tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43119867571343676802024-03-08T04:41:29.743-08:00Anacostia AngstPostings on this site usually cover politics, Intelligence, and military subjects in particular or national security in general. Culture occasionally makes the cut too. The author is a frequent contributor to journals on those same subjects. Quid rides? Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-89475894747954304542010-10-26T03:15:00.000-07:002010-10-26T03:34:33.454-07:00Public Education; Superwoman Resigns“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain<br /><br />(This is a short version of an essay which appeared in <span style="font-style:italic;">American Thinker</span> and elsewhere on 5 Oct 10. This op/ed appeared in the 10 Oct edition of the DC <span style="font-style:italic;">Current</span> newspapers.) <br /><br /><br />Education, like the economy and terrorism, has been elevated to a national security problem. Unfortunately, alarmist rhetoric is seldom matched by decisive action at the personal, municipal, or national level.<br /><br />In the nation’s capital, the President sends his kids to private schools. The average taxpayer, who exercises choice, pays twice; once for public schools and again for a private school where achievement is more likely. The District of Columbia has the worst public schools in the country. If educators were sued for malpractice; the school house might improve over night. <br /><br />The nexus of urban decay is often single party rule – a political sinecure where the incentives for reform are few. The recent Mayoral primary in the District of Columbia provides a cautionary tale. <br /><br />Unlike most urban Democrats, Adrian Fenty was a genuine reformer. He hired an Education Chancellor, Michelle Rhee; and gave her the power to fire teachers, relieve principals, and close failing schools - at the risk of putting her boss out of work. Indeed, Mayor Fenty lost the recent Democrat primary to Councilman Vincent Gray and now Ms. Rhee has resigned too. None of this is good news for kids. Predictably, the local union has already filed a suit to reinstate those 241 teachers fired for “poor performance.”<br /><br />When Fenty and Rhee touched the third rail of reform, the academic left mobilized. Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and law professor Mary Cheh made common cause. Weingarten is the anti-hero of Waiting for Superman, a documentary about public education in which Variety claims she is cast as “a foaming satanic beast.” <br />Satanic may be a bit of a stretch, but Weingarten might be the worst thing to happen to public education since head lice. <br /><br />Council members Cheh and Gray may be best remembered for taxes on plastic bags and soda pop – and removing chocolate milk from school lunches.<br /><br />Icons of the past often foretell the future. Other Gray supporters included Marion Barry and Eleanor Holmes Norton. Barry is best known as a drug addled former mayor. Delegate Norton and her Democrat colleagues in Congress killed the popular DC Voucher program which allowed over 3,300 lower-income children to escape the “ghetto” schools. <br /><br />The dim prospects for genuine schoolhouse reform in cities like the District of Columbia is not just a local phenomenon. The national outlook is grim too. <br /><br />When the academic Left brought the AFT into the DC mayoral race, the President and the Secretary of Education went to ground. As Fenty and Rhee were getting mugged by teacher union money, the national party leadership refused to campaign for education reform in their own front yard, the nation’s capital. <br /><br />Democracy is a bit of an odd duck; sometimes we get what we want and, just as often, we get what we deserve. A pathetic schoolhouse is only possible where no one has the courage or integrity to put children first. In self-segregating cities, the likely victims of inverted models are minorities, black kids in particular. Indeed, the most notorious example of “black on black” crime might be our public school system.<br /><br />Take the Dexter Manley case. Manley was an athlete who went through the entire Texas public school system and then played football for the Washington Redskins. After football, Manley landed in the Washington Lab School where he tested as a functional illiterate.<br /><br />Manley was victimized by a system that gave him a permanent hall pass for his race or his jockstrap, or both. If Manley’s teachers applied the same rigor for academics as his coaches did for athletic achievement, Dexter might be a different man today. <br /><br />For two generations, public school systems have been bottom fishing. Most grade and high school teachers come from the dregs of baccalaureates. And many of these underachievers are credentialed with “education” degrees with little or no substantive knowledge. And many of those weak teachers are now principals or administrators. In short, K through 12 has become an affirmative action program for unionized nitwits. Such swamps are not easily drained; and the muck is now generational.<br /><br />Yet black parents continue to vote for the urban plantation. Marion Barry ran and won four terms as mayor in DC. If he ran today, he would probably win again. Fenty, sober and progressive in the best sense of the word, was tossed after a term. One of the great ciphers in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death is black urban voters who continue to vote against their own best interests. <br /><br />On Sunday, 26 September, Education Secretary Arne Duncan appeared on Meet the Press and preached that “we must have the moral courage” to change. We have no evidence that Messrs. Gray, Duncan, or Obama have the courage or integrity to adopt any education policy any more enlightened than ‘business as usual.’ And who waits for superman if superwoman has been run out of town?<br />________________________________________<br /><br />The author is a graduate of Cardinal Hayes HS in the Bronx. He also writes at G. Murphy Donovan and Agnotology in Journalism.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-45850271731869779272010-09-19T05:30:00.000-07:002010-09-20T04:11:23.576-07:00Islamophobia or Masochism?"I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms truth." - Thomas Malthus <br /><br />The myth of the Islamic victim is one of the most jarring and dangerous false narratives of the early 21st Century. The whining began in 1978 with Edward Said’s Orientalism, a revisionist survey of Europe’s colonial treatment of Arab and Muslim countries and post-colonial attitudes in the West. <br /><br />In 1963, Said had landed an academic sinecure as an English professor at Columbia University in New York. He was at the time, a Palestinian refugee from Jerusalem and a self-described victim. Said’s augments provided the academic gravitas for a worldview with the following tenants: imperial Europe never understood or appreciated the “Orient” or its cultures, subsequent American policies in the Middle East reflect this ignorance, and anti-Zionism (nee anti-Semitism) is a legacy of colonialism – i.e. the Israeli plantation. In short, if some or many Muslim “victims” behave badly today; Europeans, Americans, and Jews have no one to blame but themselves. <br /><br />Or in barnyard logic; pigs might be peacocks if horses behaved better. These are predictable consequences when angry English majors attempt to write history books. Said’s Orientalism still sells well today on campus.<br /><br />Never mind that military, political, and religious conquest was the dominant external idiom for Islam from the 7th through the 15th Centuries. Indeed, one in four worldwide today claim to be Muslims. And never mind that many Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Enlightenment notions of reason and democracy never took permanent root in the barren soil of dar al Islam. And never mind that most historians agree that the Ottoman Empire collapsed like a rotten pomegranate because the Islamic caliphate was corrupt, autocratic, and semi-literate. Never mind that the Sunni and Shiite varieties of anti-Semitism, irredentism, and xenophobia have roots that predate European colonialism and the state of Israel by millennia. And never mind that much of the contemporary, global Wahhabi, Deobandi, and Taliban sectarian intolerance, proselytizing, megalomania, misogyny, and violence (nee jihad) are flaws, internal to contemporary Islam. Never mind any of this and remember that Islam is a “religion” of peace – the philosophical and moral equivalent of any other religion.<br /><br />Never mind also that Bernard Lewis, a true scholar of Islam and the Near East, has discredited Edward Said’s self–serving assertions about imperialism, racism, and victimization while at the same time identifying “the theology of Jidad” as a “licence to kill.” Lewis also anticipated the “clash of civilizations.” Never mind that other historians like Paul Johnson have underscored Lewis’s analysis of Islamism in terms that makes Professor Lewis look too generous. And never mind that progressive philosophers of the left like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens have condemned Islamism as both an irredentist shield and totalitarian sword. Berman argues that Islamism is just another toxic variety of fascism – forever joining “terror and liberalism.” The Hitchens arguments speak for themselves:<br /><br />“…the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it…demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization… liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself… in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.”<br /><br />Never mind that serious scholarship of the right and left, historians and philosophers, have designated militant Islam a threat to Muslims and infidels alike. Never mind that Bill Clinton, President Obama, Hilary Clinton, the ground zero imam, and religion “scholars” like Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post have internalized Edward Said’s agnotology in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence and analysis. <br /><br />Never mind all those young Muslim men who think “martyr” is just another career choice; and never mind those burka bimbos who wear explosives like Allah’s bustier. Never mind Luxor, Lockerbie, 9/11, Beslan, and Mumbai. Never mind. Infidel and apostate chickens are just coming home to roost.<br /><br />Never mind any of these things and reject your Islamophobia. Reject Islamophobia and embrace Islamophilia; a progressive masochism which caters to your worst religious, political, cultural, and survival instincts. Embrace Islamophilia and end your days like Daniel Pearl; headless and butchered like Ramadan lamb. And in the end remember that Pearl died for three reasons; he was a Jew, he was an American, and he was a journalist.<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------<br /> <br />The author also writes at Agnotology in Journalism and G. Murphy Donovan.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-20847828428929408152010-06-18T05:49:00.000-07:002010-06-18T06:02:37.614-07:00Soccer; the dubious thrill of nil-nil“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.” - Billy Shankly<br /><br />Americans call it soccer. Europe and the developing world call it football. Semantics is just the start of the confusion. Although the foot is only one of two appendages that might be used to strike the ball in soccer; hands can only be used for clearing nasal passages, package adjustments, and obscene gestures. The head plays a pivotal and often decisive role in “futbol”. This is not the same as using your head, as in playing intelligently; this is using your head like a bat, to strike the ball. And the “header” is just one of the uses of the frontal lobes. <br /><br />Head butting an opponent is not legal in soccer, yet often decisive nonetheless. The last World Cup was decided by a head butt, not a header – again, keeping in mind that neither involves use of the hands. Unlike hockey, punching an opponent is considered bad form in soccer – unless you’re in the stands, where fist fights are ubiquitous. Nonetheless, a head butt on the soccer pitch can be like a “grand slam” in baseball.<br /><br />The 2006 Cup match between France and Italy in Germany was illustrative. Regulation play ended in a tie (1-1). Suddenly, the scoreless tedium of an “extra time” was relieved when Zinedine Zidane (sic) of France leveled Marco Materazzi (sic) of Italy with a head butt to the solar plexus. (European soccer moms are addicted to alliteration). The world’s most watched sport was then reduced to striker practice after Zee Zee was tossed from the game - and French café society. Italy exacted sweet revenge by winning the match in the shoot-out. <br /><br />The French may be infamous for their bad manners, but their aversion to actual combat is legendary. Reducing the World Cup finale to a “shoot out” in 2006 may have been one irony too many for the sensitive French.<br /><br />Many national teams play football, but few play well. Soccer is also the definitive imperial support. Just seven countries, four in Europe and three former Latin colonies, dominate the sport; although as many as 200 national teams qualify every four years. In eighty years, the same seven teams have monopolized the Cup, a group that includes England, the game’s inventor. <br /><br />Almost everywhere English footballers appear they contribute a riot or two in the stands. English fans have rescued the hooligan from the dustbin of 19th century history. “Houlie” is Gaelic for a kind of wild Irish party where alcohol is certain and bloodshed is likely. The Irish never care much about the merits of an argument, as long as it ends in a fight. The modern hooligan is a Brit fan who uses soccer as an excuse for a fight. Who would have thought that the English would ever make the Irish look good?<br /><br />Much ink has been spilt on the subject of soccer violence in the cheap seats. Yet, sports mayhem is not restricted to the British. Italian rival spectators must often be separated by razor wire and automatic weapons. And soccer fans are hiring personal body guards in South Africa this year. <br /><br />The link between the ballet-like game of soccer and fan violence is puzzling. Rationalizations abound. Boredom is the most obvious explanation for spectator hostility. Twenty two men with oversized thighs, underdeveloped torsos, and thick skulls chase a volley ball up and down a pitch for 90 minutes and the score is often zip-zip. In contrast, a basketball game will often see over 100 goals - and a game of hoops never concludes with a tie. <br /><br />In soccer, nil-nil is good because nobody loses. In such cases, futbol is a lot like no-contact dodge ball. Then there’s the tie game where no one loses either, yet the fellas seem to savor the joy of scoring - without actually winning. In tournament play, tied teams are awarded a point apiece anyway. Go figure.<br /><br />Soccer appears to be the perfect politically correct diversion for the European Union (EU) and the non-aligned. And American leftists have taken the game to a new level with “scoreless soccer,” a game where winners and losers are banished lest some kid come to see real competition as a good thing. Sadly, parents and politicians might be clueless or non-aligned, but football fanatics are not.<br /><br />Indeed, nil and tied scores might explain why fans often feel compelled to take matters into their own hands. Any large gathering of seething partisans will often reach a critical mass when their expectations are unrealized on the playing field. A soccer eruption is often ignited by the sight of heavy breathing, the scent of testosterone, the taste of alcohol, and the angst of ancient tribal animosity. <br /><br />The homoerotic voltage generated by twenty two men running, sweating, and posturing – but not scoring - is second only to a bull fight, where several gents dressed for the Nutcracker torture and kill livestock to amuse voyeurs. Soccer players often reinforce stereotypes after the rare victory by removing jerseys and collapsing in a wet pile of man hugs and writhing bodies. <br /><br />Female players often stage similar rites, but no one seems to notice. For lady footballers that lack of upper body development might be more of a handicap. In contrast, it’s hard to imagine Tiger Woods peeling off anything on the 18th green or Peyton Manning dropping his knickerbockers at the Super Bowl.<br /> <br />And surely there’s a price to be paid when there’s more action in the stands than on the field. The chariot riots of ancient Constantinople provide a cautionary tale. Then as now, opposing teams were identified by special colors. The emperor Justinian was rash enough to let his bias be known by throwing some “green” riders in jail.<br /> <br />Imprudence was just one of Justinian’s flaws; he married a harpy, raised taxes, passed unpopular laws, and pandered to the hated Persians across the Bosporus. Any similarity to any living politician is strictly coincidental. <br /><br />On 13 January 532 AD, green fans rioted in the Hippodrome and the melee quickly consumed the city. Most of the town, including the great cathedral, was torched. When the greens again convened, to crown Justinian’s rival, Byzantine legions under Belisarius stormed the Hippodrome and slaughtered 30,000 sport’s fans. Today, Justinian is known as “the great” not just because he was a poor loser, but also because he was an early inspiration for sporting mayhem and incendiary urban renewal.<br /><br />Those who celebrate international sports seldom recall that the original Greek Olympic Games tested military skills. And most modern sports are direct decedents of later Roman blood sports. The vestiges of guts and gore still thrive in the EU and among the non-aligned. Bull fights, dog fights, chicken fights, public executions, stoning, flogging, snake charming, and fox hunting are still popular with the masses and the elites. As with many public amusements, the prospect of decisive, if not terminal, violence is the spice that fires all sport. And so it is with futbol; the average fan gets no satisfaction or ambiguous thrill from a soccer score that reads nil-nil.<br /><br />This essay appeared in the 18 June 10 edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">American Thinker</span>. <br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />The author played high school sports at the Lt. Joseph Kennedy Jr. School in the Bronx, but he did not play soccer. He also writes at G. Murphy Donovan and Agnotology in JouralismG. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-84920974983789011202010-01-06T06:51:00.000-08:002010-01-06T06:51:19.285-08:00The Last Great Tiger-Hunt<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/the_last_great_tiger_hunt.html">The Last Great Tiger-Hunt</a>G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-21217745026018421672009-12-21T05:00:00.000-08:002009-12-21T05:00:27.969-08:00Whistling in the Dark<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/12/whistling_in_the_dark.html">Whistling in the Dark</a>G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-47065671097205737462009-12-04T15:22:00.000-08:002009-12-12T16:39:12.574-08:00Kicking the Can in Afghanistan“Kick the Can” is a child’s game familiar to kids from large cities. The only equipment required is an old tin can and a few willing children. The skills in play are stealth and speed. Like “Hide & Seek,” all but one of the players hides; and then they are sought by the solitary hunter. A caught player must be escorted to “jail” and remain in the detention until all players are captured or a free player breaks from cover and “kicks the can” before being caught himself. <br /><br />Few kids win this game often, because, as the number of players increases, the odds that one will prevail against many, decreases. The hunter has two handicaps other than numbers; he doesn’t know the location of the other kids and they get to choose when to race for home. The farther a hunter strays from home base, the more vulnerable he becomes. With “Kick the Can,” all initiative is ceded to the quarry - a kind of fool’s game for solitary hunters. <br /><br />At the risk of abusing a metaphor, we have now embarked on a national strategy that looks for all the world like such a fool’s game; and, in the process, ignores rules even a child might understand.<br /><br />The first rule is that one side doesn’t get to make the rules of the game. In Afghanistan, declaring an arbitrary time limit, not only telegraphs your moves, but does nothing save ratchet up the pressure on the home team. If we can set aside for a moment all the campaign nonsense about wars of “choice” and wars of “necessity,” we might consider the blowback from Iraq. Having reversed the sectarian poles in Baghdad, might not the “progress” we see there be a kind of prudent economy of force? The Shiite majority may simply wait for the clock to run out now that we have set a date certain for withdrawal. The King of Jordan warns of a Shiite Crescent to the north of Israel. Is he wrong?<br /><br />One side doesn’t get to control is the number of players by fiat either. The arbitrary designation of just one leader (Osama bin Laden) and a single terrorist organization (al Qaeda) as the “core” of the problem ignores a much larger threat with a global reach. Islamic fundamentalism is not limited to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Indeed, the ideology and financing on the Sunni side originates in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our erstwhile “allies.” The militant threat on the Shiite side of the threat equation originates with Iran – now a nuclear aspirant. If Iraq was a distraction from the real threat in Afghanistan, how is Afghanistan not a distraction from the real threat in Iran? <br /><br />The truth about Iraq is that it was a corrupt totalitarian Arab state that was a menace to its corrupt theocratic Arab neighbors. Now Iraq is a corrupt Shiite state that in all likelihood will pursue a sectarian alliance with Iran. The truth about Afghanistan is that it is a tribal, if not feudal, mélange besieged by naïve Western apologists. The truth about Pakistan is that it is a corrupt janissary that might be one bullet away from theocracy. The truth about Iran is that it is already the world’s first and largest Shiite theocracy; a so-called Islamic “republic.” We might add that Tehran makes no secret of its quest for the bomb and makes no secret of how they might use it. The truth of all of this is that the threat is not a specific terrorist or a specific terror group; and surely the threat is not a specific Muslim country or a specific state sponsor. <br /><br />The malignant bloom of jihad and theocracy within Islam world wide is the true threat. This menace is not simply demographic; it is also political. Theocracy is the goal of Islamists of every stripe; to replace secular law with a religious monoculture. And the final and most worrisome truth is the inability or unwillingness of national security specialists, in general, and President Obama, in particular, to recognize any of this.<br /><br />Tehran is yet another example in the Muslim constellation where we presume to make the rules of the game; we assume that the Persians can be jawboned or threatened with “sanctions” to relinquish their nuclear ambitions. True pluralism and diversity in the world today might be measured by the numbers of illusions we harbor about those who would make our worst nightmares come true. <br /><br />Our new strategy announced on 1 December by the President at West Point has two components; moderation and denial. With the moderate approach we are neither “all in” nor “all out” in Afghanistan. We have limited our targets to one leader and one terror organization – and a kind of half-baked “nation building”. In Afghanistan, we aspire to do what the British and Soviets could not. The English used to strap insurgents to the busy ends of cannons and the Soviets used to level villages from the air. Our tactics are different; we plan to conquer Islamist fanatics with kindness - moderate on moderate.<br /><br />As we try to walk the middle way, play the “moderate” game, we should be mindful of what everyone’s favorite moderate over in Istanbul said recently on the subject. Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the adjective “moderate” was an insult to the faith. “Islam is Islam and that’s it;” according to our NATO ally, the Turkish Prime Minister. We must commend Erdogan for his candor and doctrinal consistency. Apparently, being moderately Islamic is a little like being moderately pregnant.<br /><br />The second component of the West Point proclamation is denial. “Islam is one of the world’s great religions” we are told. We are led to believe that Jihad, Sharia, cultural irredentism, misogyny, and fifty years of terrorism have nothing to do with Muslims in general or Islam in particular. Never mind that prominent Muslims tell us otherwise so frequently that we can not or will not hear what they say. We insist that those who say it do not mean it or those who mean it can’t be taken seriously. Yes, they speak about Islam, but the do not speak for Islam; so goes the mantra. The quest for Sharia and Kalifa is dismissed as the fantasies of a Muslim fringe.<br /><br />Criticizing the general outlines of the West Point strategy is necessary but not sufficient. The specifics of a modest reinforcement, constrained by an 18 month timeline, also deserve some scrutiny. No markers were set in the West Point plan; but military operations analysts have been looking at such campaigns, including Afghanistan, for decades. Military Operations Research (MOR) is an aggregate of disciplines that attempts to size forces and examine the variables that might lead to victory or stability. These disciplines include; statistics; probability theory, game theory, modeling, and simulation among others.<br /><br />Three variants of OR have been applied to Afghanistan or similar contingencies; force to force comparisons, force to population models, and most recently, strategy to strategy comparisons. All three reach similar conclusions; force allocations are too small and the strategy will not work in any case. The conclusion of just one of these analyses from the RAND Review speaks for all three. <br />This analysis concluded that some combination of 500,000 troops or police might be required in Afghanistan alone, not for victory, just for stability. Or in the words of the report: “The extremely low force ratio for Afghanistan, a country with a larger population than that of Iraq, shows the implausibility of current stabilization efforts by external forces”. <br /><br />This is the polite way of saying there are not enough US or allied troops in the field to do the job – nor is an adequate force likely to be deployed. For a government contractor, this kind of candor is rare, indeed. The idea that the allies will fight al Qaeda and the Taliban while training and equipping 400,000 competent Afghan cops and soldiers in 18 months is also delusional. The majority of recruits would have to come from the Pashtun tribes and these folks haven’t given up much since Roxanne married Alexander.<br /><br />In short, General McChrystal probably underestimated the theater problem to begin with - and President Obama certainly didn’t give him what he asked for anyway. We have to assume that the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the White House are aware of the available studies and have chosen to ignore their conclusions and press their luck in the tribal mountains of Afghanistan anyway. Ironically, a previous attempt to control this area was called “the great game”.<br /><br />As in “Kick the Can,” numbers matter and we appear to be playing a fool’s game; the allied expeditionary force has little or no edge in South Asia. Short of a catastrophe, in 18 months, we will still be asking “what is to be done?” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we may still be playing “Kick the Can” with the larger problem in the Muslim world.<br /><br />---------------------------<br /><br />This essay apeared on <span style="font-style:italic;">American Thinker</span> 8 Dec 09. Author also blogs on <span style="font-style:italic;">Jenkins Hill</span>.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-6853206429591276972009-12-02T06:27:00.000-08:002009-12-02T06:46:04.375-08:00Rose Colored JournalismNames for most of our sciences have Greek roots, a tradition that goes back to Aristotle. Every few years, a new one appears that invariably will be an “ology” of one sort or another. And so it was with “agnotology” several years ago. Here we have a compound of two Greek words; agnosis- “not knowing” and logia – “the study of”. The study of ignorance would be the literal meaning. The word was coined (2001) by Robert Proctor who teaches at Stanford. He was concerned that “junk” science was being used to defend the indefensible, things like cigarette smoking. More recently, agnotological evidence in the global warming hypothesis has been exposed. Specialists define the problem in several ways; a deliberate attempt to mislead, a perpetuation of ignorance, or neglect of known truths. Culturally induced ignorance is the favored definition. <br /><br />Put another way, every day ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, and therefore ethically neutral. Agnotology, on the other hand, would be a willful misconstruction, perpetuation, or avoidance. The difference between agnotology and an information vacuum is like the difference between ignorance and stupidity. With stupidity, you know the truth, but refuse to accept it – or you perpetuate falsehoods.<br /><br />Giving this phenomenon a name is a new development; but clearly several related practices have been around for centuries. Politicians use “opposition research” to discredit opponents, intelligence agents use disinformation, and soldiers use psychological operations (aka PSYOPS) to confuse the enemy. Nonetheless, to date, the few experts in the agnotology field seem to agree that Media, print and broadcast, is the prime suspect for the modern practice, the antithesis of “enlightenment” - culturally produced ignorance. False narratives might be a good way to think of the agnotology that we encounter on a daily basis.<br /><br />None of this is news or a surprise to anyone who can read a newspaper or use a TV remote. The editorial pages of most papers and magazines are awash with untutored opinion masquerading as fact or truth. Publications like Newsweek feature pages of opinion now before they get to the actual news. The message of such a format is clear; spin is more important than facts.<br /><br />Interviews with so called “newsmakers” are a favorite venue for creating false narratives. Two recent examples from the headlines illustrate the political agnotology problem: The Fox News interview with Bill Clinton (26 Sep 06) and PBS’s more recent interview with Hilary Clinton (10 Nov 09) in Berlin. <br /><br />First, a few words about the respective journalists. Chris Wallace of Fox News comes from the pit bull school of journalism. He does not suffer fools gladly, nor does he allow politicians to make excuses or cook the books. He also asks tough questions and tough follow-ups. Charlie Rose of PBS is the polar opposite of Wallace. Rose is more like an obsequious poodle who could serve as a role model for any state funded news anchor. He asks banal, if not leading questions, many of which he answers himself. Rose allows his political guests to make speeches and rattle on with talking points; he seldom challenges self-serving assertions with follow-up questions. <br /><br />Comparing the two Clinton interviews, a reader is struck by two things. First is the difference between a journalist who is a truth seeker - and a journalist who facilitates false narratives. The second is the consistent self-serving, albeit mendacious, stories that the Clinton’s continue to tell over the years. <br /><br />The major themes of the Clinton national security saga are: Bill is a victim; specifically, a victim of a right-wing conspiracy. He did all that could be done about terrorism; no one knew anything about al Qaeda until he and Richard Clark came along. Today’s problems in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are due to the “mismanagement” of the Bush administration. And the specific threat from bin Laden and al Qaeda today is a legacy of the Bush, not the Clinton years. The central false narrative is the assertion that bin Laden and al Qaeda represent the “core” of the Islamist threat. In short, once bin Laden is dead and his organization neutralized, American will be avenged and all will be well with Islamists everywhere. Let’s look at the relevant portions of the interview transcripts.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Wallace fox hunting circa 2006<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mike Wallace</span>: …when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said, "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops." …Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole… after the attacks, … bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and there was no response…Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?...The 9/11 Commission said: "The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bill Clinton</span>: …All right. Let's look at what Richard Clarke said. Do you think Richard Clarke has a vigorous attitude (sic) about bin Laden?...The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there… After the Cole (attack), I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden… But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying…So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me… you falsely accused me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia. No one knew Al Qaeda existed then… I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq…And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever… I did everything I thought I responsibly could.<br />A few weeks ago Hilary Clinton took the opportunity to perpetuate her husband’s narrative on PBS.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">ROSE COLORED JOURNALISM CIRCA 2009</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Charlie Rose</span>:…is a Taliban in control in Afghanistan a threat to the United States? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hilary Clinton</span>: Yes. And to many of us, the principal objective is still to defeat, capture, kill the Al Qaeda leadership. We do think that is important…It’s a core issue for us… and much of what President Obama and the rest of us in this administration have been working on for the last eight months is that given the failures of the last eight years to capture and kill the Al Qaeda leadership…So he will be clearly defining the purpose of our mission, how it’s going to be reconstituted. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Charlie Rose</span>: What’s taking so long, and what’s the debate inside? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hilary Clinton</span>: Well, I have to say that I think we went through eight years where it at least appeared on the outside that there wasn’t enough time taken, there wasn’t enough thought given as to what we were trying to achieve and how we would achieve it. There were a lot of midcourse corrections. Witness the surge in Iraq…The mission was, frankly, confused. There was a lot of talk during the prior administration that came pretty close to nation building, transforming Afghanistan…And we do bear some of the responsibility, frankly, for helping to create the very terrorists that we’re now all threatened by. <br /><br />We find it hard to believe that nobody knows where the Al Qaeda leadership is. And I think that there is no evidence that anybody in the government at the top levels knows. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Charlie Rose</span>: All right. So what’s the message of the Obama administration and from the secretary of state about the United States and its foreign policy intentions today? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hilary Clinton</span>: That we are back. Back as fully engaged. We’re not leaving any part of the world unattended to, because that was one of the most common complaints I heard… <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Charlie Rose</span>:.. what’s the impact of the global economic crisis? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hilary Clinton</span>: What we have done is by moving from the creditor nation that my husband’s policies helped to create to the debtor nation that we inherited from the Bush administration, made even worse by the lapses in regulation and the failure of oversight… I am a true believer in the… all these wonderful old-fashioned but very important values that (I) hold….<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Setting the Record Straight<br /></span><br />Bill Clinton’s recall or recitation of facts is flawed on many levels, but two stand out. He refuses to take little or any responsibility for the run up to the 9/11 attacks in New York, although the first attack against the Twin Towers took place on his watch. He also claims that no one knew anything about the al Qaeda threat until his administration. When Wallace refuses to accept these false narratives, the interview becomes a one-sided food fight. The ex-president descends to invective, paranoia, and name calling.<br /><br />Hilary’s narrative with Charlie Rose is more civil, and even less candid; if that’s possible. While trying to explain Obama’s national security and economic policy; she refers to the mismanagement of the Bush years on no fewer than five occasions. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton spends so much time looking backwards; she could be channeling Mullah Omar. Rose doesn’t question any of this. She goes on to insist that somehow America is responsible for creating terrorists. Rose doesn’t dispute this chestnut. She concludes with a hymn to old fashioned values. Rose smiles in agreement. Hearing either Clinton talk about values is a little like hearing Woody Allen talk about parenting.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The truth in what’s not said</span><br /><br />Yet the most damning evidence about the Clinton chronicles is what wasn’t said in either interview. Put aside all those Islamist provocations in the Clinton years, the attacks on: US embassies in Africa, US ground forces in Somalia, US airmen in Saudi Arabia, US naval forces in Yemen, and against civilians in the Twin Towers in New York. Put all that and Clinton’s dithering aside and recall that Kabul fell (26 September 1996) to the Taliban on the Clinton watch. <br /><br />Recall also the intern under the desk in the Oval Office; recall the perjury, and impeachment trial that followed. Recall all the ballyhoo about Madeline Albright as the first female secretary of state and then remember that every girl’s school in Afghanistan was shuttered on her watch. Recall also Christina Lamb’s description (2002) of the Islamist “street” in Kandahar in the Clinton years. Talking to a teen in a soccer stadium, she recorded this narrative:<br /><br />I‘ve seen more than a hundred (executions). I used to come because it was entertainment….The best time was during Ramadan because then there would be at least a hanging or amputation a day, sometimes three or four….we would buy pistachios or oranges. The person could be shot, hanged or sacrificed….you know, like sheep.<br /><br />Their hands would be tied and they would be laid on a block then their chest split open with a long knife and their guts spilled out. Women were tied to goalposts and shot down, or if they had committed adultery, they would be stoned….I saw some homosexuals have their hands and feet tied and a wall collapsed on top of them. That was interesting….<br /><br />They (the Taliban) made the family come and watch and collect the dead bodies. They used to keep an ambulance at the gate so when people had their hands or feet amputated they would be taken straight to the hospital. (pp. 246-249)<br /><br />The stadium where this “entertainment” took place was completed in 1996 with the help of American taxpayers – at the midpoint of the Clinton administration.<br /><br />This is the narrative of the Clinton years we don’t hear on PBS, most of the commercial networks, or in many print sources. We also don’t hear that the state sponsored theocratic barbarity in Afghanistan didn’t stop until George Bush sent in the Marines. We don’t hear that George Bush reopened those girl’s schools.<br /><br />And now we hear Barack Obama claim that he will “finish the job.” Would that be finishing the job that Clinton didn’t begin nearly twenty years ago; or finishing the job that Bush began so well? If the strategy enunciated by Mrs. Clinton on 10 November, i.e. moving forward by looking back, plays out; we are in for a dark future. Enduring questions about President Obama’s judgment fester on many issues: yet, none is more worrisome than this; why did he bring the Clinton circus back to town? Agnotology indeed!<br /><br />--------------------<br /><br />The author also blogs at; http://jenkinshill.blogtownhall.com/G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-68357686158127044302009-10-29T04:01:00.000-07:002009-12-02T06:26:00.395-08:00Electronic Autism“I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” – Joyce Kilmer<br /><br />A good idea is often the author of an institution; unfortunately, the institution often then becomes the enemy of the idea. Large and complex organizations are especially vulnerable to bureaucratic schizophrenia. Susceptibility seems to be aggravated by automated support systems. Digital deficit disorders are often magnified by the rigor and inflexibility of the binary logic that underlies all software. The “human resources” that design, manipulate, and monitor the digital and dot.com worlds are collectively, and often derisively, labeled “nerds” or “geeks”. Indeed, on a personal level, the symptoms of electronic autism are fairly obvious. <br /><br />Does your daughter prefer to text message or post the most intimate details of her life, including racy pictures, online instead of risking a real date with an actual boy? Does your son retreat to the basement or his room with a cell phone, an I Pod, a laptop, and video games instead of playing a sport or joining a club? Does your husband prefer holding hands with an electronic mouse after dinner instead of holding your whatever? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you get the picture.<br /><br />By all accounts, digital deficit disorders have now migrated to government and commerce. Electronic autism has gone viral; it has become a cultural phenomenon. The communications revolution that was supposed to create a warm and congenial global village has instead created a billion cold, unresponsive, and often hostile pockets of isolated indifference.<br /><br />Try asking a local, state, or federal agency a question online. Chances are your problem is not one of their automated options. Indeed, once you have exhausted the programmed prompts, you must begin anew in what often seems to be an endless loop. Good luck with a phone call! The response standards for government apparatchiks seem to be designed at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office. Economy is the touted rationale behind automated systems; yet local and federal bureaucracies and budgets still grow like that chubby, surly kid in your basement. You know, that child who doesn’t have time to chat with you because he or she has a thousand fantasy friends on Face Book, U Tube, or Twitter.<br /><br />The picture is even grimmer in the world of commerce where the gap between seller and buyer is growing as we speak. Debits to your account are posted instantly while credits might take days or months – especially if there is a dispute. The “float” is never to your advantage. All online problem resolution requires a run through the maze of online prompts; and then you get to attempt to talk to someone if you’re lucky enough to find a help number. Yet here again, you are run through another gauntlet of automated cues where the penultimate prompt tells you that “you are a valued client, all of our drones are busy, please hold for the next customer service representative.” These patronizing recordings are dishonest on three counts; if you were “valued,” someone would pick up the damn phone; the only “customer representative” in the equation is you; and “service” is never the primary design consideration behind any kind of “automated” customer relations. <br /><br />A single maple tree in Washington, DC provides all the evidence we might need to appreciate the consequences of electronic autism in government and business circles.<br /><br />Several years ago, it might be as long as ten; a medium size sugar maple blew over on Carolina Place, NW. The tree was caught, and still lies, on above ground utility wires that are maintained by three different “service” companies; power, cable, and phone. These utilities are complimented by a tree service company (Aspulundi) and the various bureaucracies in the DC City Government which oversee both trees and utilities. After years (yes, years) of complaints about this hazard to utilities, parked automobiles, and pedestrians; a pair of power company (PEPCO) trucks, with crews, appeared in September to reroute their wires off the tree. The tree was left to hang on the cable and phone lines, making the tree even more unstable with three power wires rerouted. <br /><br />When the absurdity of this “solution” was brought to the attention of the PEPCO crew, the chief indignantly called his superior who confirmed that the tree was the city’s problem and the other utility cables weren’t their concern either. The implied logic here is that each utility should reroute their wires in turn instead of removing the derelict tree which is bound to fall anyway - and that day is hastened each time a supporting wire is removed. <br /><br />Let’s see if we can follow the economic logic here. Instead of all five interested parties cooperating and agreeing to a common sense solution (i.e. removing the tree), at a cost of approximately one thousand dollars (confirmed by estimates); each party is pursuing separate solutions to the same hazard, where the collective cost will be many thousands of dollars. Keep in mind that the offending tree becomes more of a threat with each rerouting. Each of the five separate agencies, including the city government, is supported by automated response systems, information technology acquired in the name of efficiency and economy. Unfortunately, these systems, apparently, do not converse with citizens, customers, or each other.<br /><br />All of this might be just another humorous symptom of life in a one party town. Or maybe some folks would simply dismiss such Orwellian nonsense as another kind of inside the beltway “stimulus” package. Yet the cost is born by stakeholders; citizens and voters who in these difficult times might expect some prudence on the part of the nation’s capitol or their “service” utilities. The price of electronic autism grows daily; let’s hope they never run out of your money.<br /><br />(A truncated version of this essay appeared in the Washington edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Current</span>, 11 Novwmber 2009.)G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-56037547421488029782009-09-12T06:21:00.000-07:002009-09-13T06:41:29.740-07:00Monoculture(This essay originally appeared in the 16 Aug 09 edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">American Thinker</span>)<br /><br />“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it”. – George Orwell<br /><br />Monoculture is a term that has been freighted with a lot of baggage, mostly negative. The origin of this compound word is usually traced to agriculture where it is used to describe a farm or a farming community that relies on a single crop. Tobacco, cotton, sugar, and now corn, are examples. The advantages of monoculture farming are obvious; seed, soil, water and equipment requirements are uniform. Yet standardization has a down side. Uniformity makes crops vulnerable to a single pathogen or pest; and the soil, once exhausted, needs to be replenished. Newer varieties of seed or more pesticides or more fertilizer are required. In short, the single crop specialist, over time, must work harder and faster to stay in the same place - until he or the land is exhausted. The tipping point of monoculture is often defined by a single vulnerability.<br /><br />More recently the notion of monoculture has migrated to cyberspace. Here again it is used as a pejorative to describe alleged abuses by software or telecommunications monopolies; Microsoft operating systems, Google search engines or cable companies are frequently described as monocultures. The advantages of singularity here, like agriculture, are uniformity, consistency, and homogeneity. The disadvantages are also obvious. Like all monopolies, the lack of serious competition breeds complacency, arrogance, and indifference; inferior products and shoddy services. While good ideas often create good institutions, just as often, over time, that same institution becomes the enemy of the idea – especially new ideas. Here monoculture becomes a kind of totalitarianism; a cult of “my way or the highway”. <br /><br />Single party towns, cities, states and even countries often become political monocultures. National Socialists, Fascists, and Marxists are examples in the extreme. Once a single party achieves success, controls the levers of power; the dominant ethic often becomes the retention of power. An ideology that may come to power with appeals to diversity and pluralism often morphs into a culture of exclusion – a place where the external infidel (non-believer) and the internal apostate (independent thinker) become public enemies. Such developments are not limited to primitive political forms like monarchies and military dictatorships. Indeed, often the worst totalitarians begin as Utopian prophets. Even with democracies, the first free election is often last real election. <br /><br />America, often held up as the exemplar of democratic probity, is no exception. Some of the most dysfunctional states and municipalities are the victims of single party arrogance and mismanagement. The District of Columbia, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, San Francisco and possibly all of the state of California are examples.<br /><br />Utopian schemes from which monocultures rise always have two faces. Almost all international or regional organizations begin with high hopes for the comforts of conformity; and then reality sets in. Somehow we never get to know how regional parochialism is an improvement over national chauvinism. World organizations such as the League of Nations and now the United Nations are not much better. The most frequent consensus in these forums is the agreement to agree to do nothing about real problems or bad behavior. Maybe the world would be less safe without these organizations, without these “talking cures,” and maybe most of these forums are just job programs for otherwise unemployable international bureaucrats. There are few measures of effectiveness for what didn’t happen or “what might have been”.<br /><br />The problem with the layering of international, national and local governments is that eventually, like the monoculture farmer, you have to work harder and run faster just to stay in the same place. And as the shrewd Baroness from Finchley observed; “Eventually, you run out of other people’s money”. No government at any level creates wealth or prosperity; they consume it. Chaos is not an accident; it’s merely the logical consequence of unmanageable complexity or catastrophe. Sometimes the two are synonymous with homogeneity.<br /><br />None of this has ever deterred Utopian intellectuals who pedal uniformity, conformity and the quest for some enchanted ideology or technology which eliminates conflict and brings unity, peace, and justice to all. Serious people often take these things seriously. <br /><br />Karl Marx thought a world commune was possible if only the proletariat would rise and seize the moment. Little did he imagine that the proletariat would be hijacked by a vanguard of venal intellectuals. Marx seems to have slept through French history. Woodrow Wilson thought the League of Nations was a good idea and then Hitler thought he could bludgeon the world into Aryan consciousness. Albert Einstein thought world government was possible if only America would take the lead - proving only how little of the reason required for great science is fungible. Even Canadians got into the act; Marshal McLuhan forecast a global village united by communications technology. McLuhan hardly noticed that the number of nation states had doubled since WW II while the world was supposed to be bonding with Media cement. The post-colonial political centrifuge was at odds with the global village; the medium didn’t send that message.<br /><br />Today, another variant of Utopian unity and conformity darkens the horizon. Five hundred some odd years after the fall of Constantinople, religion is on the march again; this time the objective is Tel Aviv, Rome and all points west. Once again the barbarians are at the gate. The 21st Century version of monoculture is a triple threat; military, ideological, and totalitarian. Theocracy is the latest militant monoculture; and if Islamists have their way, it will be the last. <br /><br />All forms of monoculture are authoritarian in some respect; however, theocracy seeks to be totalitarian in all respects. For contemporary Islamists, there are no divided loyalties. National boundaries are irrelevant; only the boundaries of the Ummah (Muslim world) count. Civil or penal law is another abomination; there is only one law, religious law (Sharia). The separation of church and state is heretical; the religious community is the state, the community. <br /><br />For the fundamentalist, the division of the world into material and spiritual realms is the nexus of Western culture; the source of wars and all other woes. The divided authorities of democracies are at the root of a “hideous schizophrenia;” indeed, infidels and apostates are sick, slaves to a self-imposed angst. The jihadist is a humanitarian, a liberator. He represents one God (Allah), one law (Sharia), one messenger (Mohammed), and one message (jihad). With jihad, the medium is also the message.<br /><br /><br />In its most benign incarnation the jihad is simply a “struggle”. In practice there are several means, at least four ways to fight for universal unity: the struggle to improve self, study and accept the word of God; the struggle to spread the word of God, once properly understood; the struggle to do God’s work, improve the community; and finally, jihad is also the right and requirement to defend Islam with every violent means available – jihad of the sword. Yes, defend! By definition, the nature of jihad, the nature of the war (harb), is defensive.<br /><br />For the devout, the world is divided into two spheres: the house of Islam (dar al-Islam), they who have submitted to Sharia; and the house of war (dar al-harb), they who have yet to submit. Those outside of the Muslim community, or those within, who doubt, are living in a state of dangerous ignorance (jahiliyya). The danger is literal, by ancient and modern legal definition; apostasy is a capital offense, punishable by death. Ignorance itself is an aggressive threat, one that threatens to infect the purity and divide the unity of true believers. Eliminating ignorance is God’s purpose, Mohammed’s purpose, and the Koran’s purpose. It is also the right and duty of all Islamists to fight any ignorance of God’s will. The ultimate goal of militant Islam is one God, one law, one path, and one community of believers – in short, monoculture.<br /><br />The Islamist take on the role of ignorance in society however, is more political than theological; indeed, it is a convenient rationalization for aggression. The proper role of civil society, or civilization writ large, is not to clear every thicket of contradiction or ignorance; the proper role of authority in any society is to eliminate the deserts of intolerance. And there is little debate within the Muslim community on the meaning of jihad. Dr. Tawfik Hamid, a former mujahadeen, cautions; “The doctrines of jihad are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue. They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims”.<br /><br />For jihadists, means are variable; the type of jihad is tailored to circumstances – time, conditions, and place. What works here might not work there. The tactics may change but the strategy is constant; “two steps forward, one step back”. Mainstream or so-called “moderate” organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Akwan) make peaceful protestations on cue, yet their menace is underlined by spin-offs, cut-outs, and splinter groups which are more than happy to do the “wet” work as necessary. In one case a brotherhood operative, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, taught at a Florida university for three years before assuming command of Islamic Jihad in Syria. His first act as chief was to call for the elimination of Israel. <br /><br />In a more recent case, the grandson of the founder of al Akwan, Tariq Ramadan, was about to accept a teaching post at Notre Dame when his visa was denied. Supporters of Ramadan represent him as a scholar and “reformer”. Yet the facts tell another story. Tariq was probably happy to seek refuge at South Bend because British and French critics had exposed his irredentism and his defenses of bloody jihad in Europe. In short, Mr. Ramadan had been caught practicing taqiyya; a kind of Islamic dissimilation where you are not required to speak the truth to infidels. Indeed, Bernard Kouchner, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, has labeled Tariq Ramadan a “most dangerous man”. <br /><br />The Ramadan appointment has been defended in the name of free speech, academic freedom, and ecumenicism. Yet, there are no axioms of freedom that require the academy to provide a soapbox for hate speech; and more important, ecumenicism is not a suicide pact. Or as George Orwell might put it; “There are some ideas that are so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”<br /><br />The liberation theologists of Notre Dame are not alone; there is an emerging if not bizarre convergence between Western intellectuals and Jihad dissimulators; an odd couple coalition of the American Left and the Islamic Right. John Walsh, writing for the Harvard International Review, winter 2003, claims that “there is no evidence to undermine the Brotherhood’s peaceful rhetoric”. He also repeats, without question, the party line; “The Brotherhood has never ordered an act of terrorism”. <br /><br />In the March/April, 2007 edition of Foreign Affairs, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke took a similar tack in “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” where the title itself is an asserted conclusion. The problem with these arguments, and many like it, is the willingness to accept spoken or written assurances about non-violence while ignoring or rationalizing the violence <br /><br /><br /><br />itself. As a practical matter, the historical record, of deeds not words, is what should inform judgments. Surely there are peace loving Brothers; but, their existence in no way offsets the dark history and continuing excuse making for terror. Academic and official analyses of modern theocrats have two troubling deficits; little common sense and no sense of responsibility.<br /> <br />National security naiveté is not limited to journalists and academics. The July 2009 conference of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) provided a forum for Imam Warith Deen Umar, among others. He is the former director of NY State prison chaplains. Umar used the occasion to argue that a small number of Jews “control the world”. He offered White House aides Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as evidence. Iman Umar was preceded by Valerie Jarrett as keynote speaker. Ms. Jarret is a senior White House advisor for public engagement; her appearance was a first for any White House official. ISNA is a Brotherhood affiliate.<br /><br />Brotherhood proselytizers are now seconded in America by Hizb ut Tahir (HT), an organization now represented in at least 40 other countries. HT is a Sunni political party based in Palestine which openly advocates Kilafah, a unitary Muslim state controlled by clerics and Sharia. This theocratic movement has been outlawed in many Muslim countries; yet, they held their first open national conference in America in Illinois this July. <br /><br />Al Akwan and Hizb ut Tahir are thought to be the largest and best organized radical Islamic political movements in the world. Although they make frequent peaceful protestations; they both rationalize violent jihad, non-violent sedition, and anti-Semitism. The Brotherhood is infamous for its cut-outs or affiliates who represent a “whose who” of terror organizations including Hammas and al Qaeda. HT is thought to be a recruiting venue for mujahadeen who, once indoctrinated, are then passed on to line terror groups as required. Their alumni include known “jihad of the sword” soldiers including Abu Musad al-Zarqawi and Kalid Sheik Mohammed. Neither al Akwan nor Hizb ut Tahir appear on the State Department’s official list of terror groups.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />The incongruity of American kafirs (infidels) trying to rebrand al Ikwan as “moderate” is beyond ironic. From the Islamist point of view, a secular Muslim is two things; an apostate and a target. In Egypt alone, the most populous Arab nation, the Brotherhood or cutouts, have been responsible for hundreds of terrorist incidents and scores of assassination attempts, several of which have been successful. <br /><br />The Brothers assassinated Anwar Sadat and have been responsible for more than half dozen attempts against Hosni Mubarak. Al-Ikwan is illegal in Egypt where there are few illusions about “moderation”. The latest menace on the Israeli front, Hammas, is a Brotherhood export. <br /><br />The list of so-called moderates like Sadat who have been executed for apostasy is international. Benasir Bhutto was a special threat, a presumptuous woman and a secular Islamist. The most notable martyr to “moderation” was Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah. In August of 1996, he called for the US and “the civilized world to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism”. A month later, he was assassinated and hoisted on a lamppost by the Taliban as a public example. Najibullah had more than a dog in the fight; he gave his life trying to define the enemy. More than a decade later, Najibullah’s clarity is lost under a fog of politically correct euphemisms. <br /><br />This and other evidence that jihad apologists are willing to ignore is overwhelming. According to State Department figures, the number of terrorist incidents and casualties has increased tenfold since Najabullah’s death. More recently, a professional intelligence officer, Stephen Collins Coughlin, at the Pentagon, connected the dots linking historical Sharia precedents to contemporary jihadist military doctrine in a 300 page legal brief. Coughlin was labeled a “Christian zealot with a poison pen” and fired for his candor. <br /><br />His nemesis turned out to be a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. Apparently Major Coughlin was asked to moderate his scholarship and legal expertise at the behest of a special assistant to England, Hesham Islam. Egyptian born Islam was a “community outreach” expert for the Pentagon with ties to al Ikwan affiliates in America. Mr. Islam left his Pentagon post after several “anomalies” in his resume were exposed.<br /><br />If nothing else, Jihads of the tongue and of the hand, these “peaceful” struggles, provide a kind of plausible deniability, a convenient separation from those with blood on their hands, the jihahists of the sword. <br /><br />This jihad al-sayf is frequently literal. Never mind individual amputations or beheadings; recall the massacre at Luxor, the work of a Brotherhood splinter, where 84 were killed, 58 of them tourists, one of which was a child of five. Several were hacked to death with knives and swords. The literal symbol of the sword is lost on Westerners; the coercive power of the knife is not lost on Muslims.<br /><br />Children aren’t incidental casualties or collateral damage of jihad; they are often targets - especially females. At Beslan an entire grade school of over seven hundred was held hostage: 334 hostages were killed; 186 of these were children. Although the leader of the massacre was a Chechen national, Shamil Basayev; his crew, like most jihadist operations, was international. Several held British passports and some were associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque, London.<br /><br />In January of 2004, Basayev issued an annual report of sorts entitled “Nothing Can Stop this Jihad”. In it he highlights Russian losses and all the usual justifications common to such manifestos; appeals to Allah, blessings to the Prophet, cant about the righteousness of bloody jihad, castigations of kefirs , and one eerily prophetic note; he compares Russians to “children who close there eyes in order to hide”. Ten months later nearly 200 hundred Russian children were dead at Beslan. <br /><br />Religion is the heart of the Western predicament. On the one hand, smug intellectuals dismiss religion as some primitive superstition. In the process they underestimate the power of ideas, the significance of Jihad and Sharia; and their relation to military doctrine in the Muslim world. On the other hand, these same self-anointed progressives defend the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Here they are skewered on the horns of the political correctness dilemma; tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance. Separation of church and state is not the only core value in peril; the rights of women and children and freedom of thought and speech are also at risk under any theocratic ideology.<br /><br /><br />One constant of despotism over the centuries has been anti-Semitism. The modern jihadist is no exception. Not only are 20th Century atrocities like the European Jewish and Armenian Christian genocides denied by Islamic politicians, but ayatollahs and imams regularly use the Prophet and the Koran as touchstones for characterizing Jews as “apes and pigs”. This bigotry is not a “fringe” phenomena; it is a thread of Muslim history. Indeed, with Saudi Arabia and Iran, intolerance is a state sponsored activity. Despotism has only three requirements; false prophets, slaves to immutable doctrine, and naïve apologists.<br /><br />The oft repeated mantra that Israel, not Jews, is at the heart of Muslim angst is another deceit. Anti-Israel rhetoric is mostly anti-Semitism shaded with a political veil. The structural bigotry of Sunni Deobandis and Wahbis all predate the state of Israel, in one case by millennia. Wahabism is the state religion of the wealthiest Arab state, Saudi Arabia; the irredentism of al Ikwan is the most infamous modern export of Egypt, the most populous Arab state. The Brotherhood was created in Egypt two decades before the state of Israel reappeared in the Levant. The official hate speech of Shiite Iran is a modern phenomenon, but its literary antecedents are as old as the Sunni variety.<br /><br />Surely the mere presence of modern Israel in the midst of the Arab world is itself an irritant; and many Israeli policies have aggravated the problem. However, any honest review of historical Muslim literature and commentaries reveal anti-Semitism to be part of the warp and weft of ancient and contemporary ideology. Just as surely apologists can find appropriate citations to the contrary; nonetheless, these exceptions are not the rule. <br /><br />Official irredentism has been underlined by Arab and Muslim states at numerous human rights forums. The 60th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 7 April 2004, was no exception. Whenever issues such as the stoning of women, honor killings, mutilations, and the apostasy death penalty are raised, Muslim officials reject any criticism as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. (Dar al-Islam scholars recognize secular or national boundaries when convenient to their arguments.) Only two Muslim states address the apostasy issue in their penal codes (Sudan and Mauritania); both mandate the death penalty. In all other Muslim states the issue is covered by religious law where the penalty is the same. Wherever elected politicians are superseded by clerics, the first casualty is reason.<br /><br /><br /><br />Religious dogma is not negotiable; the idea that “moderate” Islam can or will compromise core tenants is absurd. Why change a winning strategy? In contrast, secular democratic values in Europe and America appear to be malleable at their best and marketable at their worst. Indeed, serving and retired presidents, premiers, cabinet officers and military personnel all avail themselves of Petro-retainers with unseemly regularity. This is not to suggest that such officials are for sale; but their values may have lease options.<br /><br />Some ask the question; why now? Why has radical jihad now come to dominate the threat spectrum? The answer is simple; because it can! The theosophy, dogma, and militant doctrine (as Major Coughlin reminds us), have been elaborated for centuries had anyone cared to look. The Arab world, especially, now has the resources to resume the “struggle”. The largest transfer of wealth in human history is underwriting the attempt to undo the last five hundred years of human history. <br /><br />Nonetheless, the Islamic chimera of religious homogeneity is still a pipe dream. Cultural, political and theological unity can not be validated by virtue, history, or reason. Put aside for a moment the record of utopias or even the practical difficulties of establishing or maintaining a universal theocracy. The real evil is coercion. No political monoculture can succeed or be sustained without force and oppression. This is the great moral contradiction of all utopian visions and with militant Islam today; a warped amalgam of military terror, bigotry, politics, cultural arrogance, and misappropriated wealth. <br /><br />Surely persuasion is one of many tactics used on believers, doubters, and infidels. Yet, in the end, like all totalitarian schemes; theocracy is underwritten by fear and the threat or reality of force. Anwar Sadat put it best before his assassination; “Fear is the most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people”. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Najabullah and Sadat had the integrity and courage to identify the theocratic threat and its consequences – and they paid with their lives. Sadly, there are few signs at the moment that any Western politicians, save a few Israelis, are worthy of their mantle or their sacrifice. Appeasement is not so much a hopeful strategy as it is a symptom of fear, a signal of weakness, and a harbinger of defeat.<br /><br />All monocultures are destined to fail eventually; they all suffer from insurmountable internal contradictions. Healthy biological and political cultures require diversity, competition and pluralism to thrive. Unfortunately, the lessons of the last century seem to be forfeit by first decade of this century. In an age where any principle or weapon might be sold if the price is right, the cost of relearning the futility of utopian visions will be high. Islamic monoculture is sure to fail, but before it does, the jihad could wipe more than Israel “off the face of the earth”. Words like holocaust may be inadequate to describe the impending clash.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-47165360183358071172009-07-11T18:44:00.000-07:002009-10-13T15:45:24.279-07:00Privatizing National Intelligence Estimates(This commentary appeared in the Winter, 2009 edition of the Journal for Intelligence and Counterintelligence udder the title; "Escaping the Wilderness of Mirrors")<br /><br /><br />There was a time when most National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) were classified, cloistered and rarely read. Recurring estimates were dusted off periodically and circulated in the Intelligence Community for coordination. “Happy” might be changed to “glad” and the cycle would begin anew. Indeed, the NIE was formatted not to be read, they all began with the punch lines, “Key Judgments”. Most readers stopped there.<br /> <br />All of this changed in the wake of the ‘weapons of mass destruction fiasco’. The subsequent NIE on Iraq was sifted above the fold like the ashes of Herculaneum. We have come full circle on analysis, from cooking the books to opening the books. CIA, especially, is clearly trying to address a credibility problem.<br /> <br />Unfortunately, this effort does not speak to the two faults at the heart of the analysis problem; competence and integrity.<br /> <br />As far as anyone knows, any given estimate might be written by one or sixteen nameless intelligence agency bureaucrats. Dissenting agencies appear in footnotes. In most cases, the point men represent agency politics not expertise. Few experts of national repute work in the bowels of Intelligence agencies. Most national estimates are not just group-think, worse still; they are bureaucratic group-think. They don’t represent good analysis so much as they represent consensus, however brief.<br /> <br />The sixteen agency circus is defended in the name of analytical diversity. These same agencies are then condemned as “stovepipes” when the diverse fail to converse; a classic ‘cake and eat it’ argument.<br /> <br />Integrity is the predictable victim when the key dynamic of the process is bureaucratic log-rolling. The closet battle between Air Force Intelligence and all others during the Cold War is a classic example. In that period, Air Force footnotes to strategic force NIEs would exceed the word count in the body of estimates. Those infamous bomber and missile “gaps” were products of this struggle. Maxwell Taylor’s, Uncertain Trumpet, documents some of the blow back from this era. Strategic force assessments are unique insomuch as the threat is tied directly to budgets. The math is simple, bigger threats equal bigger budgets. <br /> <br />Beyond weapons systems, cooking the books is an old and honored tradition in Intelligence Community analysis. The spectrum of fakery includes false ignorance, data manipulation and outright invention. Cases of premeditated ignorance would include the Israeli nuclear weapons program, the Tonkin Gulf incident and the KAL 007 shoot down, just to name a few. Blatant statistical manipulation was part of the heady brew during the McNamara years of the Vietnam War. Bomb damage, strategic hamlet, pacification and Vietnamization statistics, masquerading as measures of effectiveness, were all used to obscure an unpalatable ground truth. More recently, since 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War, evidence seems to have been manufactured wholesale to support foregone conclusions. <br /> <br />After any real or imagined intelligence failure, the inevitable ad hoc commission comes to tell us how to fix the beast. Invariably, the answer is more money and more bureaucracy. Bigger is always better.<br /> <br />The 9/11 Commission and the more recent Iraq Study Group are illustrations. None of their bromides address the obvious solution to better national security analysis; ending the Executive Branch monopoly. There is no good reason for national security analysis to be the exclusive purview of any branch of government or worse still, a cabal of agencies with vested interests in outcomes. Privatization is the answer for analytical competence. Transparency is the answer for product integrity.<br /> <br />A small group of independent experts could convene as required to prepare assessments. The membership might vary as the subject requires. Experts might be compensated on a per diem basis. Politicians, lobbyists and obvious partisans need not apply. Intelligence agency functions could then be restricted to what they do best; collecting, processing, archiving and Tactical Intelligence. <br /> <br />Transparency might also eliminate special interest ad hoc analysis within the Intelligence Community. The Douglas Feith group which used to operate out of the Pentagon comes to mind. <br /> <br />Assessments from an independent group of experts might also benefit from single hand and named authorship, much like Supreme Court decisions. Dissenters would write minority opinions. Court analysis is attributable and transparent. National security analysis should not have lesser standards. Indeed, the current practice of giving the Executive Branch an exclusive on national security analysis is a little like giving the power of judicial review to Congress.<br /> <br />Calling our national assessments “intelligence” estimates is also misleading. The issue is national security not Intelligence. Intelligence is merely one of the ingredients of analysis. Most data, method and even thinking that go into analysis are unclassified. Surely sources and methods of intelligence collection need to be protected by classification. So be it. Nonetheless, classification should not be used as an excuse to obscure the whole process or product of national security deliberations. <br /> <br />If you were to visit the CIA web site, you might be led to believe that the NIE, and the process that supports it, is the gold standard in the Intelligence Community. Conversely, uninformed critics often sneer at Military Intelligence (aka Tactical Intelligence) as an oxymoron. In fact, our seamless net of tactical collection, identification, targeting and weapons applications is the Intelligence Community gold standard. This is not to say that the tactical folks don’t ever get it wrong. But when they do, their systems are self medicating. National estimates, on the other hand, have been a basket case for decades. <br /> <br />National security analysis needs to be separated from the Executive Branch and the Intelligence Community. Privatize immediately!<br /> <br /> -------------------------------------------G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-51483322310364284692009-06-14T02:45:00.000-07:002009-06-14T03:00:58.098-07:00The Best Among Us<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CMurphy%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="State"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.misspell {mso-style-name:misspell;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">On Memorial Day I unfurled a flag on my porch to honor the service of those who died, were wounded, or otherwise sacrificed for something greater than themselves. I do the same on the 4<span class="misspell">th</span> of July as a token of my appreciation for the advantages of democracy. We don't have a perfect country, but its better than most of the alternatives that I can think of. Having hung the flag the other day, I surveyed the streets in four directions and saw one other flag. One flag - as far as the eye could see on the <st1:place>Palisades</st1:place>, on Memorial Day, in this corner of the nation's capitol. I don't see flags as a token of patriotism. Like the flags that fly in every military cemetery; it’s simply my family’s way of saying<i> thank you - and remembering.
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<br /></i>Several days later, I picked up a copy of the neighborhood paper, <i>The Northwest Current,</i> and was greeted with an editorial headline; "Rolling Blunder," a <span class="misspell">snarky</span> put down of the annual Memorial Weekend tribute to veterans known as Rolling Thunder. Originally a remembrance of <st1:country-region><st1:place>Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region> era POWs and veterans, the "thunder" refers to the number of taxpayers who arrive each year on motorcycles. The complaint, apparently endorsed by the paper, concerns street closures and other inconveniences; including a "traffic nightmare" with "flags waving and motors roaring". </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">The author of this polemic is a reporter for the local ABC affiliate. He gets two columns of opinion space in most editions of<i> The Current </i>where he holds forth on every subject imaginable. Yet, I don't recall any complaints about street closures for rallies, marches, and marathons for every cause under the sun; including, most notably, a "million" man march organized by one of the nation's most noxious bigots. Hardly a month goes by in the <st1:state><st1:place>District of Columbia</st1:place></st1:state> without street closures for some special pleader, yet we should move the vets to "<span class="misspell">Hains</span> Point," a place most tourists couldn't find with a map and compass. Suggesting this venue, the District’s most notorious open air drug market, adds insult to injury. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">Journalists and TV networks often lament the recent decline in news readers and viewers. Yet, they seldom look to themselves or their product for an explanation. Consumers have not stopped reading or listening; they may have just stopped buying or reading slanted products that sneer at values or insult common sense. On the latter we could ask; what parade or demonstration doesn’t inconvenience someone?
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<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><o:p></o:p>Like most urban journalists, the author of “Rolling Blunder,” was probably opposed to the Vietnam War in particular; and my guess is today he would be opposed to war in general. For many like him, anti-war sentiment often morphs into a low key and patronizing contempt for servicemen and veterans. This seems to be the subtext of that recent editorial. This phenomenon, blaming the military for unpopular wars, is kin to blaming crime on cops or arson on firefighters.
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<br /><!--[endif]--></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">Having done its best to sugar coat an insult, the “Rolling Blunder” harangue <span style=""> </span>also presumes to instruct us on the difference between Memorial and Veteran's Day, as if self-evident were not a synonym for obvious. Indeed, Memorial Day commemorates those who died in battle or as Pericles, and later <st1:city><st1:place>Lincoln</st1:place></st1:city>, put it; “given the last full measure of devotion" to their country. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal">If we only preserved one holiday where we close streets, wave flags and make noise; I would choose Memorial Day. I would choose to honor the memories of those who paid so dearly to preserve the right of journalists and their editors to be small minded, self-absorbed, and insensitive to real inconvenience and true sacrifice. I would choose to preserve the minor inconveniences of Memorial Day because we need a visible reminder of the best among us so that we do not succumb to the worst.
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<br /><!--[endif]--></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-80406467769907820402009-03-27T10:41:00.000-07:002009-03-27T10:54:12.906-07:00Sister Mary WisteriaChristopher Hitchens’ <span style="font-style:italic;">God Is Not Great</span> and Bill Maher’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Religulous</span> are hysterical, not hysterically funny, just frenzied. If you didn’t know better, you might think that rabbis and priests were pursuing these guys through the salons of Georgetown and the gin mills of West Hollywood threatening them with bris, baptism and brimstone. They protest too much. Indeed, they seem to be self anointed; bi-coastal evangelists for nihilism.<br /><br />So let us review their arguments for rational atheism, their theology if you will. In the first instance, they reject the historical consensus on God. Never mind that every culture, large or small, has believed in some sort of deity. Secondly, they reject the common consensus (and common sense); that is, the faith of their peers. As a practical matter, see Pascal’s Gambit, the vast majority of people believe in some kind of superior being. They do so, not out of fear or ignorance, but also out of the certainty that humans can not be ‘as good as it gets’. Experience and common sense tells them that Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens can not be the apex of evolution. <br /><br />Another axiom for militant atheists is invective; laying the history of bad behavior at the feet of traditional religion. This is more than a little like blaming war on soldiers and crime on cops. The corollary of invective is ad hominem attacks; cherry picking religious figures to vilify. The Pope and Mother Teresa come to mind; every contemporary liberal’s favorite whipping posts – as if name calling were an argument.<br /><br />Yet, Hitchens saves the best of his worst for Blaise Pascal, the brilliant 17th Century mathematician and physicist who questioned the uses of reason, especially in matters of faith. Pascal celebrated and defended “the expected value of faith” and the “infinite” value of belief against any utility of relying on reason alone. Pascal argued that reason provides neither certainty nor truth. Hitchens calls this “sordid” and likens Pascal to “hypocrites and frauds” who abound in the “Talmudic Jewish” tradition. <br /><br />Polemicists like Maher and Hitchens confuse God with religion. Our entire ethical, legal and democratic tradition is a direct descendant of Judaism and Christianity. A Church is only one of many public institutions; each is populated with saints and sinners. Yet, without these influences, democratic capitalism is impossible. Indeed, it was an Augustinian monk who raised the most profound and lasting defense of free will and choice. <br /><br />Rational atheism is a kind of moral anarchy. Ethical autism has a long history with science; now compounded by the electronic autism of Eric Schmidt (Google as God). George Orwell could take another bow!<br /><br />Many missionary atheists, unlike Pascal, are not tempered by the humility of doubt. They can not say; I do not know. The can not say; I may never know. What they do say is that all that will be known shall be known by people like me; an enlightened, progressive, liberal, rational, scientific, intellectual elite. This group will take all of the credit and none of the blame for the mixed record of humanity and science since the Enlightenment. The ABC’s of modern warfare (atomic, biological and chemical weapons) were not created by nuns and rabbis. <br /><br />The heart of evangelical atheism is cowardice. What many can not say is what they truly believe: they believe that they and only they know the way forward – all else is backward; they believe that they should not be constrained by “arbitrary” ethics, morality or law; sounds too much like religion. Hitchens uses the phrase “unfettered scientific inquiry” to describe his vision of the future. Josef Mengele would be comfortable this euphemism.<br /><br />A profound, some would say fatal, conceit infects secular rationalists; the belief that there could not be any intelligence that is superior to their intelligence. They also believe what tyrants and oligarchs have always believed since the birth of philosophy; they are the philosopher kings (Plato); they are the vanguard (Lenin); and they are the master race (Hitler). They believe that they should do the thinking for the rest of us. They believe that men like Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky are as godlike as it gets. Hobbes called them necessary and Nietzsche called them supermen. <br /><br />Hitchens disinters Marx, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg in his rant against religion. This is typical Left logic; one which confuses secular saints with significance. The only possible service Trotsky and Red Rosie provide is to illustrate how the Left usually deals with apostates. Someone might also point out to Hitchens that Marx was not so much a descendant of the "rabbinical line" as he was a product of Teutonic philosophy and a virulent anti-Semite to boot. <br /><br />Things get very unscientific very quickly when you ask many atheists to define objectivity and reason. How do we separate our minds from the things we try to understand? Are rationalists capable of some out of body experience where they are devoid of inherited knowledge, historic influences, emotions, bias, prejudice and all the other sensibilities and tangential influences that plague ordinary mortals? <br /><br />If you listen carefully, you would never know that reason is just one tool, like arithmetic, that we use to understand. And you will seldom hear that most scientific method is a smoke screen for junk science – derivative research. Original research and controlled experiments are rare, very expensive and time consuming. Yet as long as academics get something into print, nobody seems to give a damn.<br /><br />In their hearts, these intellectuals do not believe in consensus; they do not believe in the wisdom of crowds; they do not believe in history or tradition; and if you have visited any modern American university campus recently, you will understand that they sure as hell do not believe in tolerance or democracy – at least not in any form you would recognize.<br /><br />Truth is what we choose to believe. The most difficult challenge for all study is to bridge that gap between analysis and acceptance. Any belief is more potent than any idea. And what we believe always has more to do with faith than reason; we can not test every premise for every action. We believe in something or trip over everything. The alternatives are chaos and autism.<br /><br />Here’s a common sense test for all those who think that reason trumps faith. If you have a choice between a committed rationalist with a PHD and a nun with a high school diploma; who would you trust to instruct your child? Sister Mary Wisteria wins this contest every time. Even community organizers send their kids to ‘religulous’ schools. Faith is just another word for trust; civilization is impossible without it. <br /><br />Thank God!G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-20531636769554155362009-03-24T07:10:00.000-07:002009-03-24T07:14:25.990-07:00Thin Ice and Electronic AutismA woman bore two children eight years apart. When the second child was an infant, mom was a little reluctant to leave her alone with the older girl. The mother feared her first born was jealous of the baby. Nonetheless, after constant pleading, the older girl was allowed to baby sit. Still fearful, Mom left the nursery door ajar, but stayed within ear shot. After a long silence, she heard her eldest whisper to the baby; “Tell me about God, I’m starting to forget”. <br /><br />Children are born believers. They have to be. No creature is more dependent on others to survive the rigors of infancy. Trust is the primal virtue that makes any society possible; family, enterprise or nation. Religions take advantage of these early inclinations with rituals of initiation: circumcision and baptism are examples. In time, an adult may choose from various degrees of observance, but they are not choosing among religion, faith or reason. Religion is cannon or cant, organized or not: faith or trust is a component of adult character; and reason is merely a tool – like arithmetic. The so called clash between “faith and reason” is a false dilemma. The first is a belief, the other is an instrument. There is no conflict. <br /><br />Atheism is a simple religion; a disbelief in God. Many who think of themselves as atheists also subscribe to subordinate doctrines such as secular rationalism or secular humanism; that is, all that we can or should know can be induced or deduced with the aid of scientific method or reason. As logic or even arithmetic, this is very thin ice.<br /><br />There are many roads to knowledge; reason is just one. We are born with a degree of inherited information, conscious or unconscious. Indeed, we stand on the shoulders of thousands of generations of ancestors. Call this information instinct, DNA or the collective unconscious (thanks to Carl Jung); it’s all the same. My neighbor has a terrier. The first time it got out of the yard, it caught and killed a squirrel; a blessing on my block. This dog did not have to learn to kill rodents. That skill is hard wired by generations of experience and breeding.<br /><br />Could we say less about humans? The English language is rich with patronymics that <br />suggest skill sets passed from generation to generation; Carpenter, Harper, Driver, Smith, Farmer, Butcher, Cantor, Levy, Knight, Mason, and Fisher - just to name a few. Call it heritage or genetics, these veins of inherited knowledge play a powerful role. And ground truth exists long before “science” examines it. If you’re broke, balancing your check book doesn’t change truth or reality. A little arithmetic merely confirms your poverty. <br /><br />Our senses are another way of knowing; what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell - and feel emotionally. Common sense, although not as common as we would like, is a way of knowing to often ignored or devalued by science. Senses and emotions are critical to human intelligence. Indeed, we all would like to be associated with “sensible” people. If we do not learn from what our senses tell us, no tool like reason will compensate. Indeed, academic rationalists and computer “geeks’ are notorious for their common sense deficits. This is no accident. <br /><br />Our true sixth sense is our feelings or emotions. Emotional responses, intuition, hunches, and gut feelings often guide what we accept or believe. If you can’t see a role for emotional knowledge, just talk to your daughter, sister, mother or wife. Indeed, the most difficult problem of human intellectual history is the chasm that separates analysis and acceptance. How we feel about thing is often more important than what we think. No amount of fact finding and logic will overcome a strong belief. Truth is simply what we choose to believe: reason is simply one of the tools that get us there.<br /><br />Any belief is more potent than any idea. An idea can turn on a dime: a belief is truth derived from ideas. If you don’t believe in something, you will probably fall for anything. This American mantra can be traced to ancient Greece, the trail of Socrates. He was tried for lack of piety and corrupting his students. He questioned the Athenian belief in democracy; he challenged the very freedom that made his questions possible. Unfortunately, Socrates didn’t have the benefit of Aristotle’s logic. Socrates wasn’t executed; he swallowed his foot and died from internal contradictions.<br /><br />Democracy assumes a culture of belief, faith and morals; atheism is a kind of moral anarchy. All of what we think of as the best of Western culture, including our legal system, has proceeded apace with the evolution of the ethics associated with Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, democratic capitalism (are you listening Noam?) is impossible without these influences. The moral code that these great forums continue to debate, imperfect as it may be at times, is our cultural cement. The most advanced and just societies on earth are the product of these ideas. None of this proves a thing about God.<br />Yet, it illustrates the value of faith. Cotton Mather is as American as popcorn.<br /> <br />Mather likened mankind to a spider suspended by a thread over the fires of hell. Science tells us that we literally float on a sea of molten lava below and we are dependent on the fires of the sun above. We are also told that a meteor could end life as we know it in an instant. A few nuclear weapons might do the same. As Jared Diamond points out; our world will end with a bang or whimper (some unknown pathogen). How do scientific assessments differ from Mather’s spider or the horsemen of the apocalypse?<br /><br />In several respects, reason is, and maybe should be, a last resort. The most important questions facing humanity will not be answered by mathematicians or engineers. Further, reason it is a relative newcomer – Aristotle forward. Our moral and genetic heritage, our common sense and our emotions have been with us from the beginning. We were a race of thinkers long before Plato’s pupil formalized logic. In recent memory the luminaries of rational atheism include Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Adolph Hitler, Josef Mengle, and Joseph Stalin - and now we have Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and Eric Schmidt, just to name the celebutantes. <br /><br />If you read Hitchens’ latest polemic (God is Not Great), you might suppose that priests and rabbis were pursuing him through the salons of Georgetown – somehow infringing on his right not to believe. You might also think invective was a logical argument. The name calling is directed at all manner of secular apostates like Mother Teresa. Ironically, <br />Christopher Hitchens’ atheism mirrors the certainty of orthodox clerics.<br /><br />The Maher film (Religulous) fails as logic or humor. A Borat derivative, his film allows an edited selection of unwary and inarticulate ‘marks,’ including his aging mother, to be ridiculed on subjects religious. ‘Foot in mouth’ as science and art seems to be Maher’s strong suites. <br /><br />Hitchens and Maher might be dismissed as media clowns, but Schmidt’s influence has Orwellian import. His faith in Goggle, engineering and digital technology has messianic dimensions. Yet, when Schmidt is confronted by ethical questions about data collection, storage and potential political abuses he takes a pass. “Trust me,” he says “we have the appropriate internal controls”. This is where binary logic leaves the track. If we couldn’t trust the government (i.e. NSA, the FBI and the IRS) not to use personal data for political purposes; why should we trust ‘.Com’ billionaires or Google? Unlike Hitchens and Maher, Schmidt has the cash to buy the political support he needs.<br /><br />Digital evangelists are notably tone deaf to internet ethical sensitivities like exploitation, predation (economic and sexual) and electronic autism. The autism is not limited to the ethical blind spots of science and engineering, but the more widespread symptoms of obsessive and compulsive electronic addictions among users. Follow the logic! Government should not regulate, police or tax the internet; but, at the same time, .Com moguls shouldn’t play cop either! Even if you ignore the circular logic, this is just another version of the Hitchens “unfettered scientific inquiry” dogma. If you combine the ethics of evasion and known political cant, in Schmidt and others, you have a critical mass.<br /><br />Indeed, if we examine most of the ‘Google as God’ arguments, they are similar to historical variants of political rationalism; National Socialism and Communism just name two. It might also be prudent to recall that there isn’t a dimes worth of difference<br />between National Socialism and Communism; except that one is a virulent nationalism and the other is ecumenical totalitarianism. The legacy from this toxic mix includes infanticide, racial genocide, euthanasia and the ABC’s of “unfettered” science – atomic, biological and chemical weapons. In fairness, we should point out that science also gave us Diet Coke, panty hose, U Tube, digital porn, Bart Simpson and Noam Chomsky’s web site. <br /><br />Indeed, the danger of rational atheism (aka religious rationalism) in the 21st Century is that it is capable of producing a digital or binary science that is both indifferent and imprudent. Scientists are uncomfortable with the unquantifiable; morality sounds a little too much like religion. In another era, a complete education would have included ethics, rhetoric and the sciences. Ethics was not only the first condition of enlightenment, it was first among equals. The sciences were listed last for a reason. Historically, should do has been more important than can do. <br /><br /><br /><br />Modern atheism and “unfettered scientific inquiry” is the flotsam left in the wake of Karl Marx and the fall of Communism. Along with “democratic” social engineering, it was the great secular religion of the 20th Century. Rationalists see traditional religions as kinds of pious bigotry. Worse still, they conflate God, religion and faith - things that can be as different as day and night. Faith is a complex phenomena; religion is not.<br /><br />Indeed, the crisis of faith, or ‘revolution,’ that began with Luther and Calvin fell off the cliff and brained Nietzsche, Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. The German monks dismissed free will and good works; and introduced the notion of predestination – an elect. Calvin’s elect morphed into Nietzsche’s “superman”. Marx dismissed the values of Judaism and Christianity whole scale. Indeed, he was a virulent, self-hating, anti-Semite. Marx’s “internationale”, Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” and Hitler’s “master race” are the logical outcomes of “objective considerations” unfettered by moral traditions.<br /><br />It also takes a special arrogance to claim to know what you can’t possibly know; to assume that reason trumps faith. The notion that truth (or progress) will emerge from the mouth of a test tube or a computer program is an assumption, nothing more. You may recall that Einstein was for nuclear weapons before he was against them. Einstein’s dilemma is an eloquent testimony to the binary simplicity and subsequent danger of many science projects. Unfortunately, courage is not a required course for science or engineering.<br /><br />Rationalism often flies in the face of history and consensus; and atheists often confuse apex predator with apex of evolution, a dangerous proposition indeed. Humility has never been a strong suite for science. In contrast, people of faith have the modesty to admit that humans may not be the top of the food chain and there are things we do not and may never know. The recent play and film adaptation of Doubt is an excellent treatment of ethics leavened with uncertainty - an intramural moral struggle between two Catholic clerics. Say what you will about the progressive religious views of the priest and the conservative religious views of the nun; in the end, you would still trust your kids to their school. Faith and trust are synonymous.<br /><br />Finding Hollywood and virtue in the same argument may give you a bit of jolt. Nonetheless, theater and film frequently treat ethical questions with candor not arrogance. Art is always more candid than science. If ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge; stupidity is the absence of faith in spite of knowledge. The question has never been faith or reason; but the answer has always been - faith and reason - in that order. Thank God!G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-9662407121965112502009-02-26T12:48:00.000-08:002009-02-26T23:01:06.210-08:00Reform and Accountability?Politicians have a lot of annoying habits. Presuming to tell us what we think and then validating that opinion with some selective poll are two of the worst. Before the election, the senator from Illinois told us that "corruption" was the grievance most frequently cited by voters (Washpost, 04 Jan 08). By that account, you might think the economy and the war were small potatoes.<br /> <br />Since then, the President has frequently said; "it's not enough to change the players, we have to change the game." Game is the key word in the argument. Hearing about ethics from a chap who represented a state where his vacant Senate was put up for auction is a little like hearing from Harry Reid about the evils of gambling and prostitution.<br /> <br />Whenever politicians start to preach about ethics and accountability, we need to recall Mark Twain's observation that politicians are the only permanent class of organized criminals. We are told daily that draconian measures are necessary to “recover from the mismanagement of the last eight years”. Polosi, Reid, Frank, and Dodd were the financial management of the last decade. Where’s the accountability in this group? Congress proposes; a president merely disposes. <br /><br />The recovery plan (aka bailouts) has drop-kicked all moral hazards out of the financial arena. To be replaced with what? The fatal flaw of all government roles in commerce is the assumption that politicians or federal bureaucrats are moral and competent; at least more so than entrepreneurs and the titans of industry. All those who believe politicians and integrity belong in the same sentence, raise your hand! <br /><br />In short, on the oversight front, President Obama wouldn't do more with less; he would do less with more. The “unprecedented effort” to be led by the Vice President is a cipher. Biden’s first effort was to strong arm governors into accepting funds they do not want. Surely the President knows that a deeper oversight matrix makes any corrective action less likely. Joe Biden has spent his entire career inside the Beltway. Should we believe he’s about to have an epiphany? <br /> <br />Here's a thought. Instead of new bureaucracies, boards and commissions; let's disband all the inert oversight and ethics monitors that aren't doing the job and let the Justice Department do its job. Revive the ABSCAM stings if you will, with apologies to Representative Murtha and Senator McCain of course. If we must have another "people's public watchdog," let's keep the varmints out of the hen house - no politicians on the oversight dais. The solution isn’t bipartisanship; the answer to oversight is no partisans - citizens who have never held office.<br /> <br />It's hard to believe that smart people like Obama and Pelosi do not understand all of the above. We are left to conclude that, like the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform, we can look forward to a lot of moral sizzle, but no steak. Creepier still is the similarity of Obama's proposals to Marion Barry's recent stunt. Councilman Barry introduced legislation, since withdrawn, to the DC Council that would prohibit employment discrimination against ex- convicts. Presumably that would mean the guy who gave your neighbor a lead pipe lobotomy might someday return to your street as the beat cop. When the President and the Speaker have their way, the folks who stole your chickens will get to watch the hen house.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-63833730167049398712009-02-18T22:31:00.000-08:002009-02-18T22:44:54.332-08:00The War on Prosperity and Others<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CMurphy%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="State"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoFooter, li.MsoFooter, div.MsoFooter {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">There are three things we know for certain about Barrack H. Obama – maybe four. The first is that he is our President; he just won the most expensive bull shit contest in the free world. The second is that he has a good rap; that’s how he won the contest. Indeed, even when he shades or ignores the truth, he is so sincere and so articulate that we give him a pass on candor. A Press corps whelped by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is unlikely to hold his feet to the fire. NBC’s Chris Matthews admits to being “tingled” by Obama. Stimulus indeed! The third thing we know for certain is that Obama has written two books – mostly about himself. The fourth is a little sensitive; he doesn’t like to use his middle name, a least not in public. Obama seems to be more than a little cagey about his Muslim heritage. If character is destiny, we may be headed for the ego abyss. Picture Carter(D) policies fronted by Kennedy(D) rhetoric.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">All of the air in the room is being sucked out by the economy at the moment. For the near term, our dismal science is the sum of bail-outs, stimuli, political pork, affirmative action mortgages and earmarks – although the later, henceforth, will be known as investments. No one seems to know whether a trillion large will work, but let’s not sweat details like effectiveness. Using more deficits and more debt to “stimulate” may be a little like hiring Maynard Keynes to diddle your furnace and expecting it to heat the house. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">On a daily basis we are told that draconian measures are necessary to recover from the “mismanagement of the last eight years”. Never mind that Nancy, Harry, Barney, Chris and Maxine <i style="">were</i> our management in that decade. Does Congress still propose and the President still dispose?<span style=""> </span>If Maxine prevails and we nationalize everything; we will still be the most prosperous nation on earth – until Halloween.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">All this economic heat is more notable for smoke than fire. And national security seems to be receding into the miasma. Wars with real bullets have fallen off the radar. Some might argue that the first priority of national security is the domestic piñata. Fair enough, but those gifts are already on their way. Our domestic vector is set. We are going to pig out as far as the eye can see and then make a date with Jenny Craig – a date uncertain. We have launched the war on prosperity and that’s that!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">But what about those other wars that were so worrisome during the late great campaign? Is it two or three wars? Harry said we lost one. We need to do the math. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">There is the <i style="">bad</i> war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> that the President ran against; and the <i style="">good</i> war in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> he says we should be fighting. Never mind that many of Obamas’s acolytes never met any war they approve of. Then there is the “war on terror” which apparently has fronts in places like <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>, <st1:city><st1:place>Karachi</st1:place></st1:city>, <st1:place><st1:city>London</st1:city>, <st1:state>Madrid</st1:state></st1:place>, <st1:city><st1:place>Beirut</st1:place></st1:city>, Tel Aviv, <st1:place><st1:city>Aden</st1:city>, <st1:country-region>Somalia</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and recently, Mumbai. Let’s end the confusion and call it the “whatever” war. But who the hell are we fighting?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Making war on terror is out; nobody makes war on a tactic. And then there’s the Carlin (bless his soul) corollary: “Beware of those who speak euphemism”; they say not what they mean nor mean what they say. We can’t call it the war on Islamofascists. That’s an affront to National Socialists and Communists every where. After all, Fascism has been in decline while Islam has been growing like, well, the Later Day Saints. National security mavens such as Sally Quinn assure us that terrorists are just a small minority, not representative of Islam – never mind that Islam is exactly what they have in common. Nobody ever asks Ms. Quinn how many followers the Bolsheviks had in 1916 or the Nazis had in 1932. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Now that the Congress and the White House have Democracy and Capitalism on the run, what are we going to do about the enemy whose name we dare not speak? <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region> may be suffering from sacrifice fatigue. What with going from jumbos to hail Mary mortgages, Hummers<span style=""> </span>to hybrids, Deer Valley to the Delaware Shore, Feragamo to flip flops and most worrisome of all, from plastic back to paper. If the President opens another front on the <st1:place>Great Salt Lake</st1:place>, we should put down our dopio, pull up our panty hose and just say no!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Enough is enough!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-50199777548780431092009-02-17T01:40:00.000-08:002009-02-17T02:35:13.545-08:00Dear GeneralWe haven’t heard much from you since that last piece of performance art at the United Nations. Now it seems that we hear from you once a month. First there was that endorsement of Obama and then, after the election, there was the condemnation of Republicans, Sarah Palin and, of all people, Rush Limbaugh. Let’s start with the Republicans.<br /><br />You jumped ship at the eleventh hour before the election. And now you give Republicans advice on how to get well? This is a little like Colonel Arnold giving war counsel to General Washington. You recommend that they dump Palin and stop listening to Limbaugh! You may lose your RINO card.<br /><br />You also seem to laboring under the illusion that the ‘community organizer’ won because he was a better choice, more accomplished than, or had a better program than McCain/Palin. Bravo Sierra, sir! <br /><br />Any honest observer would have to admit that Barrack’s only concrete accomplishments to date are two books – about Obama. Now granted he has a good rap. But it’s not like someone hasn’t said it all before. The only difference between B.H.O. and Jesse Jackson is that Obama doesn’t patronize us with rhymes. And by-the-by, should you ever decide to counsel the president, you might want to point out that hope is not a strategy and change is not an objective.<br /><br />The Republicans could have run Pericles and still lost. The Republicans lost because Hilary blew the primaries. The Republicans lost because the economy fell into the crapper just before show time. The Republicans lost because a left-leaning congressional circle-jerk successfully, if not fairly, hung the affirmative action mortgage debacle on Bush and by implication, McCain.<br /><br />‘Twas unfair to link Obama with Wright and Farrakhan, but somehow not unfair to claim a McCain victory (guilt by association) would be a third term for Bush. The Republicans lost because a vote for Obama was a vote against Bush. The Republicans lost because McCain looked and sounded like yesterday. <br /><br />But why do you have Sarah Palin in your cross hairs? By any metric, she is an accomplished lady; athlete, wife, mother, business woman, volunteer, municipal and state-wide office holder. Unlike the usual political groupies and bimbos inside the beltway, she’s also a babe. Ms Palin favors and actually does justice to a skirt. <br /><br />She is ridiculed for her performance on the gas bag circuit. Compared to whom? Surely you can’t be thinking about Joe (“I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most people know”) Biden.<br /><br />Biden’s singular accomplishments are tenure and an overwrought ego. He is an inside baseball, inside the beltway diva. His only qualification to be chair of anything is 35 years at the Senate trough. Change my ass! Let’s put aside for the moment his hair plugs, teeth by Steinway, plagiarism and chronic foot-in-mouth problem and look at his grip on history and current issues. He doesn’t know when Roosevelt (D) served or when television began! Entertainment is the only value added that Senator Malaprop brings to this administration.<br /><br />His one recent foreign policy initiative was to suggest we divide Iraq into ethnic and religious cantons! Such a policy would reinforce not eliminate the divisions that fuel conflict in the Levant. Such nonsense would also torch relations with at least four other nations in the region. As we used to say in boot camp; “this guy doesn’t know shit from Shinola (an excellent shoe polish I might add)”.<br /><br />The real difference between Palin and Biden deserves a hockey analogy; good prospect versus no prospects. Before I leave Sarah, one more thought. If we compare you, Obama, Biden and Palin, we can say with certainty that Governor Palin has reached her high station without benefit of political tenure or an affirmative action tailwind. You will note that my remark about you and the President is conditional, yet if the shoe fits, I’m sure it’s a size ten.<br /><br />Let’s move on to Limbaugh. You suggest that Republicans need to stop listening to El Rushbeau? Whatever for? He is their most caustic critic; <br />flailing the flaccid on an equal opportunity basis. Take the McCain case. Limbaugh may have lost several million votes for Republicans before the recent election by suggesting that McCain was a political hermaphrodite. <br /><br />You must appreciate that the Left makes Limbaugh and talk radio possible! Newspapers and networks are loosing clients while conservative talk radio is growing. There is only one possible message here. Talk radio is providing facts and a point of view that “mainstream” outlets, including CPB, are unable or unwilling to provide. The issue here, sir, is bias and in too many cases “cooking (Janet you know who you are) the books”. The mainstream keeps telling itself that it is loosing ground because of technology. Their real problem is integrity. Readers, viewers and listeners are literally not buying crap anymore - or corvettes, it seems.<br /><br />Just a few examples would include Mike Wallace, Janet Cooke, Stone Phillips, Dan Rather and Jason Blair. We might even throw in Woodward and Bernstein now that we know that their source for Watergate was a highly placed FBI fruitcake with an ax to grind. Cooke and Blair, you may recall, were two investigative “journalists” caught lying for the Washington Post and NY Times about conditions in black communities – as if the truth were not bad enough. Old school editors like Ben Bradley (WP) Hal Raines (NYT) underwrite questionable journalism with bad conduct medals. Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize. <br /><br />But your personal favorite should be Mike Wallace. Do you remember how CBS tried to smear Danny Graham and William Westmoreland on their Vietnam era order-of-battle assessments? CBS and Wallace had to be taken to court before the truth was told. Blaming soldiers for an unpopular war is a little like blaming crime on cops.<br /><br />Conservative media is a growth business because they put their politics and their agenda up front. The so-called mainstream is committing suicide (no offense, Mr. Wallace) in slow motion because they continue to lie about their agenda and cook the books in an era when such duplicity is quickly exposed. Leftist, liberal and socialist journalists never admit to an agenda or admit who they are. Say what you will about Limbaugh’s politics; you don’t have to take him to court to know from whence he comes.<br /> <br />In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that like you, I‘m a product of the Bronx, a proud graduate of Cardinal Hayes High. Indeed, I was also born into the Democrat Party. As a youth, I was a big fan of Tip O’Neil and Pat Moynihan. I lost my progressive cherry when Moynihan was thrown under the bus for telling the truth about welfare and affirmative action hustles. Since then, my misgivings about liberals have been validated. <br /><br />Today, the Democrat Party is led by a botox bimbo, a sin city shill, a hysterical sodomite (who ran a boy’s bordello out of his basement) and two philandering boozers, one of whom may be a homicidal drunk. Please fill in any names that fit. The governor of California recently characterized legislators as girlie men. Here in Washington we actually have three types; there are women who want to be men, men who want to be women and the rest don’t seem to have the giblets to make either team. Calling this crowd a “parliament of whores” (thanks PJ) is an insult to honest hookers everywhere. <br /><br />Not that any of this drove me into the arms of Republicans. In my Bronx neighborhood we thought Republicans had died off with Teddy Roosevelt, if not Lincoln. I had a short hot-flash of deja-vu during the Reagan years, but I recovered. Yet the real problem isn’t Party; its propriety.<br /><br />So I was more than a little concerned the other day when you trashed the good lady from Alaska because you thought she had slighted your “Bronx values”. I applaud your concern with values but let me say a few words about the use of “Bronx” as an adjectival salutation.<br /><br />The Bronx is a place people come from, not a place people go to. Even when New Yorkers talk about “the city”, they mean Manhattan not the Bronx. If you were to go to the Bronx today there a five things you would not bring; your wife, your kids, your wallet, your watch and certainly not your automobile. If you were to ask citizens of the Bronx where they would like to live, 75 percent would say “anywhere else” and the remainder would be unresponsive due to mind numbing chemicals. Let’s be serious, neither of us would go back there to vacation, buy property or to retire. Just as surely, the best day of our lives was the one when we saw the Cross Bronx Expressway in the rear view mirror.<br /><br />They say you can take the boy out of the Bronx but you can’t take the Bronx out of the boy. As a soldier and citizen, I tried to refute this canard daily. You shouldn’t be defensive about the Bronx and I don’t think Governor Palin ever mentioned your values or lack of them. Yet I think she has a point about small state, small town values. And she always makes her point with gentle, humorous Thornton Wilder aplomb. <br /><br />Considering recent political values on display in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and now Illinois, we should all worry. Yet, you say that big cities are where the votes are. So what! Does this mean its OK to sell a Senate seat if enough like-minded idiots agree?<br /><br />Seeing that you have brought up this values thing, let’s talk about them in important venues like a president’s character - the economy and in national security matters.<br /><br />People like us who grew up in the Bronx can’t afford to believe in guilt by association. Good folks should be willing to overlook those unsavory characters that dog Obama’s character. At the same time, you know that were he a GS-6 looking a security clearance, he wouldn’t get past hello. Nonetheless, he should be judged on his contemporary associates. <br /><br />The first that come to mind are the Clintons - the last pair of breeding lawyers in the White House. You may recall how that played out. Now Obama brings this circus act back to the national stage under the flag of “change you can believe in”. Hello, general, are you still there? Good, let’s continue the values chat.<br /><br />We now live in a single-trade oligarchy, a culture where almost all elected and too many appointed officials are lawyers. The law trade is like the psycho babble business. Their ethic is the game – keeping the ball in play, not unlike scoreless soccer. Lawyers and psychiatrists don’t care who wins or looses as long as they get paid or laid (sorry Bill). In Barack’s old neighborhood it’s called pay to play. Do you think it’s an accident that even judicial pay raises get pasted into unrelated bail-out bills?<br /><br />So when I think about the economy I’m having another hot flash of deja-vu. Plan Obama calls for massive spending to be followed by a fiscal diet at a date uncertain. Seems to me that massive spending is what got us here in the first place. Using deficit and debt and to stimulate the economy may be a little like having Maynard Keynes diddle your furnace to heat the house.<br /><br />Politicians never see any problem that can’t use more money. That’s where the votes really hang out. Conversely, they never have the stones to end programs that don’t work. I live in a town where health care, education, housing and policing receive massive taxpayer support. If any of these programs were dependent on values or effectiveness, they wouldn’t merit another nickel. A century and a half after Lincoln’s death, too large a part of the nation’s capital is still a dangerous slum. Values for lawyer/politicians, sir, are about arithmetic not ethics. <br /><br />Barney Frank and Chris Dodd couldn’t manage a trip to the toilet without staff assistance. Yet we have to watch Obama’s Hill colleagues lecture Wall Street and Industry on accountability. This may be change you can believe in. I’m still stuck on the hope thing. <br /><br />And finally, there is national security. I’m concerned that a guy who thinks his grandfather liberated Poland doesn’t have a firm grip on reality or world history. You know, those Nazis, fascists, communists and like-minded totalitarians in the Muslim world. When he meets Putin, Obama may have to apologize to Marshal Zuchov’s memory. Nonetheless, today’s war is more to the point. Not once in the recent campaign did I hear Obama say the word Islamist. Is courage one of those values that concern you? Does he plan to beat the bad guys by never speaking their name? <br /><br />When you chat with the commander-in-chief you might also point out that we are not fighting “a war on terror”. Nobody makes war on a tactic. We are fighting Muslim fanatics. You might also disabuse him of the notion that we have two wars; a bad war in Iraq and a good war in Afghanistan. There may be two major theaters and numerous minor fronts but the war is singular and it’s world-wide. Does Mumbai ring a bell? If he thinks he can jawbone this growing movement of religious crazies, I suggest he hang onto those smokes and one of your flak jackets. He’s going to need them.<br /><br />You know, general, the beauty of democracy is that sometimes we get the kind of government we want and sometimes we just get what we deserve. Back in our active duty days an SOS (save our ship) was a distress signal. But for troops in the mess hall it also meant chipped beef on toast (shit on a shingle). For bored grunts in the barracks, it simply meant “same old shit”. So I’m thinking that Jeremiah Wright might be right no matter how you read the SOS. The chickens have come home to roost.<br /><br />Before I wrap this up, let me apologize to you on behalf of George Tenent and the Intelligence Community. Yes, I’m a twenty five year Intelligence veteran. Old George hung you out to dry. Guys that work both sides of the aisle don’t have values. But they get medals too. That Iraq speech CIA wrote for you to deliver at the UN could not pass muster at a cadet beer bust. But you gave it anyway. So we all understand how you might be in the mood for a little pay back. <br /><br />But lay off Sarah Palin! She has already been slapped silly by the deficit side of the values spectrum - for trivial reasons in most cases. She is a role model for any American girl. And compared to Caroline Kennedy, Sarah Palin looks like Elizabeth the First.<br /><br />And it’s not like you didn’t shoot yourself in the foot at the UN. At the time, you had 50 thousand gofers that could have done some Iraq fact checking or a little in-house analysis at the State Department. But that’s another story. Until next time, let me leave you with a few lines of poetic consolation: “Of all the words to come from mouth or pen, the saddest are these, what might have been”.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-80918429009325373312009-02-17T00:24:00.000-08:002009-02-17T00:29:27.264-08:00On Education(This is the first in a series of essays prepared for a couple of beginning college freshman – one at American University and the other at the University of Southern California. The assumption that proceeds all of these is that true education comes after class.)<br /><br />If you are looking for an education, you probably will not find it at the schoolhouse. For too many Americans, the mandatory 12 years and the optional four years of schooling is a deferment from life. A high school diploma does not guarantee you can read. A college degree will not guarantee you can write. And no number of advanced degrees can certify that you will ever be able to think for your self. Education can not be forced. Universal “education” (aka the public school system) is predicated on two flawed assumptions: all people can learn and all people want to learn.<br /><br />So before you squander part of your lives and all of your youth, we should make a few distinctions.<br /><br />School is not a synonym for education. In the last 60 years, the object of schooling has morphed from learning to credentials. Thus, diplomas and degrees are not necessarily accomplishments. Today, there are institutions where a well matriculated hamster could get a diploma or baccalaureate. You already know the mantra. High school graduates make more money than dropouts; college graduates make more than high school grads. There may be a link between learning and earning but it has nothing to do with schooling as we know it.<br /><br />Learning has been subverted by credentials. Grades, promotions, diplomas and degrees are often a function of social concerns and misguided notions of affirmative action. An illiterate professional footballer recently enrolled in the adult literacy program at the Lab School in Washington, DC. He was a graduate of primary, secondary, and college programs in the State of Texas. Academic credentials often represent social ransom not achievement. Feeling good is the new being good. And you seldom hear about the home scholars and drop outs that change the world or become billionaires. If urban public schools could be sued for malpractice, the system would collapse in a year.<br /><br />Public schools at the primary and secondary levels are government monopolies, a kind of municipal day care. They are also a civic tautology; mandatory taxes for mandatory schools. They exist because the law says they must. And because attendance is compulsory, their fist mandate is custody – learning is optional. Armed guards and metal detectors are standard features of the urban school. The public community college and university is an extension of primary and secondary school logic. If twelve years in public custody are good, sixteen must be better. Education is possible in a public school; it is likely almost anywhere else.<br /><br />The so-called “education system” is the largest single private and public employer in the country. If your parents send you to private school, they pay twice. First for the public school you don’t attend and then for the private school you do attend. Such a hustle is bound to attract grifters: school systems are magnets for fraud and mediocrity. <br /><br />An old adage says that those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach. There is much more than a grain of truth in this folk wisdom. A brief survey of public school teachers and text books tells the tale. <br /><br />An Education degree or “certificate” is the necessary credential for primary and secondary school instructors. Indeed, most administrators and principals possess advanced Education degrees. Thus at every level, the “how” of teaching is emphasized at the expense of the “what”: method trumps substance throughout. The substance vacuum is compounded by the devalued currency of Education degrees. Consistent research finds that Education majors test well below the bottom of the academic pile. The dregs of academia are thus preordained to become primary, middle and high school teachers, and principals – the untutored leading the uneducated.<br /><br />Conditions are not much better at the college and university level – for different reasons.<br /><br />We now have a very large class of instructors who have no life experience but every academic credential. Indeed they spend their entire life at the academy. And substantive superstars in the cloisters do not teach; they spend as little time in the classroom as possible. Such savants are expected to research or write. Most of the research is derivative and most of the writing is drivel - resume fodder or text books. <br /><br />The text book racket is notorious. Over-priced books, most of which have no use beyond the class room, are the mandatory expenses for a captive audience. Assistants on the make and tenured professors regularly commend each other’s texts to the various departments. Every few years, Professor Avarice changes ‘happy to glad’ and a new edition and another revenue stream is created. Never mind that definitive classics already exist for most subjects. Never mind that these might be available on line or in any library. Need we mention that the campus book store is a revenue stream for the school. Text books are the perfect cash cow - or circle jerk – depending on whether you’re buying or selling.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the most pernicious influences on schools are tenure and unions. At all levels, tenure is a euphemism for permanent employment devoid of merit. Two examples are definitive. In Manhattan there is a high rise in New York City where teachers who have been removed from the classroom, for cause, are warehoused at taxpayer expense. Some are child molesters. They have been removed from class but not from the payroll. They are protected by contract, union mandates and tradition. Children, unfortunately, have no similar protection.<br /><br />Tenure is no less of a problem for higher education. In the nation’s capital, a school president was recently removed from office for making obscene phone calls to a day care center. After several months of “rehabilitation”, he was returned to the classroom at full salary with all the perks of academic tenure. Ironically, the school in question calls itself American University. Such is the way of American tenure.<br /><br />This quality deficit is compounded by toxic politics. Almost every text used at the primary and secondary level is tainted by political revisionism. At higher levels the American academy has been hijacked by the totalitarian left. The recent fiasco at Harvard is instructive. The president, a male, was fired because he had made some innocuous remarks about differences between males and female. The only politically correct vision of women in the academy is that they are men without giblets. They only correct view of men is that they are not women - and therefore clueless brutes or gay.<br /><br />Ironically, academic feminists are captive to a kind of self-serving sexual hypocrisy. When coeds fall under the spell of some male lecturer with a good rap, the next thing they are likely to hear is the sound of a zipper going south. Male academics have traditionally seen female students as one of their academic perks. Indeed, a Georgetown scholar once observed: “The advantage of teaching, over other professions, is that, unlike your wife, the girls never get any older”. It’s not just that women tolerate this kind of exploitation; they now seem to participate with gusto. If we can believe what we read in the Press, the distaff pedant has few boundaries – including sex with minors.<br /><br />Beyond the politics of sex, many campuses have become permanent refuges for all manner of neo-Marxist ideologues. These are not just the Chomskys (University of Chicago) who rave against democracy and capitalism – the very things that make his brand of political nihilism possible. Worse still, many universities actually seek out former criminals, terrorists, ‘community activivists’ and assorted bomb throwers and give them tenure in the name of diversity. The line between professor and propagandist has been obliterated. Many a campus has become the employer of last resort for the social flotsam and political bong resin of the last century.<br /><br />So what’s a girl to do? Can you swim in this sludge? Is it possible to learn and get an education? Ironically, even in a swamp, the good bits float to the top. Today, any student with a modest triple digit IQ has a leg up when you consider the caliber of peer and pedagogue you are likely to encounter. <br /><br />Nonetheless, forewarned is forearmed. In another time, there was a clear consensus on faculty qualifications and student study requirements. Until the turn of the last century a genuine scholar might speak the vernacular and Latin - and have a working knowledge of Greek and Hebrew in addition to some specialty expertise in the natural sciences. Don’t look for any of these guys in your faculty lounge.<br /><br />A serious student would be required to master ethics and rhetoric before dabbling in the natural sciences. Back in the day, rhetoric would include logic, reading, writing and public speaking. The natural sciences are all those ‘ics’ and ‘ologies’ parsed by Aristotle and refined during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. A classical education would also include the great books – the canon of “dead white men.” <br /><br />Given the circus of political correctness and assorted distractions on today’s campus, you could do worse than model your personal academic goals on the classic model. <br /><br />If you have no sense of ethics or morals, you will be rudderless before you leave port. Ethics is simply an understanding of the historical consensus about right and wrong; indeed, the basis of all law and civil behavior. In the old school, ethics was first among equals; should do was always superior to can do. You might have to transfer to Hillsdale College to find an ethics course.<br /><br />Rhetoric was the anchor for all specialized learning. Thinking logically, reading critically, writing coherently and speaking persuasively are the real prerequisites for any field of study or profession. Master these rhetorical skills and the world, academic or professional, is your oyster. <br /><br />If you are ever to be truly learned, you must also get up to your ear lobes in the dead man’s (or women’s) canon. Classics on any subject are classics for a reason. Two illustrations follow. <br /><br />If you were to explore the subject of atheism, you could do no better than to read Graham Greene or Dostoyevsky. Their life’s work is an exposition of the subject. The value added with dead authors is that they are always more entertaining than live professors. <br /><br />And so it is with subjects like poetry, prose and stage craft. You can do no better than to read Shakespeare. (He never went to college.) And the value added here is not just entertainment, but a slow epiphany that will allow you to see that the bard is a lot like your mother and father; as you get older, they get smarter.<br /><br />One more dead white guy until our next conversation. Hemingway believed that the secret of good prose was knowing what to throw out. In the next four years or more you will encounter a blizzard of bravo sierra and a host of charming charlatans. Please, know what and who to throw out of you lives. Good luck ladies!<br /><br /> ----------------------------------- <br /><br />G MurphyG. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-10086128739126798602008-03-15T06:03:00.000-07:002008-03-15T06:10:25.096-07:00A Confederacy of Dunces<p><br />Tersh Boasberg, chairman of the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB), has gone public to defend the land-marking of the Third Church of Christ, Scientist (see NW Current, 6 Feb 08). In the process, he is ignoring the wishes of the property owners, congregants and neighbors. Boasberg is less than candid on several counts in his defense of this example of "Brutalist" architecture. First, he never identifies the architectural school as Brutalism; to do so would undermine his argument. Then Mr. Boasberg rebrands the church architecture as "Modernist", a mistake that no art history sophomore would make. He goes on to claim the building was designed sometime between 1968 and 1971. He doesn't seem to know when. And in a final sleight of hand, he invokes the ghost of I.M. Pei twice without ever actually claiming that Pei designed the building. Close only counts in horseshoes. There is no historic or artistic merit by association.<br /><br />Mr. Boasberg and the HPRB are avoiding the Brutalist label for good reason. The term comes from the French <i>beton brut</i> or "raw concrete". Brutalism was originally a mid-century <i>construction technique </i>using forms to pour rough concrete. This technique almost simultaneously became associated with shock architecture and "Utopian social ideology" - a polite phrase for Communism, neo-Stalinism and the associated art schools of social realism (aka propaganda). When dictators are toppled, the second casualty is usually social realism. Most impartial historians define Brutalism as a short lived (25 years at the outside), failed school of architecture and a failed social ideology.<br /><br />A recent encyclopedia entry describes Brutalism as "striking, blatant, irregular...unfriendly and uncommunicative...disregards the social, historic and architectural environment of its surroundings...appears starkly out of place and alien...uncompromising...anti-bourgeois...claustrophobic...fortress-like and vulnerable to spray-can graffiti...with concrete facades that don't age well...many (Brutalist buildings) have been or are slated to be demolished."<br /></p><p>An architectural column devoted exclusively to the criticism of Brutalism is appropriately called "New Barbarism". Prince Charles, of Great Britain, has famously compared Brutalism to the rubble left in London by WWII German air raids. We should also note that a British exponent of Brutalism was Erno Goldfinger, rightly satirized by Ian Fleming as an evil symbol of brutal excess in the James Bond series. We can be sympathetic to the board's hot flashes of socialist deja-vu, but political nostalgia is not a basis for preservation.<br /><br />The shock school of art and architecture has had many evil stepchildren since the advent of Brutalism. The crucifix in a beaker of urine at the Brooklyn Museum comes to mind. Here again we saw "art" used for its shock value - as propaganda if not bigotry. No serious historian or art critic would defend a similar treatment of the Star of David or the Koran. When artifacts of propaganda are displayed or preserved, the motives are usually political not aesthetic. Brutalism in America was nothing more than the faint failed echo of Utopian European socialism.</p>The Washington City Paper (22 Feb 08) recently ran an excellent cover story about H.D. Woodson Senior High School, another monument to Brutalism. After only 36 years of public service, the eight story "tower of power" is scheduled for demolition - a victim of poor design, sorry engineering and negligent maintenance. With Brutalism, function is often sacrificed to form. In the design phase, "architectural types", like the Commission of Fine Arts, endorsed Woodson as a "good symbol and an excellent landmark". Why are there no voices raised today to preserve this publicly financed Brutalist failure?<br /><p>Compare the HPRB defense of Brutalism to their meeting of 27 September 07 when Mr. Boasberg could barely tolerate testimony about the archeology and American Indian history of a Palisades property. The chair would allow only <i>two minutes</i> of testimony about what may have been 10,000 years of indigenous occupation. And those two minutes were not without interruption. The first question from the chair asked about the "relevance" (sic) of American Indian history in the District. The Board 'archaeologist', Mr. Sonderman, went on to use his time to characterize the preservationists as "looters". The Algonquian nation did not have a good day before the board. In all of their deliberations, the preservation board has landmarked hundreds of places and buildings, yet not a single American Indian site has been preserved or recognized on its own merits although such sites abound in Anacostia, the Rock Creek drainage and the Palisades. A few decades of Brutalism is worth preserving but 10,000 years of American Indian history is not?<br /></p>The only authorities that Mr Boasberg, a lawyer by profession, cites to support preservation of the Third Church of Christ is a cherry-picked group of local architects and the members HPRB. Do the opinions of construction trade technicians and municipal apparatchiks outweigh the property rights of owners and the democratic choices of congregants and neighbors? In nearly all cases, an architectural plan is merely a necessary adjunct to the building trades. Only a fraction of any building designs in any city rise to the level of art. In most cases, the architect is to art what the orchestra pit is to music. Mr. Boasberg and the board's judgements on the Third Church of Christ are not supported by history, aesthetics or common sense.<br /><br />Today it is difficult to pick up a newspaper without reading about another dysfunctional department within the city government. Yet departmental pathology is only half the story. Boards and commissions, such as the Historic Preservation Review Board, suffer from the same aliments. Indeed, one might argue that competence, the invisible elephant that haunts the District, is a function of the difficulty of firing a unionized municipal employee. But this is not the case with boards and commissions. They do not need to be renominated nor do their terms have to be renewed. Nonetheless, the boards and commissions seem to be peopled by the same "confederacy of dunces" that haunts the unionized departments. Tenure is the permanent enemy of competence. Encouraging the "usual suspects" to spend more time with their families is one alternative to permanent municipal pathology.<p><br /></p>G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-44278364781288569322007-11-19T11:43:00.000-08:002007-11-23T13:56:38.494-08:00A PRAYER FOR LILY 1917-2007They say it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but this is only a half-truth. It is hard to imagine anyone who has never loved and surely we all lose eventually. The real truth about love is that it never dies. We just pass it on. Pericles said it best: the only thing we can leave behind on this earth is our place in the hearts of men. So sail on Lily Ring Best. Your love is secure in the hearts of all those who knew you.<br /><br />Love is like faith, a consuming conviction that defies definition. Yet somehow both define our lives. It's hard to know whether we love because we believe or believe because we love. Surely both represent the triumph of hope over experience. At times like these, the agnostic or atheist among us have neither faith nor comfort - nor humility it seems. They are poor in spirit indeed who can not distinguish between the debits of religion and the credits of belief. Who among us with eyes or ears, who has walked through a crowd, believes that we are the top of the food chain?<br /><br />Old Testament arrogance gave us dominion over all other creatures. The New Testament parsed the error by giving souls to men alone. Apparently the prophets and evangelists never owned cats or dogs. Yet the failings of religion do not justify cynicism. Life and our beliefs are not dogma; they are works in progress - a road to enlightenment as Eastern believers might say. Even an atheist gets buried face up; sure proof that God has a sense of humor.<br /><br />So look down now, Sir, on your perfect flower, this Lily who knew nothing is necessary while all things are possible. She is bound for port now with a following wind. Never was a girl better named. Nor has any woman plotted a better course. Faithful wife and dutiful mother, she had the pitch perfect heart, dedicating the better part of her life to others: Roland Charles, Arthur, Judy and Rollie. We thank Lily especially for Judy. She has inherited that pitch perfect heart, dedicating her life to the comfort of others. As for Arthur and Rollie please remember them also as, well, how shall we say, works in progress.<br /><br />Twenty five hundred years ago Pericles tried to comfort the mothers of Athens who had lost sons in war. Closer to our time Lincoln used those same ancient words to comfort mothers at Gettysburg. He called their sacrifice "the last full measure of devotion." Could we say less about the sacrifice of mothers? The capstone for a noble life is death. So it should be. We are all required to become One. Lily waits for us. Amen.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-22836624417941145212007-11-19T10:24:00.000-08:002007-11-23T14:09:43.401-08:00The Small Town in All of UsIn November I was invited to see a revival of Thornton Wilder's <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Our Town </span>at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. To be honest, I thought going to Baltimore to see Wilder would be a little like going to Bronx Park to see the leaves change. As we drove up I-95, I recalled Shakespeare's caution that all theater required "a willing suspension of disbelief". Yet, I also remembered Robert De Niro's classic urban challenge in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Taxi:</span> "ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?" Eye contact in a small town reflects good manners; eye contact on the wrong street in the big city can be fatal.<br /><br />I first saw <em>Our Town</em> in high school but I had a couple of aunts who had seen the original on Broadway. When I asked them what they thought, my Aunt Marge said, "too old, too soon; too smart, too late". My Aunt Wheesy added, "enjoy yourself honey, it's later than you think," a line from a song popular at the time. I remember agreeing with both appraisals. When I read the play again in college and realized that small town folks might just find Wilder amusing, while a city cynic like myself might just find him transformational. And so it was again the other night.<br /><br /><em>Our Town</em> is a subtle piece of soft sell. Act One draws us into Grovers Corners with the stage manager (James Miller) as a guide. He introduces us to ordinary people in an ordinary town. The principal players are the Gibb and Webb families, next door neighbors. By the end of Act One we know that the boy next door, George (Ali Hong) is falling for the girl next door, Emily (Amanda Wyatt). Sure enough by Act Two George and Emily are at the altar accompanied by all the ordinary misgivings of ordinary people.<br /><br /><br />Yet beneath the folksy chit chat of Grovers Corners there is an undercurrent of Presbyterian fatalism. As in a Cotton Mather sermon, the citizens of Grovers Corners are dangling like spiders above the flames of fate. Act Three opens with a funeral. We are confronted with that small space between wed and dead. It's Emily. She has died in childbirth.<br /><br /><br />Emily is Chekov's gun. First we learned to like her, then we love her, then the playwright kills her. For Wilder, death is another ordinary part of life, unremarkable in general. But a specific death like Emily's can be quite extraordinary. She dies giving birth to another generation. Wilder kills her but he doesn't kill hope. Wilder's Emily Webb embodies the two most important, and contentious, human emotions; trust and regret. No relationship is possible without trust and no improvement is possible without regret.<br /><br /><br />All of the principals In Bryn Mawr's <em>Our Town</em> helped us to find that "willing suspension of disbelief". Yet in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I have known Mrs. Webb (Renee Best) since before she was born. I have watched her grow from shy girl to sure woman. I should recuse myself on the merits of Ms. Best's performance. The cynic in me says that it isn't much of a stretch for any girl to play an annoying mother, but the optimist in me says her patronymic speaks for itself.<br /><br /><br />The real genius of great plays often resides in small parts. Wilder and Bryn Mawr have two; the milkman and the town drunk.<br /><br /><br />At Bryn Mawr, the milkman, Howie Newsome, is played by a girl (Julie Roland). Yes, he is a she. But the androgyny evaporates the first time Ms. Roland hits her mark. Every time she appears we almost know what she will say, yet we want to hear it anyway. Julie Roland has that undefinable quality called presence. If she follows her nose, she is sure to find a bigger stage.<br /><br /><br />Spencer Tracy once said that the secret to good acting was to remember your lines and don't bump into the furniture. Yet, pantomime plays a rather large minor role in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Our Town</span>. Wilder, and Bryn Mawr it seems, are not overly fond of props or furniture. Mrs. Gibbs (Ren Andrews) and Mrs. Webb are forever fussing with imaginary pots, plates and pans - we must even imagine those shucked peas. Pantomime is the echo of the ordinary. We waste too much of our lives going through the motions.<br /><br /><br />Nowhere is pantomime put to better use than in the role of Simon Stimson (Johnny Snouffer). He is the organist, choirmaster and town drunk - a trifecta of civic virtue. At once comic and tragic, he suffers from demons unspecified, another dead man walking. Simon, like Emily gets to make one of life's early exits; she a victim of fate, he a victim by his own hand. We don't have to know the specifics of Simon's problems to appreciate his laconic world view. We like him anyway. Johnny Snouffer owns this part.<br /><br />In the last scene of the play, Wilder brings the entire cast on stage; the dead stage right and the survivors stage left. Emily pleads with her mother-in-law, also deceased, to return to Grovers Corners on her 12th birthday. Mother Gibbs and Simon Stimsom know this is a bad idea. The dead do not look at the living, nor do the living see. Undeterred, Emily returns to the kitchen of her youth. After a few banal moments she pleads with the stage manager: "I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at each other". So there we are left by Wilder and his Emily. We now own the regrets.<br /><br /><br />Yup, I had a good time at Bryn Mawr the other night. As we left Centennial Hall, I heard an obviously proud mother exclaim; "How do they remember all those lines?" Indeed, it shouldn't be a mystery. Theater, like life, requires practice and it helps if you're doing something you love.<br /><br />As we drove away from Baltimore, I had one special regret - that this edition of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Our Town</span> didn't run for three months instead of three days. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary takes time. Oh well, that's life in the fast lane. As Bogey might have put it; "Here's looking at you, kid".G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-28004673168536728522007-08-17T08:33:00.000-07:002007-08-17T08:47:47.801-07:00LIGHTNING AND LIGHTNING BUGSThe recent Don Imus flap has confirmed the power of words - and the power of the politically correct. No matter that Imus and his producer were using language that is common currency among hip and hypocrite alike. As one editorial put it, "Imus was executed for jaywalking." The usual suspects, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, led the charge against NBC and Imus. It has become futile yet again to argue that Jackson and Sharpton have no credibility to judge hate speech. Both have been anointed, achieved a special status, above criticism. Indeed, unlike Imus, they have been awarded ethnic immunity. <br /><br />Nonetheless, the Imus case is small potatoes. The ladies of Rutgers will get over the insult, if not Oprah. Don Imus was rich and famous before the fall, he will continue to be both after the fall. For the moment he has lost his soapbox. Another arrogant white guy bites the dust. Who cares? <br /><br />We should all care because there is a deadly serious side to the ethnic immunities phenomenon. While all the networks obsessed on the Imus circus, a real drama was unfolding at PBS and its Washington, DC affiliate, WETA. PBS was in the process of showcasing a six night series about Islam after 9/11 entitled "Crossroads." At the eleventh hour, the centerpiece documentary, "Islam vs. Islamists", directed by Martyn Burke, was spiked and replaced by a NewsHour confection called "Muslims in America," produced and directed by Robin McNeil, himself a latecomer to a project three years in the making. We can surmise that McNeil was brought to the project to lend a NewsHour halo of credibility. At the outset, he characterized the "Crossroads" series as "groundbreaking." Indeed, groundbreaking for the weight of evidence ignored. The Burke film did not make the cut because representatives from the Nation of Islam objected at a private screening arranged by PBS and WETA. <br /><br />Killing the Burke documentary thus removed the keystone and any semblance of objectivity from the entire PBS series. Bernard Lewis, arguably America's most prominent Islamic scholar, has come to the following conclusion, "If the fundamentalists are correct in their calculations and succeed in their war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part that embraces Islam." Unlike, "Islam vs Islamists," none of this wisdom is reflected in the McNeil film aired on Wednesday, 18 April. <br /><br />There is no mention of Elijah Mohamed, Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, decades of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech or Saudi funding of Wahhabi ministries, mosques, madrases and student groups. A Ray Suarez voice-over suggests in no uncertain terms that the Islamist (radical) threat is somehow different in America than it is in Europe. Did the NewsHour crew miss the attack on 9/11? Did they miss that week several years ago when the Hanafi sect attacked city hall in the heart of Washington, DC? Do they not know of Jose Padilla? Louis Farrakhan may not be the face of Islam but surely he is the most infamous Muslim in America. Are we to ignore a bigot who can mobilize a 'million' men? Are we to accept the pandering of Ray Suarez and ignore the scholarly judgments of Bernard Lewis? The big lie is not simple misrepresentation, it is also what you choose to ignore. <br /><br />PBS and the wider world of politically correct seem to be on a crusade to ignore, at best, or appease, at worst, the ugly side of Islam in America and elsewhere. So let's be clear about what's at stake here. There are four targets on the Islamists' hit list. <br /><br />First, there are the apostates, that is those Muslims who do not subscribe to Sharia, religious law. This would include almost all moderate or secular Muslims including Americans. Second, would be the Jews. In this target set, Zionists will be first among equals. If you need to know what the Islam bomb is all about, think Tel Aviv. The Diaspora would follow in short order. The third target is European democracies, or as Oriana Fallaci calls them, the cicadas. Before she died, Fallaci surmised that Europe might be on the road to surrender, thus avoiding conquest. And finally, last but not least, comes America, the "great Satan," the final bastion of capitalism and democracy. <br /><br />Apologists often defend hate groups by pointing to their good works in the community. This is a little like rationalizing National Socialism by saying that Hitler was a vegetarian. Today, every extremist group has adopted this strategy; good works and terror. Some of the terror is simple intimidation and some of it is simply fatal. <br /><br />In all of this, the politically correct, anti-Semitic Left and the Islamist Right seem to have made common cause. The Left works from within like termites while the Islamist Right flies passenger aircraft into skyscrapers. Both have capitalism and democracy, one being impossible without the other, in the cross-hairs. <br /><br />Almost any objective Islamic scholar will tell you that internal struggle within Islam is key to understanding the threat to the Muslim world, Europe, and America. This threat is trans-national. When PBS uses taxpayer monies for "documentaries" which ignore or distort this reality then their product should be called what it <br />is - propaganda. <br /><br />Speaking of propaganda, George Bush and American conservatives also need to stop inventing language to hype the threat. The hyperbole is redundant. The term "Islamofascist" comes to mind. Name calling isn't an argument. Fascism is European in origin and historical practice. The goal of Islamists isn't government by dictators; it's worse, government by clerics. And while we're at it, let's drop the pretense of the so-called "War on Terror." We are not at war with a tactic; we are at war with religious fanatics - Islamists. <br /><br />Harry Reid, ironic representative from Navada has said that we have already "lost the war." He didn't say which war, the sideshow in Iraq or the larger struggle against Islamists. Maybe he is correct in both cases. With the PBS "Crossroads" series as a barometer, Mr. Reid might revise and amend his remarks and change "we lost" to "we surrender." <br /><br />Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and one that is almost right is like the difference between "lightning and lightning bugs". Words matter, indeed!G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-53783263238829814582007-08-15T09:34:00.000-07:002009-12-20T06:12:16.717-08:00The Tumescent ThreatEnough already! All of this carping about the misuse of Intelligence is getting tedious. To begin, it's irrelevant. Wars are seldom fought for explicit reasons. There are no honest brokers in this debate. Politicians, the Press and the Intelligence Community all have their axes to grind. The hidden agenda is often the agenda. Here are a few issues that don't make it to the chit chat tables at the DNC, RNC, the Press Club or the Intelligence Agencies.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">OIL</span><br /><br />Oil or more specifically, the painful steps required to end a dangerous dependence. And then there's oil money and the irony of Uncle Sap funding both sides of the war. When we audit terror funding can we see which sheik is using our money to support evildoers? Then there are consultants and lobbyists working for Arab governments. How about Kissinger's client list? If we can't see this, how about the list of retired American generals on Middle East retainers? Expecting a realist discussion of the role of oil in our policy may be a little like expecting Nancy Pelosi to ride a bicycle to her vineyard.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">ISRAEL</span><br /><br />The black helicopter crowd is starting to murmur about gentiles dying to make the world safe for a larger Kosher kibbutz. Indeed, Natan Sharansky tells us he believes in the "historical right of Jews to the land of Israel". Indeed! Israel is only democracy in the Levant and our only friend in a nasty neighborhood. Yet, many Americans and most journalists treat Israel like a pariah state. Given a choice between the shadow of a mosque and the light of synagogues, the choice for any <br />civilized person should be a no brainer. We support Israel for one reason; it's the right thing to do.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION</span><br /><br />Contrary to what you read in the Press, we have always known where to find the WMDs in the Levant. Unfortunately, Chuck Schummer and Barbara Boxer won't let us invade Israel. For thirty years our policy has been to maintain Israeli nuclear hegemony; call it the Sampson option. As long as European and American attitudes towards Israel remain ambiguous, nuclear weapons are a prudent hedge.<br /><br />Seymour Hirsch has written more on this subject than the Press Corps and Intelligence Community combined in the past fifty years. Please direct all hate mail in his direction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">HAZARDS OF HABITS</span><br /><br />History is precedent and habits are hazardous. When Bill Clinton was asked why he put his reputation, office and family at risk for a few knob gobs, he said, "Because I could". And so it goes. We did Iraq because we had done her before. Nothing beats a sure thing or a nostalgia poke. Forget revenge or unfinished business. Cheney was right, on substance and metaphor. Most Shia and all Kurds still have their arms open. Now, if we can just get those Sunni to bend over and take it like men. Still, two of three ain't bad.<br /><br />And now let's look at the critics, those who presume to preach about candor or manipulation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE CRITICS</span><br /><br />Take Congress, our beloved parliament of whores. Are you familiar with 'earmarks'? This is that process where a special interest group pays a handsome fee to some K Street lobbyist to "guarantee" that an designated sum will be shoveled out the back door of Congress to the special interest, neatly circumventing daylight and the usual appropriations process. Congressmen then receive a kickback in the form of campaign contributions, a job for a relative or friend, or a donation to the representative's favorite charity. This circle jerk grabs your taxes in the dark. We can't even find out which bitch in the bordello is picking our pockets. Point of privilege, thank you. Talk about cooking the books, these weasels don't keep books.<br /><br />Here's the problem on the Hill. Most politicians are lawyers. The legal trade is like the psycho babble industry, the strategic ethic is to keep the ball in play. Robert Byrd, dean of dark room deals, tells us that senators "are the heart and soul of the republic". No sir, more like the armpit and asshole. If we can mix a metaphor for a moment - a college of cockroaches with tenure.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE PRESS</span><br /><br />Now for the Press, our pious fourth estate. We could start with Scooter Libby, the New York Times and that infamous yellow cake. Too easy. We could look at plagiarism, a standard tool in many press kits. Or ad hominem arguments that blur the line between fact and vitriol. Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have been feasting on this carcass for 50 years. Too easy. Let's limit this discussion to fraud...outright invention.<br /><br />Cast a net over CBS (at least twice), the New York Times and the Washington Post. Do the names Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Jason Blair or Janet Cooke ring a bell? These journalists didn't just cook the books, they torched the cafe.<br /><br />Their histories have one thing in common, bias and, our old friend, hidden agenda. Wallace (CBS vs. Westmoreland), Rather, Blair and Cooke were telling their editors or producers what they wanted to hear. Ben Bradlee got his bias caught in his zipper during a recent interview with Charlie Rose when he tried to explain the lack of fact checking in the Cooke case. He said editors like him (white residents of Georgetown) didn't spend much time in the areas (black and poor ) fictionalized by Cooke. Her fraud was nominated for journalism's highest prize by the Washington Post. She won! In its current configuration the Pulitzer prize is a kind of special Olympics for political correctness and lame journalism.<br /><br />More recently, two national correspondents for the New York Times got their tits caught in the political wringer. One was pimping for the Left (on social issues) and the other for the Right (rationale for the Iraq war). Guess who got fired? Pompous editors or producers will tell you with a straight face that reporters suppress their personal beliefs when writing or broadcasting. This fallacy is first cousin to claims that private vice is unrelated to pubic virtue. Sorry Bill and Hillary devotees!<br /><br />Like many lobbyists on K Street, budding Media stars often make their bones as partisan political slugs. When they graduate to the real world, or should we say the world of real money, they bring their bones with them. If polls on the subject provide any evidence, politics may be the best bullet on an aspiring journalist's resume. Indeed, the best political pimps often get the top network jobs: Tim Russet, Chris Mathews and George Stephanopolus take a bow!<br /><br />Editors and producers would also have you believe that journalism and Intelligence are worlds apart. Not! Leakers are bread and butter for the Press. The Fourth Estate often carries water for Intelligence, just as they do for politicians - especially where agendas coincide. The recent flurry of NIE leaks speaks to this phenomena eloquently.<br /><br />We need to be mindful of an important distinction between journalistic dishonesty and intelligence manipulation. On a given day you might be lucky if a dozen people read an NIE. Press and Radio/TV networks have a daily audience in the millions. Hopefully, the Agora, the marketplace of ideas, will save us from Hal Raines and Ben Bradlee. The Intelligence Community, as we shall see, is a tougher nut.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">SHOTS FROM THE GRAVE<br /></span><br />The final category of critics are my personal favorites. Let's call them what they are, shots from the grave. This is that kiss and tell cottage industry of retired generals and former intelligence officers who find their integrity after they get fired or retired. Many of these, say Richard Clarke, have been passed over or coughed up like hairballs. Some like Dwight Eisenhower and Maxwell Taylor were genuine men of accomplishment who suffered from late-blooming conscience. Ike talked about the dangers of the military/industrial complex when he was on the 19Th hole. Taylor railed against nuclear weapons and a priapic Air Force after he vacated the E-ring.<br /><br />The worst of these are those with personal gripes. The late Deputy Director of the FBI aka "Deep Throat" is an infamous example. How would Watergate have played in the eyes of Congress and the public if they had known that a major source was a passover at the FBI? It's a stretch, but you could argue Woodward and Bradlee didn't have an agenda. Then you would also believe they couldn't figure who was using who. Unfortunately, this is the question not often asked. Nor are leakers asked why they didn't speak up when they could have made a difference. Did I forget to mention Daniel Ellsberg?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY<br /></span><br />Now that we have killed some of the messengers, let's save a few rounds for the Intelligence Community. How come history's largest spook network can't find its ass with a flashlight and a road map? Here's a short list of problems that didn't make the 9/11 Commission's dance card.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">MONOPOLY</span><br /><br />Intelligence is a Monopoly. Not just any monopoly but a government monopoly. Have you rode AMTRAK lately, stood in line at the DMV, tried to make eye contact at the Post Office? The best is last. Have you sent your kid to an urban public elementary, middle or high school? If you work in any of those institutions you don't have to be efficient, relevant, productive, creative, successful or polite. Like the Wizard of Oz, you don't have to think outside the box. You are the box.<br /><br />We have erected a very expensive and impressive edifice. Yet, behind the walls of Intelligence sits a timid, flaccid little man holding a wet finger in the air. He probably looks a lot like George Tennant or Louie Frey.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">POLITICS<br /></span><br />They say you can't tell the truth and survive in politics. Indeed! The Intelligence Community is political, a part of the Executive Branch. Truth for politicians is not some objective reality, it's what they believe. And better still, like it is for everyone else, what they want to hear. George Tennant was a politician, a staffer from the Hill. We have already covered the ethical standards on that pile. But wait, Tennant served two presidents one from each party, he was bipartisan. Indeed he was.<br /><br />Inside the beltway, telling both parties what they want to hear is the real definition of bipartisan. The image of Tennant watching Bush as he addressed Congress on yellow cake and Powell as he rationalized the Iraq war at the UN only had one possible message; Intelligence endorses this crap. Nothing short of privatization will get the politics out of Intelligence analysis.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">SIZE</span><br /><br />Let's agree at the outset that no one ever made admiral by asking for fewer boats. We all think bigger is better. Ask any bimbo or her plastic surgeon. Or try and convince a lawyer that you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. The Intelligence Community is no exception. Nonetheless, size is a dead hand, especially when the enemy is small, agile, flexible and lethal.<br /><br />The various sixteen agencies that makeup the Intelligence Community are like a large flock of geese. They eat a lot of green, the occasional bug, and then they shit often and profusely. The bureaucracy acts like a septic tank, holding choice bits in suspension. Then comes a tedious coordination where changing "happy to glad" often constipates the birds. When something floats to the top, it is usually characterized by painful prose and cover your ass content. Rhetorical fellatio anyone?<br /><br />There are only two things certain about any intelligence product; you know who received it, not who read it. Condi Rice gets to say "amen" here. One of the 9/11 Commission chairmen recently referred to the President's Daily Brief (PDB) as the "gold standard". Bullshit! The PDB like the NIE are simply things upon which the community agrees.<br /><br />There is an important exception, tactical or military intelligence. Here we are talking about local and global sensors and all their excellent derivatives: maps charts, photos and target materials. The myth among the alphabet soup agencies and a snarky Press is that military intelligence is an oxymoron. Only morons believe this. Military intelligence is the gold standard. This is true because military officers know something about objectives. They understand what is required to find, identify, capture or destroy. Think of military intelligence as the shield and the sword. Indeed, many of these guys, like Spartans, come back from the fight on their shields?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">SECRECY</span><br /><br />What was Sandy Berger up to at the National Archives before his 9/11 testimony? A charitable take would be that he had an irresistible urge to pad his Johnson with code words. Safe money says he was stuffing his briefs with classified memos embarrassing to the Clintonistas.<br /><br />Surely classification has a legitimate role in protecting sources and methods. Unfortunately, as Mr. Berger could tell us, it also masks less savory practices, like covering our asses. Classification also shrouds many of those hidden agendas. My favorite was the debate over missile and bomber gaps and all those Air Force footnotes to Cold War NIEs. In those days it didn't hurt your budget pitch to convince the Hill that we were losing the arms race. The belief that Russians (nee Soviets) were ten feet tall may have originated here. Kevin Lewis, the sage of Santa Monica at RAND Corporation, christened all "bigger is better" arguments as the Tumescent Threat.<br /><br />Classification also protects shabby analysis and incompetence. I recall an iconic photo of Washington, DC, superimposed by the outline of a Soviet era tank factory. I witnessed this sleight of hand so many times, I finally asked the DIA briefer what it was supposed to mean. He said the audience could draw its own conclusions. The audience was Congress and the White House.<br /><br />Secrecy is also a barrier to connecting those dots. "Eyes Only" caveats prevent analysts from seeing evidence that is often available only to principals. When competence and security arm wrestle, security usually wins.<br /><br />A final debit of our obsession with inappropriate secrecy is that it is used to hide programs that could not possibly survive the cockroach test, daylight that is. The late CIA/DIA excursions into remote viewing, a euphemism for the use of psychics to see into the Kremlin, is an egregious example. As with Congress, secrecy in the Executive Branch is often a mask for mischief.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE ANALYTICAL ENIGMA<br /></span><br />The intelligence monopoly, its size and secrecy are all structural problems. These are compounded by process problems, the most obvious of which is politicization. We really don't need any more evidence than that photo of Tennant leering over Colin Powell's shoulder at the UN.<br /><br />Tennant is to Intelligence what Rather is to Journalism. They're both political, they both cooked the books and they both got caught. Negroponte's most recent NIE on terrorism, leaked to the press, speaks for itself.<br /><br />Defenders of Rather and Tennant etched their scams in stone by raising the Himmler defense. Prior to WWII Himmler was presented with an annotated copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" by some Jewish notables. He dismissed the forged facts by claiming the conclusions were still valid. More recently, Douglas Feith, late great second guesser at DOD boldly claimed "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (he was talking about those WMD's). More on cliche wisdom later.<br /><br />Speaking of cliches, those infamous "stovepipes" celebrated by the 9/11 Commission are a myth. The problem inside the Intelligence Community isn't lack of coordination or lack of fusion it's more like outright cultural hostility. Some anecdotal evidence provides some insight.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">PISSING ON WALLS</span><br /><br />If a CIA guy comes to an inter-agency meeting he lifts his leg and pisses on the wall. Just to let you know who comes from the alpha agency. If a FBI representative is present, he may do it twice. When an NSA, aka puzzle palace, analyst attends he will be accompanied by a supervisor. It's not just "mother may I", it's a "bring your mother" culture at NSA. An outside observer might mistake such meetings as group for passive aggressives.<br /><br />DIA is a stepchild fashioned from the detritus of the old military agencies. While at the Pentagon, it was known as the mushroom factory. No doubt due to workspace in the mezzanine basement. Below grade offices at the Pentagon are notorious for rodents, asbestos, fungi and malcontents. Now that DIA has moved to Bolling AFB, it has been rechristened the Death Star. For years DIA had all the symptoms of a shotgun marriage.<br /><br />These same problems will no doubt plague the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), already known inside the beltway as the Department of Duct Tape. As we rearrange the intelligence deck chairs yet again it's hard not to be cynical. Indeed, trying to explain his Katrina performance, the late director of FEMA complained that Chertoff had siphoned the best people to DHS. This is a little like complaining about the neighbor who dug up your dead cats.<br /><br />Politics and cultural friction are actually minor problems compared to the chasm that separates Intelligence from policy. The purpose of Intelligence and analysis is to warn, educate or change paradigms. In short, inform policy and make prudent action possible. The task is easy to define. Success is another matter.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">ANALYZING ANALYSIS</span><br /><br />Competence is a function of action. Acts are driven by Belief (faith, if you will) Sense or Reason. Beliefs are all those generalizations we have internalized by virtue of heredity or experience. Nature and nurture rule in this sphere.<br /><br />Sensory knowledge is more immediate. It's what we can see, hear, smell, touch or feel. It is the realm of intuition, emotion and common sense. Although common sense is not as common as you might think. When confronted with danger, we freeze, flee or fight. Acts all driven by our senses.<br /><br />Reasoning is a kind of thumb sucking and naval gazing. The formal variety is a parvenu, Aristotle forward. This is the realm of fact gathering and analysis and all their tedious cousins; logic, mathematics, sciences and whatever you use to balance your checkbook. The optimistic and naive among us like to believe reasoning proceeds action. Though we like to think that reason is in the driver's seat, in the world of national security and politics, it seldom even makes the bus. Beliefs and senses have been around a lot longer and they have many more adherents.<br /><br />Belief, sense and reason are all necessary to our cognitive or analytical faculties, but only belief is sufficient. Truth is what you believe. Senses can be deceived, facts can be forged (Dan Rather takes a bow here) and reasoning can be fallacious. Thus our faith or our minds are not easily changed.<br /><br />Marx once said that ideology is a prison without walls. He should have known, his religion put 70% of the world's population behind bars. Belief almost always trumps feeling or reason. We can dismiss this phenomenon with name calling. The word ideologue comes to mind. However, this allows us to avoid the analytical cipher; how to bridge the gap between analysis and acceptance?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">ROOTS OF REASON</span><br /><br />Questions of beliefs and reason have a good pedigrees. Socrates tried to undermine the belief in democracy and paid with his life. "Impiety", lack of faith, was the charge. A capital offense back in the day. Socrates was surely our first thumb sucker, an anti-democratic intellectual without a grain of common sense. He had little faith in the wisdom of crowds. He died trying to score debating points.<br /><br />His student Plato kicked the can. He suggested mere humans couldn't know the truth, only reflections or shadows. Closer to our time, Alfred North Whitehead picked up the Platonic thread and asserted that there were no truths, only half truths. Moral relativists have been plowing this furrow ever since.<br /><br />Plato's student, Aristotle, threw his patron over the rail and crafted all those "ics" and "ologies" that allow us to parse what we think we know into a thousand parts. Reason is also that faculty that allows us to think we are smarter than we are. Or as Donald Rumsfeld might put it; "we don't know what we don't know." As many recent events suggest, after 2400 years, reason does not often speak truth to power. The faith of our fathers, and occasionally common sense, still rule the roost.<br /><br />In the end, the faith/reason conflict is a bit of a straw man. It's not a fair fight; two, faith and sensibility, against one, reason. And reason is still a junior partner. The senior partners have been in business for 100,000 years. Lastly, reason is a bit of a floozie, she often rolls over for every new paradigm carrying a wad of facts.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">RELIGION ROUTS REASON</span><br /><br />Our tendency to ignore the power of belief has two roots. Firstly, faith or belief is too often confused with religion and therefor ignored or dismissed. Secondly, the power of reason to overcome beliefs, especially religion, is vastly overrated.<br /><br />Secular rationalists have long assumed that influence of religion would diminish with the growth of the global village. In fact, religion has exploded to fill the vacuum of failed secular ideologies; communism, national socialism and fascism come to mind. Religion is not just a growth business; it now uses the instruments of democracy to undermine the very freedoms which make science possible. In short, a poison pill. Indeed, the orthodox variants of all major religions have little use for reason or science. Religion thus represents both a domestic and international threat to stability, to say nothing of progress. You will not hear of this at the academy or from the televised Sunday morning gas bags.<br /><br />Ironically, political correctness and a post-enlightenment hangover are sapping the precious bodily fluids from scientists and academics - or progressives as they like to think of themselves. With the possible exception of Oriana Fallacci, few intellectuals have come forward to condemn the intolerance of Jewish, Islamic or Christian orthodoxies. Indeed we tolerate bigotry, divisiveness, ignorance and even stupidity in the name of diversity and religious "freedom". The very phrase is an oxymoron. No orthodoxies hold elections. Clerics are anointed or appointed. The power of priests, like the power of politicians, professors and pundits, is underwritten by the terror of tenure.<br /><br />Back in the day, few rationalists were willing to reassess the value systems of a science which gave us nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to say nothing of an industrial revolution predicated on colonial exploitation. Blood diamonds were not invented by Leonardo DiCaprio. And you might also recall, long before John Kerry, Einstein was for nuclear weapons before he was against them.<br /><br />The progressive and rational were also the first to embrace Marx and his German philosophical antecedents, a vein of thought which continues to enriched Communists, Fascists and Nazis. None of this bodes well for reason, science or the academy to be the vanguard for truth, justice or the American way. The same might be said for our legal, political and journalistic oligarchies. Indeed, reason is an unlikely ally in any ongoing "clash of civilizations".<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE USUAL SUSPECTS<br /></span><br />Here, two recent examples are instructive: the 9/11 Commission and Douglas Feith group at the Pentagon.<br /><br />Ad hoc committees, commissions or offices have one thing in common, they are a vote of no confidence in the official structure. Membership is drawn from the usual suspects. Indeed, some cadre are often unindicted co-conspirators. Big shout out to Bob Kerry and Jamie Gorelick! These special commissions resemble legal star chambers; fact gathering, witnesses and summary judgments. They are models of Aristotelian induction. Logical sound and fury signifying nothing.<br /><br />The outcomes from such groups are predictable; per diem, platitudes, a deck chair shuffle and some variation of bigger is better! If you press such groups and ask why they don't name names, roll heads or deconstruct an agency or two, the response is equally predictable; "We don't want to conduct a witch hunt." Hoping, of course, that the taxpayer might not recall that the witches were actually innocent.<br /><br />In the end what you have is a failure of operational reasoning compounded by a failure of critical reasoning. The late 9/11 Commission is no exception.<br /><br />First, there was the failure to indite or execute the guilty. Then came a failure to torch any cognizant but obviously culpable agency. Then the guilty and culpable were rewarded with bigger budgets. Verily, like Janet Cooke, the President even gave a medal to the late Director of Central Intelligence.<br /><br />The net result of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations is a wider and taller Intelligence Community. They validated a new layer of blubber and three new agencies. More tumescence if you will. Also vastly more expensive. Few will note that mindless spending is also one of the objectives of those evildoers. The terrorism cash cow is now milked by a thousand hands.<br /><br />Ironically, hidden agendas and misplaced zeal often dovetail. In spite of its name, DOD has never been much interested in defense - the military capability. Surely you noticed during the 9/11 attacks. The Coast Guard our only defensive service, is now sailing under a DHS flag. What's next? Air and coastal artillery arms for Chertoff. Or maybe we could put all of the Marines under Barbara Bodine at State. If you think we are guided by logic, reason or scientific analysis in the national security arena, you would be wrong.<br /><br />And now for the late Douglas Feith and that special intelligence unit at the Pentagon. It would be easy to dismiss this guy as another moron. However, the message that such groups send to the rest of the Intelligence Community is corrosive: Evidence doesn't matter! If you don't tell us what we want to hear, you're not looking hard enough! Or maybe, if you don't give us the answers we need, we will create a special unit for policy support! When you hear that a special unit has been created so that "fresh eyes" can look at the problem, stand by for a pimp walk. Reason indeed!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">COWARDICE ENSHRINED</span><br /><br />At this point we should all be feeling a little like Hemingway, ready to rack a round into the chamber. There are no easy solutions to any of the forgoing.<br /><br />Hidden agendas are what they are. Expecting candor from politicians is a little like hoping your dog will have kittens. The structural problem, the large secret monopoly is also impervious. The chances of ending the Intelligence monopoly are about as good as ending the public education monopoly. Here you also encounter Clintonian logic, being and not being. Sixteen Intelligence stovepipes, bad! Sixteen Intelligence voices, good! And then there's the process problem. Nothing short of brain surgery here. Reason has been pimped out to our foregone conclusions.<br /><br />The failing that underlies all of these problems is not just the absence or misuse of reason or logic; rather it is the lack of personal integrity or public morals. Our principal vice is cowardice; the absence of heart among Politicians, the Press, Intelligence officers and the likes of Tennant, Negroponte, Kean, Hamilton and more recently the Baker Iraq Study Group. You could read the 9/11 Commission Report, the Iraq Study Group Report and the latest NIE on terror and come to believe the threat need to be reorganized rather than defeated..<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">TOUCHING PERICLES</span><br /><br />If we could reach back beyond Aristotle's rationality we might touch Pericles - present at the birth of democracy. Athenian Greeks had a social syllogism which began with "arete", personal excellence - physical, mental and moral. Personal excellence enriched the family which in turn enriched the state. This notion of an invisible hand was later incorporated into economic theory by Adam Smith. Pericles and Smith knew that real democracy and real entrepreneurial capitalism, came from the bottom up, not top down. So much for imposing democracy.<br /><br />As he lamented the war dead of the Peloponnesian campaign, Pericles instructed the citizens of Athens; "the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is a brave heart". He was admonishing his constituents to do the right thing - as soldiers, citizens and statesmen. He drew no lines between private vice and public virtue.<br /><br />Our political, journalistic and government institutions seem to have little or no capability for this kind of introspection. When caught out, we try and smother critics with bullshit. Deception and manipulation are symptoms of ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance may just be what we don't know, but just as surely, stupidity is what we do know and choose to ignore. The former is unfortunate, the latter might be fatal.<br /><br /><br /><br />-------------------------------G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4311986757134367680.post-40596372812488947742007-08-10T10:23:00.001-07:002007-08-10T10:49:06.840-07:00EATING TAILSWe often assume that achievement is fungible; talent in one subject provides a license to assert conclusions in areas unrelated to education, expertise or experience. Pronouncements from Rosie O'Donnell on the behavior of I-beams under intense heat comes to mind. Apparently the structural engineers on The View don't believe that fire melts steel, thus fueling another post- 9/11 conspiracy theory. Other examples would include a virtual legion of entertainers providing their unsolicited advice on foreign aid, diplomacy, war fighting and national strategy. In this group Bono and Sean Penn stand out. Why two Keith Richards clones think they are qualified to give advice on national security is a national mystery. More recently the speaker of the House of Representatives, heretofore known for her expertise on political pork, flew off to the Middle-East to launch a unilateral peace initiative with a tyrant, bypassing the National Security Council, the Department of State and the White House in the process.<br /><br />Surely in a democracy everyone is entitled to their opinions no matter how ill informed. The real question here is not the players but the stage. Why do we provide the forums for celebrities to spout nonsense, embarrass themselves and insult public discourse? The short answer is a Media obsessed with arguments not answers. Enlightenment doesn't sell as well as food fights. There isn't much of a market for serious discussion of serious subjects.<br /><br />And too often even serious people use their celebrity as a kind of omniscience. Socrates parlayed his celebrity as an Agora gadfly into an assisted suicide. Most of what we know of Socrates comes through a fawning Plato who didn't think we could know truth only half-truths. Yet some Socratic nonsense is still with us in whole measures.<br /><br />First there's that infamous Socratic method; pedagogical interrogation. Learning by questioning the untutored, exposing their false assumptions. The modern version has has been reduced to "there's no such thing as a bad question". Surely there are bad questions large and small. Questioning freedom or democracy was then as it is today, a bad question. As Churchill might have said, considering the alternatives. Some questions are prudent and some are fatal. Socrates was tried for impiety, lack of faith (in democracy). He and his followers were questioning the very freedoms which made their debates possible, a tragic error in logic. On small issues, it is very unlikely that Socrates ever asked his wife if she was gaining weight, needed another pair of shoes or another handbag. Imprudent questions all.<br /><br />Socrates also famously told us; "there is only one good - knowledge; and only one evil - ignorance". Had he the benefit of Aristotle's logic, Socrates might not have conflated knowing and acting. Good and evil are moral questions which require choice and action. Knowledge is a function of opportunity, access or experience. Ignorance is ethically neutral. We are all ignorant on some subject or other. As that celebrated Pentagon sage once said; "We don't know what we don't know". If there is a moral judgement to be made, it concerns ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge; stupidity is the absence of judgement in the presence of knowledge. In another context Pericles nailed the distinction; "There is no shame in poverty. The shame is not trying to overcome poverty".<br /><br />Socratics were notorious anti-democrats, no believers in the wisdom of crowds. Then as now, intellectuals couldn't see themselves ruled by plumbers or carpenters, people who didn't swim in a sea of abstractions. Plato argued for a state ruled by philosopher kings. Today's democratic oligarchy of lawyers is surely an ironic echo of the Platonic ideal.<br /><br />Closer to our time, Albert Einstein wandered out of the academic cloister to advise us on strategy and then world government. First he was for nuclear weapons then he was against them. As an abstraction, nuclear explosions seemed to be an interesting project; the reality of bombs proved less savory. From the front lines in Princeton, New Jersey, Einstein also advised that world government would be impossible without American leadership. It is almost impossible to think that he didn't know that "world government" was the objective of Nazis and Communists, not the goal of democracies. The essence of democracy is free will, choice and competition; competing ideas, competing politics and competing industries. World government is the antithesis of freedom and surely would be the death knell of competition. A world of scoreless soccer is no world at all.<br /><br />When intellectuals stray from experience or expertise, they often morph into idiot savants. Like many German refugees of his day, Einstein could reject Nazis yet admire Marxists - as if they were different creatures. The only significant different between National Socialism and Soviet Communism was that the first was chauvinistic and the latter was ecumenical.<br /><br />Indeed Karl Marx, like the Socratics, constructed an elaborate circular argument, a snake devouring its own tail. The critique of capitalism would abolish the very marketplace that made the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution possible. Marx lacked both the expertise or moral credibility to dabble in economics or politics. Like Socrates and Blanche Dubois, he depended on the kindness of strangers for a livelihood. In the middle of the Industrial Revolution, Marx could or would not find employment to feed his family. Indeed, at least one of his children starved to death, sacrificed on an altar of abstractions. Likewise, Socrates sacrificed his own life trying to score debating points.<br /><br />This is not to say that idiot savants are without influence. Words matter. The written word matters permanently. Beyond words, it's not hard to imagine what Bono, Einstein and Marx have in common. All proceed on a single false assumption; some kind of global village would be an improvement on the messy, fractious world we live in.<br /><br />Einstein would have America lead the charge to Utopia. Yet he would ignore the centrifugal forces of world politics; the number of separate nation states has doubled since WWII. Today, Bono would redistribute wealth, North to South, from the developed to the undeveloped. All the while ignoring tyranny, corruption and incompetence. Indeed, in his zeal to save Africa, ignoring the euphemistic "troubles" in his own back yard. And finally modern Marxists (Chomsky comes to mind) and now radical Islamists still see democracy and capitalism as the two great evils of the world. It is no coincidence that political and religious extremists live by the same binary code - believe or die.<br /><br />Bernard Lewis tells us that all extremists believe in democracy - at least once.G. Murphy Donovanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14524265596388811573noreply@blogger.com0