Despite a severe shortage of and active search for people fluent in Arabic, the Army, in an incredibly stupid move, has dismissed six Arabic linguists because they're gay. Hopefully the State Dept, NSA or CIA will hire them for much higher pay.

This great exchange was featured in a blog from Bulgaria Sofia Sideshow

I’ll draw back the curtain on one example: One American fellow (a nice guy, mind you, not some kitten-eating troll) with some minute knowledge of Bulgaria mentions loudly over his foie gras how capitalism is hurting this country.

The Bulgarian girl, 10 years the younger, stares at him like he grew a second head. And the fellow continues with what he thinks is the final and immutable proof of his assertion.

He says, "Prices were cheaper back during the previous government, isn’t that right? Now I mean, you didn’t have cuisine then like MacDonalds,” he sneered that last word, “but hey?”

My only note is: “but hey” is not an acceptable ending to a point you are trying to make. “But hey…” is a poignant failure to discipline your mind, to examine the full breadth of what you are trying to argue. Often, it is avoidance of the revelation that your point is actually no excuse for whatever you are defending.

The girl looked like she was going to use her knife, but instead, she told him that everything was indeed much, much cheaper under Communism. Bananas, she said, were only 5 stultinki per kilo [US: 2.5 cents]. He nodded, knowingly. Except, she added, there were no bananas.

You could buy bread for 2 stultinki per loaf…He looked at her warily now…But bread was rationed.

You would go to a market and buy a picture of bread. Then, when the government made a radio announcement, that picture could be turned in at a government center, for bread, after waiting in line, sometimes for hours.

Medicine was free, she said. There was none (well, none for The Workers).

He looked around like he had zips on the wire. Backup! Repeat: I need backup!

And I have Ferrari's for sale, only $24.95 each. Unfortunately I don't know when we'll have any in stock. So if you don't mind waiting forever, send me your $24.95 and I'll let you know when they come in. Yes, you can sell things for any price you like as long as you don't actually have to produce them. (via Instapundit)

Interesting article at MIT Tech Review on the technological aspects of a war with Iraq.

If you dread city warfare, perhaps based on accounts from World War II or Somalia (e.g. Black Hawk Down), recognize that it may still be bad, but in Baghdad it will be different. In a few seconds, a synthetic aperture radar carried on a Predator can take a radar image of several city blocks with a ground resolution of 30 centimeters. It looks like a sharp photo taken from directly above. The image will be delivered to the ground troops in nearly real time (we couldn’t do that in Desert Storm) using the new Joint Tactical Information Distribution System. In this city warfare, there will be fewer surprises lurking just around the corner.

When the Predator finds something interesting on radar or far infrared, it can zoom in with an optical telescope for a close look. According to the New York Times, it did this in Yemen on November 3. It (or rather, the remote pilot) fired a Hellfire missile and killed Abu Ali, the accused planner of the attack on the USS Cole. Saddam may run out of look-alikes, as the Predator spots them and kills them. Don’t be surprised if Saddam instructs all male Iraqis to grow mustaches and to dress like him. Higher in the sky, the unmanned Global Hawk (a U-2 replacement) equipped with far infrared and Synthetic Aperture Radar (and more) will survey large areas. A Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System will locate, identify, and track most vehicles, in all weather conditions. It was used in Desert Storm, but now (as with the Predator) the information will be available to our ground troops almost instantly.

John Derbyshire sings the praises of Google.

I myself use Google — which is to say, I google — an average of, I should think, around 40 or 50 times a day. I google a lot when doing these blogs. For example, I may need to draw in a quote to reinforce some point I'm making. A dozen or more blogs ago I was trying to recall some remark Winston Churchill had made about "frightfulness." It was, I felt pretty sure, something in connection with the 1919 Amritsar massacre.* I flipped to Google, typed in "churchill frightfulness amritsar," and sure enough, there it was: a House of Commons speech the old bulldog made on July 8, 1920. In a matter of seconds I had the full text of the speech in front of me, complete with Churchill's exchanges with other members.

Pre-Google, I could not have done this. It would have been inconceivable. Search engines have been around for years, of course — for longer than web browsers, in fact, as old hands at Internet research will recall. There was nothing as comprehensive as this, though. Before about 1999 there was really no way for me to track down that quote without getting access to expensive subscriber-only databases — and not even then, probably, in a case as vaguely-defined as "churchill frightfulness amritsar." This astonishing power I have at my fingertips is new enough that it still seems slightly miraculous; yet it is familiar enough, after just a couple of years, that only with difficulty can I remember now I managed — or more likely, failed to manage — before Google came along.

I'm not sure what point Kristof is trying to make in his NYT column today. He says, in retrospect, the Israeli bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor was correct and that all the contemporary condemnations of it wrong.

"Thank God that Menachem Begin overrode his own intelligence agency, which worried that the attack would affect the peace process with Egypt, and ordered the reactor destroyed."

But then he goes on to use this in support of the view that we shouldn't go after Iraq, on the grounds that what we really need is a series of surgical, pinpointed strikes like the Israeli one. The point he seems to miss is that after the Israeli strike, the Iraqis spread out and hid their weapons development program so there is no place pinpointed attacks would work. He does seem to support the idea of assasinating Hussein and points out it is not against US law but rather a violation of a Reagan executive order which could be easily overturned by another executive order. Here, here! I'm all for it if we can find him. While we're at it, let's send the squads to get Castro, Gadhafi, Kim, Jong Il, Mugabe, Obiang, Than Shwe and a few others, like the scene at the end of the Godfather where the Corleones kill all the rival gangheads.

His final point is a bit odd too.

"After all, if it's appropriate to launch pre-emptive strikes on countries that sponsor terrorism and secretly develop nuclear weapons, then we could launch an invasion today — of Pakistan."

Let's not forget N. Korea too. But again the essential point he misses is that they already have nuclear weapons. In order to disarm them we have to risk having Seoul or Tokyo (or in Pakistans case Delhi or Bombay) vaporized. As far as Pakistan goes we might also be able to pursue diplomatic strategies to disarm them, but as with N. Korea it is much harder to hope for a diplomatic solution in Iraq so our only hope is to stop Hussein before he gets nuclear weapons.

This is not going to help me sleep any better. Yury Vishnyevsky, head of Gosatomnadzor, Russia's nuclear regulatory agency, said that small amounts of weapons- and reactor-grade nuclear materials had disappeared from the country's atomic facilities.

Peggy Noonan takes on the anti-smoking movement and Mike Bloomberg. You go girl!

Which gets me to Michael Bloomberg. New York is still suffering from 9/11, threatened by huge budget deficits, struggling with Wall Street's downturn, facing draconian tax increases including a brand new commuter tax--that'll certainly encourage new businesses to come here!--and trying to come to contract agreement with big unions. Our realistic and no-nonsense mayor has surveyed the scene, pondered the landscape, and come up with his answer: Ban all smoking in bars.

In bars, where the people we force out of our business offices seek refuge! In bars, where half of us plan to spend our last hours after Osama tries to take out Times Square. In bars, the last public place you can go to be a dropout, a nonconformist, refusenik, a time waster, a bohemian, a hider from reality, a bum, a rebel, a bore, a heathen. The last public place in which you can really wallow in your own and others' human messiness. The last place where you can still take part in that great American tradition, leaving the teeming marching soldiers of capitalism outside to go inside, quit the race, retreat and have a drink and fire up a Marlboro and . . . think, fantasize, daydream, listen to Steely Dan or Sinatra, revel in your loser-tude, play the Drunken Misery Scene in the movie of your life, meet a girl, meet a guy, meet a girl who's a guy. The last public place you could go to turn on, tune in, drop out and light up.

Andrew Sullivan on the incoherent letter from the Iraqis accepting, in principle, weapon inspections:

Absorbing the Iraqi letter to the U.N. is a surreal experience. It reads a little like those notes from the Washington snipers. No eighth grader would be proud of its syntax or even its spelling. Whatever else it is, it surely isn't the product of a serious government with actual policies and actual members. It's the note that might be wriiten by a psychopath - full of inane self-grandeur, stupid threats, excessive Unabomber-style rhetoric and any number of Nazi-like references to the "Zionist entity." If you got a letter like this in the mail, you'd call the cops. My favorite piece of rhetorical weirdness: "We shall see when remorse will not do any good for those who bite on their fingers." Ohhhhh-kay. I point this out because some people insist on arguing that we are dealing with an actual state, a legitimate government, or an erratic but familiar kind of leader. We're not. We're dealing with a psychopathic megalomaniac. Which is why we have to assume that everything he says is a lie; and yet we also have to assume that amid these pathological lies there might by a smidgen of truth. We need criminal psychologists, not diplomats.

Jeff Jacoby also has an excellent piece in the Boston Globe today on the murders at the Kibbutz Metzer.

He began by shooting Tirtza Damari, 42, who was out for a walk with her boyfriend. Then he killed Yitzhak Drori, the head of the kibbutz secretariat, who had heard the first gunshots and rushed over to help. Next he kicked in the door of the Ohayon home, where 34-year-old Revital Ohayon had been reading a bedtime story to her sons Noam, 4, and Matan, 5. He killed her first, riddling her body with bullets as she tried desperately to block the doorway to the children's bedroom. Then he fired at Noam and Matan, shooting them dead as they cowered in their beds. Matan died with the two pacifiers he liked to take to bed, one to suck on, one to hold.
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It was no accident that the terrorists' statement identified Metzer as a ''settlement.'' To Fatah and the Tanzim, to Arafat and Hamas, every Jewish community in Israel is a ''settlement,'' not just those located in the territories Israel seized in self-defense during the 1967 Six Day War. When the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, it was not in order to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which were then occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The PLO's mission, then as now, was to ''liberate'' all of Israel, expel the Jews, and replace it with a new Arab state called Palestine.

It is one of the abiding myths of the Arab-Israel conflict that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the key to peace. But if that were true, peace would have broken out in 2000, when former Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed a Palestinian state comprising all of Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. Arafat responded to Barak's offer by launching a new war of terrorism and bloodshed.

The only surprise is that anyone is still surprised. The al-Fatah constitution has long declared that ''this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.'' The Arabs have never made a secret of their aspiration.

Good piece by James R. Holmes in the Boston Globe on U.S. Imperialism (and it's non-existance).

What the opponents of war with Iraq really object to is American power and the willingness to use that power abroad - not to imperialism in any meaningful sense. To qualify as imperialism, a policy must involve either an acquisition of foreign territory or the use of military force to compel peripheral nations to provide wealth to the center - to the United States. The Bush foreign policy meets neither criterion.
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First, even the president's most vehement critics don't accuse him of plotting to annex Iraqi territory. More likely, given its dubious track record in Afghanistan, the administration will balk at committing the resources necessary to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq.

Second, Bush isn't trying to reduce Iraq to economic servitude. If the president were jockeying for cheap Iraqi oil, as the antiwar movement maintains, he would simply push to lift the longstanding UN sanctions. Baghdad would be pleased as punch to sell the American people all the petroleum they could use - why bother seizing and administering such a large, unruly country?

Actually I don't agree with the first point, some of Bush's most vehement critics have, in fact, accused him of wanting to annex Iraq "for the oil". I do agree that the administration has no such plans or desires but many of his most vociferous critics are sure he want's to set up a puppet government in Iraq and rule it like the Soviets did Eastern Europe for 40 years.

Gates honored with big condom

As much as I hate Windows sometimes, I actually think Gates gets more shit than he deserves, but I couldn't help smiling at the above headline. It seems appropriate somehow.

I didn't want to brag, but I thought so.

Israeli officials identified the gunman who carried out the attack on Kibbutz Metzer as Sirhan Sirhan. He is not, as originally thought, a distant relative of the Sirhan Sirhan who killed Robert Kennedy. I wonder if stopping people named Sirhan Sirhan from getting on planes would be considered profiling?

A Kuwaiti court has ordered Al-Jazeera television to pay $16,670 in damages to four Kuwaiti lawyers who sued it for slandering their country. The slander? A guest on the live talk show described Kuwaitis as "the Jews of the Arabs." The term "Jew" is considered derogatory to some people in the Arab world. (via Best of the Web)

NYT article on the comeback of marriage and two-parent families in the inner city indicates, somewhat begrudgingly I think, that this is an issue the Left basically abandoned in the sixties, since Moynahan's 1965 report on the breakdown of the black family. The author admits "But there is now growing consensus among social scientists that, all things being equal, two parents are best for children.", but then proceeds to add qualifications and conditions to dilute the point. The final line is a typical NYT gem:

"Even if conservatives don't know how to get there, at least they recognize that marriage, this very private institution, has very public consequences. Liberals, who have a much firmer understanding of the obstacles poor people face, need to enter that conversation." (emphasis mine)

Stated as fact with not a shred of supporting evidence that Liberals have a firmer understanding of the obstacles of the poor. But then, as the NYT knows, conservatives are all just rich, heartless bastards who know nothing about the true plight of the poor, otherwise they would be urging on the great socialist utopia.

I love this paragraph from the end of todays NYT article on the Dem's decision to have the 2004 convention in Boston instead of NY

Democrats familiar with Mr. McAuliffe's thinking said he saw no political gain in moving the convention to New York, and many political risks. New York is, for a number of reasons — ranging from strong unions to an array of protesters — a difficult place to hold a convention, notwithstanding the other benefits it might offer.

Strong unions and protesters? Aren't those the core of the Democratic constituency?

Finally! A federal judge in Manhattan ruled yesterday that New York's law barring the shipment of wine from outside the state directly to consumers was unconstitutional. Since I collect wine, this has been one of my pet peeves for years. To get certain hard-to-get California wines you have to be on the wineries annual shipping list to get allocations. The longer you are on the more of the hard-to-get stuff you get allocated. But almost all wineries stopped shipping to NY a few years ago because of increased threat of prosecution from the state. For the life of me, I never understood how this restriction on interstate sale of a legal product could ever have passed constitutional muster, and now apparently it hasn't. After the final decision comes in I will be recontacting several of my favorite wineries to get back on their mailing lists. Yum.
Cheers also to Institute for Justice who represented the plaintiffs and to whom I now give all the money I used to give to the ACLU when they still gave a shit about the Constitution. The IJ is also working to end asset forfeiture laws which I also seem a clear violation of due process protections to me.

Which Firearm are you? brought to you byStan Ryker

Cool! You can buy your own Cobra Attack Helicopter on Ebay.
That'll keep the neighbor's dog out of your yard! Current bid is $500,000. (Now you know why I have an ominosity quotient of 7. Bwahahahaha).

you have an ominosity quotient of seven. you are as ominous as the creators of this quiz. which terrifies us. find out your ominosity quotient.

I would add Max's question about global warming as #5 in my list. My problems with global warming, as I've tried to make clear in multiple other posts on this site, are as follows:

1) It is not at all established that there actually has been any significant warming trend in the last 50 years. There are different conclusions when surface data is looked at compared to satellite data.
2) If there has been a warming trend, it is not at all clear that it is not due to natural variation rather than a buildup of greenhouse gases.
3) If it is due to greenhouse gases, it is not clear that they are man-made. See my post from Friday.
4) If the planet is warming, it is not at all clear that it is a bad thing. In the past civilization flourished during relative warming periods and tended to suffer during little ice ages. While there would be increased flooding and weather related damage in some places, there would be more temperate weather elsewhere. Larger tracts of currently frozen land could be opened up for agriculture. Greenland is so-called, because it was...Green when the Vikings got there. If they discovered it now it would be called FrozenNothingGrowsLand.

Interesting article on al Qaeda's use of the Internet.

Krugman is on vacation so the NYT has instead run a very sensible column by Nick Kristof in support of payment for organ donations.

Another great day for free speech in Europe. The Council of Europe has adopted a measure that would criminalize Internet hate speech, including hyperlinks to pages that contain offensive content. Of course, 'hate' speech is in the eye of the beholder, apparently burning down synagogues is not included in the ban.

Osama bin Laden's diary.

Maureen Dowd has actually written a good and readable column. The apocalypse must be nigh.

Ron Rosenbaum fisks Gore Vidal, who becomes loonier with each passing year. Rosenbaum specifically takes on the Vidal theory that the Bush 'cabal' was behind the 9/11 attacks in a sort of grand Kristallnacht gesture so they could neutralize civil rights in the US.

There is a very good article by Karl Zinsmeister in the current American Enterprise Magazine on the growing split between the US and Europe.

This simple reality needs to be faced squarely by Americans: In a great variety of areas--foreign policy, demography, religion, economics--Americans and Europeans are growing apart. While the September 11 attacks deepened American sobriety, patriotic feeling, and national resolution, in Europe they merely created one more flashpoint for division. European elites, already worried they won't be able to keep up with America over the next generation, are now approaching panic as the U.S. coalesces, during its September 11 recovery, into an even steelier and more determined colossus.
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For everyday, non-political Americans, Europe is simply not a preoccupation one way or the other. It is Canada with castles, as one acquaintance puts it--a nice place, but hardly the furnace where our future will be forged. Given our fundamental belief that each person and nation should be free to solve their own problems, average Americans are perfectly content to have Europeans go their own way. If the Euros think welfare statism and E.U. regulation is their ticket to prosperity, they're welcome to try. If they believe they're safer without a ballistic missile shield than with one, we say Godspeed to them.

But Americans, as I told the audience in Warsaw, claim this same independence of national direction for themselves. And in many particulars Americans now have very different ideas on how best to achieve prosperity and peace. Where overlaps and mutual benefits can be negotiated between the European course and American goals, by all means let's make our policies coincide. But otherwise, let a thousand flowers bloom.

If Europeans want to ban the death penalty, that's fine with Americans; but don't ask us to follow the same dictate. If Europeans think selling military technology to North Korea and Iran, and helping Libya and Iraq with their oil industries is a good idea, expect not a shred of support from the U.S. If Europeans believe their determination to send billions of dollars to Yasser Arafat is likely to speed peace in the Middle East, we won't stop them.

If enough of these divergences accumulate, however, Americans may eventually be forced to conclude that, as economist Irwin Stelzer has put it, many European nations "are ceasing, or may have already ceased, to be our friends."
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First economics. We have conventionally thought of Europe as having about the same standard of living as Americans. This is less and less true. For the European Union as a whole, GDP per capita is presently less than two thirds of U.S. levels. America's poorest sub-groups, like African Americans, now have higher average income levels than the typical European.
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If no visible alternative loomed, citizens might not realize that better ways of achieving prosperity exist. But any European with eyes can observe that the United States makes very different economic choices, with very different results. Here is one root of the resentment felt by European elites, who would otherwise have a free hand to mold their societies according to their own visions. "The anti-American alliance," noted Michael Gove in the London Times earlier this year, "resents American economic success because it reminds them that their preferred cocktails of protectionism, state regulation, subsidy, and intervention constrict growth. America's practical success is a standing rebuke to their abstract beliefs."
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Without admitting it, the Europeans have essentially decided to rely on the U.S. to keep them safe. American taxpayers are paying to build a missile defense system, an unchallengeable air force, and a fleet of 13 separate supercarriers with attendant air wings and naval battle groups. Europeans are concentrating on producing richer foie gras, art museums, and corporate subsidies. They could do much more to help guard the West without straining themselves.

Contrary to Euro myth, America isn't strong because it buys guns instead of butter. Military spending represents only 3 percent of U.S. GDP today. That's down from nearly 7 percent in the 1980s, a level we could return to almost instantly if any serious threat required that. America is powerful militarily simply because it is a highly productive nation, and utterly devoted to defense of its homeland.

It's a long piece, which I have excerpted extensively, but well worth reading the entire thing.

Especially good Lileks today.

A gunmen from the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, killed a mother and two children aged 4 and 5 at the Kibbutz Metzer which has long advocated Arab-Jewish cooperation and reconciliation.

Barely a month ago, the kibbutz had led a public battle to shift the route of the Defense Ministry's planned West Bank security fence, such that it would neither harm their neighbor's olive trees nor keep them from tending them.

Many residents of the area believe the delays in erecting the security fence, put off largely at the behest of settlers who could find themselves on the other side, put them in direct risk, especially in areas used as crossing points by Palestinian terrorists.

Two companies have announced the first commercially available quantum cryptographic systems. Currently transmissions are limited to about 67km, because they can't maintain the quantum state over distances longer than that.

Fred on homeland security.

A new study indicates that motherhood makes women smarter and help prevent dementia in old age. So far the results only apply to rats, but one of the researchers, Craig Kinsley, believes the results will translate to humans.
My own studies indicate that motherhood also imbues women with a much stronger tolerance for vomit, poop, snot and other disgusting bodily discharges. I'm looking for a journal to publish my results.

Eeeewww!