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Israelis: Don’t make me stop this car!

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 25, 2008

That Ehud Olmert is some hothead!

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a direct appeal to Gaza’s people to pressure their leaders to stop the barrages. But the attacks showed no signs of ending. By nightfall, three rockets and 15 mortar shells had exploded in Israel.

Olmert issued his appeal in a rare interview with the Arabic language satellite channel al-Arabiya, saying Israel would not hesitate to respond with force if the attacks continued.

Isn’t a little hard to say you “won’t hesitate” when you’re in the middle of an extended bout of hesitation?  It gets even worse — you might think the Onion wrote this last part:

“I am telling them now, it may be the last minute, I’m telling them stop it. We are stronger,” he said.

On the other hand, I think the Onion already did write it…

UPDATE:  Car stopped.  How much of this could have been avoided, though, had a generation of deterrent credibility not been squandered in a decade?

Posted in Orient, Sisyphus, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Facebook debate on Iraq

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 15, 2008

Ron Dean Esmay makes the one point about Iraq, the presidency and GWB and history that everyone’s all too willing to forget http://bit.ly/9R2A.via Twitter – 2:01pm

– 14 Comments

Brian Gocial at 3:12pm December 14
I certainly hope you’re right that in the long-term invading Iraq will turn out to have good consequences. But I think the only way “history will not be kind to many of the so-called ‘progressives'” is if the United States Constitution is no longer the governing law of our country.
Judith Weiss at 3:27pm December 14
The people most likely to play games with the Constitution are Dems. For example, Obama wants to use the Supreme Court to redistribute income, which is not its job.
Timbo Jones at 4:29pm December 14
True, the Supreme Court is not supposed to do such things…which is why I guess the Bush administration doesn’t bother with such things when conducting unconstitutional acts.
Rhoads Hollowell at 4:46pm December 14
I am sorry, Ron, but the Project For a New American Century was an evil group from the start, and the end does not justify the means, even in this case.
Ron Coleman at 5:01pm December 14
Brian, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion on that matter!

Which were the objectionable means you have in mind, Rhoads? Humor me.

Rhoads Hollowell at 5:07pm December 14
attacking a sovereign country just because you think it would be a good idea, and then making up the justification so you could do so.
Ron Coleman at 5:15pm December 14
Well, I suppose if I accept all your false premises as true, I’d agree with you. Yeah, definitely evil.
Rhoads Hollowell at 5:17pm December 14
And if you believed in the concept of the rule of law, you would accept my premises as true. There was only one reason that the war in Iraq could ever have been judged as legal: that we did indeed find WMD. We did not. Therefore it was not legal under international law. My source for this is Dean Slaughter of the WWS, a source I think is reliable.
Ron Coleman at 5:34pm December 14
I must admit this is the first time I ever heard it suggested that legality of an act is to be determined based on ex post evaluation of whether certain facts assumed to be true ex ante are in fact true, regardless of what a reasonable person would have believed ex ante.

I knew it that this was the basis — along with taking causalities — for Democrats to decide whether or not they supported the war when it was going badly, but not whether it was legal in the first place.

There is a vast degree of opinion regarding the war’s legality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War

As a general rule almost every opinion on the matter promulgated by an institution, person or other entity came to a conclusion that could be predicted based on that source’s political inclinations regarding the matter.

That doesn’t mean you’re wrong or that it doesn’t matter. It means the question is more complex than you suggest.

Brian Gocial at 6:55pm December 14
Preemptive war, manipulating intelligence, illegal wiretapping, torture, rendition, signing statements, executive secrecy, indefinite imprisonment w/o due process … there is nothing complex about the unconstitutionality of these “means.”
Stephen Ban at 9:59pm December 14
and yet, no further terrorist acts on US soil, and ample evidence that many have been thwarted. It’s a fascinating choice… “unlawful” (your words) and alive vs. self-righteous and dead… complex world out there, isn’t it?
Ron Coleman at 10:50pm December 14
Not only that, Stephen. “International law” is pretty much of interest to those on the outside looking in. Every single country in a position to project power on any level ignores international law when it is in its interest do so, including all the weak sisters of Western Europe. And not only decades ago, but whenever it works for tghem.

Brian, you are mistaking political sloganeering for reality.

Brian Gocial at 8:33am December 15
Ron,

I only wish these serious issues were political sloganeering rather than reality …

But back to the point of your original post, history will be the judge of who is correct. Until then, we’ll each live in the reality of our own choosing.

Ron Coleman at 12:59pm December 15
Well, mentally anyway. Reality chooses us!
—
Pretty good stuff, and lots of anger still boiling. Still, it seems that great minds think alike:

History will one day credit Bush with patience, multilateralism and conviction. But right now, history is still being made. And there is a war to be continued and to be won.

Can you guess who said it?  No peeking!

Posted in Oppression, Orient, Past is prologue, Politics and Poker, Stragety | 1 Comment »

Just don’t say you’re “sick”

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 8, 2008

Calling in “gay”:

Some same-sex marriage supporters are urging people to “call in gay” Wednesday to show how much the country relies on gays and lesbians, but others question whether it’s wise to encourage skipping work given the nation’s economic distress. . .

“We want to get the conversation going in the community that gay is not bad,” Craig said. “For kids to hear that in a positive light can be life-changing.”

The irony is that the people who think they’re all about openness, tolerance, understanding, communicating, and open channels utterly don’t get it.  As I argued a couple of weeks ago, “we’re” not “anti-gay.”  We’re not against them.  We don’t remotely think they’re “bad.”  We are their friends.

We — people who, for example, may have supported Proposition 8 — just don’t agree with their political agenda, we don’t accept their perspective of how what they want politically is a “right,” and we aren’t prepared to turn over our culture (however much of it “they” are responsible for) to celebration, endorsement or even explicit acceptance of behavior that we believe in good faith is private, but either morally wrong, religiously forbidden or, for many of us, viscerally offensive.

They think we think they’re bad, or that they can’t do their jobs, or that we shouldn’t be friends with them.  They think we’re “against” them, but except to the unfortunate extent they have allowed their political goals to be coterminus with their persons, they are the ones who are mistaken.

It seems as if we really aren’t communicating at all.  And calling in “gay” isn’t going to start the conversation they want, because that isn’t the conversation anyone needs to have.

Believe me, I’m not obsessed with this topic, but someone is.  And that’s the point, too:  If you leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone regarding your private lives.  Just show up for work like the rest of us, dress as flamboyantly as you like or as straight as you like, and really, we won’t think you’re “bad” or anything.

It’s a lot simpler than you think.

UPDATE: Good sideways elucidation of the issues here, via Mox Ie.

Posted in O Mores!, Oppression, Stragety | 7 Comments »

Class war in Illinois

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 6, 2008

It’s a brave new world, and their favorite son is not even in office yet:

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

Workers who got three days’ notice that their factory was shutting its doors have occupied the building and say they won’t go home without assurances they’ll get severance and vacation pay.

About 250 union workers occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in shifts Saturday while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind. . . .

“We’re doing something we haven’t done since the 1930s, so we’re trying to make it work,” she said, referring to a tactic most famously used in 1936-37 by General Motors factory workers in Flint, Mich., to help unionize the U.S. auto industry.

Of course in ’36-’37, the country was actually beginning to recover from the double whammy of the Depression and the New Deal policies that deepened it.  The unionization of the auto industry probably didn’t help much, but with war in Europe brewing orders were picking up.  A year or two later, and the real shooting under way, factory orders were up enough that unionization seemed to work wonders for the economy!

Here in 2008, however, we’re almost certainly not at bottom yet, by a long shot, and no obvious new war is on the horizon, so the timing for union-orchestrated violence — and that is what this is — would appear less than brilliant.

So what is the thinking in the People’s Republic of Illinois?  Is organized labor so close to back in the driver’s seat, and the Big Three bailout so close to fruition after all, that a fantasy-based-union-bounty-based economy is upon us?   Is it that the era of President-Elect Obama means that Chicago is totally up for leftist power grabs?  A little of both?  Or was I wrong about the whole “here comes socialism” piece altogether, in a way that — let’s face it — none of us had guessed?

Posted in Gelt, Oppression, Past is prologue, Politics and Poker, Stragety | 12 Comments »

Remember the price signals thingy?

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 4, 2008

I do! I was reminded by this post over at Rick Moore’s:

Back when the economic crisis first hit at the end of September, Donald Trump predicted that oil could fall to $20 a barrel. Gulf Oil thinks that’s where it’s headed:

RANDOLPH — Gulf Oil CEO Joe Petrowski said on Wednesday that the price of oil could sink to $20 per barrel, and there is a chance gasoline prices could drop as low as $1 per gallon by early next year. . .

Ah, yep.  Sounds really familiar to me, theme-wise.  Because here’s what I said in October in response to a surprising policy prescription urged by Glorious Leader:

You thought Instapundit was a libertarian? So did I! At least on economics issues. But check this:

BOB ZUBRIN: Obama’s Energy Plan a Mix of Bad and Good. “Moreover, there is one part of the Obama plan which is absolutely splendid, and that is his explicit promise to require flex fuel capability on all new cars sold in the USA by the end of his first term. This is indeed a potential real game changer, especially if the flex fuel standard is written to include not only automobile compatibility with gasoline and ethanol, but methanol as well.” You can make methanol from kudzu. ‘Nuff said.

Well, not ’nuff for me. What happened to the free market? Is it inconceivable that oil could be $40 a barrel at the end of Obama’s first term — and cars will either be X dollars more expensive because of this requirement, or perhaps won’t work right, or… whatever?

Whatever, indeed. We see how easy it is to fix massive policy problems merely by legislating a solution, right?

Right.  Did I say “by the end of Obama’s first term”?

Posted in Futurama, Gelt, Stragety | 2 Comments »

Leveraging terror

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 29, 2008

I made a point in a previous post that appears to have gotten obscured, and while I reiterated it in the comments earlier this evening, I subsequently saw another item (again via Instapundit) that seemed, in perhaps a somewhat roundabout way — to confirm it. Here’s what I said:

The terrorists “leveraged” Western victims in Mumbai. I use that term because 100 300 dead Westerners will have more impact in the West than probably many more hundreds of dead Indians. That is not how it ought to be, but look at what goes on in Africa, to the shock and horror of just about no one in America. Usually our thoughts are, if we notice such stories at all, “Well, those people are always killing each other over there.” It may be a less than ideal reaction, morally speaking, but I believe I am accurately describing the human condition, as I wrote last year when considering the “never again” myth.

So, now this:

And as Indian commandos ended the bloody 59-hour siege at the Taj yesterday by killing the last three Islamic gunmen, baby-faced Kasab was dispassionately detailing the background to the mayhem.

He described how its mastermind briefed the group to ‘target whites, preferably Americans and British’.

The direct victims of terror, really, are not the objects of the terrorism.  Rather the object is the survivors of terror.   But high-value survivors only yield the payoff if they notice, if they care, if terror scans on their screen at all.  Instapundit, tongue somewhat in cheek, grimly jokes that these Islamists weren’t just mass murderers, but — by modern lights — they were worse:  They were “racists”!

Of course they were, but, as I said above, that’s because, well, in a way, “we” are.

Posted in Homo sapiens, Oppression, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Everything we know is wrong?

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 29, 2008

Instapundit:

JOHN THOMPSON: The Mumbai attacks represent a scenario that few Western police and security forces have dared envision. Fewer still have prepared for it.

The basic strategy: use a large number of attackers to overwhelm a target city’s ability to respond, and then suddenly switch focus to high value targets and seize hostages.

I guess Glenn Reynolds would call that An Army of Davids.  Why are we surprised that such a strategy can be a force for evil as well as for good?

A partial response, actually, is the big and rather eye-opening discussion Glenn’s having on the topic of ubiquitous gun ownership / carrying at that first link, especially as juxtaposed with the depressing story he links to later:  Indian police refused to shoot back, evidently being poorly trained for situations requiring … what you’d want police with guns, in a democracy, to do.

But the bigger response to Thompson’s point is this:  We will always have a problem of terrorists’ originality.  Their 9/11 strategy worked all right:  Once.  It will never work again, now that I can’t take a nail clipper onto an airplane.  Granted, this sounds like a hairier one to combat, but it’s not surprising that Western police and security forces haven’t thought of every possible tactical approach that these Davids — and, really, terrorism is all about being a David; all about using focused and conceptually distinct force to knock out a Goliath who could never be overcome by brute force — will cook up.  Frankly they’re more motivated toward originality, and they’re, well, more wicked.

They’ll always have one up on us if we, Goliath-like, think we have to guess everything they might do in advance.  The only way to turn this formula on its head (not to say that more and better security, training and planning isn’t called for) is to better manage the way we allow terrorism to affect policy — to make these “stunning victories,” if not less stunning, less victorious.  The pre-9/11 message to terrorists such as the PLO (and the one Israel is still sending, unfortunately) was bloody our nose enough times and, okay, we’ll honor you at the UN, give you a Nobel prize, provide you with your own provisional government to loot and we’ll arm you, too.  It’s going to be a long time until that is unlearned.

Posted in Packing heat, Stragety | 2 Comments »

Foggy Bottom

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 24, 2008

Hitch on Hillary:

In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me.

It is hard to understand how Obama could really do this.  (Though if you read Dick Morris, certain aspects of the story do become more clear!)

Posted in Politics and Poker, Stragety | 2 Comments »

Halloween’s over!

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 19, 2008

Instapundit:

TO SAVE THE AMERICAN AUTO INDUSTRY, let Detroit go bankrupt.

Meanwhile, Katie Granju thinks that such talk is union-busting in disguise.

In disguise?

We don’t need no stinkin’ disguises!!

Posted in Gelt, Oppression, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Watch the whole thing!

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 18, 2008

Pace Emmett Tyrell, now is the conservative crackup. Melissa Clouthier is right: You really have to take a few minutes to watch this, the whole thing, to get a sense of where we aren’t going, and how we aren’t getting there.

I don’t know what to make of it.  First of all it’s hardly clear what the role of Brink Lindsey is here.  It’s Bloggingheads.tv, but we don’t really need two blogging heads (does Brink really even blog except as an afterthought?), one — here, David Frum — to talk, and one to bounce up and down.  That’s not blogging, that’s bobbing.

But this is of a piece with the wing of the GOP that believes that to be a Republican is essentially to be a libertarian with NATO, or something like that.  Brink has made a career now of insisting that the Right write off right, or any concept of conservative values, to be relevant in the future.  Now David Frum is at least acknowledging that he has no business at the National Review, still redolent of the incense and candles of the late William F. Buckley’s Catholic-based conservatism.  If Frum is a post-neoconservative, then what kind of conservative is he, if he is so contemptuous of “heartland” conservative sensibilities?  If Frum is the lone voice of a resurgent intellectualism on the Right, in theory much to be welcomed, how can he compare the inexcusable Harriet Miers nomination to the political arbitrage of the Palin candidacy?

We don’t need, and I don’t want any part of, a party of Brink Lindseys and P.J. O’Rourkes, and such a party has no future in this country as an alternative to the present regime.  Frum, whose persona and ethnic / religious identity, a Google search reveals, unleashes a great deal of smoke but very little light, even confuses the Jews.  As far as this Jew, so does this debate, both as exemplified in the video above and in other trenches, confound.  But perhaps free of the Bush White House and out of National Review, David Frum can go somewhere coherently intellectual, yet genuinely conservative; and perhaps there will be something good there.  He need not throw out the values baby with the know-nothing bathwater; if he does, what does he have?

Let’s see just how smart David Frum really is.

Posted in Heart and spirit, O Mores!, Politics and Poker, Stragety | 4 Comments »

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