How I'd like to see Galloway end his testimony:

"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!!"

Zoiks!

Galloway, con't

Geez, for a reliable opponent of Hussein, as Galloway just claimed to be, he certainly spends a lot of emotion and energy defending the guy and his regime. Interesting.

Galloway's finished his opening statement, now. I'll have to say, he does a better reading of a written statement than the Senators do. He had good phrasing and intonation and didn't come across as reading it. You could tell when the Senators were reading their statements and when they were speaking extemporaneously.

Interestingly, Galloway's opening statement was one long harrangue, and you could practically see the guy spitting in anger as he spoke. Fifteen seconds later, Coleman started the questioning, and Galloway switched to a calm, declarative tone of voice.

UPDATE: OK, now he's back to the emotional responses. Coleman's doing a great job of ignoring the bile and just sticking to the facts and the specifics of his questions.

Galloway's up

Galloway is testifying now. See the previous post for the video link.

The grubby little bugger has just claimed he's more reliably anti-Hussein than the American or British governments. Now he's accusing our "puppet government" (his words) of forging the lists of Hussein's beneficiaries. Doesn't explain why Tariq Aziz (or was it Ramadan? One of Hussein's officials) specifically said Galloway was on the take.

So far as I've seen, all of Galloway's vaunted evidence of his innocence amounts to saying he's never met Ramadan, and claiming all of the variety of evidence against him is lies, lies! All lies! That, and calling all of his accusers names.

Would a reliable anti-Hussein activist, as Galloway claims to be, spout off such vile invective against the free and democratic government that has replaced the dictator?

Weaselly little twit.

UPDATE: Now he's on to the Daily Telegraph. Yes, he won a libel suit in Great Britain against the Telegraph. But it's relatively easy for a plaintiff to do so in that country, which does not have the same free speech protections we do, and which puts a higher burden on the defendant. That isn't much of a defense, in my mind.

UPDATE 2: Now he's on to those wiley "Neo-cons" and their treacherous websites.

Liveblogging the UNSCAM hearings

I'm watching Norm Coleman's Senate hearing on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal live over the web right now. The RealPlayer feed is available straight from the Senate at www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/livehearing.ram. The British Parliament member, George Galloway, is supposed to be a witness at today's hearing, but I haven't seen him, yet. So far, it's just been the "opening monologues" from Coleman and his ranking minority member, Carl Levin. Levin, incidentally, blamed the whole mess on insufficient US oversight. I'm sure the US could have done more, but keep in mind that we were the country pushing the reform of the system at the time and for the investigation now.

Best actress name ever

Li-Li Li. She was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There's a name to remember!

Newsweek lied, people died, Part 2

So it seems I'm not the first one to come up with the "Newsweek lied, people died" line I posted below. Glenn Reynolds cleverly did a Technorati search and is showing 64 blog entries with this quote, as of this morning. So why am I not on the Technorati list? Maybe I've got to have Newsweek lied, people died in the body of the entry, rather than just in the title. Hmph. Hope this one shows up...

Newsweek lied, people died

No, Newsweek might not have lied, so much as been lied to. By their "reputable" source. But it makes a better bumper sticker or angry-mob chant this way, doesn't it. I mean, the Left does this to Bush, who didn't lie, so isn't turnabout fair play? Nah.

This story had only barely made me aware of itself this week. Something about riots throughout Central Asia over a rumor that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were desecrating Korans. The usual eye-rolling stuff. Except that 15 people have died as a result of these riots in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. This rumor had really spread.

And where did this rumor come from? This is what I learned watching CNN and FNC today. Newsweek magazine last week published a report that started the whole thing off. They claimed that an American interrogator(s?) at Guantanamo had been intimidating prisoners through various means, including tearing up a Koran and flushing it down the toilet. So soon after this comes out, a Pakistani politician reads the article out loud to an angry mob and tells them this is what we infidel Americans are doing to Korans. Crowd whipped up. Frenzy. Etc. Riots spread to two other countries, and in their wake, fifteen people die. Oh, and a cabal of Taliban-sympathizing imams in Afghanistan have "given us" three days to hand over to them the interrogator supposedly responsible for this, or they'll call a jihad on us. (Right, guys, remember how well that last one worked out for you?)

Now. Newsweek is kinda sorta backing away from their claims. Turns out their "reputable" source might not actually have been so sure about the whole thing. The Pentagon has had some choice words to say about Newsweek, and it now comes out that no, it was a Moslem prisoner himself who tore up his Koran and flushed it--he was trying to stop up the toilet in another passive aggressive little trick.

Well. Do you, dear reader, think that the retraction Newsweek's printing this week is going to get nearly the airplay the original story did? And even if it did, do you think that your average rioting Uzbek is going to see the retraction and say, "Hey! We were wrong! Sorry about all that. I'll stop rioting now." No. They'll claim the Pentagon forced Newsweek to retract it, or some conspiracy like that. This is one of those stories you simply can't undo.

I wonder what the record is for the number of people killed in the aftermath of a false news report. You'd think that 15 would have to be up in the running, somewhere.

Kingdom of Heaven

I saw Kingdom of Heaven tonight. Hmmmmm... Conflicted. The battle scenes and the general plot were both a lot of fun to watch, but in places, this was one of those white-knuckle movies. Because of the cringing, I mean. I don't know what problem the writer has with religion (or maybe Christianity in particular?), but he seemed to lay it on a little thick.

I got such a lesson in history. You see, I didn't realize that the Moslems never attacked the Christian territories without a really good reason, while the Christians murdered Moslems (soldiers and civilians alike) because they just liked killing people. And Christian priests are uniformly of bad character. They'll either encourage the duke to flee the invading army and leave the civilians to their doom ("Yes, it's unfortunate, but...") or else taunt you about your dead wife's suicide. Oh, except for the priest who says he doesn't believe in "religion." He's OK.

The characterizations were a little cartoonish. Hint: every character who uses the phrase "the will of God" (it comes up a lot) is portrayed badly.

Well, like I said, there were some white-knuckle moments. If you can ignore the groan-inducing slams on Christianity, though (ummm...), it was an exciting movie. Great battle and siege scenes. A pretty good take on moral character.

One niggling detail on the siege scene, though. I've noticed that most of the mediaeval movies I've seen lately manage to work in exploding fireballs fired from catapults and trebuchets. You know, I really don't think those were used so much back then. Plus, a big, soft, flaming ball isn't the best projectile to take down a stone wall. Still, they really look cool in night scenes.

The Simpsons on Grad Students

Great quote from tonight's Simpsons. The family goes to an Albanian art film, and, predictably, everybody but Lisa is bored. As they walk out of the theater, Bart waves a man's ponytail he cut off of the guy in front of him. He sticks it on the back of his head ands smirks, "Look at me, I'm a grad student! I made $600 last year!"

Marge scolds him and says, "Don't be mean. Grad students are nice people. They just made a bad life choice."

I like to think of it as "delayed gratification."

Evangelical Judaism

You occasionally hear it said, in conversations on the differences between modern Judaism and Christianity (there's a reason I qualify these with "modern"), that Judaism is an inherently un-evangelical religion. I mean evangelical in the sense I grew up knowing it--basically, missionary work. Spreading the religion. It is sometimes explained that because Judaism depends on being Jewish, then it doesn't make sense to spread the religion.

I'd long objected to that as a distinction. For one thing, many Jewish denominations do take converts (even the Orthodox, I understand, though with some requirements or caveats in there).

Furthermore, Judaism certainly used to have missionaries--the prophets! Some of these (not all) weren't sent to the Jews themselves but to other nations. Job is the one example who comes to mind immediately. He was sent to...Nineveh? (OK, forgetting my Bible. Have to look this up.) Now, it may have been that he was to tell that nation to adopt the so-called Noahite laws. These are seven(?) laws in the Bible that were given to Noah after the Flood, I think, and are generally regarded as applying to all Gentiles, as well.

Well, with that in mind, Dennis Prager has a great column asking what the Mission of Judaism is. (Unfortunately, it's not up yet on the indispensable Jewish World Review website, yet, or I'd link to it there. But JWR does have his previous column on a related topic, moral absolutes and Judeo-Christian values.)

I won't go into detail on his answer, except to say that he thinks Judaism's Mission is to bring the world "ethical monotheism." Not a bad answer, I'd say. Worthy of discussion.

On the injustice of Yalta

Growing up in my family, it was almost an article of faith that the Yalta agreement was a bad one. We gave up too much to Stalin, essentially drawing the line for the Iron Curtain that came soon after. Not surprisingly, this is the general wisdom among conservatives, but I had assumed that liberals more or less agreed. So I am shocked by the reaction on the left to President Bush's condemnation of Yalta last week, while he was there in the Baltics. The liberals are actually criticizing Bush over this?! Why?! Do they actually think Yalta was a good thing? The best defense they can come up with is "But our hands were tied!" That's a good point to debate, but it's not the same as saying this was a good thing. If you're forced into a bad decision, you can still admit it was a bad decision to "have" to make.

Ugh.

Anyway, Jonah Goldberg has a good column on this. Yes, I know, I've been on a Goldberg kick today. But he's about my favorite conservative columnist, and he's on a roll this week.

My Rumanian girlfriend told me about Yalta from the perspective "behind the curtain." Rumania had a German king and had joined the war on the German side, I believe to recover some territories lost after WWI. Late in the war, like Italy, they had turned on Germany and joined the Russian side. Her grandfather was a Rumanian soldier and was told at that point that "The Russians are our allies!" OK, then. And then the Russian allies were let into the country, and he and his fellow soldiers were shipped off to Siberia, anyway.

The news of the Yalta agreement spread quickly among the Rumanian population, and there was utter disbelief. They couldn't believe that the Americans would let the Russians take their country. They had been sure we would protect them.

Can you imagine the sinking feeling you'd get in that situation? Thank-you, Mr. Bush, for saying this out loud.

What is a "Conservative"?

I remember looking up a document on the web called the "Conservative FAQ" (or something like that) some years ago. It was then the best discussion of what conservatism is that I'd seen. Jonah Goldberg Wednesday took another stab at the topic.

I've never been one to worry too much about detailed subclassifications of conservatives, feeling that this is more a feature of the radical left. I've seen a communist friend browsing a website of the Fourth (5th?) International, which was excoriating the Trotskyites and Zinovievites and so forth, hating their not-quite-pure-enough comrades even more than they hate us conservatives... The lefties incessantly squabble over minor distinctions, and this is what led to some of the various purges in Communist countries over the years.

Goldberg's column is not one of these. He does get into some of the taxonomical systems on the Right, but only lightly, and he makes the point that these groups are all, after all, on the Right. (I love his phrase, "The Great Hall of the Right": "I imagine a crowd of generals and aides-de-camp in different uniforms crowded around a giant map of liberalism barking at each other over strategy." Can I be an Adjutant General? Please? That would be soooo cool.)

But the thrust of his article is a discussion of "what is a conservative?" The question doesn't have a simple answer, and Goldberg doesn't try to give one. But he does give a lot of the big points to cover.

...part of the problem is that a conservative in America is a liberal in the classical sense — because the institutions conservatives seek to preserve are liberal institutions.

One of these points is the idea that conservatives are comfortable with the fact we have to live with some choices and contradictions. We can't get to a utopia in which no decisions in life or public policy will ever involve difficult choices. There are always trade-offs, and we recognize these. Heck, it's the whole foundation of the study of economics! (Hey, I just thought of that! But maybe this point is obvious to every kid in Econ 101...)

Anyway, read the whole thing. Discuss amongst yourselves.

"Your Darwin Fish are safe, my friends."

Jonah Goldberg nails Law & Order's latest distortion of a political issue. Considering that Law & Order has taken on a lot more political topics lately, he makes the excellent point that, "most of our political contests do not involve murders."

Another good line:

I half expected Pat Robertson to burst through McCoy’s office spraying holy water screaming, “Exorcist”-style, “The power of Christ compels you!”

The NY Times on blog ethics

Tim Worstall has some good commentary on the NY Times' admonition on blog "ethics" today. Geesh. Being lectured on journalistic ethics by the Times is like being scolded by congressmen on fundraising ethics. No. Wait. That's been happening, too.

I've long thought the whole obsession with "ethics" was a dodge for avoiding morality. Well, that's probably not exactly it. But Cohen gets onto this thing about "Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts..." That avoiding the "appearance of" seems to be high up on the list of "ethics" rules that don't interest me much. If there's not a *real* problem, I'm not worried too much by the false appearance of one, as long as I know what's beneath the surface.

Bloggers, as Worstall points out, tend to be "partisans" of one kind or another. Not to a particular party, I'd say, but to one side of an argument or another. I'm a conservative. I make conservative comments and will generally criticize from a conservative point of view (including criticizing "Republicans"--see post below). And I expect this out of other bloggers. In fact, I read bloggers primarily because I like their point of view and look forward to seeing them hit the other side. So what if a professor-blogger comments on issues relating to professors? (Like me!) Or a legislator blogs about legislative goings-on? Isn't that why I read them to begin with? The fact that they know what they're talking about and describe these from their point of view? It's not a "conflict of interest," it's their background. We readers know them, and we can read or not read them, as we choose. There are millions of others out there to choose from, if we change our minds.

Against "Real ID"

I fear it may be too late now to do anything about it, but I here put forth my last call for people to stand against the so-called "Real ID" act the Senate is about to take up. The House sneaked the grubby little bill through, hidden in an Iraq war appropriations bill. This is why I hate Congress' trick of putting unrelated items into the same bill. Let the Congressmen take a stand for or against the issue on its own merits!

Maybe there's a chance of the Senate making some changes and therefore having to iron out differences in Committee, but I doubt it. Anyway, here are my reasons for opposing this:

1) It's unConstitutional! Do there need to be any more reasons?!!?

2) Let me expand on that in some detail. It seeks to intrude on the states' rights to determine who can drive a car within their territories. The United States government has zero authority to say anything about this, one way or the other. Check the Constitution. It's not in there. Surprise, surprise. So this directly violates Article I, Section 8 (which lists the powers of Congress) and Amendment 10 (which explicitly reserves all unenumerated powers to the States).

3) I might as well pile a few other objections onto this, beyond mere Constitutional law. (That was sarcastic understatement.) For one, I don't want my driver's license being standardized with any other state's. I don't want the Federal or other non-Tennessee authorities to have instant access to whatever non-driving data Congress wants to make my license the access point to. I haven't read specifically what this part is about, but I'm suspicious of it. There's room for all kinds of meddling, there. I won't even invoke some nebulous "privacy concerns," here, because that gets over- and mis-used as an objection. But a nationally-standardized driver's license would become a de facto national ID. And I'm not about to let that happen without a fight.

4) Four kinds of ID to renew your license?!?! What the heck?! I don't have four kinds of ID! Let's count: (1) driver's license. --wait--can you use a driver's license as an ID to establish that you can get a driver's license? Scratch that. (1) Social security card. "Not to be used for identification" my foot. %*(! politicians. (2) voter's identification card. When was the last time I pulled that thing out of the closet? We do things differently at the polling booth at home, and I don't think I've had to show that particular card in a long time. (3) Mail sent to me? A bill? (4) ?!?! I can't think of anything else I could reasonably use for establishing who I am. Faculty ID? My Blockbuster card? Did the congresscritters actually think this through when they wrote & voted on it? If I can't come up with a good list, how is some poor shut-in grandmotherly type going to?

I heard some reprobate, whom I might otherwise agree with on politics, on the radio (or maybe on a political commentary website) lamenting that the "compromise" Real ID bill would allow states to issue non-identification driver's licenses to people who couldn't establish the 4 kinds of ID. These licenses would be...licenses to drive a car! Wow! Who would have thought of the concept? And the guy was mad that the Feds would allow states to get away with this in the compromise bill. In other words, this guy wants to Federally mandate who is allowed to drive. No excuse about using an ID to board a plane or any of that. He wants to centralize in Washington the control over driving itself.

Does this guy have any concept of that document sitting over on (ahem) Constitution Ave., NW, on display in the National Archives. Something to do with restricting the power of the Federal Government... I think it's been in force for something like 2 1/4 centuries or so... Starts with a "C-"... Anything? Anything?

I'm totally disgusted with these erstwhile "conservatives," who want to Federalize any state authority they can in their quest to plug a minor hole in the immigration dike. Why not have the Federal government actually patrol the border and leave driving to the states? That sounds more like the division of powers described by that "C-" word thingy. These people aren't conservatives in the sense that I know the word. "Republicans," maybe (all the more reason these two terms are not synonymous), but it's the statist impulse that leads to this action. Traditional Southern conservatives certainly ought to fight this. Let's see if there's still some fight left in us. And if this sneaks through the Senate and is signed by the President, at least one state ought to sue on 10th Amendment grounds. Even if it's done by a bunch of pro-illegal immigrant activists (I disagree with their reasons for opposing this, obviously), I'll be hoping they win.

Sancti Thomae Mori Utopia

No, Tim, I never have tried translating Saint Thomas More's Utopia. At 59 pages, it would be quite a chore. Fortunately, there is no need, as an English translation is already available for free.

More's Utopia and the Seri

Watched Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Utopia last night. Turner Classic Movies had a short on Thomas More's Utopia and legends of "real" Utopias. They focused on the island of Tiburon, in the Gulf of California. This was a short film made in the 1930s, I'd reckon, and the Indians they came across were descendants of the Seri (spelling?), legendary creators of an island paradise hundreds of years earlier. By the time the film crew arrived, this tribe had reverted to a more primitive state, and the surviving 100 or fewer tribesmen had very recently decided that this was the end of them. They'd made a conscious decision to have no more children and go extinct. The youngest child was about four, and this would be the last. The eldest tribesman, I think referred to as a sort of medicine man in the film, had been entrusted with the tribe's history some years earlier. Then he had had his tongue cut out to keep him from telling anyone else.

I'm curious what became of these people. The youngest could easily be alive today. Did the tribe change its mind?

On a related topic, I found a Latin-English bilingual copy of Sir Thomas More's Utopia on Amazon. It would be a lot of fun to work through, but it's $100. There are probably some cheaper copies of the Latin text on its own.

Figulus--have you ever tried translating Utopia?

Sen. Mikulski on the new NASA Administrator

A friend sends along this transcript from NASA chief Griffin's Senate hearings last week:

And also we want to thank, that while Dr. Griffin has served the nation, his wonderful wife, Rebecca, has been behind him. And we know that behind every great rocket scientist was the woman who provided the rocket.

...I don't get it...

France and the Strategic Implications for China, Taiwan, and North Korea

France is the enemy. No, that is a little harsh. Perhaps I should write, "France sides with the enemy." Well, either way, as our enemy or as our enemy's ally, I don't see too much difference.

France has now put itself in the position of supporting Hitler's annexations of the Sudetenland and Austria, except in this case with guns blazing. After all, what's the difference between those actions and Red China's threat to invade and conquer Taiwan, if Taiwan decides to declare itself independent in law, as it already is in fact?

This unbelievable story is reported in today's Deutsche Welle (link via Instapundit). French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has begun a three-day visit to Red China, during which he said, "The anti-secession law is completely compatible with the position of France." Now, this anti-"secession" law is a misnomer in itself. A clever little bit of doublespeak. Taiwan is not ruled from Peking. It is an independent country, despite all of the linguistic pas de chat to the contrary. It is subject to no laws passed in or by Red China.

So to speak of the possibility of Taiwan "seceding" from Red China is to misrepresent the situation. The Prime Minister of France is complicit in this falsehood, as he uses the same phrase in describing the law (although it might have been only for convenience, I'll admit). The worst thing, of course, is that he says France agrees with the Communists in Peking on this. He says France will support the invasion of Taiwan if the latter stands up for itself and utters those unspeakable magic words, "We are independent."

What would change if Taiwan did so? Taiwan already acts as every other independent country, with the exception of some diplomatic formalities, and they already exchange ambassadors with a few small countries in the Pacific (good for them!). Has Red China gone to war with Taiwan already because Vanuatu has an ambassador in Taipei?

No, while a wider diplomatic representation is important, the utterance of these words would mostly just make everybody publicly admit what is already the case. And it is that wide public admission China cannot tolerate. At that point, they would have lost any pretense for claiming to rule the island, so they must set up this justification now.

It is not to our credit that the United States plays along with this charade, having recently subtly but significantly changed our stand on the issue. Our old formulation was that we recognized that both parties (Red China and Taiwan) had a "One-China Policy." But we did not say that we had this policy, ourselves. Today, after public statements by the Clinton administration and later by Colin Powell, we have worked ourselves into a corner, proclaiming that we have a One-China policy, as well. What's the difference between our One-China policy and that of Peking? Well, we think it should be peacefully resolved. They agree but hold onto a Plan B, of resolution by a missile barrage and an amphibious landing.

The only thing...no, make that two things that I can see excusing (well, partly excusing) our betrayal of a free and democratic country in this case is that (1) to force the issue now would cause a large and difficult war that we might not be ready for, just yet [And just when will we be ready for it? Come on, this problem has been around for a half-century!], and that (2) we need China's help to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem. North Korea is more pressing, and we should solve it first, if we can.

Of course, it could be that China is deliberately dragging its feet on North Korea for this very reason. They can get us to treat them with kid gloves longer and longer, as long as this situation remains unresolved. We can't very well say to them, "Come on now and fix North Korea quickly, so we can get on with confronting you about Taiwan," can we? So despite our talk about how a non-nuclear North Korea is in China's own interests, it might not be. China is unlikely to be attacked by their Communist little brother, and it might very well be in China's interest to let this issue fester, to distract us from the Taiwan problem.

Let me return to France. It is in the light of this whole mess that Raffarin throws his weight behind the aggressor. Let's keep this clear in our heads: Red China is a Communist tyranny. They are the bad guys. France wants to sell them weapons. I'm not talking about the Airbus sales or anything civilian. I mean weapons that will be pointed at the good guys. In the event of a war, they'll be used to shoot at our ally and quite possibly at us. And France wants those to be French weapons.

What is he thinking? How could there be any clearer case of a bad idea?

I'd like to thank the Academy...

We here at Hypotheses Non Fingo are proud to announce that we've been named one of the best Tennessee blogs by the fine folks at TennesseeBloggers.com. We're included in the "Best East Tennessee Blogs" and "Best Political Coverage" categories. In fact, in the latter, we rank right aboveInstapundit. Because it's in alphabetical order. Well, still...!

It's a new site to me, but we're happy to be on it. Thanks for the compliment, boys!

Habemus papam, Benedictum Sextum-Decimum

I couldn't have been more wrong, and that is just as well. The cardinal electors have chosen the most prominent member of their college, its dean and prolific best-selling international author Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI. He was elected by a 2/3 or more majority after between 4 and 6 rounds of voting within a mere 24 hours of his delivering a stunning homily to the college.

Saint Benedict is the patron saint of Western Europe; his religious order is credited with having saved classical civilization from the dark ages.

Ratzinger's new name

He's taking the name Benedict XVI.

...and the winner is...

Joseph Ratzinger

The Bells of Saint Peters

Now the Vatican bells are indeed ringing, a confirmation that the College of Cardinals has selected their new pope. And the crowd goes wild! Really. Fox News is showing people actually running towards Saint Peter's Square.

This is pretty exciting to watch, even for a non-Catholic like me.

I hear from the reporters that we've got about 45 min.---1 hr. to wait before we see who the new pope is. That'll be around 12:45---1:00 PM EDT.

What color is it?

Smoke's coming from the Sistine Chapel chimney right now. Its color is a little hard to tell against the sky, and there are mixed reports coming from local radio: Vatican Radio reports black (no choice made), while Sky Italia reports white (a new pope). The crowd is cheering, and the cheers are building and building. No bells ringing yet, which is a new indicator that will be given.

Looks white now, to me... Stay tuned.

What color is it?

Miracles, physical laws, and the Papal Conclave

I just read Michael Novak's interesting piece on how the Holy Spirit could be at work in the Papal Conclave in Rome this week, choosing the new pope.

Not being a Catholic, I might disagree with some of Novak's specifics, but I'm impressed with his thinking on the subject, because he gets to the heart of a longstanding problem: how can divine intervention (in the form of either miracles or more subtle effects) exist in a world governed by apparently unbreakable natural laws?

This has been a hot topic in science and religion since at least as far back as Newton. Newton and Leibniz, rivals for the credit of inventing calculus, also argued opposite sides of this debate. Newton, unlike the later Deists who would call themselves "Newtonians," believed that miracles were not only possible (a divine suspension of divinely-ordained laws) but even necessary.

I'll get into that debate some other time. For now, let me quote Novak:

... In between details like the weather, personal illness, chance encounters, and accidental perceptions thrown off by odd angles in the way people meet — not to mention unsummoned thoughts and images and intimations — there are a host of ways in which the Divine Artist of events can set the stage and arrange actions, without in the least interfering in the natural laws of human nature and history, or even in the perfect freedom of will of those who make decisions.

Read the whole thing.

De Conclavi

Back in January, George Weigel gave an excellent analysis of the next conclave, now scheduled to begin on Monday the 18th.

Signs of the Times

More interesting calendar coincidences regarding the date of the pope's death, from the Shrine:

1) On a first Saturday, which are specially dedicated to Mary Our Lady of Fatima,
2) On the Vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday, a feast he created,
3) Within the Octave of Easter,
4) In a New Springtime (only 12 days old), and
5) In the Year of the Eucharist

During the novena of mourning falls April 11, the feast of St. Stanislas, patron of his beloved Poland, whose name he had considered taking as Pope.

Quis Papabilis?

Speculating about the next pope is a game played by many in the blogosphere, and far be it from me to sit it out. Here, for the record, is my prediction, just so the world may see in the future how little I know about such things.

Most of the papabiles mentioned in the media are very much like John Paul II was - dynamic, charismatic, non-Italians well known all over the world. But I predict the next pope will not be like that at all.

Going by the pendulum theory, I'd guess that the next pope will be sort of an opposite to John Paul II. He will be an old (possibly too old to vote) cardinal, an Italian bureaucrat, a conservative who will not shake things up too much, an interim pope who will be hoped to smooth out the operational functions of the curia, which has been more or less in a state of shock for the last 26 years.

He'll be old because most (all?) of the electors in this conclave will have never voted for a pope before, so they will feel more comfortable electing an interim pope who will only reign for a few years. That way, in a few years, they'll get a chance to vote again.

But then again, the electors will be listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit, and not for the cries of their own anxieties. So who knows whom we will get? Spiritus, ubi vult, spirat.

Misericordia Divina

The death of Pope John Paul II dominates the blogosphere today, and on many blogs you hear mention of the Feast of the Divine Mercy. This feast is the second Sunday of the Easter season, i.e., the Sunday after Easter Sunday. Divine Mercy is a new feast, and it was established by John Paul II himself. "It is fitting", many say, "that Pope John Paul II should die on such a feast day, which meant so much to him." And so it is.

"But wait a minute," you think, "didn't John Paul II die on Saturday night? Why, then, all this talk about his dying on a Sunday?" The answer can be found in the oldest of Astronomical duties, the recording of times and the making of calendars, in this case, the Church's liturgical calendar.

The calendar of the ancient Romans which we still use today, slightly reformed by Lilius and Clavius under Pope Gregory XIII, counted and still counts each day as beginning and ending at midnight. In our day to day social lives, however, we tend to regard the day as beginning and ending with dawn, not midnight. Thus we commonly refer to 2 A.M. Sunday morning as being "Saturday night". In the Jewish calendar, however, the day is seen as beginning and ending at sunset, not sunrise.

According to the Gospels, Jesus rose from the dead before dawn on the first day of the week, i.e. Sunday. We might think that that means he rose sometime between 12 AM and 5:20 AM standard time in Jerusalem. But given that the Jewish day begins at nightfall, the first day of the week actually began earlier, on Saturday evening.

The early Christians were mostly gentiles, and they for the most part kept the Roman custom of beginning and ending days at midnight. However, they were well aware of the fact that the Jews did things differently, and that Jesus may well have risen from the dead on Saturday night. They accommodated this fact in the liturgical calendar by extending Sunday, the day celebrating the resurrection, so that it began Saturday evening. All other days continued to begin at midnight. So today in the liturgical calendar, Sunday has two evenings, while Saturday has none.

In later days, this practice was also applied to Solemnities such as Christmas and All Saints Day, and so the liturgies of these days also begin on the evening of the previous day. Today, if you go to a Catholic parish on a Saturday evening you will commonly find a Sunday mass being offered.

That is what happened Saturday night at Rome. In the last hours of the Pope, he and his closest friends chanted the first Vespers of Sunday (the second Vespers of Sunday being celebrated the next evening) followed by a Sunday mass celebrated in his bed chamber by Archbishop Dziwisz.

According to the regulations governing the death of a pope, Universi Dominici Gregis, the burial of the Pope is to take place on the 4th to 6th day of his death, "inter quartum sextumque post mortem diem". John Paul II's burial is scheduled for Friday, indicating that the cardinals are reckoning his death according to the liturgical, not the Roman, calendar.

It is understandable that they would want to bury him as late as possible, given the huge throngs lined up for the viewing.

After nine days of mourning, the conclave will begin. A new pope is elected typically after 2 to 4 days of conclave.

Tennessee Legislator blogs

An East Tennessee legislator (in the state General Assembly, not a congressman) from Knoxville, Stacey Campfield, has started his own blog recently. He's already gotten the liberals riled up for posting "15 ways to know if you are a Democrat in the Tennessee Legislature".

Sample:

15. You define “capitalism” as selling your vote for $237,000.

You believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.

Now he's gone and done it again, with a Scooby-Doo dream sequence imagining conversations with state House leader Jimmy Naifeh, Governor Bredesen, and perennial Lieutenant Governor Wilder (I can't remember a time when Wilder wasn't L.G.!) over the failed Tenncare program. This one's even funnier:

...

WILDER:Butterfly...Pretty butterfly....

...

GOVERNOR:YES!! Brilliant!! Do we have any in the house who we could tap for their knowledge?

NEIFEH: Well there is doctor Hensley.But..

...

NEIFEH:But governor he is A...A..A REPUBLICAN...

GOVERNOR:.......I see.....

WILDER:flower...

I have this very distinct picture of L.G. Wilder right now...

I'll also note that Campfield includes references to South Park in his blog, making me wonder if he's going to become the E. Tenn. Jonah Goldberg. That's a compliment, of course!

Browsing the referral logs...

Following the tradition of The Rat and Old Oligarch, I've been browsing Hypotheses Non Fingo's referral logs today. I don't know how the person asking Google, "where do people in michigan get a female ecliptic parrot" came to our site, but welcome in!

For the person searching for "rhodes college" and "berlin wall," I'm curious if this was a fellow alumnus. Rhodes has a chunk of the wall, encased in the wall of Buckman Hall. Our former president brought it back from a trip to Berlin when the building was being put up around 1990-1.

And similarly, I got a little thrill seeing a Google search for "Richard Halliburton lost at sea" bring a visitor to us. Richard Halliburton is (was? He's long dead & lost at sea, after all.) my favorite travel writer, and I've had the pleasure of following in a few of his footsteps from his Latin American trip. Proud to call him a fellow Tennesseean, and Rhodes has Halliburton Tower, dedicated in his memory. Along with the 5th(?) largest bell in the US (something like that) at its top.

Sciavo and the Pope

I haven't posted on either of them--odd how I keep skipping the events of the day in this blog--but I will eventually. The Pope is timelier, now. I'll say quickly that although I'm not Roman Catholic, I respect the man, and he's played a large and constructive role in the happy ending of the 20th Century.

By that, I mean the overthrow of Communism. A Jewish friend of mine has remarked that the 20th Century was, on the whole, a bad one in the light of history, and I can't really argue with that. Its great achievements must be weighed against the rise of the great totalitarian regimes--Communist, Nazi, and Fascist (not sure of the differences between the latter two, but I often see people in the know list them separately)--and the outbreak of widespread slaughters, beginning with the Armenian massacre at the century's onset.

In rough order, you have the Armenian massacre, the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust (by far the largest single event--I don't mean to minimize it by putting it in a list), the various Soviet massacres spread over the century, the terror of Pol Pot, and then Rwanda. I don't know numbers from the Sudan, but it may be big enough to put in here, as well.

But the century had a happy ending. Count the millions of people who were liberated from Communism less than a decade before the end of this era. And John Paul II had a role to play in this, for which we should all be thankful.

Open Secrets

Patrick Carver over at Southern Appeal (a big Rebel yell out to the boys there!) has a great post on political donations from those "59 former diplomats" urging the Senate to reject John Bolton for the UN ambassadorship. Turns out that even the ones who served exclusively under Republicans are donors to Democratic and liberal (left-wing) candidates and causes. No big surprise, there, but keep this in mind the next time your liberal friends claim that "even Republicans" are opposing Bolton. Great work by Carver--this is the kind of job that makes the blogosphere shine!

Links on Meg Urry and Women in Astronomy

National Review today has an article by Christina Hoff Sommers on Harvard, the Larry Summers issue, and the broader context of women in science. In it, Sommers mentions a friend of mine, Meg Urry, who is a Yale astrophysicist and active with CSWA, the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy. One paragraph deals with her comments on the subject to CNN in 1993. I've been looking and am unable to find a transcript of the original interview, but there is slightly more context here. (Third item from the bottom.)

The latest American Astronomical Society newsletter has recommendations from CSWA on the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women in astronomy. I might post that later. I'm curious if any of it was added or changed after Larry Summers' comments became public.

Top Spy on Spy Novels

James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence, is interviewed on his taste in spy novels. He gives some interesting recommendations, mostly famous ones that I've never read. Link via John Miller at The Corner.

Spoken Latin at National Review Dot Com

In the March 8th edition of Derb Radio at National Review Dot Com, John Derbyshire ends his show with a quote from a very famous oration of Cicero against Catalina. I will not feign a hypothesis about why he does this, but this is the quote, along with my attempt at a translation.

"O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum."

"O seasons, O morals! The senate understands these things. The consul sees; yet this man lives. He lives? Indeed he comes even into the senate, he becomes a sharer of the public council, he notes and designates with his eyes each and every one of us for murder."

Readers of this blog may have noted also that this is not the only Latin quote that Derb used in his show. Earlier in the same show he used a much more obscure quote from Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, "Hypotheses non fingo."

A Paramecium of Mars

OK, I was trying to do a spoof of Edgar Rice Burrough's A Princess of Mars, but maybe that flopped. Regardless, Russell Seitz has a well-written discussion of the recent evidence for life on Mars, in today's Opinion Journal. (Free registration might be required...)

Two discoveries point us in this direction--the finding of methane and formaldehyde. From what I understand, there are two prime sources of methane: volcanism and life. Seitz discounts the former, but let's not be too hasty. Mars has plenty of volcanos, but until the past few months, we've only found ones that seemed to be long extinct. Mars and Earth were both formed about the same time with hot, radioactive cores, but while Earth still has hers--and thus has active volcanos erupting under the core's pressure--Mars is thought to have long cooled off. The reason is that Mars is smaller than Earth, so the ratio of its surface area to its mass is larger, and it can radiate away its internal heat more quickly.

However, the European Space Agency probe Mars Express has found evidence of more recent volcanism.

Although we can get some age estimates for these volcanos and cinder cones, we still don't know how active they are today. Do they produce enough methane to explain all that we see?

Methane breaks down in the presence of oxygen and ultraviolet light, so its presence in the Martian atmosphere indicates an ongoing replenishment. This might come from volcanic outgassing and eruptions. In fact, it is really incredible that Mars seems still to be geologically active. It's not the dead planet we had thought.

Now, what does this mean for life? Even if there are geologically active sites on Mars, and even if they did produce methane (which we don't know yet), this is still evidence that life could exist on Mars. Life needs an energy source, and we have long suspected that any life on Mars might be hidden under the surface, down in crevices on the rocks, protected from the cold Martian air. Down in the rocks, they would be warmer and possibly be surrounded by water--necessary for the kind of life we are used to. Now that we know Mars' interior is able to support volcanos, we might conclude that it is warmer even than we had thought. Warm enough to keep underground reservoirs of water? Maybe. We do see evidence for recent flash floods on the surface. And this is good news for the search for life.

Or, maybe the methane comes right out of the organisms themselves...

Reality-Based Communities

Jonah Goldberg has a good discussion today of NY Times reporter Ron Suskind's infamous article describing liberals as part of the "Reality-Based Community." When I first heard of Suskind's article, I had assumed that "reality-based" was intended in opposition to "faith-based," and thus was a slam against those of us on the religious Right. When I read more, I found that the phrase was from a Bush aide, who put "reality" in opposition to the idea of transforming reality. It was actually a criticism of the Left. Now, the Left has proudly taken up this label, perhaps mistaking the aide's intent as I first did.

Goldberg goes into a good discussion of how the Left suffers from a failure of imagination in foreign policy. By being "reality-based," they assume the present reality will continue indefinitely. They are conservative, in a limited way. Meanwhile, the right has, for the most part (there are exceptions among the more isolationist), agreed that we need to transform the current state of the Middle East.

This brings to my mind President Kennedy's speech in which he said, "Some see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I see things as they could be and ask, 'Why not?'" (I paraphrase here, from memory.)

Isn't this exactly the description of President Bush and his opponents in foreign policy?

Terrorist Threat Level Bert

Today's Terrorist Threat Alert Level is...



As I write this, we're at level "Bert." Thank goodness we're not at level "Evil Bert"!



Link via Zacht Ei.

Fun with Starry Night

Fun with Starry Night

After years of using the free software package XEphem, I finally broke down and bought some commercial planetarium software that runs natively on my Mac OS X.3 without having to start Xwindows. I bought the cheapest version of Starry Night I could find: Starry Night Complete Space & Astronomy Pack, or Starry Night CSAP.

Certainly the graphics are stunning to anyone used to XEphem. Equally stunning, unfortunately was the lack of documentation of the features that would make it a competitor with XEphem. Not that the features don't exist, they do, but they are not always documented.

Learning to use Starry Night was a little like playing Myst; it was a game of solving a puzzle. Now I'm not talking about the basic features here; those are covered quite adequately by the quick start up sheet and the built in tutorial. I'm talking about features that might interest an Astronomy graduate. They are there, but you have to figure them out for yourself. I couldn't even find these on google.

So in the interest of helping out future Starry Night newbies who look to google in their frustration, I thought it might be a good idea to list the effects of pressing a key while your cursor is in the sky. Some of these keystrokes are handy short cuts; some of them have functions that I do not know how to duplicate in the sky guide panel or the application menu; none of them are documented, as far as I can tell. So without further ado, here is my attempt at documentation:

i -- Toggle the Heads Up Display (HUD). The HUD is a (sometimes annoying) label that follows your mouse cursor around telling you what it's pointed at. If you toggle it off with the I key, you can still get that information to display, but only for as long as you hold down the control key. I love this feature! Pressing I again causes the default behavior to resume.

f -- Toggle the ecliptic. If it's not displayed, cause it to be marked as a green line in the sky. If it is displayed, cause that green line to go away.

g -- Causes a grid to be displayed of the celestial coordinates.

b -- Toggle the display of the horizon. Pressing b causes the horizon to disappear, effectively making the Earth invisible and giving you an unobstructed view of the entire celestial sphere. Pressing b returns you to the normal earthling view of the sky.

c -- Toggle the highlighting of clusters.

+ -- Zoom in.

- -- Zoom out.

n, s, e, w -- Point the sky panel to the north, south, east or west.

z -- Point the sky panel to the zenith.

y -- Increment the Time and Date by one year; holding down the shift key while typing Y causes the year to decrement.

m -- Increment the month; M causes the month to decrement.

d or D -- Increment or decrement the day by one.

h or H -- Increment or decrement the hour.

t or T -- Increment or decrement the minute.

tab -- jump to the next sunset or sunrise. Shift-tab takes you to the previous one.

r -- sets the time to "now"

p -- Increase the time flow rate. Shift-p causes the time flow rate to decrease.

k -- Toggles the labeling of constellations in the sky.

L -- Toggles the labeling of objects in the sky.

The other keys do nothing as far as I can tell (but I might not be able to tell very far).

One feature that I hope exists but have not yet found: I'd like to be able to find the Bayer names as well as the common names of the brightest stars. Currently, each star shows only one name in the HUD, regardless of how many it may actually have.

Despite these documentation issues, I have been really impressed with Starry Night: CSAP. Especially fun has been the tracking of satellites in the sky. This was a feature of Starry Night I was not expecting; it was a real joy to discover.

NASA's returned to manned spaceflight; FUSE's kluge

Fox News is reporting that the space shuttle Discovery will go into space in May. It will carry several tile patch kits for in-flight repairs, if necessary.

I've been waiting for this for some time, now. Very happy to see us back in space. Now we just need to get Servicing Mission 4 up there to work on the Hubble Space Telescope... The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble, says we may have to go to "2-gyro mode" this year, since the gyroscopes are showing mechanical problems. You need three gyros to keep a spacecraft stabilized. Two-gyro mode won't be a total loss, but it will create some "jitter" in one direction, slightly blurring the images along that axis. It will also restrict the directions in which the Hubble can point, which means some targets might become unviewable.

At some point, I'll have to describe the amazing kluge put together by the FUSE observatory team, when their space telescope's guidance system lost control along one axis. OK, but briefly: they used the fact that the FUSE spacecraft is orbiting through the Earth's magnetic field, and FUSE is running an electrical current. ...it's a gigantic electric motor! They use the "torquer bars"--electromagnets in the spacecraft made to dump excess angular momentum--and run a certain current through them, creating a magnetic field for the spacecraft and letting it push off of the Earth's magnetic field. (This is a crude description of how forces work in electromagnetism, but bear with me.) One of the project scientists told me (after I asked), that they had not even planned on this before launch. It was an impromptu fix after one of the "reaction wheels" failed. If they had thought of it beforehand, he said, they'd have made the torquer bars bigger! And they continuously have to update the current running through the torquer bars as the Earth's magnetic field changes. It's a rapid change at that altitude (near Earth orbit)--noticeable from one orbit to another.

Now FUSE has had a second reaction wheel fail. They're down to just one left. As of last month, my colleague told me that they were meeting to figure out how to update the torquer bar solution. Let's hope it works!

Astronomer's night out

Up 'til the wee hours this week, trying to finish up a research paper I've been working on for three years. It's time to publish when you're sick of looking at the thing! It's amazing how long it can take to pretty-up the figures. Diagrams. That kind of figure. And I've learned never to do a "sanity check" on your mathematical results if you're afraid of what you might find...

On the other hand, we've had two straight nights of beautifully clear skies. I've gotten nice binocular views of the comet out, and as soon as my camera mounting plate comes in the mail, I can try some astrophotography with my new tripod and clock drive. Very eager to try this out!

CNN's Eason Jordan resigns

Bill, over at INDC Journal, is reporting that CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, is resigning. (Full story on the AP Wire.) This, after he claimed at the World Economic Forum that the US military was targeting journalists in Iraq.

I'm actually not cheerleading the effort to have him fired. I'd prefer to have him publicly retract his comments (very publicly, which means somewhere other than on CNN) and explain why he made them in the first place. Either back up the claim, or take it back. Fully, honestly, and humbly. And apologize, too.

I've got in mind something like John Cleese's apology to Kevin Klein while being dangled out the window in A Fish Called Wanda:

"I'm really really sorry, I apologize unreservedly. [...] I do, I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future."

Again, I don't want the guy fired, but I want something along these lines. Heck, I don't want Ward Churchill fired! He's a jerk, and I would doubt the educational value of his classes, but speaking anti-American idiocy, in class or out, is and should not be a firing offense. The quality or veracity of his scholarship would be another thing, of course, but if you're going to fire him, do it for the right reasons.

A Culturally Significant Date

This year, 2005, Good Friday falls on March 25, during a full moon. According to tradition, Jesus died during a full moon, on Friday the 14th of Abib. Since Abib is a lunar month, it doesn't regularly correspond to the same date on the Roman calendar every year. During the days of the Roman Empire, this was a source of inconvenience, since the Romans used a solar calendar, and their Greek subjects used the Metonic calendar. So they had a convention by which they would translate Roman annual celebrations to the Greek calendar. Using that convention, April 6th would get translated to the 14th of Abib.

Of course, in only about 1 out of 19 years would April 6th and Abib 14th actually occur on the same day, but as I said, this was a convention. It was used for convenience, not exactness. So in the Christian east, the date of Jesus' death was assigned by convention to April 6.

But in the west, in the 3rd century, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and others believed that they knew the exact day on which Jesus died. According to this tradition, he died on a Friday March 25. Modern astronomers doubt whether this is possible, but no one doubts that this was widely believed in the west in the 3rd century.

March 25th was a very significant date to 3rd century Christians. For reasons I do not quite understand, they believed that Jesus was incarnate for an integral number of years, so that he was conceived on the same day of the year on which he died, i.e. March 25th. They also believed Friday March 25th to be the day God created Adam, 5198 years to the day before the conception of Jesus. Adam's later fall was assigned to a March 25th as well.

A century later, when Christmas was first celebrated in Rome, the date December 25th was chosen, probably because it followed 9 months after the conception of Jesus on March 25th. (In the east, Christmas was first celebrated on January 6th, nine months after April 6th.)

A Good Friday on the 14th of Abib occurs only about 1 year in 7. And a Good Friday on March 25th is even more rare. But this year we have a Good Friday that falls on both the 25th of March and the 14th of Abib. 2005 is only the third year when this has happened since the Gregorian calendar was instituted in 1582. The other two times were in 1633 and 1910. The next time it will happen will be in 2157.

For fun, you can run the Gregorian calendar backwards to the first century. The historical value of doing this is, of course, nil. Neither the Gregorian nor the Nicene nor the Hillel calendar reforms were yet instituted in the first century. But as a point of pure trivia, the Gregorian calendar yields exactly one Good Friday that falls on both 25 March and 14 Abib in the first century: 39 AD.

First Order Approximations

Ash Wednesday is already upon us, directing our thoughts to the coming Easter. The usual expression for the formula of the date of Easter is that Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox. This formula is true in a conventional sense. A more exact expression would be that Easter is the first Sunday after the 14th of Abib, where Abib is defined by the Nicene council as being the first Metonic month whose 14th day occurs on or after March 21st.

Calling the 14th of a Metonic month "the full moon" is kind of like calling 12 AM "midnight" or 12 PM "noon"; it's a first order approximation. If the earth and moon orbited in perfect circles, then the 14th of a Metonic month would be a full moon, at least in Europe, and 12 PM would be noon, at least in the center of your time zone, unless it's Daylight Savings Time. If the earth orbited in a perfect circle, then the seasons would be equal in length, and Spring would always start on March 21st. Of course, everyone has known for millennia that the heavenly bodies don't quite move in perfect circles, but it would be a hassle to make clocks that ran slower in Winter than in Summer just to get 12 PM right, and it would be a hassle to make a Metonic calendar that ran slower in Winter just to get the 14th of a Metonic month right. So for calendar purposes Meton ignored epicycles, and made his calendar based on cycles alone, a first-order calendar that matched the average lunation very well indeed, just as our 24-hour clock matches the mean solar day very well.

In the 4th century, the Nicene council simplified the Metonic calendar by linking it to March 21st, eliminating the need to calculate embolisms to keep it lined up with the sun. Independently in the 4th century, Rabbi Hillel II applied Meton's calendar for Jewish use, so that Jews dispersed over the world could celebrate their liturgies in solidarity on the same days. In the 16th century, Pope Gregory reformed the Julian calendar, realigning March 21 (to first order) to the vernal equinox. The Jewish and Orthodox calendars have yet to undergo such a reform, and so the Julian Abib sometimes occurs one lunation after the Gregorian Abib.

This year, 2005, in America and Europe, the full moon shall indeed fall on the 14th of the Gregorian Abib, but the Julian Abib shall align with the following lunation, making for an early Easter and a late Passover.

When will we hear the death-rattle?

The last two or three paragraphs on the first page of this article are the ones that make me go, "Hmmm." What if North Korea is seriously rotting from within, and these are the tyranny's last days? I've been thinking this for too long, now, though. I keep hoping each year, but Kim holds on.

Or has he? This article says he disappeared from view two years ago, and I read a few weeks ago that his portraits in Pyongyang have been removed from many public places. I'm reminded of the old Soviet days, when the death of the Premier (how many of those old men did they go through in the early '80s, all "heart attacks," weren't they?) wasn't announced for some time after. There were these subtle clues you had to go on, first. But even they didn't drag it out for years.

A related thought: A Polish friend recently commented that they used to say about this (back in the Communist days), that "In Russia, heart attacks are contagious." Heh, heh...almost the same jokes we made about it here.

Fisking Fisk

Robert Fisk (yes, the original!) has just written a fairly typical article in today's Sunday Independent (South Africa). The message is, as usual, doom and gloom, and it's all America's fault. I haven't done a real fisking in a while (ever?), and I feel the need to try out my skills on the man who inspired the term to begin with.

Ahem.

'What a bloody charade'

That's the title. Now, he's apparently quoting somebody (hence the quotes), and yes, reporters don't necessarily get to choose their own titles. But still. Somebody thought this was the significant line.

Baghdad - In Baghdad yesterday they were supposed to be preparing for an election. But they were preparing for war.

What? You can't do both? If fascist insurgents are trying to stop your election and threaten your voters, shouldn't you prepare for war simultaneously?!

[The security forces and weapons on display] do not look like the prelude to an experiment in democracy. They are all waiting for the rivers of blood of which insurgents have warned. But there will be democracy in Iraq.

OK, a hopeful note to end that paragraph on. See, Fisk knows that Iraqi democracy is coming, no matter what the terrorists try to do to stop it. Or does he? Let's watch and see if this line pops up again in a more obviously sarcastic way. Front page newspaper "reports" don't get sarcastic and opinionated, do they? Nah...

The mortars rained down yesterday morning on the Green Zone where the US and British embassies are located, a "thumpety-thump-thump" that brought the American Apache choppers over the surrounding highways in less than 30 seconds - but the insurgents had disappeared.

Oh, really? From what I understand, from the extensive news reports yesterday, most (all?) of the men who shot the mortar off were apprehended within 20 minutes. Not merely spotted from the air, which they were the moment they fired the shell, but actually caught and arrested. Maybe Fisk means that the insurgents had temporarily disappeared, or so they thought, for a few minutes, until they were caught? Ummm...no. I saw the video from the surveillance drone. Those suckers were on camera, not even knowing they were being watched. Fisk is simply wrong. Factually wrong. Is he lying or merely ignorant? Let's be generous for now and assume he's ignorant of the facts. Somebody told him wrong, let's say.

Then a fierce gun battle broke out in the very centre of Baghdad[...] Fantasy attacks before a fantasy election. Many Iraqis do not know the names of the candidates, let alone their policies.



But there will be democracy in Iraq.

Fantasy attacks might be appropriate, given that they didn't stop that many people from voting. The insurgents were deluding themselves. But a fantasy election? Hussein's 99%(?)of the vote a few years ago was a fantasy election. His garnering of 100% the last time was a fantasy election. This one is real. Real ballots, real voters, the will of the people, freely expressed, and it will determine the government that comes out of this. Fisk is deluding himself, here.

Do some Iraqis not know the candidates' names? No doubt; some Americans don't know our candidates' names, either, but they're both real elections. And in Iraq, this election is for a constitional convention, if I follow it correctly, and the method is voting by party lists, rather than voting for an individual candidate. So even if Fisk were right (I have no doubt that's true in many ways, given the amazing number of candidates participating!), it's irrelevant as a criticism.

How do you like that last line? Where have we read it before? Is it the perserverence of Fisk's natural optimism and determination? It couldn't be a sarcastic reference to his litany of complaints, could it? Nah...

The media boys and girls will be expected to play along with this. "Transition of power", says the hourly logo on CNN's live coverage of the election, though the poll is for a parliament to write a constitution, and the men who will form a majority within it will have no power.

They'll have the power to write the constitution, won't they? Isn't that the whole point? We've already had the transition of power from America to the Iraqis themselves. The next transition of power will be from the provisional Iraqi government to the one the men elected today will create. CNN is giving a vague description, but it's not entirely inappropriate.

They have no control over their own oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150 000 soldiers whom we could all see on the main intersections of Baghdad yesterday.

I'm not sure what he means about the oil, since the old UN embargo and Oil-for-Food program put controls over it, and I'm sure Hussein exercised official control during his reign. Have to look that up. No authority over Baghdad's streets? Not anywhere else in the entire country? Well, the Kurds pretty much run their own affairs, and there are unstable areas in some Sunni provinces. But most of the country is stable. By "authority," does he mean legal authority? Or effective authority? Hard to tell from this. The Iraqi army and police are being trained, and have been to a great deal already. Not a loyal police force? I understand the Iraqi police (maybe army, too, but news reports don't always specify) performed admirably in protecting the voters and 7,000 polling places. Some attacks made it through, but I haven't heard of police complicty. Not loyal?

The idea that the only power of the (existing? future? Fisk doesn't make it clear) Iraqi government is in the 150,000 US soldiers is simplistic. We're definitely providing Iraq's backbone, but their military (or police--again, I can't always tell who's being spoken of) had about the same numbers out in force during this election. I heard that about 300,000 troops were out to protect the polls, and the US couldn't have provided more than half of those. Still, the Iraqis aren't yet ready to move ahead on their own, without US help or further training. Maybe a few more years, maybe sooner, but let's not be hasty.

I just had an odd thought. Is Mr. Fisk a proponent of the US pulling our troops out ASAP? He's just claimed that Iraq has no ability to run itself or to provide its own security, after all. Maybe he wants us to stay as long as we're needed. If he doesn't, then he must not really want a free Iraq to survive.

The big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations where they will be "allowed" to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shi'ite Muslim areas[...]

Sunnis (or specifically Sunni Arabs, perhaps--the news reports sometimes forget that Kurd/Arab is an ethnic distinction, while Sunni/Shiite is a religious one, and you can't group the country into "Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd" and expect that these are three mututally exclusive groups)... OK, let's begin this sentence again. Sunnis make up 20% of Iraqis. That's 1/5. That means Shiites are about 4/5. (Again, if the Kurds are properly classified.) Seems like the poll list for the press was done properly. Fisk seems to want to see low turnout--his point is that he thinks reporters are being herded away from Sunni areas where it might be low. Nope. Try counting. 1/5=20%

N.B. See UPDATE, below.

The majority Shi'ites, oppressed under Hussein, are expected to take a majority in the polling at the expense of the formerly dominant Sunnis.

Gee, ya think?! Let's strip this of the subordinate clause and the historical descriptions: The majority Shiites are expected to take a majority in the polling. Duh. Now, I'm not always in favor of voting for somebody because he's from your enthnic/regligious/other group, but often it's a way to figure that he shares your opinions on certain things. Let's apply this kind of brilliant Fiskian statement to another country with significant majority and minority groups: "The majority blacks, oppressed under Apartheid, are expected to take a majority in the polling at the expense of the formerly dominant whites." No kidding.

Now, I get the feeling that Fisk thinks this is bad, bad, bad. Note the phrase, "at the expense of." A vote for one candidate will always be at the expense of another candidate. And if groups vote mostly for candidates from their own group, then a minority group can be expected to win a minority of seats. This is not deep thinking. Whether the Sunnis wind up being oppressed by the majority has yet to be seen, but the Shiites have so far seemed remarkably reticent to take out revenge on their former masters.

Every working-class Sunni polling station will be out of bounds to the press.

How many of the Shiite polls on the list are "working-class"? He doesn't say. Again, he thinks that turnout goes with income level, such that poor Sunnis are less likely to vote than middle-class Sunnis. What's his evidence? And he doesn't apply this line of thought to the poor Shiites.

The "real" story is outside Baghdad, in the tens of thousands of square kilometres outside the government's control and beyond the sight of independent journalists, especially in the four Sunni Muslim provinces which are at the heart of Iraq's insurrection.

Right up to the election hour, US jets were continuing to bomb "terrorist targets", the latest in the city of Ramadi, which - although US President George Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair do not say so - is now in the hands of the insurgents as surely as Fallujah was before the Americans destroyed it.

Wow. Lots of sarcastic quotation marks, here. Intriguingly, the Fisk's first use is for "real." Is he winking at us readers, hinting to us that he doesn't actually believe this is a "real" story, after all? Hmmm...interesting little psychological question, no?

Now, he claims that the real story is not so much in the majority of Iraq that is stable, but mostly ("especially") in the minority of Iraq that has an active insurgency. If he really meant merely "outside Baghdad," he would have included Iraqi Kurdistan, which is in its umpteenth year of effective democracy, and the wide=ranging Shiite regions outside of Baghdad.

Ooh--now here's a real gem of logical thinking. Fisk claims that the real story is in regions "beyond the sight of independent journalists." He then goes on to state unequivocally that this includes Ramadi, which "is now in the hands of the insurgents as surely as Fallujah was before the Americans destroyed it." Oh? How, exactly, does Mr. Fisk know this? Is he an "independent" journalist? Has he been there? (He can't have, given his claim above.) If he hasn't, from whom did he get the report? That person also could not have been an independent journalist, for the same reason. If these reports don't come from "independent" reporters, how can he trust them?

Every month since Allawi, the former CIA agent, was appointed premier, American air strikes on Iraq have been increasing exponentially.

Is this supposed to imply a cause and effect relationship? Are the airstrikes supposed to be bad, or is it the insurgency we respond to that is bad? Is an increase in airstrikes perhaps a good thing, if we weren't responding effectively beforehand?

There are no "embedded" reporters on the giant American air base at Qatar or aboard the US carriers in the Gulf from which these ever increasing and ever more lethal sorties are being flown. They go unrecorded, unreported, part of the "fantasy" war which is all too real to the victims but hidden from us journalists.

So is it a fantasy or not? He states it is "real" to the "victims," after all. So who thinks it's a fantasy? If a bomb falls on a terrorist in the desert, and Robert Fisk is not there to see it, is it a fantasy? How does Mr. Fisk know these sorties take place, if they are "unrecorded"? How does he know they are "ever more lethal"? Is the US government telling us? If so, they're not covering them up, and if not, then some reporter is recording them. As far as I know, the embedding program has not been ended (at least, it wasn't after the end of major combat operations--I don't have any newer information), but according to the Admiral who created the program (I've forgotten his name [look this up later], but I talked to him about it at a Washington, D.C. Phi Beta Kappa Association event last year.), it's still open but embedded reporters have left to go out on their own. If Fisk isn't embedded, isn't that his own fault? Or, like the critics' claims about the Sunni vote, is Fisk's personal lack of participation a sign that the whole program is illegitimate? Incidentally, he describes "victims" of the fight against terrorist insurgents, but he doesn't say whether he's talking about dead terrorists or any innocent civilians who might have been hit by accident. Which is it, Fisk? I'm not shedding any tears for Zarqawi's dying thugs.

The reality is that much of Iraq has become a free-fire zone (for reference, see under "Vietnam") and the Americans are conducting this secret war as efficiently and as ruthlessly as they conducted [the earlier raids on Hussein's forces.]

Vietnam!!! The man waits until the 16th paragraph to compare it to Vietnam! Give the man a medal. Would this free-fire zone be like the ones self-described war criminal John Kerry participated in in Vietnam? Just curious. "Secret war"? Secret from whom? It dominated the headlines daily here until the election itself became the lead story. If ABC, etc. reported on a gunfight within Baghdad, rather than in Ramadi, were they covering up the "real" story?

Now they are attacking "foreign terrorist targets" or "anti-Iraqi forces": I especially like this one, since the foreigners involved in this violence happen in reality to be Americans who are mostly attacking Iraqis.

Nobody's claimed that all of the terrorists in Iraq are foreigners, but apparently there is a significant number coming in from outside. And fighting against them are both American and Iraqi soldiers. Does Mr. Fisk know the proportions of foreign vs. Iraqi terrorists? If not, then this paragraph is speculation on his part. How do you like that phrasing, "...foreigners involved in this violence..."? Yeah, there was a police gunfight with a bank robber. The police were all "involved in [the] violence".

Yes, I know how it's all going to be played out. Iraqis bravely vote despite the bloodcurdling threats of the enemies of democracy. At last, the US and British policies have reached fruition. A real and functioning democracy will be in place so the occupiers can leave soon. Or next year. Or in a decade or so. Merely to hold these elections - an act of folly in the eyes of so many Iraqis - will be a "success".

The Shi'ites will vote en masse,[...]

Good gracious, what a jerk! How can anybody be so sarcastic about the bravery of Iraqis who turned out to vote despite threats of death and even dismemberment by terrorists? Can you hear the tone of voice Fisk has in mind? This whole paragraph is a sneer at the entire idea of Iraqi self-determination. He can't refute the fact of this bravery, and he isn't bold enough to put forward any actual arguments against the election, so he smirks at it. Sarcasm as avoidance of debate. Oh, yeah, that's mature. (Yes, that was intentional irony.)

As for the troop levels: Actually, half of us in this country don't want our troops to be pulled out too soon. Bush and the administration aren't talking about pulling out very soon, nor specifying "next year" or any other timeline. It'll depend on how Iraq's security and stability works out. Mr. Fisk probably wants a timetable, so he can mark it as unrealistically short, or as a permanent occupation, or to watch for any deviation from it.

The elections are an "act of folly" in the minds of "so many Iraqis," at the end of one paragraph, and yet, at the beginning of the next, "Shi'ites will vote en masse." Just how many Iraqis think it's all folly? Must be a minority, if the majority group will vote "en masse." And that minority has the chance to put forward their own candidates who will tell the constitutional convention "It's all folly!" If they don't, it's their own fault, and screw 'em.

[...] the insurgency will continue and grow more violent, and the Iraqis will go on dying. But there will be democracy in Iraq.

Hey, there's that little phrase, again! Nice to see you, little buddy--we thought you were lost.

Cities were like ghost towns as most of the population waited nervously at home to see if it would be safe enough to take part in the first election since the ousting of Hussein by the US-led forces in April 2003.

Try the first real election since 1954.

Fisk ends by listing a couple or three of terrorist attacks and noting that the airport was closed before the election. All true. There's a "real" insurgency going on, after all, one which Fisk recognizes, but apparently only a "fantasy" war being fought by our side against them.

Interesting little point to note here: "[...] Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, [] has replaced Hussein as Iraq's most feared man, [...]" Really? You mean President Bush isn't Iraq's most feared man? You mean Hussein was feared? You mean things weren't all rosy and peachy before we invaded? Who knew?!

In conclusion: The Afghans who attacked Robert Fisk in 2001 didn't beat any sense into him. I'm trying to find the right words to describe Fisk and his attitude towards the Iraqis and democracy, but I like to keep this site clean. Use your own imagination.

UPDATE: The CIA World Factbook lists the following ethnic breakdown for Iraq: Arab 75%-80%, Kurdish 15%-20%. And the religious breakdown is Shi'a 60%-65%, Sunni 32%-37%. OK, so the Sunnis are about 1/3 of the country, not 1/5. But I have heard reports that the Kurds tend to be Sunni themselves (does anybody know of a good source for this?). If so, then the expectations of low turnout among Sunni is probably for Sunni Arabs, not Sunnis in general. Kurds were expected to (and did) turn out in large numbers. Were any of the five polls on the media list in Iraqi Kurdistan?

Iraqi Elections

What an exciting day it is, to see Iraqis voting in free elections! I'm nearly as excited about this as I was about our own election day. I don't buy into the curmudgeons' arguments that any Sunni non-participation will be a mark of "illegitimacy" upon the new government. If you don't vote, it's your own fault, people. And it looks like a number of Sunnis did vote, despite all of the threats.

I've got a severe fisking I need to perform, but first I want to congratulate the Iraqis on their election. Amen, brothers.