She Who Must Be Obeyed, Cub Investigative Reporter

My post here about the rumored appearance of Paul McCartney (and ultimate non-appearance) at a local benefit concert for the Laguna Beach landslide, requires an update.

She Who Must Be Obeyed did a little investigative reporting, and exposes (up to a point) the truth in this post. A scam on the sponsor side. Paul McCartney not to blame.

Not fair to children or our hard-working, beloved choral director. It will certainly reinforce the cynicism of early adolescence. Well, just as paranoids can have real enemies, those prone to see hypocrisy everywhere will run into the real thing often enough.

As an aside, the origin of the She Who Must phrase is this book, although I learned the phrase from the inimitable Rumpole.

And, to broaden the family blogoprise still further, my oldest daughter Daniela has launched her own blog, far more literate than mine.

Mourning and Humility

Sixteen of our best-trained, bravest men died in Afghanistan today, as discussed here. May they rest in peace and honor. I grieve for them, their children, wives, and parents. I am keeping politics out of this for the moment. Let us hope others do so, too. Honor these brave Americans.

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The Book Meme

The Velveteen Rabbi (yes, I know, but it's a really interesting blog) publishes a "book meme" that's going around the internet. It's really a kind of quiz.

Here goes.

Number of books I own

I never counted, but more than I have shelf space for, more than a thousand, I'm sure. I've been giving, selling and tossing away books forever. They seem to breed. And now my daughter gets me to buy many many fantasy novels (and she's moving onto other stuff, too).

Last book I read

The Question of God: C.S.Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. OK, but something less than wonderful--could have been an article, but stretched into a book. It certainly shows that in addition to being a quack, Freud was a very unpleasant person.

Last book I purchased

How to Play From a Fake Book. In my dotage, I'm playing piano the way I want to, and I needed help interpreting chord symbols, like "D7sus". This book helps, but it's not as good an introduction as How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons.

Books That Mean a Lot To Me

Oh boy. Not easy to think of.

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. The great roman à clef about America and politics and the irreplaceable Huey P. Long.

A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Yes, I know, not great poetry, but great fun still, after all these years. Free railway tickets from Lost Angeles to Heaven.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. An icon of fatherhood. Goodnight, cow jumping over the moon.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. Anthropological science fiction at its best.

The War of the End of the World by Vargas Llosa, in Spanish La Guerra del Fin del Mundo. A close-to-true historical novel about an apocalyptic rebellion in Brazil's Northeast. An earlier classic on the same subject is Euclydes da Cunha's Os Sertões, in English with the unprepossessing title Rebellion in the Backlands.

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth. Just about all his poetry appeals to me, but his translations from Chinese and Japanese are particularly fine.

This is a partly political blog, so I suppose I should mention this and this.

Finally, on the Middle East and Central Asia, two good books: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin and The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk. Both give some historical perspective to today's impatience for outcomes. And one can always read Herodotus. Then you can judge whether much has changed.

Challenge Five More

Hmm. I usually don't like chain letters and "pass this on" stuff.

But, I'll challenge Rick Radcliffe; Dr. Bob; Rick Lee, such a fine photographer (he sees, does he read, too?); Mark Roberts, my favorite blogging pastor (he must have time to read, because he writes); Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian and iconoclast; and, because he's always challenging and not afraid to be politically incorrect, Steve Sailer who is bound to be reading something I wouldn't think of.

I don't know if any of these folks reads this blog, but we might as well aim high. If anyone takes up this challenge because they saw it here, feel free to put a link in the comments section. I think Haloscan allows them.

UPDATE: I forgot the funniest modern book I ever read, A Confederacy of Dunces, by the prematurely departed John Kennedy Toole. Silly me.

UPDATE 2: Corrected some typos, missing punctuation, and two broken links.

God Bless the Pimples

Steve Greenhut writes commentary for the Orange County Register, a newspaper distinguished by its libertarian outlook.

Lately, Greenhut, as in this piece, has been addressing the view of city planners and architects who espouse the "New Urbanism." Essentially, NU is a tag for the long-standing views of planners who find suburban life and town layouts banal, plebeian and soulless, and would like to return to at least some aspects of denser communities where more traveling is done on foot or in public transportation.

Greenhut faults these folks for ignoring both the preferences of millions for life in Orange County, which is highly suburban, spread out, and decentralized, and the fact that it seems to these folks to be a good place to live and raise families, and not just because of the weather. Greenhut also scores points against planners who, it would seem, simply want to impose their own views of the good life by legislating certain outcomes, regardless of majority views, expressed, among other ways, through the market.

Fair enough. The analysis would be more incisive, though, if it were pointed out that the outcomes involving suburban sprawl and single-family homes are also, at least in part, the product of legislated restrictions on property rights, zoning regualtions that law professors call "Euclidian" because the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality in a case called City of Euclid. Thus, for example, a homeowner on a convenient corner in Irvine (known to some as "Stepford Irvine"), a planned city in Orange County, would run afoul of the law if he decided to sell milk and bread from his front window, or to serve barbecue for money in his back yard. To do such business legally, one must go to a local or regional shopping center, owned by the monopolist Irvine Company. Nor could a homeowner, legally, convert his home, no matter how close to the Univeristy of California, Irvine, into a boarding house for students, thus competing with the Big U's monopoly on dorm rooms.

In much of Orange County, these property restrictions are supplemented by a second layer of restrictions imposed by homeowners' associations, whose rules are created by developers, many of whom try to regulate such items as whether people wash cars in front of their houses, choose eccentric paint tones for their shutters, or keep their garage doors open too long.

Although I share Greenhut's admiration for much suburban life here "behind the Orange curtain," it is not a product of unfettered market forces. Houston, Texas, is a much better test case for the effects of no Euclidean zoning. There were some restrictive covenants, but for years no formal zoning in that very lively, albeit moist, Texas town.

If a Supreme Court came along that concluded that Euclidean zoning violated the Due Process or the Takings clauses, and people were free to go into just about any business, or to build just about anything that wouldn't fall down or emit poison on their property, in ten years Orange County, like most suburbs, would be a very different place, and not necessarily worse.

Likewise, just as government allowed the railroads in the Nineteenth Century to use eminent domain and public subsidies, in the last fifty years the state has conferred advantages on the auto industry, paving much of the country at taxpayer expense, while regulating businesses so that in places like the OC, one is effectively marooned without wheels and an internal combustion engine.

Greenhut and I would agree, I'm sure, on the frequent injustices and corruption that emerge from the petty tyranny of land use regulation in countless small cities.

We might also agree (I'm not sure) on the comfort that Big Real Estate and Utopian Leftists like Irvine's "liberal" politico Larry Agran have with one another. It's the small fry, who don't have the money to make big political contributions, and have an idiosyncratic view of what's good for them, who stick in the craw of corporate and poltiical magnates alike, and probably also in the craws of the Urbanists, New and Old. Little people who don't know what's good for them, whose property the Supreme Court nows says the city fathers and mothers can seize and give to Target or Toyota.

God bless these stiff-necked little guys, pimples on the *** of progress, and God Save the Republic!

Culture Media and Miasmas

Victor Serge, the Russian anarchist-turned Bolshevik-turned Trostkyist, lived in Paris before World War I.

In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary he describes the milieu in which the anarchists and socialist of the day survived. Then, as now, it was full of a surprisingly similar potpourri of freakiness--vegetarians and dabblers in Eastern religion rubben elbows with down-at-heel avant-garde artists of one sort or another, along with social dissidents of every stripe, and no doubt experimenters with unconventional sexual practices.

John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, a naive but lively paean to the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, emerged from a similar milieu in Greenwich Village.

Kennneth Rexroth, a smart guy who was never taken in by authoritarian socialism, describes some of the salons of post World War I Chicago in a not-dissimilar fashion.

In the Sixties, things were similar. The rebellious milieu combined sexual experimentation, various forms of mysticism (some drug-induced), leftism, avant garde artiness, astrology, and in that medium cults like LaRouche's arose, too.

It is a curious fact that amidst the often-voluntary poverty of that world, there are always the sons, daughters, and sometimes the adult parents of the very wealthy.

Some would-be leaders on the left who adhere to the orthodox Marxist view that there is something inherent about the place of the working class in society that will (or at least should) make it the engine of a revolution (even if that revolution is to be led, as Lenin had it, by intellectuals), with all the seriousness of Hamas sheikhs recruiting suicide bombers, to "industrialize," that is, voluntarily to become members of the working class, so they can create revolutionary nuclei in that factories, warehouses and freight terminals.

This effort is about as successful as the Maharishi would be in trying to have his flock travel to Mars by levitating.

What is interesting is the survival for over a century of a certain milieu, a mêlange of crackpots of every description, who have in common a hatred of everything normal and "square, including

• Traditional religion, especially Christianity


• Marriage and family life of any traditional sort, and with them sexual restraint


• Business of any specific kind and capitalism in general


• Disciplined science of any kind

At the same time, this milieu included people who cultivated

• Politically revolutionary theory


• Avant-guardism in art, music and literature


• Mystical cultism especially if non-Western and non-scientific (the I Ching, Amerindian mysticism, neo-Hindu offshots)


• Unconventional sexual behavior

For sure, there's more. But any R. Crumb cartoon of the period will give the flavor and appearance of this sort of milieu. Just listen to a Pacifica radio station and you'll get the anti-capitalist and anti-American rants, and in the low-ratings hours, the astrologers, vegans, the heirs of the anti-fluoridation movement, the gays, "folk" music three generations out of Appalachia or the Delta, and the weirdest possible iteration of black nationalism.

What is interesting is that the distance between the universities, once havens of upper-class boorishness and gentleman's C's among the students and a refined but conventional pretense on the faculty, have increasingly lost their separateness from this Bohemian milieu. The distance between what goes on on Telegraph Avenue and what goes on on the Berkeley campus has never been shorter, and Berkeley is no longer the exception in once was.

There is probably no way, short of police methods inadmissible under our traditions and Constitution, to drain this swamp, but swamp it is, and its miasmas periodically blow through the culture, over the universities, the theatres, and the media.

Among the effluvia is a mortal hatred of the "straight" and the "square." Bush and the social conservatives are perceived as such. The hostility to them gains much of its energy not from a rational analysis of political controversies, but from a long-standing elitist contempt of Bohemia, with its odd combination of wealth, voluntary poverty, and intellectual elitism, for everything conventional and normal.

Zimbabwe Outrages

As reported and linked here, the insane persecution of his own poor by Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe continues. Silence from Mbeki, Mandela. Where is Randall Robinson?

Apparently Ian Smith, who declared Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) independed from Britain, to worldwide boycotts and denunciations, is still alive. I wonder what he's thinking..

Where is the outrage now? Boycotts and embargos? Security Council resolutions? If there were Korans in the fires with which Mugabe's thugs are burning the shantytowns, would Newsweek and Human Rights Watch get excited?

My Supreme Court Short List: Judges Who Should Be Nominated, But Won't Be

Two people with serious intellectual accomplishments:

	Richard Posner.
	Alex Kozinksi.

Neither is on lists like this.

Alas, it won't happen. Posner's too old, and he's written about sex. Twice. Kozinski's too independent, too funny, and maybe too Jewish.

Too bad.

Defeatism Here, Loyal Opposition Long Gone

The Iraq debate has taken a nasty turn.

Sen. Durbin has offended many and then tearfully semi-apologized for invoking the Hitler analogy, seasoned with references to the Gulag and Pol Pot, no less. The Dems have tried to retaliate by attacking Karl Rove's truthful characterization of the MoveOn.org and Michael Moore responses to 9/11.

More importantly, the consensus among elected Democrats has now become the call for a withdrawal timetable. In short, a turn to defeatism.

For a long time there was a tension between a "loyal opposition" stance and a defeatist one. Defeatism is now in the ascendant.

The loyal opposition stance included the following concepts, mostly erroneous, but consistent with loyalty to the country.

• A concern that the involvement in Iraq detracted from the post-9/11 attack on Osama bin Laden and his friends, Saddam the secularist being neither an Osama ally nor an Osama friend. From this standpoint, the war was a diversion.


• Criticism of the bad intelligence and lack of candor in the run up to the war.


• Criticism of bad decisions made after the initial victory, such as the failure to deal with looting, the dissolution of the Iraqi army when nothing was available to replace it, the delay in scheduling direct elections, which Ali Sistani ultimately forced.


• Rejection of the public relations circuses and lack of clarity emanating from the Administration, including the melodramatic "mission accomplished" landing by the President on an aircraft carrier.

The new stance is different:

• The demand for a withdrawal schedule, no matter what.


• Overemphasis on alleged abuses of prisoners and their holy texts in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.


• Emphasis on the "Bush lied" motif.


• A failure to recognize the accomplishments in the war, notably the elimination of Saddam's terror apparatus, the stability and relative prosperity in Kurdistan and the Shi'a south, and the progressive political isolation of the enemy, even if his ability to engage in terror remains.


• Overwrought rhetoric about all aspects of the issue.

In economics, there is a concept of "sunk costs," assets that have been spent or committed and cannot be recalled. In this war we have sunk considerable treasure, the lives and bodies of our young men, and an important part of our national standing. Although a historical assessment of the matter can be made several generations from now, the immediate question ought to be not the war's origins or even past mistakes, but what actions NOW are in the national interest.

If we consider three alternatives, immediate withdrawal, announcement of a timetable or trigger for withdrawal, or staying the course (whether that means applying additional resources, reducing the commitment according to facts on the ground, or maintaining present force levels), even a bit of analysis leads to rejecting the Democrats' alternative.

Immediate withdrawal would result either in a victory for the Ba'ath-al Qaeda forces, or more likely to a violent civil war. The government forces, Kurdish pesh merga certainly, the Shi'a militias probably, are in a position to resist the Sunni secular and religious forces, and a bloody war would ensue. No matter what the result, we would be blamed, and the withdrawal would be portrayed everywhere as a defeat.

A Middle East that was dangerous before would become more so. The replacement of the Saudi monarchy by something far worse would be likely, given the likely lack of confidence that we or anyone else would intervene to stop the collapse. If the Shi'a triumphed, it would be with the help of Iran, tying them far closer to the the Teheran régime than the Iraqi Shi'a would otherwise like to be (there being little love lost between Arabs and Persians).

The announcement of a timetable for withdrawal might be even worse. It would encourage the insurgency, convinced, as most guerrillas, unable to triumph in battle, must be, that patience and persistence will lead them to political triumph. Even more fanatics would find their way to Iraq, hopeful of picking up the spoils.

In short, unless we become convinced that there is no better outcome possible than what I've already outlined, staying the course makes sense even if one thought originally that the war was a poor idea poorly executed.

Unless I am sadly mistaken, then, the call for a withdrawal timetable is at best misguided and more likely, simply a form of defeatism, reminiscent of Clement Vallandingham and the Copperheads during the Civil War.

I have kept away from the Vietnam analogy until now, but it undoubtedly has resonance with the Ted Kennedy's of the world, who lived through Vietnam and drew the wrong conclusions from it. Truth be told, I was a radical opponent of the Vietnam war myself. Although I haven't studied it in detail, I've done some reading and have become aware of the fact that the results of our failure to assist the South Vietnamese in 1972 was the fall of South Vietnam, the departure to death an exile of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese, most of them ordinary people, and the genocide of over a million Cambodians.

In short, the complete withdrawal, accompanied by a refusal to offer any assistance, enforced by the Democratic Congress elected post-Watergate, was a humanitarian disaster and a geopolitical disaster for this country, even if not the "domino theory" cataclysm some foresaw.

The defeatists were wrong then, and they are wrong now. The anti-Americanism of the opposition, their harping on US wrongs and errors, real and imagined, as opposed to the enemy's very real vices, and the extremism of their rhetoric, are a real problem for this country, and for millions in the Middle East who hope for a better life.

Finally, the absence of a "loyal opposition" and the undue influence of the far Left on the Democrats are potentially disastrous. Sooner or later the opposition wins if only from fatigue from the majority, or its inevitable corruption by power. This opposition is not just mistaken, but a potential disaster for the country and the world.

The rottenness of the opposition also forces folks like me, who have many many criticisms of the Bushies, into muting these and joining the phalanx around a flawed Administration and congressional majority. That's not good for the Administration or the country.

No-Show Paul

Our BoBo town, Laguna Beach, recently suffered a landslide, destroying a number of homes.

The locals have bellied up to the charitable bar and held breakfasts, raised money, and what-not.


Yesterday they held a concert (pictures, here) as a benefit for the displaced.

The day before, we received a call from my daughter's choral director, asking if she could join some others and back up Paul McCartney, who was going to be a surprise guest at the concert. In fairness, I don't know whether Paul even knew about it or whether it was a triumph of hope over information. Althouh we adults were excited, my 13-year old's reaction was more or less, "Okay. But Paul WHO?" This is a child who saw a cache of LPs and asked me what they were. Heraclitus was right. All things DO flow.

I took her to a morning rehearsal, and up to the site, where the kids were gathered into a room to practice. Long story short, Sir Paul never showed. Why, we don't know. One rumor is that it had to do with too much TV coverage. The kids weren't crushed at all. They were well-fed, had been led in games by chorus alumnae, and got to play frisbee inside a school where normally such antics would have been verboten.

I took the waiting in stride, as the picture above shows.

I'm reminded of the film The Big Night, involving a rumored appearance at a failing Italian restaurant by the great Louis Prima,
the avant-garde play Waiting for Godot, where Godot (God?) is the no-show, and the great country singer George Jones's recovery song, "No Show Jones."

Tiny Wonders

An old friend sent me a link to a series of photos of hummingbirds nesting and babies growing. The last is a shocker. It shows how tiny the whole nest is -- a bit larger than a penny.

The wonders of the world are astounding.

I once asked a bright but geeky engineer neighbor, in a discussion where the 640-beats-per-minute of the hummingbird heart came up, how they used the tiny stethoscopes. He proceeded to explain to me how they took the heartbeat. I've forgotten the science, but I remember the response. We have geeks like Jim to thank for our relative freedom from infectious diseases, clean water, electronic gadgetry, and relief from killing toil.

Here's the nest with the eggs:

Amen, Bro Mark

Mark Steyn:

This isn't a Republican vs Democrat thing; it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe. It would be heartening to think that Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don't mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him. But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable over what he's done -- in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country's military that has no value whatsoever except to America's enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.

Read it all. He's merciless.

And Newt wants the Senate to censure him! They'd have to find their withered cojones first.

What Do You Compare This To, Dick Durbin and Amnesty?

The acts described in this report of a "torture house" discovered in Karabila, Iraq, by our Marines:

This is Mr. Fathil's account of his ordeal.

He was having a lunch of lettuce and cucumbers in the kitchen of his home in the small desert village of Rabot with his mother and brother. An Opel sedan pulled up. Two men in masks carrying machine guns got out, seized him, and, leaving his mother sobbing, put him in the trunk of their car.

The drove to the house here. They taped his face, put cotton in his ears, and began to beat him.

The only possible explanation for the seizure he could think of was his time in the new Iraqi Army. Unemployed and illiterate, Mr. Fathil signed up after the American occupation began.

But nine months ago, when continuing working meant risking the wrath of the Jihadists, he quit. In all, 10 friends from his unit have been killed, he said. So have his uncle and his uncle's son, though neither ever worked as soldiers.

The men tended to talk in whispers, he said, telling him five times a day, in low voices in his ear, to pray, and offering him sand, instead of water, to wash himself. Just once, he asked if he could see his mother, and one of them said to him, "You won't leave until you are dead."

Mr. Fathil did not know there were other hostages. He found out only after the captors left and he was able to remove the tape from his eyes.

The routine in the house was regular. Because of the windows, it was always dark inside. Mr. Fathil said he was fed once a day, and allowed to use a bathroom as necessary in the back of the house.

When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead.

The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin.

The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

Any comment, Amnesty?