I'm back.

(And the crowd goes wild...)

So where the heck have I been?

Well, I spent December 19th attending my grandmother's funeral in Enid, Oklahoma. At age 85, she was my last remaining grandparent.

As it happens, that was also my 40th birhday. That's a little more mortality than one should have to face in one day.

Christmas with my parents wasn't as grim as you would expect, following something like that, but neither was it exactly festive. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Paul, and old gaming buddy. I drove back to Houston on the 26th.

I then promptly contracted some kind of respiratory infection, which meant the vacation time I took between Christmas and New Years basically went to waste. I still haven't entirely shaken off the effects.

Plus, I spent entirely too much time playing Anarchy Online.

When I refreshed my blog front page and saw that all the editorial content had scrolled off into the archives, I decided it was time to get back in the game.

So, I'm back.

This latest hip, cutting-edge, trendy thing to do on the web is vlogging, or video weblogging. Cringely has something in the works along those lines.

You won't be seeing it here, ever.

I won't foreswear linking to video clips produced by others, and I could even see keeping a clip on my own site (mirroring it, the way Steven Den Beste has mirrored important articles as insurance against their deletion from other sites). But I won't be producing any talking-head video of my own, even if I had the gear and software on hand to do it.

Remember what the first "T" in "HTTP" stands for? Text. A decade plus change after its creation, text is still the ideal medium for information on the web.

Storage and server bandwidth may be getting cheap, but it isn't yet free. And client-side broadband may be getting more popular, but it isn't yet ubiquitous. I want to keep the blogosphere open to readers on dial-up links or using text-based browsers, and bloggers using low- or no-cost hosting services.

I want search engines to be able to easily parse content. I want people to be able to skim or speed-read what I write. I want people to be able to extract quotes and include them in their responses. How do you fisk a video clip?

And what ever happened to the notion that, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog?

I want to hear from people who would not consider talking to a camera, whether because they are camera-shy, or unattractive, or anonymous, or have an unpleasant voice (or cannot speak at all). On video, Stephen Hawking is a cripple, an object of pity; in text form, his intellect rings out as clearly as a church-bell, and he is the object of admiration. I know which I prefer.

And finally, I want to keep the blogosphere technologically free; I don't want content to be trapped in a vendor-owned format. I browse and blog from Mozilla on Linux, and prefer to stick to that environment as much as possible. True, there is a version of RealPlayer for Linux (still one major rev behind their Windows player), but if a clip is in QuickTime or Windows Media Player format, I have to switch to a Windows box, assuming there is one at hand. Text and HTML are vendor-neutral and ubiquitous; video data is not. (Though the Ogg Theora and XviD people may change that in the future.)

I realize that I'm in a tiny, reactionary minority on this one. When Cringe proposed going video, I was almost the only person on his comment board to speak out against it. And no one else in the blogosphere seems to be questioning whether vlogging really is a step forward.

Video already has a home, in broadcast and cable. The Web should aim higher, and remain true to itself.

Hayate No, an Iranian daily reformist newspaper, has shut its doors (temporarily, one hopes) due to public outcry over an American cartoon it printed. Many took the cartoon as an insult to that beloved old fascist nutbar, the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Problem is, it's not Khomeini:

On Wednesday, the daily printed a caricature showing former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) pressing his thumb to the head of a US Supreme Court justice.

However, many Iranians felt the justice -- shown as an old bearded man dressed in a long black robe -- bore a striking resemblance to the revered late leader of the Islamic revolution.

Hundreds of people staged a demonstration against the "insulting caricature" in the religious city of Qom Friday, while in Tehran scores of demonstrators gathered in front of Hayate No's offices.

When contemplating the long, difficult conflict of civilizations that lies ahead, it's reassuring to know just how stupid our opponents can be.

If anyone can find a link to the original cartoon, I'd love to attach it to an update to this entry, and possibly mirror it here.

UPDATE 2003-01-16: Cool! Reader Paul Helgesen has tracked down the offending cartoon, at this archive page (search for "Court under FDR thumb" to find the entry). It's by "Shafer" of the Cincinnati Times Star, dated February of 1937. Local mirrors of the image here (338x480, 13K) and here (841x1193, 48K). Thanks, Paul!

Yesterday, the British carrier Ark Royal got underway to the Persian Gulf; today, the U.S. more than doubled its troop commitment to the Gulf.

And in perhaps the most ominous sign of all, Sarge is off on some mysterious errand, for an unspecified amount of time.

It looks like the hammer's about to fall, folks. Let's hope it happens quickly, and with no nasty surprises (for anyone other than Saddam Hussein, that is).

UPDATE 2003-01-18: Steven Den Beste presents more evidence that the shooting is about to start.

It's a very compelling story, about Israel's first astronaut, the son of a Holocaust survivor. He will be carrying with him a keepsake, a space drawing made sixty years ago by a child who was later killed in the Holocaust.

Yet, I cannot help but think of the closing sequence of Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I.

More seriously, I hope that NASA is being very careful with the physical security at the launch site on this mission. This would make a very tempting target for anyone with a hate-on for the United States and Israel.

Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card writes an excellent essay on Iraq, Korea, the differences between the two, and why we won't be invading North Korea.

I'm not sure that China would go to war to defend North Korea; no doubt they'd pitch a fit publicly, accompanied by more saber-rattling with respect to Taiwan. But even they must realize what a dangerous lunatic Kim Jong Il is, and would privately breathe a sigh of relief if he were deposed -- especially if the U.S. reduced its troop commitment to the Korean peninsula after reunification.

But I could be wrong; perhaps Card has a better handle on the situation than I do. Even if all-out war is improbable, the stakes are awfully high to be betting against the merely "improbable".

Given that the title of his blog is taken from one of Card's novels, and Card here seems to express views similar to those of the reviled "warbloggers", I wonder what Demosthenes has to say about this?

Steven Den Beste writes about recent nearly-comical protests:

Ostensibly the purpose is to prevent war. But the only way you can determine that is by the fact that they call it "antiwar protesting". The only way they could conceivably prevent war is by delivering a message which would convince the majority of American voters that war is wrong. Yet they seem to package their message in terms which are virtually guaranteed to alienate and offend the majority of voters, guaranteeing that they will stay in the political fringe and never attain the political critical mass necessary to actually have any political effect.

Replace "war" with "big government", and you have in a nutshell my reason for letting my membership in the Libertarian Party lapse.

Kevin Parrott suggests some alternative titles for CBS's upcoming miniseries on Adolph Hitler.

Fellow Houstonian Laurence Simon chips in a few suggestions of his own, and I take things entirely too far in the comments section.

My favorite is Lair's "Triumph of the Will & Grace".

Steven Den Beste rarely indulges in "fisking" -- but when he does, it's a wonder to behold:

I somehow thought that it was obvious that actively attempting to kill US soldiers wasn't "protected expression" under the First Amendment. I somehow thought it obvious that any kind of violence wasn't "protected expression". I thought it was obvious that this was top bracket sophistry. Silly me; I forgot that killing American soldiers is actually performance art!

Iain Murray, of the weblog The Edge of England's Sword, has been fired, without notice, for blogging, after being told by his previous boss that his blogging was okay.

I've hit his tipjar, and I encourage my serried legions of loyal readers (both of you, that is) to do the same.

UPDATE (21-Jan-2003): There was a problem with Iain's Paypal tipjear earlier; it's fixed now. There may also be a problem with the Amazon payment link.

Sex-starved bananas face the chop.

But then, sometimes a banana is just a banana.

(There must be a Lorena Bobbitt joke in there somewhere, but it's probably not worth the effort.)

The Washington Post reports that Condoleezza Rice played a major part in President Bush's recent decision to condemn race-based admissions quotas.

Rice, the first female national security adviser, told Bush that she worked to increase the number of African American faculty members at Stanford but that she was "absolutely opposed to quotas," a senior administration official said. A Stanford official said that under Rice, who served from 1993 to 1999 and was the university's first nonwhite provost, the number of black faculty members increased from 36 to 44.

This is interesting in a number of ways.

First, it involves Rice, whose portfolio is obviously foreign policy, in a domestic policy issue. It's certainly understandable that Bush would seek Rice's counsel; her experience is directly relevant to the issue. But why make her involvement known to the public? Perhaps she is being prepared for a broader role in the administration, such as (dare I hope) Vice President, and thus a leading contender to succeed Bush.

Second, assuming that Rice agreed to let her role be known to the public, it means she is willing to take some heat -- potentially a lot of heat -- of the "race traitor" variety. That shows some real guts. Interesting, too, that she was willing to dare such criticism over a minor matter. (Mind you, the case itself is significant, but the Administration's amicus filing is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome.)

It also shows Rice to be conservative on issues other than foreign policy. (Rumor has it her domestic politics are essentially libertarian, and this is consistent with that. That's probably too good to be true, though.)

Finally, it's a snub to Colin Powell, who is supportive of race-conscious policies. While he may have hoped to be Bush's heir apparent, those hopes now look forlorn. Secretary Powell's career has gone about as far as it is likely to go.

UPDATE (18-Jan-2003): Well, it seems it was too good to be true. The original WaPo article was apparently correct in that Rice was consulted about the decision, but implied incorrectly that Rice agreed with the administration position; according to this follow-up article (by one of the co-authors of the original piece), Rice favors using race as one of several factors in admissions, though she agrees that the U.Mich. standards go too far. She was apparently pretty upset about the story, and the President urged her to state her position publicly.

In the five-sentence statement she issued yesterday, Rice endorsed the thrust of Bush's decision but suggested he had not taken all her advice. ...

It is clear that both agree Michigan's program is flawed, but Rice made a broader statement that there are situations when race-conscious admissions programs might be necessary. Bush has avoided going that far. In remarks on the Michigan case Wednesday, Bush did not directly say whether race could be considered in admissions decisions, although he said schools should seek diversity by looking at "a student's potential and life experiences."

Here is the full text of Dr. Rice's statement:

When the President decided to submit an amicus brief, he asked for my view on how diversity can be best achieved on university campuses. I offered my view, drawing on my experience in academia and as provost of a major university. I agree with the President's position, which emphasizes the need for diversity and recognizes the continued legacy of racial prejudice, and the need to fight it. The President challenged universities to develop ways to diversify their populations fully. I believe that while race neutral means are preferable, it is appropriate to use race as one factor among others in achieving a diverse student body.

General Leopoldo Galtieri, erstwhile dictator of Argentina, has passed away. In his column in Canada's National Post, Mark Steyn writes on Galtieri's defining failure, the Falkland Islands War, and how lessons learned might be applied to the current conflict in the Middle East.

Mrs. Thatcher liberated not just the Falklands, but also Argentina, at least from the military. Galtieri fell and democracy returned. The "humiliating defeat" of the junta tainted all the other puffed-up bemedalled tinpots by implication. And, whatever the problems of Latin America today, no one's pining for the return of the generals. Twenty years ago, the realpolitik crowd thought a democratic South America was a fantasy and that we had to cosy up to the strutting little El Presidentes-for-Life. Today, the same stability junkies tell us we have to do the same with Boy Assad and Co. They're wrong again. They always are.

There's lots more, and it's all worth reading.

You know, I link to Steven Den Beste's site more than I probably should; I feel like I'm a scavenger cleaning up the scraps left behind by a big predator. But here we go again.

I think Steven is missing a fairly big piece of the puzzle; he still assigns too much importance -- or rather, the wrong kind of importance -- to Hans Blix's see-no-evil weapons inspection. The belief is, apparently, that Blix will report enough violations that we can claim that Iraq is in material breach, and then we unleash the hounds of war.

Of course, Blix and most of the members of the UN Security Council are steadfastly opposed to that outcome, and will deny that sufficient evidence of violation exists to justify the use of force, blah blah friggin' blah, you've heard it all before. We attack anyway, the Europeans are humiliated, etc.

That outcome lacks the finesse of earlier moves of the Bush administration; it's much more their style to shame or outmaneuver their opponents into going along with his plans, than simply to defy them outright.

And it is extremely unlikely that Bush would allow his strategy to hinge in any way on Hans Blix's conduct and judgement. Bush and Blair would not make the kind of force commitment they have made unless they already had compelling evidence in hand.

So are the inspections just a smoke-and-mirror show, something to pass the time while our forces are being deployed? Are they just a sop to our fair-weather allies?

No. Blix is performing a vitally important function. Not, mind you, the function that he thinks he's performing, but vital nonetheless.

It is unrealistic to expect that the inspections would actually discover Iraq's stores of WMDs; hiding them sufficiently well -- in some cases by transporting them out of Iraq entirely -- is simply too easily done.

But keeping the weapons hidden, while simultaneously preparing them for battlefield use -- that is effectively impossible. As long as the UN inspections are going on, Iraq's chemical and biological weapons are neutralized, removed from the field of battle, while our own preparations proceed unhindered. And by the time the Iraqis can move again, it will be too late; the shooting will have already begun.

Hans Blix will have neutralized the one semi-effective means the Iraqis had of resisting the Anglo-American invasion, and will have done so entirely unwittingly. Amazing how this legendary dimwit of a President keeps outsmarting all these smart people, isn't it?

UPDATE (19-Jan-2003): Bill Quick disagrees.

I was thinking primarily of chemical agents: Saddam has used them in the past against both the Kurds and Iran; and radiological and biowarfare weapons wouldn't kill quickly enough to be useful on the battlefield. (What good does it do you if the enemy's soldiers die two weeks after they've overrun your capital?)

The inspections aren't preventing the deployment of the missiles themselves, of course; the Scud launchers are surely already in the field and lying low. But as was explained in recent reports about the empty warheads discovered by the inspectors, chemo weapons can't be stored in the munitions themselves in the long term; the warheads would be filled almost immediately before launch.

If, at the time inspections began, Saddam assumed -- as I believe Bill assumed as well -- that the US hadn't yet committed to an attack, then the chemo weapons would all be in some kind of long-term storage, and would have stayed there for the duration of the inspections. The plan would have been to move them to the launchers when it became obvious attack was imminent, indicated by a sudden troop build-up, presuming that inspections would be over by then. But of course, that build-up is happening now, while inspections are still in progress.

Some of the chemo weapons are reported to have been transported out of Iraq entirely to avoid detection. Those weapons are gone for good; it now looks like there won't be enough time between the completion of inspections and the commencement of fighting for them to be retrieved.

The effectiveness of the inspectors in preventing the movement of WMDs depends not on our perception of the Blix team's effectiveness, but on Saddam's perception. He surely believes that there are American spies and saboteurs among the inspectors; he's said so often enough. (And who knows, he might be right.)

As for the risk-reward calculation, what risk? If it works, we may save some of our soldiers' lives; if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than if we didn't make use of the inspectors in this manner. Yes, the special forces in the field will probably be more successful, but why not pursue both tactics?

Perhaps this result, if it does pan out, is simply a happy accident, rather than a consciously-crafted scheme. But the timing of events seem to have worked to Bush's advantage several times running: the day after the 9/11 anniversary observance was exactly the right time to prod the UNSC into action; a month before the election was exactly the right time to extract an authorization of military action from the Senate; and now Saddam needs to prepare for the invasion at precisely the time he is under the greatest pressure from his European apologists to be on his best behavior. If it happens often enough, you have to wonder if it really is just chance.

Here's a good article from Johann Hari, a leftist writer in Australia's The Age:

Who, you may be asking incredulously, would want their country to be bombed? What would make people want to risk their children being blown to pieces? I thought this too until, last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein.

(Link courtesy of Winds of Change.)

I do wish that Saddam Hussein's horrific human rights record were cited more frequently as justification for attacking Iraq. It's better documented that either his WMD programs or his connection, if any, to al Qaeda; and we have the precedent of Slobodan Milosevic to draw upon.

Of course, there are drawbacks to such an argument. The argument that this fight is "distracting us from the war on terrorism" would get a little more traction; our fair-weather Arab "allies" would be less inclined to help us if we were attacking Saddam for conduct they engage in themselves when they think nobody's looking; and of course, there would be an endless parade of other nearly-as-bad, maybe-worse dictators (Kim Jong-Il, Mugabe, Khameini, all the usual suspects) accompanied by the question, why Saddam and not them?

So it may be a diplomatic necessity for the administration to stick to the UN-resolution line; but there's no reason that columnists and bloggers who favor intervention should be so constrained.

Of course the writer, being a leftist, has to get in a shot at Bush:

If your hatred of Dubya overwhelms your hatred of Saddam, then I sympathise - that is the reason why I, too, once viewed this war with dread and contempt - but I strongly suspect that if you were confronted with the reality of Saddam's Iraq, you would change your mind. Of course, forming an alliance with George Bush is an unpleasant experience, but we formed an alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It is also possible that Bush, like his father, will betray the hopes of the people of Iraq - and we must campaign to prevent this.

So Bush is another Stalin. Right. Whatever.

Anyway, I think Hari might be surprised at how little protest it would take to get the Bush administration to follow the course he suggests; I'd be very surprised if that weren't the plan from the very beginning.

North Koreans are fleeing to China in increasing numbers.

Chinese police posing as smugglers arrested 58 North Korean refugees shortly before they were to be secretly ferried out of China and taken to South Korea and Japan, an international aid worker said Monday.

I get a sick feeling thinking of what fate awaits the poor souls repatriated to North Korea (as required by a treaty with China). As casually brutal as Kim Jong Il's regime is when it's not even trying, how bad must it be when you have their full attention? Winston Smith probably got off lightly in comparison.

Link courtesy of Ben Fisher, by way of InstaPundit. Glenn thinks this may be a sign that Kim's regime may be near collapse. I sure hope so; and I suspect that if and when it does, we will see revealed a human tragedy on a par with the Holocaust or Cambodia's killing fields. Fifty years of Stalinism can breed a lot of human suffering.

Doctors Reattach Teen's Head After Car Wreck.

Okay, so his head wasn't completely detached; though his vertebrae were shattered, his spine was intact, as were the arteries of his neck. Still. Six months later, he's back playing basketball; that's a miracle if I ever saw one. I love living in the 21st century.

Or maybe we're living in a Rob Reiner movie:

Miracle Max: Is he completely decapitated or just mostly decapitated?

Inigo: What's the difference?

Miracle Max: If he's completely decapitated, there's only one thing you can do.

Inigo: What's that?

Miracle Max: Go through his pockets and look for loose change.

American Heritage magazine has an interview with Ralph Peters: historian, novelist, and former Army intelligence officer.

I personally feel that we’ve made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world’s Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt.

Personally, I think he's being a little rough on the Clampetts; Ellie Mae never had to wear a burqa. (And thank goodness for that.)

But the "malevolent hicks" phrase is a keeper. The Saudi's idea of good taste does sometimes seem as tacky and over-the top as any American theme park, a sort of Mordor to Disney World's Gondor. (Which would make North Korea Isengard; on the other hand, it's probably best I drop this analogy altogether.)

He's absolutely right, of course; all the moreso because the Saudis not only possess all the oil wealth, they also have political control of Mecca and Medina. They are literally the gatekeepers of Islam.

The War Against Terror will be won when the House of Saud falls, and is replaced by a more humane, more civilized regime. Nothing less will do.

Christopher Hitchens holds forth on the term "Cowboy" in an article at Slate. It seems to be written for non-Americans -- or at least, for those who look at Texas as if it were a foreign country. (And to be fair, from 1836 to 1845, it was.)

It's a little odd reading an outsider's description of one's home and oneself. (Though I claim only to be a naturalized Texan, not a cowboy in any of the senses Hitchens describes.) You're taken aback by what other people notice about you. As Rick said when reading the Nazis' dossier on himself: "Are my eyes really brown?"

And here's a keeper:

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson.

Lileks writes about seeing The Two Towers. I don't have a whole lot to add to what just about everyone else has said on this, but what I have to say involves a spoiler. Click the "More" link only if you've already seen it.

One thing that added a certain satisfying zing to the movie was that Viggo Mortenson -- a less-than-thoughtful antiwar activist in real life -- found himself connected to, responding to, and even saying all of these apparently pro-war sentiments: Aragorn's "War is upon you whether you wish it or not"; Eowyn's "We learned long ago that those who have no sword may still die upon one"; Sam's "There is some good in the world, and it's worth fighting for" speech. And more deliciously still, the only spokesman for the anti-war crowd was Grima Wormtongue, with his accusation of "war-mongering" against Eomer.

Mortenson must have signed up for the movie well before the 9/11 attacks, and had no idea he would be performing the role of a wartime ruler while a real-life war (commencing, in painfully ironic fashion, with the destruction of two towers) was being waged in the real world. By a Republican President, no less.

It's especially interesting given one significant departure from the original work: in the books, the Ents decided at their congress to go to war against Saruman. In the movie, though, they came to the opposite conclusion; but Pippin roused them to fight by showing them that war would inevitably come to them. It makes clear that the "you must fight for what you believe in" message was not just Tolkien's; it was Peter Jackson's as well.

The other thing I liked -- and that no one else seems to have noticed or commented upon -- was that the Rohan plotline finished with what must be the oldest cliche in movies: the cavalry riding over the hill to the rescue. Led by a lone rider on a white horse with the speed of light, no less.

Heigh-ho, Shadowfax! Awaaaayy!

Michael Kelly reports on an interview that he and several others conducted on Monday with a "senior administration official" (which is what the press calls any administration official speaking off the record); the subject was the State of the Union address scheduled for the next day, and naturally, matters turned to Iraq.

"We cannot allow Iraq to get to the same position where North Korea is," the official said. "This guy is richer (than Kim Jong Il). He's in an incredibly strategic location. He professes hatred for us, our friends, our closest allies in the region. He is a man who could create great havoc if not dealt with. And he is a man, as a result of his dealings with a shadowy network, who can harm Americans themselves. .... And that's why we are going to deal with him."

The verbiage of the interview seems neither as hawkish as Rumsfeld or Cheney, nor as dovish as Powell, and more folksy than any of the foreign policy heavy-hitters. (Can you imagine Condi Rice referring to Saddam as "This guy..."?) Perhaps more telling is that the interviewee never refers to the President in the third person, and at least once uses first person singular ("I believe") when describing the administration's position. It's apparent that the "senior administration official" was in fact Bush himself.

Not that the interview contains much that wasn't in the address itself. Though it's amusing that Kelly found a way to write about the SOTU address, in a column that had to be turned in before the address was given.

Arthur Silber dissents from Bush's African AIDS plan. He makes some cogent points about the Administration's priorities, but I wonder if he is really right about the reasons behind the proposal.

Perhaps my mind is a little too twisty and paranoid, but I don't think the AIDS proposal is really about humanitarianism (though that is a nice side-effect) or domestic politics (ditto). I actually think it ties into the War on Terror.

Africa's got to be a prime recruiting ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups; we've seen some of that already in Sudan and Kenya.

But if you literally depend upon aid from the United States for your day-to-day survival, are you going to support or oppose an anti-American movement like al Qaeda?

No, we probably aren't going to explicitly tie aid to anti-terrorist policies of host countries. But if aid is accompanied by American aid workers, we will surely refuse to send those workers to places we consider unsafe -- i.e., terrorist strongholds. This implicitly creates pressure on the host government to clean house. It may have a similar effect more conventional thugs like Mugabe.

UPDATE: This interpretation is backed up by this story (link courtesy of InstaPundit), which says that 90% of the aid will be administered by US agencies, not by international aid organizations. Such an arrangement would allow the US latitude to send aid where it will do the most good, geopolitically speaking. (It will also keep certain corrupt organizations [ahem] from embezzling or otherwise wasting the money.)