I’m considering changing the name of this blog to no-opinions.com. Why should I have any political opinions? It has occurred to me lately that having political opinions is a hobby less useful and potentially more dangerous than any number of other harmless pursuits, like stamp collecting or model airplane building. The vast real world out there neither knows nor cares about my political opinions. Whether or not I vote one way or another, or not at all, matters not a whit, whatever a whit is (via my cousin, Andy, a “whit” is an Old English word, believed to date from the Danish invasion, meaning the “crumb” or “speck” that falls from one’s lips as one enjoys a piece of pastry). My influence on political policy is nil. That’s the plus side. The minus side is that having political opinions pisses off more or less half of the people to whom they are expressed, no matter what the opinions or who the recipients are. The effort and time spent to develop and maintain any opinions whatsoever on the war or the economy or farm subsidies or Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, etc., is a futile waste by any rational analysis. There is nothing to be gained for anyone, and there are friends, associates, customers, and clients to be lost.

My politial science Professor brother, Jeff, has this to say about that:

“The point of developing, articulating and sharing political opinions can never be that you are going to change the world. That’s a sort of influence exercised by a tiny minority of any community. Instead, it is a way of participating in a public community of shared institutions and participating responsibly in its public affairs through your small contribution to keeping political leaders accountable to the public at large. If you cease to do that, you are declaring yourself an exile from your own community, even a traitor to your own community. You are modeling a behavior that, if generalized to the whole public, abdicates all power over public officials to small, organized, highly self-interested groups. It amounts to a declaration that democracy is worthless and should be abandoned in favor of authoritarian regimes controlled by narrow, self-interested elites.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, that’s all true of course, but from a personal point of view, a game-theory point of view, it begs, it fails to answer, the age-old question, “What’s in it for me?” And from a conservative, libertarian point of view, there is the credo, “If there isn’t anything in it for me, then what the Hell is there in it for anyone?” It’s the antidote to Kant’s categorial imperative, “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”. This is the universal law of the Left, whose ambition is to enforce their laws universally. We must all drive Prius’s or die, for the sake of Gaia. Heck, I even believe in Gaia. I mean, how much acid do you have to drop before you realize that the Earth is a living organism of which we are the sensory organs? I mean, dude!? It’s obvious!

So, I tried out my new no-opinions life strategy in the San Francisco Bay Area this August, as we journeyed to the land of the cutting edge, the mother lode, the source of all future lifestyle choices, and the home of my grandchildren. I have to say, it, our journey, was quite successful, at least in a negative sense. I didn’t piss anyone off, to my knowledge, durng the entire week, a new record for me. And, by the time we returned home to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the world was not any less, or more, saved than it had been before we left, near as I could tell.

This intriguing but doomed article in Slate, Why Petraeus’ intriguing new Iraq strategy will probably fail by Fred Kaplan purports to show that Petraeus and his generals and the ambassador to Iraq are all wrong to suppose that we have any chance whatsoever of bringing about a good outcome in Iraq. My reading of it does not disprove the thesis, but can’t help but make note of the long, torturous journey it takes to arrive at its conclusion. This does not make it wrong, of course. It may well be that the war in Iraq is hopeless, but the lengths to which the author must go to prove this, leaves me wondering if the conclusion is so inevitable.

I’ve been reading, The Masters of the Air, about the gallant heroes of the 8th and 15th Air Force in WWII, my father among them. One of the many striking things about the book is the unbelievable blundering and incompetence of Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle, and all the other generals and bigwigs, who were utterly wrong about the tactics and strategy and prognosis of strategic bombing, mistakes which cost the lives of many thousands of American airmen. But in the end, in spite of egregious errors of judgment, the Luftwaffe was defeated, and the Allies achieved air supremacy, because the Luftwaffe was even more stupid than we were, and because we had oil and they didn’t. There were dark hours. There were times when the consensus was that we would never prevail. There were huge errors in intelligence and theories of air warfare. That’s what war is like. But in WWII, there was no question about whether or not we could afford to just lose and go home. We couldn’t.

I think that is true also of this war that we are in, but the consensus about that is not what it was in 1944, the year of my birth. The point being that wars always look problematical while you are in the middle of them, but the question is, is the fight worth it or not? Is the utter defeat and rout of Al Qaeda in Iraq worth doing, or would it be OK to let them have a victory, and a foothold in a failed state? This is not what is being discussed in Congress. Everything is about gotcha, and in fact, now, the Democrats have become so heavily invested in inevitable defeat, that any chance of victory is a political threat that must be averted. If there is the slightest chance that Petraeus’s report in September might show signs of progress, then it must be headed off at the pass, and withdrawal begun immediately in order to insure failure. This is incredible to me. I don’t have any deeply-held opinions about tactics and strategy, but I do have very strong opinions about the stakes, about the importance of this fight. I just don’t understand why the urgency of discrediting George W. Bush outweighs the importance of defeating Al Qaeda. This, if any issue should be, is one that should be non-partisan, and yet it is the most partisan of all.

Maybe “The Elders” can help us sort it out.

What really needs to happen is to clean up the legal immigration bureaucracy first. And then, after that, it’s not really about a fence so much. It’s about a tamper-proof, universal id card, and strict enforcement against those who hire anyone without one. Yes, this would mean that we would have to pay a higher hourly wage to roofers, remodelers, yard-workers, chicken-plucking factory workers, etc., and higher prices as a result. Isn’t this what Democrats want? Higher wages for the bottom? (or, er, is it more non-English-speaking voters?) If these things were done, then, fence or no fence, we would be in control of who comes here, and why. This proposal is the almost diametric opposite of the immigration “compromise” that is being pushed by Ted Kennedy and Trent Lott.

If this were put in place, we could then easily accommodate those who wish to leave the failed state of Mexico, and come to the United States to work and live and thrive, as we always have.

Below is a post at ejectejecteject.com talking about the classic game theory example, the prisoner’s dilemma, and how it relates to our relationship with Al Qaeda, among other things. The two main battlefields where the United States and Al Qaeda are at war with each other, besides the mainstream Western media, are Iraq and Afghanistan, in that order. Whether or not we stay or leave, surrender or prevail, will have long-term consequences. If Al Qaeda were to be vanquished in Iraq, either by the U.S., the Iraqi Army, the tribal militias, or some combination thereof, and Iraq were then to descend into a pure Sunni/Shia civil war, as the Democrats are so desperate to insist that it already is, then I could at least contemplate an argument for withdrawal, but I would still be against it. Throwing up our hands and choosing to just turn over Iraq, the central, oil-rich territory in the Middle East, to whomever is strong enough to take it, would not, in my humble opinion, bode well.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

So, anyway, the prisoner’s dilemma is a cogent analysis of the differences between liberalism and conservatism. The choices are: always screw the other guy, never screw the other guy, or choose to screw or not screw the other guy, depending on what he did to you the last time. If it’s a one-time deal then the first option is the best choice. If it’s an iterative deal, then the third option is the best choice. The second option is never always the best choice. A large subset of liberals believes in option number two. A small subset of conservatives believes in option number one. A minority of liberals and a majority of conservatives believes in option number three. Overall, I would say that U.S. and Western culture as a whole is trending away from option number three towards option number two. This is Osama Bin Laden’s analysis as well. This is what the Islamists are banking on.

Here is my arbitrary, arrogant assignation of points to the candidates, based on the issues. I won’t even consider any of the Democrats. They have all made it clear that they wish to withdraw from Iraq. That is absolutely unacceptable to me. I’m only going to consider the top tier of the Republican candidates: Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and Thompson. None of the others has any kind of realistic chance, and I don’t like them anyway, expcept for Newt, but I don’t want him to be President. Three of them (Brownback, Tancredo, & Huckabee) don’t even believe in evolution! So here is a list of the issues in this upcoming, far into the future, election, as I see them, with my opinion of where they are at, and the number of points I assign to each candidate for that issue. Some issues get more points than others, but the issues are not presented in any particular order.

Abortion – Like Rudy Giuliani, I don’t care much about this one way or another. I think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and it would have been better to leave it up to the state legislatures, i.e., the voters, the people, but now I think it would be a mistake to overturn Roe. It’s established. Overturning it would be a huge hassle and wouldn’t significantly affect the number of abortions. 20 points for Rudy. Minus ten for McCain, Romney, and Thompson.

Iraq – The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was a brilliant, courageous undertaking. It was the right thing to do. The resulting insurgent, religious, jihadist, revenge-seeking chaos was inexcusably unexpected and unplanned for. Nevertheless, the invasion was the right thing to do, and unplanned for or not, the resulting chaos is what must be dealt with now. We hoped and wished that it would be easier than this, but it isn’t. We will need to maintain a large presence in Iraq for another 5-10 years. If we don’t, if we surrender as the Democrats demand, we will pay a huge price later. 100 points for McCain, 90 for Giuliani, 80 for Thompson, 50 for Romney.

Immigration – The Mexicans who have come here illegally are in the tradition of America’s immigrants; the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, the Swedes, the Chinese, etc., all poor people seeking opportunity, with nothing to lose. They come here, they work hard for low pay, they sacrifice so that their children can realize the American dream. Some Mexicans are criminals of course, but no more than any other ethnic group who has come here from somewhere. There is however one big difference. All those other people came here legally. They passed through Ellis or Angel Island. They waited in line. As much as is humanly possible, illegal immigration must be stopped. Our borders must be secured. Walls must be built. Then, and only then, our entire immigration system must be reformed from top to bottom. We must make it easy for people with skills and expertise and education to come to America from all over the world. We must also make it easy for those on or near our borders who want to work hard and do the back-breaking labor that nobody who is already here wants to do. And we must, after the borders are secure, make a way for those who are already here illegally to become citizens. I think McCain gets another 20 points for this one. I’ll give Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney ten each.

Pork – Nobody’s really touting this as a major issue, but I think it is. The Republicans and the Democrats are equally bad on this. McCain again. 30 more points. Thompson and Giuliani get 20 each, Romney ten.

Gay marriage – Give me a break. Although this issue really annoys me, I really don’t give a sh*t about it. I don’t care what anybody’s position is on it. No points for anybody.

McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform – I agree with the conservatives that this is a dumb bill and McCain was a dope to back it, but I don’t care about it. There is more free speech, especially political free speech than any sane person can possibly stand. We are not in any danger of being deprived of anyone’s opinion about anything. McCain loses ten points, mainly because of the reflection on his judgment. Everybody else gets ten.

Taxes – I do believe that the less a society is taxed, generally speaking, the healthier that society is. Individual responsibility trumps collective responsibility every time. The more resources and power that can be safely left in the hands of individual citizens, the better. Collectivity, “The Common Good”, the Commons, whatever you want to call it, has its place. Obviously there are endeavors that are best carried out at high levels of organization, like war and interstate highways. What is sometimes overlooked is that all such ventures in communism require a central authority to regulate and administer them. Along with such central authorities inevitably come abuses of power, waste, and stupidity. It’s a trade-off. Is the good of the common good such a good good, and so unattainable by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals, that it is worth the price of bureaucracy and loss of freedom? I am not a libertarian, but if one is to err, it is best to err on the side of the libertarians. I think Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and Thompson all get 30 points here.

Social Security and Medicare – Nobody in either party is talking about this, except for Fred Thompson. It’s a very difficult but not insurmountable problem if faced squarely. Thompson gets 50 points.

Global Warmingism – As can no doubt be discerned from the sarcastic “ism” suffix attached to this, the 21st century’s fastest growing religion, I am not a big fan of global warming hysteria. All candidates of either party are required to render obeisance to the one true ecoGod, so it is difficult to award points on this issue. I have to intuit which candidate is most insincere about his concern for the polar bears. I’m gonna give Thompson ten points.

The results:

McCain — -10 + 100 + 20 + 30 – 10 + 30 = 160

Giuliani — 20 + 90 + 10 + 20 + 10 + 30 = 180

Romney — -10 + 50 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 30 = 100

Thompson — -10 + 80 + 10 + 20 + 10 + 30 + 50 + 10 = 190

So Thompson wins, Giuliani is a close second and McCain not too far back in third, with Romney a somewhat distant fourth. We have an excruciatingly long way to go until the primaries, let alone the election, so this is all subject to massive change. Thompson is not even declared yet. All in all though, I would be pretty happy with any of these guys. If a Democrat has to win, God forbid, I would hope it’s Barack Obama, just because he’s the most unknown.

Here is Senator Inhofe’s opening statement to Saint Gore at the Senate hearing.

Here is Al “the debate is over” Gore his own self.

Although I am a global warmingism holocaust denier, here is graphic that I found interesting from a sociological point of view.

And here is The Great Global Warming Swindle video, which features a number of prominent scientists who don’t believe, many of them cited by the U.N. report as if they were supporters.

And here is a statement on global warming from Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic.

The war on Islamic fascism is an interconnected, global affair, like everything else these days. The war in Afghanistan is being waged by Al Qaeda and the Taliban from their secure strongholds in Pakistan. Afghanistan cannot be separated from Pakistan. Until the Islamic fascist threat to Pakistan is somehow resolved, Afghanistan will be at war. In the same way, the war in Iraq will not be won until Iran and Syria are made to cease importing money, weapons, and personnel. The worldwide indoctrination of young Muslims into the Wahhabi, Salafist, Islamic fascist ideology will not cease until Saudi Arabia stops funding mosques and madrassas all over the world.

The idea that Iraq exists in a vacuum and is something that we can just withdraw from, is childishly simplistic. North Korea has supplied Iran with missile technology. Pakistan has, in the past, supplied Iran and others with nuclear bomb technology. France, Germany, Austria, and Russia have all supplied Iran with military technology of various sorts. Hezbollah, Hamas, and Fatah all receive aid from iran and the Arabs, not to mention Europe and even the United States.

There is no short-term, easy way out of this. There must be a Grand Strategy that sees Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and more as pieces of the grand puzzle which is, in George W. Bush’s words, “…the great ideological struggle of the 21st century — and it is the calling of our generation. All civilized nations are bound together in this struggle between moderation and extremism.”.

Newt Gingrich to the rescue:

“All of the grand strategy has to be to organize and arouse every element on the planet that wants to be prosperous, safe and free, and to gradually crowd out every element that is determined to impose dictatorship. . . . And that means we’ve gotta think much more aggressively . . .

“For example, we should be talking about women’s rights. I mean, women’s rights is the easiest, cleanest single fight worldwide in taking on [the most radical forms of Islam]. . . .

“The tragedy of the current American system is we won in 23 days [in Iraq], and then we threw away victory . . . We don’t have a large enough strategy. . . .

“THE last time we tried liberal weakness in the Mideast was Jimmy Carter. And nobody wants to talk about what a disaster this was. It was chaotic. You had an American ambassador killed in Afghanistan, an American embassy burned in Pakistan, a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, we had gasoline rationed in the U.S. . . . People have forgotten what a total disaster this was . . .

“We tried weakness in the Middle East. Liberalism had a shot at this. And [yet] we’re not prepared to get up and say to Teddy Kennedy, “You guys did this before, I mean, do you really want to go back and do it again?

We’ve got to start with that notion – you had better think through a grand strategy, and you had better be prepared to do what it takes.”

We are the victims of identity theft. Someone got ahold of the card number and other info from my bank debit card and charged $3,000 worth of stuff yesterday before I canceled the card. I caught it right away. I look at that account every day because it gets deposits from paypal MailSteward sales. Candace has been on the phone constantly calling all of the merchants that were charged and trying to get them to cancel the orders. Some will, some won’t.

In the process she also found three different merchants who all said that the goods were being shipped to 812 N Arapahoe St. in Amarillo, TX. So she also called the Amarillo police dept. a number of times, and dragged me to the cop shop in Murfreesboro to file a police report. The nice cop who filled out our report said that this was the sixth such report filed this month. He asked if we had shopped at TJ Max recently. We had. And so had all the other people who had filed reports. TJ Max had a hacker break-in recently and thousands of credit card numbers got stolen, many of them in Tennessee. The cop informed us that there was very little likelihood that Amarillo was going to stake out that address and bust the guy.

The process of dealing with all this has been a learning experience. If you have a few numbers, which you can buy on the street for about $50 apiece, it is easy to buy stuff online, ship it overnight to the address of an empty house or building, fence it through e-bay, and never get caught. The thing is, if you are internet-savvy, and have police powers, and good communications between police departments, it is equally easy to track down and bust these guys, by just sitting in front of a computer, if you’re quick about it. But they don’t do that of course. The Murfreesboro cop just kept shaking his head and saying that they’re gonna have to do something about this pretty soon, it’s just gettin’ out of hand.

Hacking into TJ Max is the hard way. Any store or restaurant that processes credit cards gives minimum wage workers access to all of your credit card info except your address, which is easily found online for many people, certainly for me. This is just gonna get worse until we have a national identity card and retina or fingerprint verification everywhere, including attached to your personal computer. I, for one, welcome these intrusions into my privacy, now that I no longer have criminal or politically radical tendencies.

Let me get this straight. The U.S. Senate has a Constitutional duty to confirm the new commander of the new strategy in Iraq. The Armed Services Committee has unanimously, 25-0, endorsed the nomination of General Petraeus. Everybody loves General Petraeus. He is expected to sail through the Senate. General Petraeus is being confirmed to implement the new strategy, which he believes in and endorses.

The U.S. Senate does not have a Constitutional duty to devise and manage U.S. war strategy, but they are nevertheless taking it upon themselves to pass a ringing non-endorsement of the new strategy, because it’s a mistake and it won’t work. Of course they all support the troops, who are being sent to Iraq for a mistaken policy that will get some of them killed, and where they will be led by a General who believes in this doomed strategy, and who also believes that passage of such a resolution will benefit our enemies.

I happen to believe that the new strategy has a real chance, and that even if there is no immediate success, it is in our interest to remain in Iraq until we do achieve success. But no matter what your opinion of the war or the new strategy or of the necessity to remain in Iraq, how can the actions of the Democrats and some of the Republicans in the Senate be seen as anything but the most disgusting hypocrisy, cowardice, and ignorance, that can only do damage to our country?

The proposed non-binding resolutions embolden the enemy and demoralize the troops, to a greater or lesser extent, without any positive benefit whatsoever, except perhaps some short-term political benefit to some Senators. If the new strategy is wrong, if the war is wrong, then vote to not confirm General Petraeus, and vote to cut off funds, perform your Constitutional duty. If you’re not ready to do that, if you think that the new General and the new strategy might have some slight chance of success, then give him as much support as you can. The course being followed by a majority of Senators is the worst of both worlds.

Just went to see the ironically titled The Good Shepherd, De Niro’s movie about the CIA. I was looking forward to a realistic account of the CIA’s founding and early history, but this is definitely not it. What a disappointment. It’s just another bullshit Hollywood flick about the evil U.S.A., the evil CIA, and the evil WASPs who control everything. It has all the subtlety and depth of a Berkeley Barb cartoon showing blood dripping from Robert McNamara’s fangs. The threat of Soviet Communism? Fehgeddaboutit. The Soviet threat was just a fiction whomped up by the evil Skull and Bones members at the CIA to give themselves something to do. Of course, like everything out of Hollywood these days, it has great production values, excellent acting, fabulous camera work. Love the cars, the costumes, the settings. But is it beyond the imagination of anyone in Hollywood that there might have been good, patriotic, dedicated people at the CIA, who, at great personal sacrifice, successfully protected us all from very real existential threats to our freedom?