Matt Wretchard on Bigley's murder

Matt Wretchard on Kenneth Bigley's murder:

He and Steyn have put their finger on the simple error that everyone from Bigley to those campaigning for his release have made. Not only is it impossible to put a rational construction on these events, it is a waste of time to try. Bigley thought he was too old; the schoolchildren in Beslan thought they were too young; the French journalists thought they were too French to be the victims of terrorism. And they were wrong. Wrong because they assumed that enemy intent rather than capability was the limiting factor to their mayhem. It is an odd statistical fact that fewer Americans have died from terrorist attacks in Iraq than Iraqi children. The one thousand US combat deaths in the months since OIF is only slightly larger than the number of Canadians killed in the 1942 Dieppe Raid over the course of 9 hours; and not because the terrorists are eager to "show the world the justice and mercy which Islam teaches us" but because they cannot kill more.

Radical Islam is self-evidently at war with the West because their efforts are limited only by their capability. And the West is just as clearly not yet at war with radical Islam because its actions are still limited by its intent. Zarqawi sawed off Bigley's head simply because he could; America spares Fallujah from choice. That inability to think of ourselves as being truly at war underlay the rejection of Mark Steyn's column. He had only stated the obvious.

Update: Also make sure to read the Mark Steyn column Matt references.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5750

16:05 (utc-4)
edited: 17:55 (utc-4)

 

Small new feature on my weblog

Today I created a small new feature on my weblog to make it easier to link to a bunch of posts on the same topic. Rather than having to link. a. string. of. words. to. different. entries. I can now link to a set of entries all at once with just one link. For instance, here's a link to all my entries about Kerry's "nuisance" comments so far. There'll probably be more and when I want to do a recap I won't have to link them individually.

I may decide to have the entries show up in the order specified in the URL. Right now they're sorted by date.

Update: I think what I might ultimately want is some way to indicate related posts. I'm not sure how to do it yet because doing it naïvely you quickly wind up doing some graph traversal. And, do you want simple sibling relations or parent/child relations, or both?

Another way to create relations between posts is to assign the same tag to them. For instance, the tag relating the "Kerry nuisance" posts might have been 2004/Kerry/nuisance, or something like that. I have a tag-based categorization scheme for my weblog in the works, but it's not going to be put in place any time soon.

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: This website | id 5749

15:13 (utc-4)
edited: 16:51 (utc-4)

 

Roger Simon on the longevity of the terrorist threat

Roger L. Simon: Safety Last:

Well, I have news for them - the situation wasn't resolved in eighteen months and it is most likely not going to be resolved in eighteen years either. If they think the ups and downs we have seen in the last eighteen months are troublesome, that misjudgments were made, wait until they see some real ones. We are dealing with a mindset that blew up a railroad station in Madrid a few months ago and referred in their statements to the Reconquista of 1492. Eighteen months? Eighteen years? How about six centuries?

He also discusses Kerry's "nuisance" comments, saying:

Naturally, this is anxiety producing in the extreme and we all want to go back to "business as usual." Desperately. Some of us will run around pretending, or rather hoping, that the situation is only a "nuisance" - or could be. If only. This is gut check time in all our lives, even if we are not on the front lines. We have to be honest with our friends and relatives and, more treacherously, more complicatedly, we have to be honest with ourselves. Traditional ways of viewing things no longer hold.

Asymmetric warfare on the scale it exists now is really a new phenomenon in world history. That's why we have to fight differently as well.

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15:07 (utc-4)
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Nobel laureate calls for steeper tax cuts in US

Yahoo! News - Nobel laureate calls for steeper tax cuts in US. The Nobel Prize for Economics is still very much worth something (unlike the Nobel Peace Prize), and this Nobel laureate says that the Bush tax cuts weren't big enough:

"What Bush has done has been not very big, it's pretty small," Prescott told CNBC financial news television.

"Tax rates were not cut enough," he said. [Note: Bush wanted them bigger and didn't get what he wanted]

Lower tax rates provided an incentive to work, Prescott said.

Prescott and Norwegian Finn Kydland won the 2004 Nobel Economics Prize for research into the forces behind business cycles.

The American analyst, who is a professor at Arizona State University and a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said a large tax cut in 1986 had lowered rates while collecting the same revenue.

But "in the early '90s the economy was depressed by the tax increase in '93 by about four percent, and it's right at that level now," Prescott said.

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12:57 (utc-4)

 

Tales of spyware

Daring Fireball: For Whatever Reasons (via Alex). If I have to reformat another person's machine because of spyware on their system I'm going to be very unhappy. My friend's father had an identity theft with big charges on his credit card most likely due to spyware on his computer.

I say this to everybody multiple times: Don't use Internet Explorer. Most of my "come fix my computer" calls in recent history have all been because of spyware. It takes literally 5-6 or more hours to do the backup, reformat, full install of Windows and all their software, security updates, restore their data, etc. SP2 alone takes about an hour. It's crazy. And all the breaches are almost certainly traced back to Internet Explorer.

I mean, how do you make a piece of software so damn insecure that people regularly can install software on your machine from over the Internet through it?

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02:11 (utc-4)
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Belmont Club: Pillar of Salt

Belmont Club: Pillar of Salt:

Bai's article reminds me of one of those products which are described on the packaging as being a new space age, high-technology, portable illumination aid which on closer inspection turns out to be a flashlight. When the newfangled description of terrorism as a "blended threat" is subtracted, the entire program consists of the policies of the late 1990s. Bilateral talks with North Korea. Oslo. G-8. The United Nations. Warrants of arrest. Extradition requests. Not a single new element in the entire package, except the fancy rationale. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything objectionable about a flashlight, but a more candid characterization of Kerry's proposals is not a voyage into uncharted waters so much as return to the world of September 10; in Kerry's words "back to the place we were". It has the virtue of producing known results, and suffers only from the defect that those results do not include being able to prevent massive attacks on the American mainland.

Kerry's world, in a way, is where one goes if George Bush's vision proves false: the frying pan, as a place of refuge if one lands in the fire. As a negative vision it will always hold some attractions; which will grow in proportion to failures in the Global War on Terror and fade in proportion to its successes. Roger Simon succinctly described Bai's article as a plea to return to "business as usual", a call to the past from "the ultimate conservative". It is heartbreakingly pathetic in its own way.

This is about Matt Bai's article in the NY Times discussed earlier.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5740

01:50 (utc-4)
edited: 13:34 (utc-4)