Coping With Christmas

A Thought For the Season: A Good Night's Rest

        It is a season to relax. Our bodies, being created properly, tell us this. "Seasonal affective disorder", a form of psychological depression, is, like depression, a natural response to the perceived circumstances. The only "disorder" about it is in our perceptions, which may be based on negative, that is, without faith, thinking. (And, possibly, based on brain chemistry problems, which German science has recently discovered may often be rectified with St. John's wort, an ancient natural remedy, which does not have the sometimes-calamitous side effects of some artificial anti-depressants.)

        Depression, then, is a form of hibernation. Seasonal affective disorder is brought on by the short days, which limit our activities under the sun. The blessing of abundant artificial lighting has confused us.

        Mature cultures have dealt with the problem with an extended holiday: the Roman Saturnalia, the twelve days of Christmas. But the blessings of the march of modern technology have a collateral blessing: the challenge to use our heads. Things are changing too quickly for cultural adaptation to do its work.

        A poet was able to discern the proper response to the long nights. The right greeting for the season: "'Happy Christmas to all, / And to all, a good night.'"

        Or, to borrow from another poet, let sleep (and relaxation) knit "the raveled sleeve of care".

        Or, the best of all, "But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." (Isaiah 40:31 KJV).

Will We Make the Last Mistake in Iraq?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Washington Times article, Making the last mistake in Iraq:

Making the last mistake in Iraq [/] By Tony Blankley [/] November 22, 2006

The decisions made on Iraq over the next few months will take the measure of America's maturity and sense of responsibility. Because, whether we like it or not, our decisions — and our decisions alone — will determine whether the barely containable murderous pathologies of the Middle East will just be dumped into the face of humanity — or whether rational efforts will be persisted at to contain and mitigate its civilization-threatening forces.

    We have the most profound obligation to attempt to calculate the consequences of the impending American decision to wash our hands of the Iraq unpleasantness. In that regard, the words of President Kennedy come to mind: "There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."

    If we, the most powerful force on the planet, in a fit of disappointment and anger at our bungling policies to date, decide to shrug off our responsibilities to the future, we will soon receive, and deserve, the furious contempt of a terrified world. In fact, even those Americans who today can't wait to end our involvement in the "hopeless" war in Iraq, will — when the consequences of our irresponsibility becomes manifest — join the chorus of outrage.

    Expedient Washington politicians take note: Your public is fickle. They may cheer your decision today to get out of Iraq, but vote you out of office tomorrow when they don't like the results.

    Much of the world (and a fair portion of the American public) may hate us today for our alleged arrogance. But they will spit out our name with contempt through time if we permit to be released the whirlwind that will follow our exit.

    I have heard it said (by conservatives and Republicans, as well as others) that "if the Iraqis just want to murder each other, we should let them. We offered them freedom and they didn't want it." If our decision on Iraq was only about Iraq, that argument might be persuasive.

    But if, as it is hard to imagine otherwise, our departure from Iraq yields civil war, chaos, war lordism and terrorist safe havens — it is very likely that Iran will lurch in to harvest their advantages, Turkey will send in its army to stop an independent Kurdistan and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Sunni states will be sucked in to fend off Shi'ite Iran's hegemony. In that nightmare maelstrom, the 20 million barrels a day of oil shipped from the Persian Gulf — and the world economy with it — will be in daily risk of being cut off.

    Nor is that all. Al Qaeda and other terrorists are already gloating that they have whipped the "cowardly Americans" in Iraq. We will be seen (in fact already are beginning to be seen) as a weak reed for moderate Muslims to rely on in their hearts-and-mind struggle against the radical Islamists. Osama bin Laden was right in one regard: People fear and follow the strong horse; even more so in Middle Eastern culture where restraint is seen as weakness and murder is seen as strength.

    In the face of such a dreadful likelihood, the emerging Washington consensus is an exercise in self-delusion unworthy of a 5-year-old. The almost consensus Washington argument assumes that if only we will formally talk with them, Iran and Syria will volunteer to pull our chestnuts out of the fire while we start removing troops from Iraq. Such arguments exemplify the witticism that when ideas fail, words come in very handy.

    Iran has been our persistent enemy for 27 years; Syria longer. They may well be glad to give us cover while we retreat — but that would merely be an exercise in slightly delayed gratification — not self-denial, let alone benignity. So long as Iran is ruled by its current radical Shi'ite theocracy, she will be vigorously and violently undercutting any potentially positive, peaceful forces in the region — and is already triggering a prolonged clash with the terrified Sunni nations. Our absence from the region will only make matters far worse.

    We need to start undermining by all methods available that dangerous Iranian regime — as the Iranian people, free to express and implement their own opinions and policies, are our greatest natural allies in the Muslim Middle East.

    We have only two choices: Get out and let the ensuing Middle East firestorm enflame the wider world; or stay and with shrewder policies and growing material strength manage and contain the danger.

    Those who call themselves realists are the least realistic. Their great unreality is that they can't imagine that the passions of the people — for good or ill — are to be reckoned with. Thus it was they who for half a century supported and exploited the Middle East dictators who caused the Islamist pathologies that threaten the world today. It is they who will do business with the corrupt dictators to the very minute that they are overthrown by the Islamist mobs. They will keep the cash register humming until it is flooded with blood. The "realists' " unjustified conceit is, today, the most dangerous pathology facing America.

    As in all struggles, each side will make mistakes. We have certainly made several. But as the last century's great chess master Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower once famously observed: "Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake." Retreating from Iraq would be the last mistake. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Normalization Of Polygamy?!?

Say it ain't so, Supremes!

(With apologies to "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the Chicago White Sox, and Major League Baseball.)

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Captain's Quarters Blog article, Starting The Normalization Of Polygamy:

Starting The Normalization Of Polygamy [/] November 21, 2006

Quite a while back (two years ago), I wrote that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v Texas would open a Pandora's box about all sorts of cultural norms currently supported by statute throughout the United States. At the time, Jonathan Turley had written about the impending sentencing of Tom Green for polygamy, and opposed it on the basis of personal choice. I wrote:

I don't see anything particularly wrong with gay marriage, as long as a majority of voters approve it. I also think that the Texas sodomy laws were about as stupid as you could have found in any penal code. ... However, the Court used a sledgehammer when a flyswatter would have prevailed, and the consequences of their decision has led -- logically -- to the appeal of all anti-polygamy statutes. If in fact the Court applies the same thinking to polygamy as it did to the sodomy statutes, then they have no choice but to free Green and declare all anti-polygamy statutes null and void.

Perhaps that is the Libertarian stance. Maybe that's for the public good, although I highly doubt it. But the court once again has set itself in a position where its own precedent requires it to legislate, a usurpation of their Constitutional authority just as much as Lawrence was.

Not everything that transpires between consenting adults is legal or should be legal, let alone given Constitutional protection. But that's where the SCOTUS has left us. They should take the opportunity to reverse their precedent and acknowledge the error they made in Lawrence, before Constitutionally guaranteed prostitution and adult incest come next.

Today, we see the same argument, this time in a report on the efforts of polygamists to rehabilitate themselves in the media by the Washington Post. Their supporters use Lawrence much as Justice Scalia predicted in his dissent:

Valerie and others among the estimated 40,000 men, women and children in polygamous communities are part of a new movement to decriminalize bigamy. Consciously taking tactics from the gay-rights movement, polygamists have reframed their struggle, choosing in interviews to de-emphasize their religious beliefs and focus on their desire to live "in freedom," according to Anne Wilde, director of community relations for Principle Voices, a pro-polygamy group based in Salt Lake. ...

In their quest to decriminalize bigamy, practitioners have had help from unlikely quarters. HBO's series "Big Love," about a Viagra-popping man with three wives, three sets of bills, three sets of chores and three sets of kids, marked a watershed because of its sympathetic portrayal of polygamists. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which voided laws criminalizing sodomy, also aided polygamy's cause because it implied that the court disapproved of laws that reach into the bedroom.

Since then, liberal legal scholars, generally no friend of the polygamists' conservative-leaning politics, have championed decriminalization. One of them is Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who has written two op-eds for USA Today calling for the legalization of bigamy -- and same-sex marriage.

Scalia predicted legal assaults on bans against a whole range of sexual behavior as a result of the decision, but primarily polygamy. It seems from the description in this article that the local authorities may have read the writing on the wall from Lawrence and now decline to pursue cases against polygamists. The sheriff featured in the article has adopted what he calls a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that sounds very familiar indeed.

Clarence Thomas, in his dissent, said he would have voted to repeal the "silly" law overturned by Lawrence, and I agree. That's how it should have been handled, and the Supreme Court should have refused to impose a Constitutional standard in overturning it. They brought a sledgehammer where a scalpel should have been employed, and they established a standard of privacy that will undermine a host of well-established public policies, unless they repudiate Lawrence at some later date. They also signalled law enforcememt agencies that they cannot rely on any long-term stability in the law, undermining the law before they can even address it.

This again demonstrates the damage the court can do when it strays from its role of interpreting the Constitution as written, rather than as how they would like it to be.
Posted by Captain Ed at November 21, 2006 12:13 PM [My ellipses and emphasis]

Uniforms Not Allowed On Veterans Day!?!

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"

But it's "Saviour of 'is country," when the guns begin to shoot; - Kipling

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a United Press International article, Harrods boots 'intimidating' soldier:

Harrods boots 'intimidating' soldier

LONDON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Officials with London's landmark Harrods department store admit more discretion should have been used before a uniformed soldier was asked to leave.

The incident occurred eight days ago on Remembrance Sunday, when Britain acknowledges its war dead and the signing of the armistice in World War I, the Telegraph reported Monday. [/] Lt. Daniel Lenherr, 26, of the Royal Horse Artillery visited the store after attending a memorial service with his wife and was quickly approached by Harrods' staff concerned about his uniform. [/] He was wearing barracks dress, which consists of field green trousers and jacket with a leather belt, a white shirt and dark gold tie. Staff asked him to leave, as his uniform could intimidate other customers, the newspaper said.

An unidentified store spokesman said the store has long had a no-uniforms policy but considering what day it was, more discretion should have been used, the Telegraph said. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Has Iran Been Beaten?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From an Asia Times article, Jihadis and [[prostitutes]]:

Jihadis and [[prostitutes]] [/] By Spengler

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian [[prostitute]] is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish [[prostitutes]] in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse.

One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.

That is why it is folly to approach Iran as a prospective negotiating partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical government security guarantees, for the threat to its security arises from within. Once a people has determined to extinguish itself, nothing will prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to the demographic data, which come from the demographers of the United Nations. But it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth is a giant magnet; it must attract either the largest national minority in Iran, or the military attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a long-delayed justice for that ancient and resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to throw off the Persian yoke.

The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian [[prostitutes]] long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 [[prostitutes]] in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25:

Prostitution is on the rise in Iran ... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told ADNKronos International (AKI) that he believes Iran's deteriorating economy and the high unemployment rate among youths to be the main causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on Iran's streets. Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in Iran". [Spengler's ellipses]

The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day.

These numbers cannot be verified, to be sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests that the actual numbers must be very large indeed, so large, in fact, as to help explain the frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline. Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.

Islamism (or what George W Bush has called "Islamo-fascism") responds to the crisis of faith. As I wrote on November 8, 2005:

The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. [3] [Spengler's ellipses]

Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

Notes

[1] See Edward J Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).

[2] Research Based on Case Studies of Victims of Trafficking in Human Beings in 3 EU Member States, ie Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands (pdf file), European Commission.

[3] Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World, Part 2: The Islamist response. Asia Times Online. [Spengler's footnotes. My bracketed ellipses and emphasis]

Voters: "Forget the Past"!?!; "What Will You Do Tomorrow"?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Town Hall article, Wanted: New ideas:

Wanted: New ideas [/] By Michael Barone [/] Monday, November 20, 2006

Back when Republicans were winning elections in the 1980s, Tip O'Neill used to say that it was because Democratic policies made a lot of people rich enough to vote Republican. Republicans who are saying that the party needs to go back to the principles of 1994 or Ronald Reagan should keep O'Neill's lesson in mind: Successful public policies render moot the issues that bring parties to power. They won't keep winning unless they address new issues.

With that in mind, let's examine the successful Republican policies since their takeover of Congress in 1994.

Some of these were on economic issues, addressable only at the federal level. The big budget deficits of the early 1990s were eliminated by the Clinton tax increases and by the one-year standstill in spending the Republicans forced on Bill Clinton in 1995. With George W. Bush in office, Republicans produced tax cuts that kicked the economy out of recession and gave us robust, low-inflation economic growth.

Another public-policy success was welfare reform, forced on Clinton by the Republicans in 1996. But note that that success came after, and was inspired by, welfare reform in the states, started by Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin in 1987 and followed by many Republicans and also some Democrats.

Still another public-policy success of the 1990s -- crime control -- was almost entirely the work of big-city mayors, starting with Rudy Giuliani in New York. On crime, Clinton and the Republican Congress were no more than interested and occasionally helpful bystanders.

Some public-policy successes of the Bush years have been criticized by many conservatives. One was the education accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. Here, Bush and a bipartisan coalition were federalizing reforms initiated in the states, by governors like Bush himself, his brother Jeb Bush in Florida and Democrat Jim Hunt in North Carolina.

Then there was the controversial Medicare prescription drug law pushed through in a three-hour roll call in 2003. Many conservatives criticize the creation of a new federal entitlement. Bush's argument was that there was going to be a prescription drug benefit sooner or later and that it was better to have a Republican version that provided for competition and choice, rather than government ukase.

The bill also allowed the expansion of health savings accounts, which have the potential to change private-sector health insurance the way that Section 401(k) of the tax code has changed private-sector pensions. HSAs are expanding rapidly, and polls show seniors highly pleased with the prescription drug plans they've chosen -- and competition is holding down costs.

To be sure, this is big-government conservatism. But who thinks we're going to get rid of big government? Bush's approach has been to enhance choice and accountability, to rely more on markets and less on government commands.

It's the only realistic conservatism for America today.

Note that conservative policy successes have taken some issues off the political table. Republicans won a lot of suburban districts in 1994 on the issues of crime, welfare and taxes. Crime and welfare are not major issues anymore. And the Democrats' obvious unwillingness to raise taxes substantially after their defeat in 1994 took taxes off the table, too -- though the issue may come back in 2008, when voters could face a choice between Republicans who promise to extend the tax cuts that expire in 2010 and Democrats who may be eager to let those taxes go back up again. That might switch some of those suburban districts back toward Republicans.

What issues could Republicans raise in 2008? They would do well to look to the states, and especially to Florida, where Jeb Bush has enacted innovative policies on school choice and healthcare. They could look at some Democrats, as well, like Tennessee's Gov. Phil Bredesen, who has been reforming an overly generous Medicaid program.

They could highlight the proposal of Republican Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona to allow people to buy health insurance across state lines. They could consider Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's proposal to get lower-income workers to save and invest with tax credits for IRA contributions. Republicans aren't going to win elections with the new ideas of 1980, 1994 or 2000. They need new ideas for 2008.

Michael Barone is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report and the principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, published by National Journal every two years. He is also author of Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, the just-released Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Competition for the Nation's Future. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Much Of What You Know About Donald Rumsfeld Is Wrong!?!

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Pittsburgh Live .com article, Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld [/] By Douglas Feit [/] Sunday, November 19, 2006

WASHINGTON [/] Much of what you know about Donald Rumsfeld is wrong.

I know, because I worked intimately with him for four years, from the summer of 2001 until I left the Pentagon in August 2005.

Through countless meetings and private conversations, I came to learn his traits, frame of mind and principles -- characteristics wholly at odds with the standard public depiction of Rumsfeld, particularly now that he has stepped down after a long, turbulent tenure as defense secretary, a casualty of our toxic political climate.

I want to set the record straight: Don Rumsfeld is not an ideologue. He did not refuse to have his views challenged. He did not ignore the advice of his military advisers. And he did not push single-mindedly for war in Iraq. He was motivated to serve the national interest by transforming the military, though it irritated people throughout the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld's drive to modernize created a revealing contrast between his Pentagon and the State Department -- where Colin Powell was highly popular among the staff. After four years of Powell's tenure at State, the organization chart there would hardly tip anyone off that 9/11 had occurred -- or even that the Cold War was over.

Rumsfeld is a bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature. And as my high school teachers drummed into my head, the best literature reveals that humans are complex. They are not the all-good or all-bad, all-brilliant or all-dumb figures that inhabit trashy novels and news stories. Fine literature teaches us the difference between appearance and reality.

Because of his complexity, Rumsfeld often is misread. His politics are deeply conservative but he was radical in his drive to force change in every area he oversaw. He is strong-willed and hard-driving but he built his defense strategies and Quadrennial Defense Reviews on calls for intellectual humility.

Those of us in his inner circle heard him say over and over again: Our intelligence, in all senses of the term, is limited. We cannot predict the future. We must continually question our preconceptions and theories. If events contradict them, don't suppress the bad news; rather, change your preconceptions and theories.

If an ideologue is someone to whom the facts don't matter, then Rumsfeld is the opposite of an ideologue. He insists that briefings for him be full of facts, thoughtfully organized and rigorously sourced. He demands that facts at odds with his key policy assumptions be brought to his attention immediately. "Bad news never gets better with time," he says, and berates any subordinate who fails to rush forward to him with such news. He does not suppress bad news; he acts on it.

Rumsfeld's drive to overhaul the Pentagon -- to drop outdated practices, programs and ideas -- antagonized many senior military officers and civilian officials in the department. He pushed for doing more with less. He pushed for reorganizing offices and relationships to adapt to a changing world. After 9/11, he created the Northern Command (the first combatant command that included the U.S. homeland among its areas of responsibility), a new undersecretary job for intelligence and a new assistant secretary job for homeland defense.

Seeking to improve civil-military cooperation, Rumsfeld devised new institutions for the Pentagon's top civilian and military officials to work face to face on strategic matters and new venues for all of them to gather a few times a year with the combatant commanders. He also conceived and pushed through a thorough revision of how U.S. military forces are based, store equipment, move and train with partners around the world -- something that was never done before in U.S. history.

On Iraq, Rumsfeld helped President Bush analyze the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Given Saddam's history -- starting wars; using chemical weapons against foreign and domestic enemies; and training, financing and otherwise supporting various terrorists -- Rumsfeld helped make the case that leaving him in power entailed significant risks.

But in October 2002, Rumsfeld also wrote a list of the risks involved in removing Saddam from power. (I called the list his "parade of horribles" memo.) He reviewed it in detail with the president and the National Security Council. Rumsfeld's warnings about the dangers of war -- including the perils of a post-Saddam power vacuum -- were more comprehensive than anything I saw from the CIA, State or elsewhere. Rumsfeld continually reminded the president that he had no risk-free option for dealing with the dangers Saddam posed.

Historians will sort out whether Rumsfeld was too pushy with his military, or not pushy enough; whether he micromanaged Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, or gave them too much slack. I know more about these issues than most people, yet I don't have all the information for a full analysis. I do know, however, that the common view of Rumsfeld as a close-minded man, ideologically wedded to the virtues of a small force, is wrong.

Rumsfeld had to resign, I suppose, because our bitter and noxious political debate of recent years has turned him into a symbol. His effectiveness was damaged. For many in Congress and the public, the Rumsfeld caricature dominated their view of the Iraq war and the administration's ability to prosecute it successfully. Even if nominee Robert Gates pursues essentially the same strategies, he may garner more public confidence.

What Rumsfeld believed, said and did differs from the caricature. The public picture of him today is drawn from news accounts reflecting the views of people who disapproved of his policies or disliked him. Rumsfeld, after all, can be brutally demanding and tough.

But I believe history will be more appreciative of him than the first draft has been. What will last is serious history, which, like serious literature, can distinguish appearance from reality.

Douglas J. Feith, a professor at Georgetown University, served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Milton Friedman, 1912-2006: Sampler of His Writings from The Wall Street Journal

If we are to look to economists for support of our notions of social justice, there are better choices than Marx, Keynes, and Galbraith.

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a WSJ Opinion Journal article, Friedman's Sampler:

Friedman's Sampler [/] A selection of writings from The Wall Street Journal. [/] BY MILTON FRIEDMAN [/] Saturday, November 18, 2006 12:01 a.m.

(Editor's note: Emily Parker and Joseph Rago compiled this collection of Milton Friedman's writings from The Wall Street Journal. Friedman died Thursday at 94.)

On Freedom [/] It is important to emphasize that economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, "freedom" in economic arrangements itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so "economic freedom" is an end in itself to a believer in freedom.

In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom. . . . [/] A citizen of the United States who under the laws of various states is not free to follow the occupation of his own choosing, unless he can get a license for it, is likewise being deprived of an essential part of his freedom. So economic freedom, in and of itself, is an extremely important part of total freedom.

The reason it is important to emphasize this point is because intellectuals in particular have a strong bias against regarding this aspect of freedom as important. They tend to express contempt for what they regard as material aspects of life and to regard their own pursuit of allegedly higher values as on a different plane of significance and as deserving special attention. But for the ordinary citizen of the country, for the great masses of the people, the direct importance of economic freedom is in many cases of at least comparable importance to the indirect importance of economic freedom as a means of political freedom.

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are essential because of the effect which they have on the concentration of power. A major thesis of the new liberal is that the kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, organization of economic activities through a largely free market and private enterprises, in short, through competitive capitalism, is also a necessary though not a sufficient condition for political freedom.

The central reason why this is true is because such a form of economic organization separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to be an offset to the other. I cannot think of a single example at any time or any place where there was a large measure of political freedom without there also being something comparable to a private enterprise market form of economic organization for the bulk of economic activity. [/] --from "Capitalism and Freedom: Why and How the Two Ideas Are Mutually Dependent," May 17, 1961

On the Free Market [/] What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.

The essence of political freedom is the absence of coercion of one man by his fellow men. The fundamental danger to political freedom is the concentration of power. The existence of a large measure of power in the hands of a relatively few individuals enables them to use it to coerce their fellow men. Preservation of freedom requires either the elimination of power where that is possible, or its dispersal where it cannot be eliminated. [/] It essentially requires a system of checks and balances, like that explicitly incorporated in our Constitution. . . .

The person who buys bread doesn't know whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a pleader of the Fifth Amendment or a McCarthyite, by person whose skin is black or whose skin is white. The market is an impersonal mechanism that separates economic activities of individual from their personal characteristics. It enables people to cooperate in the economic realm regardless of any differences of opinion or views or attitudes they may have in other areas. [/] --from "The New Liberal's Creed: Individual Freedom, Preserving Dissent Are Ultimate Goals," May 18, 1961

On Free Trade [/] What we ought to do is practice what we preach. We have been going around preaching the virtues of free enterprise, of free competition in a free market. What have we been doing? We've been practicing the opposite, not only through our foreign aid program, but also at home. We tell other countries, use the market: we tell our farmers, look to Washington. We tell other countries, don't try to be self-sustained; try to develop valuable industries that can compete on the international market, and then what do we do? We impose import quotas on oil, we impose tariffs on goods that come in, we dump agricultural products abroad, and impose quota on their import at home. The rest of the world listens to what we say and they think, "now there is a fine bunch of hypocrites," and they are right. [/] --from "An Alternative to Aid: An Economist Urges U.S. to Free Trade, End Grants of Money," April 30, 1962

On Inflation [/] If the Fed does not explain to the public the nature of our problem and the costs involved in ending inflation, if it does not take the lead in imposing the temporarily unpopular measure required, who will? [/] --From "Why Curbing Inflation Is the Fed's Job, March 6, 1974

On Taxes [/] To summarize, deficits are bad--but not because they necessarily raise interest rates. They are bad because they encourage political irresponsibility. They enable our representatives in Washington to buy votes at our expense without having to vote explicitly for taxes to finance the largesse. The result is a bigger government and a poorer nation. That is why I favor a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget and limit taxation. [/] --from "The Taxes Called Deficits," April 24, 1984

On the Economy [/] The Wall Street Journal has been a firm and dedicated supporter of free markets at home and free trade abroad. It has repeatedly stressed its view that the invisible hand of Adam Smith is a far more effective and equitable means of organizing economic activity than the visible hand of government. Yet when it comes to foreign economic policy, a recent editorial, "Beyond Venice" (June 8), relies upon a wholly different and thoroughly incompatible set of ideas.

According to that editorial, "The economic summits of leading free-market nations are a sound recognition that the world economy defies sovereign borders, and can be run only through international cooperation."

Would the Journal describe the American economy as being "run," whether through international cooperation or by the powers that be in Washington or through cooperation among the individual states? Or would it rather, in accordance with its general philosophy, describe it as a system that is coordinated by the voluntary activities of millions of individuals, a system that runs but is not run? [/] --from "Please Reread Your Adam Smith," June 24, 1987

On Social Security [/] I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else's old age. On a more pragmatic level, Social Security is another example of the generalization that government programs typically have effects that are the opposite of those intended by their well-meaning sponsors (what Rep. Richard Armey calls the "invisible foot of government").

The well-meaning sponsors intended Social Security to ensure a minimum income to the poor in their old age. It has largely done that, but at the cost of what they would have regarded as a perverse redistribution of income from the young to the old, from black to white, from the relatively poor to the relatively well-to-do.

From its inception, Social Security has been an unholy combination of two items: a flat-rate tax on earnings up to a maximum with no exemption and a benefit program that awards subsidies that have essentially no relation to need but are based on such criteria as marital status, longevity and recent earnings. As I wrote many years ago, "hardly anyone approves of either part separately. Yet the two combined have become a sacred cow. What a triumph of imaginative packaging and Madison Avenue advertising!" [/] --from "Social Security: The General And the Personal," March 15, 1988

On the Future [/] Let us put aside the scarecrows of the twin deficits and face up to the real problems that threaten U.S. growth and prosperity: excessive and wasteful government spending and taxing, including in particular the real time bomb in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs; concealed taxes in the form of mandated expenditures on private business; excessive and misguided regulation of individuals as well as businesses; the changes in tort legislation that are discouraging innovation; and not least, the recent increase in protectionism and the threat of a further major increase. We should and can do something about these problems, not allow ourselves to be diverted by politically convenient scarecrows. [/] --from "Why the Twin Deficits are a Blessing," Dec. 14, 1988

On Health Care Prices [/] Toward the end of World War II, I served as an instructor in a quality-control course for Navy procurement officers. It was held in Hershey, Pa. As I recall, we stayed at the Hershey Hotel, on the corner of Cocoa Avenue and Chocolate Boulevard, across the street from the Hershey Junior College, where the actual instruction took place, a block or so from the Hershey Department Store, and so on. You get the idea. The stench--or perfume--of paternalism was heavy in the air.

Early in the century such company towns, most far less benevolently paternalistic than Hershey, were common. Workers who were employed at mines or factories located far from large cities, in towns that typically had only a single major employer, were often required, or induced, to live in company housing and buy their food and other supplies at company stores. In effect, they were paid in kind rather than in cash--the so-called truck system. . . .

The company town has been revived in one major area: medical care. It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store? [/] --from "Pricing Health Care: The Folly of Buying Health Care at the Company Store," Feb. 13, 1993

On Jobs [/] Proposed economic policies tend to be judged in terms of jobs "created." That is the wrong criterion. The economic problem is not creating jobs. That is easy: Hire people at minimum wages (or lower) to dig holes and fill them. True, raising taxes to finance that project would destroy jobs, but the jobs destroyed would be high-wage jobs, the jobs created low-wage jobs, so for each job destroyed more than one job would be created--a net gain of jobs.

The real problem is to establish an economic environment in which there is a demand for workers at wages that those workers not only regard as satisfactory, but are qualified to earn: Better qualified workers and better wages--not simply more jobs--is the real problem. [/] --from "Better Workers, Better Wages: The Real Issue," June 1, 1993

On the Federal Reserve [/] My favorite "moderate" proposal for the Fed (my "extreme" proposal is to abolish it) is that (1) at the beginning of each quarter, have it estimate how much it will have to add net to its holdings during that quarter to achieve its target monetary growth; (2) divide that number by 12; and (3) announce that every Monday morning at 11 a.m. it will buy that amount of securities from the lowest bidder, and then close up shop until the next Monday, except for replacing maturing securities.

What harm would that do? It would mean day-to-day and week-to-week fluctuation in the federal-funds rate. However, the sophisticated financial markets have surely demonstrated their capacity to handle wide daily fluctuations in all kinds of securities prices. Dealing with the fluctuations in the federal-funds rate would be child's play. [/] --from "End the Fed's Fine-Tuning," Sept. 15, 1993

On the Flat Tax [/] The only way we are ever likely to get it is if there is a drive for a constitutional convention to repeal the 16th Amendment (which gives Congress the power to tax income) and replace it with one mandating a flat-rate tax. [/] However, I regret that that is not an immediate prospect. [/] --from "Why a Flat Tax Is Not Politically Feasible," March 30, 1995

On Government Spending [/] The typical rhetoric, Republican as well as Democratic, about the current battle to balance the budget is that cutting government spending imposes short-term pain more than compensated by long-term gain. That is utter nonsense. Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all. [/] --from "Budget Cutting: A Lot of Gain, Little Pain," June 15, 1995

On Hong Kong [/] By some accident of officialdom, the colonial office assigned John Cowperthwaite, a Scotsman and a disciple of Adam Smith, to serve as financial secretary of Hong Kong. Cowperthwaite's free market policies are widely credited with producing the subsequent economic miracle that led to a phenomenal rise in the average level of living despite a nearly 10-fold rise in population. [/] It is hard to conceive of a more severe test of free market policies. Hong Kong is an island devoid of any significant natural resources other than a great harbor. When the Communists took over China, refugees came streaming over the borders with only the possessions they could carry. They and their successors produced a rapid rise in population. Hong Kong received negligible if any foreign aid to assist the assimilation of the refugees.

Under these adverse circumstances, the salvation of Hong Kong has been its complete free trade and free market policy. No tariffs on imports, no subsidies or other privileges to exports. (The only restrictions are those that Hong Kong has been forced to impose by pressure from other countries, including the U.S., as under the multifiber agreement.) There is no fixing of prices or wages; few if any restrictions on entry into business or trade; and government spending and taxes have been kept low. The top tax rate on personal income is 25%, with a maximum average rate of 15%. . . .

What a contrast to the experience of most of the colonies to which Britain gave their freedom after the war. And what a striking demonstration of how much better free trade and free markets are for the ordinary citizen than the protectionism of Mr. Buchanan and the "fair trade" of President Clinton. "Fair" is in the eye of the beholder; free is the verdict of the market. (The word "free" is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with "freedom." The word "fair" is not used in either of our founding documents.) [/] --From "Hong Kong vs. Buchanan," March 7, 1996

On Health Care [/] The best way to restore freedom of choice to both patient and physician and to control costs would be to eliminate the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care. However, that is clearly not feasible politically. The best alternative available is to extend the tax exemption to all expenditures on medical care, whether made by the patient directly or by employers, to establish a level playing field, in terms of the currently popular cliche.

Many individuals would then find it attractive to negotiate with their employer for a higher cash wage in place of employer-financed medical care. With part or all of the higher cash wage, they could purchase an insurance policy with a very high deductible, i.e., a policy for medical catastrophes, which would be decidedly cheaper than the low-deductible policy their employer had been providing to them, and deposit all or part of the difference in a special "medical savings account" that could be drawn on only for medical purposes. Any amounts unused in a particular year could be allowed to accumulate without being subject to tax, or could be withdrawn with a tax penalty or for special purposes, as with current Individual Retirement Accounts--in effect, a medical IRA. Many employers would find it attractive to offer such an arrangement to their employees as an option. [/] --from "A Way Out of Soviet-Style Health Care," April 17, 1996

On 'Reform' [/] The present crisis is not the result of market failure. Rather, it is the result of governments intervening in or seeking to supersede the market, both internally via loans, subsidies, or taxes and other handicaps, and externally via the IMF, the World Bank and other international agencies. We do not need more powerful government agencies spending still more of the taxpayers' money, with limited or nonexistent accountability. That would simply be throwing good money after bad. We need government, both within the nations and internationally, to get out of the way and let the market work. The more that people spend or lend their own money, and the less they spend or lend taxpayer money, the better. [/] --from "Markets to the Rescue," Oct. 13, 1998

On Ronald Reagan [/] To Mr. Reagan, of course, holding down government spending was a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end was freedom, human freedom, the right of every individual to pursue his own objectives and values so long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of others. That was his end in every phase of his remarkable career. [/] We still have a long way to go to achieve the optimum degree of freedom. But few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom than Ronald Wilson Reagan. [/] --from "Freedom's Friend," June 11, 2004

On Communism [/] In the almost six decades since the end of World War II, intellectual opinion in the United States about the desirable role of government has undergone a major shift. At the end of the war, opinion was predominantly collectivist. Socialism--defined as government ownership and operation of the means of production--was seen as both feasible and desirable. Those few of us who favored free markets and limited government were a beleaguered minority.

In subsequent decades opinion moved away from collectivism and toward a belief in free markets and limited government. By 1980 opinion had moved enough to enable Ronald Reagan to win the presidency on a quasi-libertarian agenda.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 delivered the final blow to the belief in socialism. Hardly anyone today, from the far left to the far right, regards socialism in the traditional sense of government ownership and operation of the means of production as either feasible or desirable. Those who profess socialism today mean by it a welfare state. [/] --from "The Battle's Half Won," Dec. 9, 2004

On School Choice [/] One result has been experimentation with such alternatives as vouchers, tax credits, and charter schools. Government voucher programs are in effect in a few places (Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, the District of Columbia); private voucher programs are widespread; tax credits for educational expenses have been adopted in at least three states and tax credit vouchers (tax credits for gifts to scholarship-granting organizations) in three states. In addition, a major legal obstacle to the adoption of vouchers was removed when the Supreme Court affirmed the legality of the Cleveland voucher in 2002. However, all of these programs are limited; taken together they cover only a small fraction of all children in the country.

Throughout this long period, we have been repeatedly frustrated by the gulf between the clear and present need, the burning desire of parents to have more control over the schooling of their children, on the one hand, and the adamant and effective opposition of trade union leaders and educational administrators to any change that would in any way reduce their control of the educational system. [/] --from "Free to Choose," June 9, 2005 [My ellipses and emphasis]

Death of Monetarism Exaggerated?!?

My comments in the Telegraph [U.K.] thread on article linked and excerpted below:

[1.] "'Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.'"

I am thankful for someone who quotes beyond the comma in his homage to Friedman. [/] I have a suspicion that the death of monetarism may be exaggerated. [/] It all seems to depend on how one measures "output".

For some "cheap electronics" and "cheap labor" might mean a great increase in output in real terms. There is an abundance of goods and services that were either too costly or technically unavailable in earlier times.

[2.] Another thought. "Dead" seems to have more the meaning of "politically incorrect" rather than "untrue" as applied to monetarism in this article. [/] Even it one believes that man is the measure of man, it is better to examine more than the history of our society in recent decades. [Emphasis added]

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Telegraph [U.K.] article, Friedman is dead, monetarism is dead, but what about inflation?:

Friedman is dead, monetarism is dead, but what about inflation? [/] By Niall Ferguson [/] Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 19/11/2006

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output." I can think of few sentences in economics that have engraved themselves more deeply in my memory than Milton Friedman's famous line in his Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for "Money". It was a kind of mantra for the Thatcher generation. The question is: Does anyone still believe it?

[...] And I still recall the thrill of reading that line for the first time: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Suddenly all became clear. Instead of worrying about the marginal propensity to consume and other arcane Keynesian concepts, I just needed to figure out why the Weimar Republic printed such an insane quantity of banknotes. And, sure enough, it turned out that socialist politicians had been trying, among other things, to spend their way to full employment.

In 1920s Germany, however, just as in 1970s Britain, the notion of a trade-off between inflation and unemployment proved to be illusory, precisely as Friedman argued in his celebrated 1967 address to the American Economic Association. Gradually, people cottoned on to what was happening, prices soared sky-high and the economy collapsed.

It wasn't just that Friedman rehabilitated the quantity theory of money. It was his emphasis on people's expectations that was the key; for that was what translated monetary expansion into higher prices (with positive effects on employment and incomes lasting only as long as it took people to wise up). In this, as in all his work, Friedman combined skepticism towards government with faith in individual rationality and therefore freedom.

The list of libertarian reforms he urged is an impressive one: the abolition of the draft; the abolition of fixed exchange rates; vouchers to allow parental choice in education; tax credits instead of government handouts. Nevertheless, it will be for monetarism — the principle that inflation could be defeated only by targeting the growth of the money supply and thereby changing expectations — that Friedman will be best remembered. [/] Why then has this, his most important idea, ceased to be honoured, even in the breach? Friedman outlived Keynes by half a century. But the same cannot be said for their respective theories. Keynesianism survived its inventor for at least three decades. Monetarism, by contrast, predeceased Milton Friedman by nearly two.

The death of monetarism is usually explained as follows. In the course of the 1980s, pragmatic politicians and clever central bankers came to realise that it was difficult to target the growth of the money supply. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe preferred to raise interest rates and reduce public sector borrowing. His successor Nigel Lawson targeted the exchange rate of the pound against the deutschmark. [/] At the Federal Reserve, too, Friedman's rules, once zealously applied by Paul Volcker, gradually gave way to Alan Greenspan's discretion. […] It is the inflation rate that today's central bankers want to target, not money (though the President of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, recently came out as a neo-monetarist).

[...] Yet simply because consumer price inflation has remained low, money has not become irrelevant. On the contrary: it is the key to understanding the world economy today. For there is nothing in Friedman's work that states that monetary expansion is always and everywhere a consumer price phenomenon. [/] In our time, unlike in the 1970s, oil price pressures have been countered by the entry of low-cost Asian labour into the global workforce. Not only are the things Asians make cheap and getting cheaper, competition from Asia also means that Western labour has lost the bargaining power it had 30 years ago. Stuff is cheap. Wages are pretty flat.

As a result, monetary expansion in our time does not translate into significantly higher prices in shopping malls. We don't expect it to. Rather, it translates into significantly higher prices for capital assets, particularly real estate and equities. […]

[...] No one can say for sure what the consequences will be of this new variety of inflation. For the winners, one asset bubble leads merrily to another; the key is to know when to switch from real estate to paintings by Gustav Klimt. For the losers, there is the compensation of cheap electronics. Why worry, when China is willing to buy all the US dollars the Fed cares to print in order to keep its currency from appreciating and its exports cheap?

[...] No, the theorist may be dead, but long live the theory. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." It's true, no matter what is inflating.

• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution (as was Milton Friedman) [/] www.niallferguson.org [My ellipses and emphasis]

Terror War: A "Valse Macabre"?!?

Links to: Mark Steyn's "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it" and to excerpts at The National Post [Canada]: Part 1, [[The Canadian Example]]; Part 2, Fallujah, then & now; Part 3, Loving thine enemy (copied in part below); Part 4, Franchising terror, mosque by mosque; Part 5 (to be published tomorrow), The world's first non-imperial superpower.

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a National Post [Canada] article, Loving thine enemy:

Loving thine enemy [/] The more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily around the room [/] Mark Steyn [/] National Post [/] Thursday, November 16, 2006 [[Third of five excerpts from Steyn's "America Alone"]]

After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many more. And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn't help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well, bizarre. Pearl Harbor's been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a matinee of Madam Butterfly!

Seeking to reassure the co-religionists of those who attack you that you do not regard them all as the enemy is a worthy aim but a curious first priority. And, given that more than a few of the imams in those mosque photo-ops turned out to be at best equivocal on the matter of Islamic terrorism and at worst somewhat enthusiastic supporters of it, it involved way too much self-deception on our part. But it set the tone for all that followed, to the point where with each bomb or plot -- from September 11 to London to Toronto -- the protestations of Islam's good faith grew ever more fulsome.

Consider the name given to the current conflict: "war on terror." Wait a minute. Aren't wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.

[…] "Our enemies are small worms," Adolf Hitler told his generals in August 1939. "I saw them at Munich." In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely acknowledges the latest surrender before moving on to the next invented grievance. Indeed, a formal enemy is all but superfluous to requirements. Bomb us, and we agonize over the "root causes." Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace." Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle low-fat granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." During the Danish cartoon jihad, The New York Times gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us the representations of the Prophet: Sensitive news organizations, the editors explained, had the duty to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols." The very next day, the Times illustrated a story on the Danish controversy with a piece of New York "art" from a couple of seasons earlier showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. […] Under the rules as understood by The New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elites' loathing of their own.

Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off. [My ellipses and emphasis]

"Doctor X" Marches On!?!

It was seminars led by masked psychiatrist, "Doctor X" together with rowdy, long-haired, hippy, disruptive activist intruders, at their normal seminars, that led the American Psychiatric Association, in their collective wisdom, to decide that homosexuality was not a disorder. It was a bit awkward to have an estimated two hundred members, in good standing, of their organization suffering from a disorder recognized by the organization yet not seeking healing. And even more awkward when the media was attracted to the situation by the bizarre happenings at their annual conventions.

Rather than healing themselves, this organization of healers decided to redefine mental health.

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Fox News article, Pentagon Changes Listing of Homosexuality as Mental Illness:

Pentagon Changes Listing of Homosexuality as Mental Illness [/] Thursday , November 16, 2006

WASHINGTON — Pentagon guidelines that classified homosexuality as a mental disorder now put it among a list of conditions or "circumstances" that range from bed-wetting to fear of flying. [/] The new rules are related to the military's retirement practices. The change does not affect the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibits officials from inquiring about the sex lives of service members and requires discharges of those who openly acknowledge being gay. [/] The revision came in response to criticism this year when it was discovered that the guidelines listed homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.

Mental health professionals said Thursday they were not satisfied by the change. [/] "We appreciate your good-faith effort to address our concern that the document was not medically accurate," James H. Scully, head of the American Psychiatric Association, wrote David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "But we remain concerned because we believe that the revised document lacks the clarity necessary to resolve the issue."

The guidelines outline retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities. The rules include sections that describes other specific conditions, circumstances and defects that also could lead to retirement, but are not physical disabilities. [/] Among the conditions are stammering or stuttering, dyslexia, sleepwalking, motion sickness, obesity, insect venom allergies and homosexuality.

More than 30 years after the mental health community declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, it is disappointing that the Pentagon still continues to mischaracterize it as a 'defect,'" said Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., a member of the House Armed Services Committee. [/] Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said "homosexuality should not have been characterized as a mental disorder. A clarification has been issued." [/] The psychiatric association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. [/] Questions about the Pentagon's guidelines were raised in June by a research institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara. [/] There were 726 military members discharged under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy during the budget year that ended Sept. 30. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Why O.J.'s "Confession" Was Published

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Drudge Report FLASH, REGAN: 'I DID NOT PAY OJ':

REGAN: 'I DID NOT PAY OJ' [/] Thu Nov 16 2006 20:07:38 ET

Full Statement From Publisher [[of O. J. Simpson's "good as a confession" book, "If I Did It"]] Judith Regan: [/] Why I Did It

I was sitting with Howard Stern, of all people, when the verdict came down. Many of you probably remember where you were at that moment. It was a moment I, like so many others, was dreading. [/] Because, I knew that the “killer,” as Kim Goldman so eloquently named him, would be acquitted. I knew it from my own experience. [/] Conviction is what I wanted—and not just in the legal sense.

I wanted it because I had once been that young woman who loved with all of her heart and believed in the goodness of man, the trusting girl who fell for the guy, who believed in the beauty of romance, the power of love, the joy of family and the miracle of motherhood. Like Nicole Brown, I believed with all my heart . . . and then got punched in the face. [/] Literally.

On that day, October 3, 1995, as Howard and I sat watching the television with a conference room full of people, I said, “He’ll be acquitted.” I said it out loud, and the others in the room looked at me in a way I’d been looked at before: “Oh, God. She’s crazy.” [/] But I knew it, because I’d been there. I’d listened to the lies (“She hit herself’), watched him charm the police (“Sir, I don’t know why she’s saying this”), endured the ignorance of one cop who looked at me with disdain and said “You must like it,” and couldn’t understand why they didn’t believe me.

That man was tall, dark, and handsome. A great athlete. A brilliant mind. He was even a doctor, with an M.D. after his name and a degree that came with an oath: “First, do no harm.” He was one of the brightest men I’d ever met. And he could charm anyone. He charmed me. We had a child. And then he knocked me out, with a blow to my head, and sent me to the hospital. [/] He manipulated, lied, and broke my heart. [/] And then, after all but leaving me for dead in a hospital, where his daughter died a few days later, he left for good.

So as I watched this new scene play itself out, I knew that this man—the killer, as Kim calls him—would be acquitted. I’d seen it before: The men in court, dressed in their designer suits, blaming the women they attacked. I’d seen, firsthand, the “criminal injustice system,” as I called it in my twenties—the system that let him go one night after assaulting me so he could come right back and do it again.

I had my witnesses, thank God, or no one would have believed me. But he, too, had his fans, the ones who could not believe that a man that smart, that good-looking, and that successful “would ever do anything like that.” [/] “Why,” one of my own family members said in one of the many denials I’d heard, “would someone like him do that to you? Why? And if he did, you must have done something to provoke him.” I’d heard it all.

So when the verdict came down, I watched the faces in the room freeze in shock. [/] “I told you,” I said, and left the room.

The Trial of the Century, as it was called, was not just a moment for me, it was a seminal moment in American history. The curtain was pulled back on the issues of domestic violence, police corruption, and racism—on both sides. And when the final curtain fell, it fell on the killer, as he is known, providing a protective shield from the consequences of his grievous act. [/] Conviction, or lack thereof, is the story of the trial of the century. Where was that sense of conviction when racist police officers abused and battered their victims? Where was that sense of conviction when Nicole Brown was being battered and people stood by and let him get away with it time and time again? Where was it when NBC kept him on the air when they were sure to know? Where was it when the Browns lost custody of the children, who were sent to be raised by the narcissist who killed their mother? Where was it when Fred Goldman, who lost his beautiful son, won a civil judgment, but was unable to collect it?

Where was it? [/] I never lost my desire for his conviction. And if Marcia Clark couldn’t do it. I sure wanted to try. [/] In the past few days, since the announcement of the forthcoming book and televised interview If I Did It, it has been strange watching the media spin the story. They have all but called for my death for publishing his book and for interviewing him. A death, I might add, not called for when Katie Couric interviewed him; not called for when Barbara Walters had an exclusive with the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents in cold blood, nor when she conducted her celebrated interviews with dictator Fidel Castro or Muammar al-Gaddafi; not called for when 60 Minutes interviewed Timothy McVeigh who murdered hundreds in Oklahoma City, not called for when the U.S. government released tapes of Osama bin Laden; not called for when Geraldo Rivera interviewed his dozens of murderers, miscreants, and deviants.

Nor should it be. [/] “To publish” does not mean “to endorse”; it means “to make public.” If you doubt that, ask the mainstream publishers who keep Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in print to this day. They are likely to say that there is a historical value in publishing such material, so that the public can read, and judge for themselves, the thoughts and attempted defenses of an indefensible man. There is historical value in such work; there is value for law enforcement, for students of psychology, for anyone who wants to gain insight into the mind of a sociopath.

But that is not why I did it. That is not why I wanted to face the killer. That is not why I wanted to publish his story. [/] I didn’t know what to expect when I got the call that the killer wanted to confess. I didn’t know what would happen. But I knew one thing. I wanted the confession for my own selfish reasons and for the symbolism of that act. [/] For me, it was personal.

My son is now twenty-five years old, my daughter fifteen. I wanted them, and everyone else, to have a chance to see that there are consequences to grievous acts. That the consequences of pain and suffering will ultimately be brought upon its perpetrators. And I wanted, as so many victims do, to hear him say “I did it and I am sorry.” [/] I didn’t know if he would. But I wanted to try. I wanted his confession. [/] I wanted the acknowledgment, not for me but for my son, so I could turn to him and say, “I’m sorry that he was not a father to you. I’m sorry that he could not teach you what it means to be a man. And, finally, he’s sorry too.”

When I was a girl, a young, innocent, and believing girl, my parents made me go to confession. I didn’t always like to go. It was spooky going into the dark confessional booths, where I was told to say my penance for my sins and to recite The Act of Contrition. [/] Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. And I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because I offend thee my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life, amen. [/] To confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life, amen. [/] I was seven or eight years old at the time, and I had no idea what I was saying or doing. But I do now.

I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. [/] Amen.

I have not spent a lifetime in the study of deception detection, but ex-CIA specialist Phil Houston has. “When killers confess,” he told me, “the way they often do it is by creating a hypothetical”—and then they spill their guts. [/] For many of them, it is the only way to tell the truth. [/] I thought of this and the many books I’ve published over the years on the subject of sociopaths and their lack of empathy (Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits). And I thought about The Mind & The Brain, a book about the power of the human will. Is such behavior the result of a genetic flaw? Could it be caused by a head injury? Is it the result of a weak and damaged human will? Was this man suffering from a sort of emotional autism?

How did it happen? How could a man with so much have so little? And how could we, as a society, continue to protect him and others from the consequences of his wrong-doing? [/] I don’t know why he did it—why he did the book, and sat for the interview. Was it his own disturbed need for attention? Did he have remorse? Was he ready to come clean and make amends and do his penance? I wouldn’t know until I sat down in a chair across from him.

What I do know is I didn’t pay him. I contracted through a third party who owns the rights, and I was told the money would go to his children. That much I could live with. [/] What I wanted was closure, not money.

I had never met him and never spoken with him until the day I interviewed him. And I was ready. Fifty-three years prepared me for this conversation. [/] The men who lied and cheated and beat me—they were all there in the room. And the people who denied it, they were there too. And though it might sound a little strange, Nicole and Ron were in my heart. And for them I wanted him to confess his sins, to do penance and to amend his life. Amen.

We live in a world right now where hatred and vengeance is a way of life. [/] And as the killer sat before me I was not filled with vengeance or hatred. I thought of the man who had beaten me so many years ago, who left me in a hospital, the man who broke my child’s heart. And I listened carefully. [/] And what went through my mind surprised me. Mental illness. Thought process disorder. No empathy. Malignant narcissism. [/] In the years to come, I hope we will have a better understanding of this type of disordered personality. Are certain people simply born that way? If not, what goes wrong that changes them? How does this happen? And why?

I took on this project with the belief that his life must be a constant torture, a kind of hell. And I wondered: In his confession, however he chose to state it, would he do his penance, could he amend his life? Could he say he was sorry?

I thought back to Christmas Eve, a few years ago. The man who broke my heart was now standing on my doorstep, shaking. He talked about my son, now in his twenties, and told me I’d done a great job raising him alone. [/] During the years that I was running from work to homework, from my office to every school play, assembly, swim meet or parent conference, he never showed up for a single thing. While I was raising my son, he had lived a high life and then lost everything. He ended up in prison, lost his medical license, lost many of his worldly possessions, lost his looks and now, most of the women who once cared had gone, too.

And he was losing his mind. His hand was shaking violently. He had Parkinson’s disease, and was a broken man. He looked at me. The girl he’d left in the gutter had raised two children alone, had built a successful company, and was now a happy woman. [/] “I guess you think I’m getting my comeuppance,” he said. [/] And strangely I didn’t. That a man who had so much could throw it all away and fall so low—it gave me no pleasure. [/] I was sad for my son, sad for the women he’d left behind, sad for the mother and siblings he’d disappointed and I was sad for him that he’d missed the opportunity to live a beautiful life.

When I sat face to face with the killer, I wanted him to confess, to release us all from the wound of the conviction that was lost on that fall day in October of 1995. [/] For the girl who was left in the gutter, I wanted to make it right. [My ellipses and emphasis]

A Report from Inside the Enemy Camp

I only am escaped alone to tell thee. - Job 1:15, 16, 17, and 19

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a National Post [Canada] article, Hot for martyrdom:

Hot for martyrdom [/] Michael Coren [/] Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Friday, November 03, 2006 [/] Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn't tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It's safer that way. It's only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.

He's a disarmingly gentle and courteous man. But he's determined to tell a complacent North America what he knows about fundamentalist Muslim imperialism.

"Yes, 'imperialism,' " he tells me. "The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe."

Hamid drank in the message of Jihadism while at medical school in Cairo, and devoted himself to the cause. His group began meeting in a small room. Then a larger one. Then a Mosque reserved for followers of al-Zawahiri. By the time Hamid left the movement, its members were intimidating other students who were unsympathetic.

He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. "The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education," he says. "I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine.

"I've heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims -- and never poor Christians -- who become suicide bombers in Palestine."

His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.

"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys."

He leans back, takes a deep breath and moves to another area, one that he says is far too seldom discussed: "North Americans are too squeamish about discussing the obvious sexual dynamic behind suicide bombings. If they understood contemporary Islamic society, they would understand the sheer sexual tension of Sunni Muslim men. Look at the figures for suicide bombings and see how few are from the Shiite world. Terrorism and violence yes, but not suicide. The overwhelming majority are from Sunnis. Now within the Shiite world there are what is known as temporary marriages, lasting anywhere from an hour to 95 years. It enables men to release their sexual frustrations.

"Islam condemns extra-marital sex as well as masturbation, which is also taught in the Christian tradition. But Islam also tells of unlimited sexual ecstasy in paradise with beautiful virgins for the martyr who gives his life for the faith. Don't for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism."

A pause. "I know. I was one who accepted it." [/] This partial explanation is shocking more for its banality than its horror. Mass murder provoked partly by simple lust. But it cannot be denied that letters written by suicide bombers frequently dwell on waiting virgins and sexual gratification.

"The sexual aspect is, of course, just one part of this. But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"

He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want." [/] Then he leaves -- for where, he cannot say. A voice that is silenced in its homeland and too often ignored by those who prefer convenient revision to disturbing truth. The tragedy is that Tawfik Hamid is almost used to it. [/] - Michael Coren is an author and broadcaster. www.michaelcoren.com [My ellipses and emphasis]

Pelosi's Democratic Freshmen Cannon Fodder?!?

Say it ain't so, Nancy!

(With apologies to "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the Chicago White Sox, and Major League Baseball.)

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Canada Free Press article, Freshmen, Pelosi, marching orders:

Freshmen, Pelosi, marching orders [/] Democratic cannon fodder [/] By John Burtis [/] Friday, November 10, 2006

A lot of starry eyed winners last Tuesday will soon find out that they are really rubber stamps of the Pelosi machine – no more, no less.

Carol Shea-Porter, our cherubic, liberal and far left New Hampshire conqueror of Jeb Bradley - who, it now appears forgot to campaign - ran a one theme campaign, will go to Washington not as an independent Mrs. Smith, but as a member of a centrally controlled Politburo, which will clap and vote in unison, or disappear. [/] And there’s the rub.

While the progressive press has been quick to point out the arguments and the divisions which beset the once conservative Grand Old Party, the new Democrats in the House, under the stern gaze of that Botox enhanced San Francisco treat, Ms. Pelosi, will suffer no similar subdivisions.

If they do, they will promptly be dropped from the lists of those slated to receive the Party’s future largesse guaranteeing them the sinecure they’ll be seeking in 2008, and they’ll be greeted shortly by the person who’ll shortly take their seat from them in the perpetual game of Pelosi’s chairs. Perpetual, that is, until the Democrats are voted out, or Pelosi disappears, or the next two years at least. And two years is an eternity in the Democratic blame game.

As Rush Limbaugh quickly pointed out between Bush’s Wednesday surrender speeches, sometimes the Democrats even use conservative shills to advance their socialist cause. But everyone who won a Democratic House seat on Tuesday is an absolute ringer.

But, at least compared to the Soviet Union, where Teddy K wrote his letters seeking help, where the government which the Democrats will seek to emulate used to sit, you won’t get shot for being a deviationist, or put on trial. The latter activity will be reserved for Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and probably President Bush.

And it’ll be here that Pelosi’s orders and the freshmen’s votes will be the most damaging, whatever they may really think, regardless of the evidence presented, because the new Democrats must now make their move, realizing that they may have only these two years to do their dirty work.

The new Democrats’ finest henchman, the well attired John Conyers, who can manufacture the thinnest of beefs with his staff and his subpoena power, has outlined his case already. And he’ll work with Henry Waxman, his old connate at the bar. [/] The Conyers case, as outlined by Byron York in NRO, is based on blogs, crank articles, the web site “raw story,” among his other sterling evidenciary footnotes, for the prosecution of President Bush.

And it’ll happen, because Pelosi can’t risk having John Conyers, and the likes of Jackson, Sharpton, and their ilk, leave the new Democratic reservation.

There are those sundry who believe that Ms. Pelosi will keep her word and keep the impeachment activities under control and off the front burner. But the hatred runs deep and the cries for revenge – reprisals for House Republican actions taken for the outrageous prevarications uttered by the Duke of Dalliance, the intern’s profligate paramour, the catch penny Mr. Bill Clinton. And the freshmen House members will be the cannon fodder providing the votes necessary to continue the radicals’ retribution operation.

Interestingly, Mr. Bush tossed off concerns Wednesday about Ms. Pelosi’s previous descriptions of him as a liar Wednesday, when he announced his surrender plan. Rumsfeld, like Bataan and Corregidor, was gone. Will Cheney be far behind? Especially now that the minimum wage, the borders, and all the taxes will be on the table?

And once a head has rolled, the new Democrats, just like the Parisians of 1789, will cry for more. [/] And soon Mr. Bush may find himself standing in an uncomfortable position in Mr. Conyer’s rented tumbrel, rolling inexorably towards the impeachment guillotine, buffeted by his fellow passengers, Dick and Don. [/] Revenge is sweet and it has been a long time in coming. [/] The cheering crowd will be made up, this time, of the cheery, bright eyed brand new class of green Democratic representatives, who will be waving their flags, hollering their studied lines, and voting as directed. [/] And they may be joined by some Republicans, who may fear the future and further losses, and are too afraid to fight.

Oh, boy, these next two years are going to be something.

But we can all be assured that we’ll witness the end of the innocence of the new Democratic freshmen. They have become, every one, accomplices of the new Democratic plan. Their independence ended with their election.

John Burtis is a former Broome County, NY firefighter, a retired Santa Monica, CA, police officer. He obtained his BA in European History at Boston University and is fluent in German. He resides in NH with his wife, Betsy. [/] John Burtis can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com

Opinion [[Canada Free Press]] - 2006 [|] 2005

[…] Northeast Intelligence Network [/] is a leading anti-terrorist web site, that offers practical reference information, vital links, and other valuable information from an investigative perspective in today's troubled times. [My ellipses and emphasis]