem with this is that we have no way of knowing who was voting for him and who was voting because of other people on the list. This is the problem with voting for lists rather than specific people; the government can be manipulated by those in charge of making the lists by putting unpopular people on a popular list (particularly when the exact composition of the list is not revealed until just before or maybe after the elections). As I recall, polls taken last year showed that Chalabi has essentially nil popular support.
It's obvious to me that the neocons are trying to manipulate the list to put Chalabi in power. They make certain that he gets on the most popular list and then claim that he is the reason that they were so popular.

This quote is a perfect example of her deception:

"The claim that Chalabi has no base of support in Iraq and no significant allies there will, likely, be put paid by the election results, and by his continuing relationships with Sistani, with the Kurds, and other Iraqi players."

Er... when no one voted specifically for Chalabi (or any other candidate, for that matter), how does the fact that people voted for a 275-candidate list on which he happened to be, prove that HE is popular?

Essentailly she is pulling a Michael Rubin; projecting her preferences onto the Iraqis.

(2) Chalabi gave us good intelligence, Gen. Myers said so.
I'll have to do some checking on that.

(3) Chalabi didn't try to lie us into war. Look, the CIA believed that there were weapons of mass destruction, so obviously we believed for other reasons.
Considering how skeptical the CIA was about the WMD claims, I think that the idea that it was the CIA who made the mistakes is ludicrous. Hack Kelly makes the same stupid claims. I don't know why George Tenet reassured Bush that the WMDs were a "slam dunk," but I have a feeling that he was put under a lot more pressure and thus was a lot more solicitous of the president than rank-and-file CIA members.

(4) Chalabi never betrayed us to Iran.
I think the explanation for why Iran used the broken code to relay the message that Chalabi had let them know the code was broken was NOT, as neocons claim, because he was a good guy and they wanted him out. I think that they recognized him for what he was, a person who was looking out only for himself (I think he'd work for the highest bidder), and they decided to take him down because they didn't trust him.

(5) The charges of bank fraud were entirely politically motivated.
I can't directly say, but I think there is just as much chance that the prince allowing him to flee from Jordan was politically motivated. We shall see, I guess.

(6) The CIA hates Chalabi because Chalabi was right about everything.
This assumes that Chalabi didn't play a role in the secuirty breach that he told the CIA about. Also, Lerner's insistence that "The CIA was contemptuous of him, and of his claim that a majority of Iraqis hated Saddam and would welcome his overthrow but, once again, the facts proved Chalabi correct" is less than totally accurate, considering that the Iraqis did not, in fact, welcome the overthrow of Saddam in the sense that they threw flowers at us and greeted us as liberators.

In short, it's more of the same ol' Babs.

That is all.

Babs Kisses Chalabi's Rear End Again

Barabara Lerner once agian shills for Chalabi.
I'd have to do some research to write an exhaustive post about her article, but let's go over the most obvious issue.

Barbara obviously believes that the success of the UIA list means that the voters want Chalabi, as he was on that list.
Bulls**t.
Polls out earlier showed Chalabi as having no particular popularity in Iraq. Rather, he managed to get himself onto the most popular list, so that Shiites who wanted to get behind Sistani's list had no choice but to vote, in essence, for Chalabi.
It's exactly the highly-manipulated result I worried about here.

The whole reason why they voted for lists instead of candidates was so that the US could manipulate the results.

Also, Babs is channeling Michael Rubin, who always states his opinions under the claim "Iraqis feel."

This is definitely NOT all.

Antiwar.com Expanding?

I can't help but notice that AntiWar.com is asking for $60,000 this quarter, up from about $20,000 or so 3 or 4 years ago.
I suppose this is a good sign, that they can get more money, as the amount they have asked for has steadily increased and they have always made their goals.

That is all.

I Will not Watch the District Again

I recently began watching Craig T. Nelson's new show, "The District," about a Police Commissioner in Washington D.C.
In an epsiode aired recently (as a rerun, though), a consultant to the police gets mugged, and wants to have the Commissioner sign paperwork so that he can have an exception to the gun ban.
Craig won't give him one, and in the end, the friend acts as if getting a gun were a stupid idea in the first place.

Bulls**t.

I firmly believe that some people shouldn't carry guns for defense because they aren't going to use them responsibly, but I believe that we can rely on these people to determine that for themselves. People for whom carrying a gun in self-defense would put them more at risk know who they are and are the best arbiters of whether or not they should carry one.

"The District," however, clearly gave the impression that we should just rely on the police, because letting citizens carry guns is dangerous.

I hope that Congress passes that legislation repealing the stupid Washington, D.C. gun ban.

And I hope that Craig T. Nelson's character gets exposed for the fascist he is. (If he were unwilling because he was afraid of the liability he might incur, that would be one thing, but there was no indication that he disagreed with the stupid DC gun ban in the first place).

That is all.

UPDATE: Greg Cochran disagrees and has some good poitns against John Lott. I guess I will say this: I don't trust the government to tell people they can't have guns. I also do not agree with the idea of many gun rights groups that everyone should be armed, including people who do not wish to be armed. My point about people who hsouldn't carry guns knowing who they are was basically that even if the statistics are true that more gun ownership reduces crime, in the US gun owners are a self-selected group. In other words, we have little to no evidence that forcing people to cary guns has any positive effect (and I would also think that there would be a trend of diminishing returns as more people were armed, as those who most need guns would presumably be among the first to get them), so I have no desire to shame people for not wanting to have guns. Of course, some may argue that letting people who want to carry guns carry them doesn't reduce and m ay increase crime. Cochran seems to suggest that in many cases it has a deleterious effect. I will concede that I haven't studied the issue thoroughly enough (nor have I spent a lot of time on it recently) to make a really effective argument. I tend to think that more freedom is a good thing, but I concede that I don't have the data to back it up, at least not right now.

Ads - Good, Bad, and Ugly

I have found that some advertisements are mindlesly stupid, while I genuinely love others. And some can be painful to watch.

A list:

Good:
The Bacardi and Cola commercials are all funny, but I like the "breathless in Mardi Gras" best (the women isn't getting any beads, so they tell her to take a deep breath (which enhances her chest, thus causing her to receive a whole bunch of beads)).
The commercial with the praire dogs looking out of their holes, and the guy thinks of co-workers sticking their heads out of their cubicles.

Bad:
I dislike the ad where the husband and wife keep trying to one-up each other to get to the Mercury first in the morning. It's too mean.

Ugly:
The commercials for Leann Rimes' hosting "Nashville Star" are not flattering. Bright white light makes her look too ruddy-faced. Also, the blouse she is wearing when interacting with the wannabes is hideous.

That is not all. I will update later.

Self-Referential Post

Searches that have led people to the Glaivester blog:

"Barbara Lerner" "neoconservative" (Google)

warren cuccurullo scandal photo (Google Hungary)

warren cucurello (Google)

Juan Cole (Technorati)

If this stuff interests you, click on the Sitemeter icon. My stats are an open book.

Antiwar Bias or Prowar Bias?

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst suggests that the stereotype of the antiwar mainstream media may not be accurate.

Considering that we usually hear the neocons claiming that the mainstream media is a bunch of Gloomy Guses because they don't portray the war as being a wonderful success, this is an interesting point of view to think about.

That is all.

Charley Reese on the Elections

An interesting piece by Charley Reese about the elections.
One big disagreement I have with him:

He states that there is a strong nationalist sense in Iraq, so we can forget about civil war.
Perhaps with the Arabs we can stop worrying about a Sunni-Shia battle.
However, I still think that the Kurds want their own country.

In any case, I do think that the elections ar less important than the neocons claim they are, but we shall see what we shall see.

That is all.

It's Not All About Israel

Lawrence Auster makes a point that I have made myself, and that I hint at here.

Despite all of the talk about neoconservatives being interested mainly in Israel's interests (which I think is true in the case of Richard Perle and perhaps Michael Ledeen), a large number of neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Clifford May, perhaps Bill Kristol) are actually not as interested in Zionism as in messianic democratism. These neocons would gladly sell Israel's interests down the river if it helped the world democratization project.

There are also those who simply want to project American power to produce an American one-world government (James Woolsey, Jed Babbin, Richard Poe). I'm not entirely certian, though, whether I would consider any of these neocons or not (and some, like Richard Poe, I definitely would not consider neocons).

There is probably a lot more I want to say, but for now -

That is all.

Elections, Iranian and Iraqi

Jonah Goldberg recently attacked Juan Cole for his position thaty Iran's elections in 1997 were more democratic than Iraq's recent ones.

Juan Cole responds.

Ouch.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Llewellyn Rockwell.

NRO Finally Getting It?

Veronique de Rugy begins to understand that Bush is not, in fact, a fiscal conservative. This is a fact that is often brought up, but rarely dwelt upon in neoconservative circles, and it has never seemed to lead to people questioning their Bush-worship.

Dare I hope that this will change?

IPods and Me

For some reason, I am not at all excited by the IPod.
Perhaps I am behind the times technologically, but I am interested in Macs as computers, not as music players.
So all of the buzz about the IPod has not moved me much.
But I still love my Mac.

That is all.

Gay Marriage, Again

I want to restate a point I made earlier:

The reason why it is especially bad for gay "marriage" to come to the US through court decisions rather than through legislation (although I don't support gay "marriage" or "civil unions" myself at all), is that the legislature is a body of choice, whereas the courts a body of necessity. This means that forcing the acceptance of gay "marriage" at the courts creates a tide that cannot be stopped, unlike in the legislature, so we are going to wind up with polygamy, group marriage, and incest marriage.

In other words, if gay marriage were seen as an issue to be settled by legislation, then the legislatue could say "this far, and no further," with no other justification than "we find gay marriage okay, but we don't like polygamy."

However, when phrased in terms of rights, once you say that any two people have the right to be married, and htat that right cannot be abridged by a social more, then you lose all principled opposition to abridge that right by other social mores.

Why not allow brothers and sisters to get married? Or if the concern about inbreeding develops, why not homosexual incestuous couples, where such is not a concern, or heterosexual ones that agree not to have children with each other? Why not polygamy? All of the arguments against polygamy ultimately boil down to "because we don't like polygamy," or , as Steve Sailer says, because civil rights "don't apply" to the groups of people whom we think of when we think of polygamy, which, in the end, is not a good enough reason, and sooner or later, the courts will say that.

That is all.

More Sailer

Steve Sailer ponders the Iraqi elections.

That is all.