Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Friday, December 26, 2003

Return Of The Poseur - Brian at Boviosity tackles Roger Ebert's review of Return of the King.

Ebert had this to say about the movie:
That it falls a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece. It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit.
Fantasy?

The story is about good versus evil - something that faces everyone, in some way or another, every day, whether it's in parking in a handicapped zone or cheating on ones' spouse or in fighting international terror. It's about faith and redemption and belief in a Messiah and the higher, transcendental ideals for which the messiah stands, and for which we live and fight in our bigger or smaller ways, and sometimes choose to live or die for.

Fantasy?

Oh, wait - he's not done:
Still, Jackson's achievement cannot be denied. "Return of the King" is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films. Yes, they will be adrift during the early passages of the film's 200 minutes, but to be adrift occasionally during this nine-hour saga comes with the territory; Tolkien's story is so sweeping and Jackson includes so much of it that only devoted students of the Ring can be sure they understand every character, relationship and plot point.
So - the story is "silly", but the special effects sure are cool!

What to say? Well, Brian says it best:
I suppose when a movie doesn't support your particular worldview, it must be airily dismissed as "archetypes" lacking in "psychological depth." You keep saying that movies aren't about what they're about, they're about how they're about what they're about. I've always admired that stance and I guess it's true, unless they're about the reality of Good and Evil and the need for Good to sacrifice some of its easy complacency when Evil is determined to kill it. Then they just need to be dismissed as "for adolescents (of all ages)."

Even adolescents know a shite-spewing poser when they see one, Rog, and I'm looking at one right now. If you'd had the ring, you'd still be using it to sneak through Bill Clinton's secret service coterie and give him big sweaty bear hugs...right up until you got run through with a rusty Nazgul sword, of course.
Read the whole thing.

posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 10:26:59 AM

Gays In Minnesota - The latest Minnesota Poll shows that a majority of Minnesotans reject gay clergy and consider homosexuality a sin.

This was interesting, following as it did last week's Time/CBS poll that showed similar results nationwide.

Says the Strib:
"Most Minnesotans believe it is wrong to ordain sexually active gays and lesbians to the clergy, most object to giving same-sex couples the same legal rights as married people and most say homosexuality is a sin.
Those results are from a Minnesota Poll of the state's religious beliefs and practices, taken of 1,049 people Dec. 2-8.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents oppose ordaining gays and lesbians. Fifty-three percent said homosexuality is sinful, and 51 percent oppose granting homosexual couples the same legal rights as married people.
The numbers sear through the consciousness of Christian churches, particularly mainline Protestant denominations grappling with how to minister to gays and lesbians and whether to allow them into the ministry."
I keep going back and forth on this issue.

As I said in the piece earlier in the week, I think the gay movement - like the feminists and Afro-Americans before them - have done a great job of alienating those that should support them - indeed, want to support them in many cases. Despite some peoples' best efforts to convince people otherwise, I'm perhaps one of the most pro-gay-rights conservative Christians you'll ever meet. I think there is a legitimate case to be made for gay civil unions. I have trouble with the notion of gay marriage - in spite of Andrew Sullivan's very logical case for the subject, I'm neither convinced nor convincingly opposed.

Pieces like this - by the Strib, which would have to be considered pro-gay-marriage - might tend to push me back to the "anti" camp. As they do with so many of their polls, they try to equate correlation with causation:
Consistently, through all three poll questions, a profile of those who oppose and support gay rights emerges among Minnesotans.
Younger, more educated, politically liberal and religiously inactive Minnesotans are more likely to favor legal rights for couples, are less likely to believe that homosexuality is a sin and would allow ordination.
Those on the other side are older, less educated, politically conservative and more religiously active.
Catch that? "If you oppose gay marriage, it's because you're an old, stupid, fundie dittohead".

It'll be interesting to see how these polls are spun in the next few weeks.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 08:32:22 AM

The Common Food - Twin Cities' sports-radio station KFAN is doing a firat - opening the nation's first radio-station-branded restraurant.:
"'A lot of people,' says Mick Anselmo, regional vice president for Clear Channel Inc., 'aren't willing to stick their head up out the hole and take a risk. You know that. You see it all the time. They play it cautious. But that's not us.' Anselmo, boss of all things Clear Channel in the Twin Cities, was working the crowd last week at a preview of KFAN the Restaurant.

The sprawling, high-tech, 24,000-square-foot eatery, formerly Lido's Italian Market Café & Bar, opens its doors at 4 p.m. today.

If successful, it could be a model for other Clear Channel operations around the country.
In keeping with KFAN's market niche - loud opinions expressed with extreme, almost comic-book vehemence, about sports - the restaurant will feature dozens of big-screen TVs, and a two-hour daily radio show broadcast live from the restaurant. I can feel the headache already.

Which begs the question; what sort of restaurant would the Cities' other radio stations sponsor? Hmmmm:
KQRS - The waitresses are cute, but they tell long, dull stories that have no punchlines. The waiters interrupt your order with "Mitchie, Mitchie, Mitchie - you're just keepin' da brotha down". And the food is sometimes good, but the kitchen staffs only serve unnaturally large chicken breast sandwiches.
KSTP - Their lunch rush is huge. But if you come in for dinner, they'll give you a baloney sandwich, and tell you you'd damn well better be glad about it, like they were back in the old days.
KDWB - Special of the day: Monday through Sunday, Cheeseburger Happy Meal. Also the only menu item. Although it's listed two dozen times in different typefaces and fonts.
KNOW - Soffritto of Tomatoes and Fresh Herbs with Penne, served by a kitchen staff of two dozen cooks, six dozen assistant cooks, four supervising cooks, a vastly overpaid chef, and 200 waitstaff that bug you for a really large tip five or six times during your meal.
Speaking of KFAN - I can never listen to the station for more than a few minutes; the hosts make everything sound like a pro wrestling cablecast. "The Roseville Raptors T-Ball Team is laying the smack down, boyee!" Puh leez. Listen, morons; it's sports. It's oversized adolescents charging around a field or a court while people pay for the right to watch them. That is all. Which is fine - I love going to a baseball game or two every year. But while listening to talent-free pinheads yap about...er, professional sports is bad enough, when the likes of Chad Hartman start swerving into world events, it's just too much.

Signs that someone needs some perspective:
"The city (of Roseville) wants to do something for a grand opening," Herstine [Mike, the joint's General Manager] said. "We're the biggest thing in town. So they're excited. The other day, one of them was calling us the Taj Mahal. "
Reason #45 not to live in Roseville.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 06:59:43 AM

Christmas Remembered - Lileks notes one of the more liberating observations you can make about Christmas:
All Christmases refer back to the Christmases of your early childhood. That’s your baseline, your definition. Mine were warm and happy, which is a blessing and a curse – you love the season, but now you have an unreasonable standard. Everything falls short. It takes a long time to unlearn Christmas and reassemble it for your own – although having kids of your own accelerates the process, makes it easier. Forget your own unrealistic half-remembered expectations; let’s implant the same in the next crop! And when your toddler hugs your leg and says Oh Daddee it’s the best Christmas EVER you know you’re back in the groove.
This ties back to what I wrote yesterday; there's no reason for this to be a depressing season, as long as it's yours, and in the here and now. Christmas when I was a kid was the same thing - nearly perfect. And when I stop trying to make Christmas "nearly perfect", then that's exactly what it becomes.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 06:07:49 AM

Ramone Street - New York names a cross-street after Joey Ramone.

It's a few weeks old, sure. But still pretty cool.

Gabba gabba hey, indeed.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 06:00:54 AM

The World is Shocked - Jesse Ventura's Americatanks after two months.:
"After a two-month run, former Gov. Jesse Ventura's cable show is off the air and there are no immediate plans for MSNBC to bring it back.

The news channel's president, Erik Sorenson, sent a memo Tuesday to staff announcing he was extending a previously announced holiday break for the show."
And I never managed to see it...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/26/2003 06:00:51 AM

Thursday, December 25, 2003

T'is the Season - Lileks has a compact, pictorial holiday bleat..

He noted the changing holiday scene:
At the Mall on Tuesday it was almost the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name; there were references to the season, and things festive. "
Maybe it's just a sign of our over-inclusive, PC times, but I was shocked - shocked, I tell you - to see explicit references, not only to the Christmas holiday (omitting the now-obligatory references to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa), but to the actual story of the Navitity on...

..."The Wiggles", an Australian kids' show that makes "Barney" look like "24", and is usually not much less PC than "Captain Planet".

And yet there it was, plain as a Sunday School lesson - the whole Christmas story, complete with Mary, the star, three wise men, baby Jesus...I sat and listened, amazed I was actually hearing this on the "Disney" network. The "Wiggles" are Australian; maybe the same un-PC-ness that gives Australian English 35 words for "drunken vomiting" allows them to speak of a key tenet of their nation's major faith.

Anyway.

I had a wonderful Christmas, thanks for asking; had my mom and her husband and my little brother over for dinner today. First time I've ever done Xmas dinner solo - nobody's come down with Salmonella yet.

Knock wood.

I should take this time to point out that I love Christmas. Easter is more important spiritually, and Thanksgiving is a big personal day for me, but Christmas is still the big kahuna. I guess it has a lot to do with having kids. For them, it is the most wonderful time of the year. In trying to keep it that way, maybe it rubs off on me. I don't know. But I may be the only adult I know that actually looks forward to the season.

I know why so many people find the season depressing; they are exactly the reasons I refuse to feel either depressed, or the "pressure" that seems to bring it on for most people.

And I'm looking forward to next year already!

Anyway - I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday, and thanks for brightening my 2003 by stopping by!
posted by Mitch Berg 12/25/2003 08:04:31 PM

Dean Update - From Curious Furious:
"Update on the Howard Dean Slaughtered By a Landslide Meter: Last month it was Godzilla v. a Giant Jelly Donut - Dean of course being the donut - with the capture of Saddam it has been upgraded to: Joan Rivers v. Mike Tyson on a 4 day meth binge ... Dean representing the one with the bad plastic surgery ..."
Stay tuned for further updates.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/25/2003 08:00:03 AM

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Yes, Virginia - ScrappleFace has a holiday classic.
Yes, Virginia, there is a United States of America. It exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no United States! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.
There's more - and while I bet you know how it reads, you still need to read it.

I may well link it every Christmas, at this rate.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 08:08:44 AM

Merry Christmas! - More later today or tonight - but until then, do me a huge favor; drive carefully and have a great holiday.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 07:34:25 AM

Who Caught Hussein? - Josh Marshall tackles the rumor that Hussein was captured by the Kurds. We discussed this last week.

Marshall says:
"There've been other rumors flying around -- like this one from Debkafile. But Debkafile is about as reliable as raw intelligence and should be treated with the same skepticism. Actually, it's not just that it should be treated like raw intelligence, it ... well, that's for another day.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying there's nothing to this. I haven't had time to make any calls. Anything could be true. And it's entirely possible that there are dimensions to the intel leading to Saddam's capture, which haven't yet been revealed. But none of the publish accounts I've seen strike me as credible or even close to substantiated. So until I see more I assume there's nothing to it."
Marshall's right, at least in terms of the mechanics of assigning credibility to a story.

But In the end, even if true, the proper response to the story is "So What?" If the promise of the reward money got a member of Hussein's handlers to hand the boss over to the Kurds (which seems possible, given the extent to which Hussein's security apparatus seems to have penetrated the Kurdish opposition during the regime), then it was money well spent. We didn't have to fight a climactic battle for him, or track him to the Sudan and grab him in a messy black-bag job.

One suspects the likes of...well, Kos moreso than Marshall - will try to make hay over the notion that "Bush's" military didn't make the collar - that we had to rely on "unsavory" Iraqis do "Do the work for us".

Such "logic" is too depressing to bother refuting.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 07:33:37 AM

Russia to Forgive Iraqi Debt - Wasn't this the sort of thing that the "no contracts to countries that didn't support the war" flap of two weeks ago was supposed to have blown to smithereens?

The stuff that had the likes of Josh Marshall calling the Administration "amateurish" at foreign policy?

Remember?
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 07:16:31 AM

The Return Of The Market - Daily Kos noted a few weeks ago that the "Terror Market" - the Pentagon's idea for a futures market for predicting terrorist attacks - may re-open in March, proving (if true) that you can't keep a good idea down.

Kos' reaction is predictable:
The idea is still grotesque, and the site would still allow terrorists to make money off their own attacks. Bet on an attack, conduct the attack, cash the check. Beyond ridiculous.
So many possible reactions to such a short paragraph.

"Grotesque" - what, the reaction is aesthetic?

Kos seems to share the liberal conceit that "disagreement with me equals stupidity in you." The scenario would probably be more like "bet on an attack, conduct the attack, cash the "check" (Kos seems to think the market would be some sort of online slot machine), have an FBI SWAT team meeting you at the ATM before you deposit the check.

The idea - as we discussed last summer - is sound, has history backing it, and is potentially very useful.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 07:12:31 AM

Bush Up - The Minnesota Poll - as liberal an artifact as exists in Minnesota - shows President Bush's job approval at 56 percent in the state.

The Strib ran some positive comments...
"He stands up for what he thinks is right and won't back down to anybody," said poll respondent Dorla Tellerhuis, an auto parts warehouse worker who lives outside of Scandia. "And he's standing up to those people who want to destroy our country."
...and some negative ones...
Virgil Gunter, a retired paper company worker from Grand Rapids, said he believes Bush "is not the man for the job ... He hasn't solved our terrorism - remember how he was going to get that Osama guy? The war's costing a lot, and we have bread lines over here."
Mr. Gunter may unwittingly display the current idea that the young have become more conservative than the old.

Let's see how the Strib analyzes this:
Since September, when the war in Iraq and the economy appeared to be sputtering,
Whoah!

The war in Iraq never "appeared to be sputtering" to anyone with the remotest literacy in the subject - which excludes the Strib and anyone who relies on it for information on the subject, of course.
...the number of Minnesotans who say the nation is headed in the right direction has jumped from 36 percent to 55 percent. They're even more rosy about life in their home state, with 58 percent saying things in Minnesota are headed in the right direction.

Approval for Bush's stewardship of the war, at 58 percent, is higher than his overall job rating. But Minnesotans remain sharply divided on how well he has handled the nation's economy.

It's better than it was in September, when 37 percent approved of Bush's economic performance. But while 47 percent now approve, 45 percent give him a thumbs-down. That puts him where he stood in August 2002.

Jacobs [Larry Jacobs, political science prof at the University of Minnesota] said he believed the economy "remains something the White House must be a little worried about ... Big economic numbers are up, but on everyday pocketbook issues, voters are still a bit sour."
Mr. Jacobs should know that "pocketbook indicators" are trailing issues in any recovery. And while they may be trailing a bit further with this recovery (the recession has technically been over for nearly a year), that will be good news for Bush in Minnesota, barring any further calamities.

I'm dying to see how the DFL spins this news. The DFL (motto - "We loved Howard Dean the first time we saw him - when he was called Paul Wellstone!") seems to be off in its own little world lately.

Of which more next week.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 05:38:00 AM

Orange Christmas - I was going to write about it, but Lileks already did.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/24/2003 05:18:25 AM

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

So Which Is It? - On the one hand, Andrew Sullivan is citing this American Family Institute poll.

In the meantime, the Times/CBS poll tells a different story:
Attitudes on the subject seemed to be linked to how people view marriage itself. A majority of respondents, 53 percent, said marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people opposed gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of respondents said marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people, 55 percent, said they support gay marriage.

The most positive feelings toward gay people were registered among respondents younger 30, and among those who knew gay people.

The nationwide poll said that 55 percent of respondents favored an amendment to the constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman, while 40 percent opposed the idea.
Medved, citing the same poll on his show yesterday, noted that opposition to homosexuality itself seems to be on the rise.

Why is this? At a time when social attitudes about so many things - sex, sexual orientation, gender roles, race relations, religion and many other traditional breaking points in American life - are liberalizing or libertinizing, why are attitudes toward homosexual marriage, reform of obsolescent sodomy laws and other key "gay" issues taking hits?

I'm no expert, but I'd suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons that feminism has taken such a whack in the last decade.

"Identity feminism" - the victim-mongering, hyper-academic, bitter cousin of the "equity feminism" that drove the grandmothers of so many current feminists - has alienated a big swathe of society over the last few decades, including many of the younger women that have been opting for a more nuanced, equity-based feminism in place of the vitriolic man-hatred of their bitter aunts. Why? Because "identity feminism" went beyond challenging an unjust status-quo - something most Americans eventually will get behind - and sought to become a power, in and of itself.

I think the gay movement has made, I think, many of the same mistakes that the Identity Feminists and the likes of Jesse Jackson did - going beyond the initial focus on ending inequity and bigotry (which are thoroughly admirable), and moving on to trying to re-mold society at large in an image they found acceptable (which is not).

And just as the feminists alienated many would-be supporters by trying to re-mold institutions like marriage and life itself to fit their agenda (and, in the case of public education, succeeding!), gays have gone beyond the fight against bigotry to attack institutions to which most of society is positively attaced - the Boy Scouts, and the traditional religious notion of marriage.

Huge mistake. While there is a thin film of people who will hate gays no matter what they do, the attack on the religious conception of marriage has alienated an awful lot of people who are, in many ways, very sympathetic to the gay movement's other agendas.

As a result, we have the surreal dichotomy; homosexuals and homosexuality are becoming more accepted (can you imaging "Queer Eye" or 30 years ago? Or the current state, where gay tastes serve as the social barometer of hipness?), while the reconstructionist agenda of the gay movement, if this Times/CBS polls is accurate, is seeing its support erode. It's the same dichotomy that the feminists and Afro-Americans have seen - women and african-americans are more equal than ever before, while Germaine Greer and Jesse Jackson's fortunes are at a bit of a nadir.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/23/2003 07:01:30 AM

We're Very Different People - It's become an trite observation; "these people just don't see things the way we do". When I hear people say - or read people blog - things like "capturing Hussein doesn't make us safer", I am at a loss for a response.

Hewitt, fortunately, is not:
Hours after the Homeland Security alert level was raised on Sunday, a poster at the blog Dean for America made this comment which is representative of opinion among the Dean Dongs: "Dean's remarks about national security and the Saddam capture not making the US any safer has [sic] been validated by today's Orange Alert."

There's no arguing with such reasoning, even by pointing out that although banks continued to be robbed after Dillinger was killed, banks were indisputably safer than when he was alive and among the robbers. The left does not want to understand the war on terror because to understand it is to leave the left and join the center-right on issues of deterrence and preemption, and especially in the center-right's suspicion of the impotence of international organizations on matters of national security.
And this is what I'm finding - some of my responsible Democrat friends, the ones with enough background in history to qualify as "acceptably literate", are starting to have doubts about their party and its front-runner.

If Lieberman or Gephardt don't get the nod - and they won't - they're seriously wondering if they can vote for their party.

Good.

posted by Mitch Berg 12/23/2003 05:53:42 AM

The Process Disease - I'm a software designer. I design User Interfaces to make them easier and more intuitive to use - so that users can not only accomplish things with software, but be comfortable with the knowledge that they're accomplishing something.

The job involves being very "goal oriented"; figuring out a vision of what your user is supposed to be trying to accomplish, and then delivering it. If you don't know where you're going, you'll not only never know when you get there - you'll never know how to get there, either.

The bane of my existence are the people in the organization who call themselves "process police". In the "process-oriented" world they inhabit, it doesn't really matter where you're going - as long as your path there is documentable, traceable and orderly. I'm exaggerating, naturally - some process people have a keen sense of what needs to be done, and they accomplish it - otherwise, no software would ever get done. At its worst, though, eternal focus on "process" is a means of systematically providing oneself plausible deniability for accomplishing nothing. Mocking "Process people" has made Scott Adams a rich man.

So look at the world today; the world of crisis diplomacy, like the world of software development, is full of processes that are creaking to bloody, horrific halts, because people, events, reality aren't cooperating.

The contrast in desired, stated (and in the case of this past year, real-life) approaches to terror and Saddam Hussein's outlawry throw this contrast into stark relief. What did Bush do? He went forth and vanquished the enemy.

For what do his opponents endlessly pine? A "process" - without filling in details (fair enough if you don't know them) or filling agenda-based details (the UN? Oh, whatever) or failing to fill in a goal (stupid). (No, I mean that . Stupid).

Democrat foreign policy, and its focus on "process" without "goal" (Dead and imprisoned terrorists, objectively safer USA) is, like introducing "process" to a dysfunctional company, a clinical-sounding way to camouflage inability to make a decision - or at least to make the tough politially-dicey decisions.

Bush focused on the goal - elimination of terrorism and its sponsoring countries - immediately. He followed up on that focus with action - action that's been exceptionally successful.

That kind of thing, successful or not, drives "Process" people (or, as Al Gore refers to them, "Protheth people") crazy.

posted by Mitch Berg 12/23/2003 05:00:06 AM

Monday, December 22, 2003

Things I Wish I'd Said - Dating Edition - I've been single for four years now. I figure that I've been on at least one date with a total of 72 different women in that time. With some I had second or third dates, a few I dated for a few months, and a couple I went out with for 6-9 months before something or another went wrong. I'm a 41 year old guy who...well, looks 41. I never made the List of Conservative Blog Studs, so I guess life is pretty much over.

Still, I genuinely enjoy meeting women, but while I ~~firmly believe~~ think it's possible that I might meet that special someone someday, it goes without saying that I haven't yet [1]. So I date.

And date.

And date.

And over the course of ~~four years of expensive, soul-destroying masochism~~ meeting all those interesting women, I've encountered, as they say, "all types".

So I present for your morbid enjoyment, "Things I Wished I'd Said to Some Dates Of Mine", 2003 edition.

Woman #1: 36, recently divorced after a two-year separation. Let's call her "Ann". Two young children. Perhaps the most devastatingly attractive woman that I've ever had in my car - long auburn hair, near-supermodel bod in a cocktail dress that left nothing to the imagination. After a date, she sent me an email saying "You're a nice guy, but I just don't feel any chemistry, so I'd rather not see you again". We spoke again at a happenstance meeting, a year later.
MITCH: So, how are you doing, Ann?

ANN: Oh, I've gone out with a few guys. Went out with a couple of them, for a few months. It's been frustrating - I feel the chemistry when we meet, but after a few months, it feels like something's missing.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: Let me get this straight - you meet guys, and you only go out with the ones with which you feel "chemistry" immediately? And then you wonder why it fizzles after a few months? You married young, right?

ANN: Yeah, I was 19.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID THEN: Lemme guess, that was all about "Chemistry,", too, right?

ANN: Well, until the kids came along, sure...

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: Riiiight. "Chemistry", at least on the first date or three, is nothing but a feeling in the back of your head that says "I know I don't know you very well, but I think I want to sleep with you way before I should". I mean - you expected precisely what from these "Chemistry"-based "relationships?

I'll let you think about the question for a while, sure. Have another "Sex On The Beach"...
Woman #2 - 37 years old, never married, one young child. We'll call her "Leela". We met for drinks, after a week or two of casual phone conversations that seemed vaguely interesting. She used to be a hottie - but years of office life and fast food are catching up with her - every part of her below the neckline is deserting its post under gravity attack. Still, you can see the face of a woman that used to turn heads in bars. Not the Saint Paul Grill, mind you, I'm talking bars like "T-Birds".
LEELA: (Looking disinterested in Mitch, after about two minutes of strained conversation) Yeah, I pretty much go with initial reaction. I figure, if the Chemistry's not there, there's really nothing to keep me interested. Back when I was single before I had my daughter, I met some of the coolest guys when I was out bar-hopping. I just don't feel that on dates anymore, and it bugs me.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID (on figuring that she was saying she had no interest in him): So you're 37, and you have kid to take care of, and you make all sorts of noises about wanting to find the "right guy", but at every first date, you're sizing the guys up against the bar-hopping "bad boys" you still seem to miss so much? Does anything strike you as...

...oh, never mind.
Woman #3 - 35 year old communications professional, one kid. Let's call her "Lori". Devastatingly attractive at 35 in a way that will look flinty and frumpy in 15 years. Conversation takes place at the end of a first, blind date.
LORI: Well, I gotta be honest. You're not exactly what I look for in the looks department. (Smiles) Hey, I warned you - sometimes people say I'm too honest for my own good!

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: That's OK. You're not exactly what I look for in the brains department. (Smiles) But hey, I'm too honest for myown good, too.

(The person in the above example may occasionally read this space. Hey, sorry - sometimes I really am too honest for my own good! Although where I come from, it's more often called "Rude, unempathetic and solipsistic.")
Woman #4: Drop-dead gorgeous single mother of two. Let's call her "Julia". We'd had a wonderful first date three weeks earlier. We'd had a couple of phone conversations since then - pleasant, seemingly interested in a second date, but non-committal for various reasons, some of them plausible, others trailing off into space. Then, I got an email:
JULIA (Via email): Hey, Mitch - it was nice meeting you. However, there's someone else I'm going to be dating. So please don't call again. However, your blog is pretty cool - mind if I read it? :-)

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN BACK: Tell it to the Amazon Link in the right margin.
The next date from hell I go on, I swear, I'll do it.

Don't tempt me. I mean it.

[1] OK - Date #71 has serious potential. Although I may have just jinxed it...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/22/2003 06:15:37 AM

Absence of Knowledge - Iraq Now attacks the media's literacy about military matters.

Nothing new in the concept - the media is famously ill-informed about anything to do with the military.

But this is new:
Whether we ought to use a smart bomb to attack a high-value target in a residential area is absolutely a valid ‘just war’ question.

Personally, I suppose you could justify it if the strike has a reasonable chance of killing or incapacitating the target, and if the killing or disappearance of that target individual has a reasonable chance of saving lives by hastening the collapse of military resistance, or disrupting the command and control of major enemy units so severely that they become paralyzed by indecision, or poor decision, become unable to react to the Protean nature of the mechanized battlefield, and so become simply irrelevant to the battle.

Unfortunately, this side of the equation seems wholly absent from Human Rights Watch’s analysis. Nor has it appeared in any of several articles I’ve read covering their report. Only Kaplan—a veteran national security affairs writer and a damned good one—even touches on the issue. And that is only indirectly, when he glances against the concept of proportionality from the Just Warfare tradition.

If military reporters were up on their beat, though, they would be familiar with the principles of maneuver warfare, which provide a good deal of theoretical basis for the strike. In part, these principles are as follows:

1. It is better to win by outmaneuvering an enemy and placing him in a hopeless position than it is to outshoot him. Or as Sun Tzu wrote: "To win without fighting is the acme of skill."

2. Firepower should be focused not just on enemy weaknesses, but critical vulnerabilities.

3. The armies of totalitarian regimes, and those with weak or nonexistent NCO corps, are especially reliant upon centralized command and control.

4. Put enough pressure on the command and control nodes, and their decisions will become unsound. They will be reacting to false information, or information which is hours old. If it takes your division 24 hours to conceive, plan, and execute an operation, and it takes him 36 hours, then his decisions will become increasingly removed from the reality on the ground. The errors will compound geometrically, and you will appear on his flanks or rear (or overrun the Baghdad Airport) before his command and control procedures can grasp the fact that you’re within miles of his critical point. This is called “getting inside his decision cycle.”

If the reporters and editors assigned to the military were really up on their beats, they would have boned up on the basic theoretical underpinnings of U.S. military doctrine. B.H. Liddell-Hart’s “Strategy,” “Warfighting,” an excellent Marine Corps manual on the theory of maneuver warfare for the unit level leader (which the Army should immediately adopt and distribute, by the way), and The Art of Maneuver

Unfortunately, in most cases, they have not done their homework. A few of them have a passing familiarity with concepts like jus in bello and jus ad bellum, but no one I’ve seen has yet grasped the indirect battlefield effects of violently attacking nodes of command. Nodes like Saddam, Qusay, and Uday themselves. No reporter I’ve seen writing on the HRW report has yet demonstrated an understanding that it is better to cripple an enemy’s command and control and then bypass his irrelevant army than it is to allow things to devolve into a head-to-head mutual slaughter. No reporter I’ve seen writing on the HRW report has yet seemed to grasp that one of the best ways to do that is to hit the boss so hard and so often that he becomes terrified of using his cell phone.

As a result, the public is ill informed.
Before the war, the military put "embedded" reporters through a brief training session, to acquaint them with basic military procedures designed to keep them alive when the units with which they were embedded started taking fire.

It seems they might need to put their editors through a course, teaching them something about not only long term military history (about which editors are illiterate enough) but the recent evolutions in the way war is fought.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/22/2003 06:00:09 AM

You Mean, 10,000 Hack Pundits and Moron Comics Can Be Wrong? - The Admnistration's "Drugs Support Terrorism" public service spots last year drew a lot of flak from the righteously indignant.

"Why, that's just paraoid!", they bellowed from columns and blogs and guest chairs throughout the land. Understandable - if drugs were linked to Al Quaeda and other terrorists, that'd mean that all of show-biz, the NFL and NBA, and every high school in America would be in the Al Quada camp.

Guess what?
The United States Navy seized two tons of hashish and detained three men it said had ties to Al Qaeda when it halted and boarded a boat in the Persian Gulf on Monday, military officials announced Friday.

"An initial investigation uncovered clear ties between the smuggling operation and Al Qaeda," the Navy said in a statement.

Pentagon and military officials declined to give any details of the information that linked the shipment or the three men to Al Qaeda, but they said they had evidence that the cache of drugs aboard the 40-foot boat was intended to raise funds for terrorist activities.
How 'bout that?

Suppose we'll see 10,000 hack pundits and moron comics taking it all back?

(Via Jay Reding - to whom this blog sends good luck out to Orange country...)
posted by Mitch Berg 12/22/2003 05:44:02 AM

Not Ready For Prime Time - Powerline was absolutely on fire yesterday.

First - a fascinating series of links about General Clark, explaining why he's just not a viable alternative, even for those looking for a less-fevered alternative to Dean.

Money bit:
Clark now blames the non-capture of Karadzic on the fact that he had to cooperate with the French. But this dodge undercuts Clark's insistence on multilaterlism when it comes to Iraq. And, speaking of Iraq, Jacoby points out that "before he became a presidential candidate, Clark strongly supported the Iraq war resolution; since entering the race, he has tied himself into knots insisting that he actually opposed it. Before becoming a candidate, he described Saddam as a menace requiring urgent action -- 'the clock is ticking,' he said last year. Now Clark labors to explain why Saddam wasn't a burning issue --'there was no ticking clock,' he said last week."

It seems to me that Clark is even less ready for prime-time than Dean.
Read the whole thing - there are some essential links.

Before that - comparing the rantings of Al-Jazeera and those of Madeline Albrecht
posted by Mitch Berg 12/22/2003 04:40:50 AM

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Return of the Trilogy - Saw Return of the King last night.

I may need to see it again.

I have been awash in admiration for Peter Jackson ever since the first movie of the trilogy; it's not easy to take books that Mitch Berg found completely unreadable (I made it through about 20 pages of "Fellowship" before I put it down for good), and turn them into movies that are not only monumental and epic, but genuinely touching on a human as well as philosophical level.

And Return of the King is touching, in a way that amazed me, even as I sat and watched it

Oh, there are flaws; there is so much material to jam in there that some things seem jagged (what happened to Saruman? How did Eomir kill the "unkillable" Nasgul? How does that Elf ship sail with no crew?), and some character denouements get very short shrift. I'm told the extended version, which will probably clock at a butt-numbing 4.5 hours, will fix some of that.

Still, it's a wonderful movie - for different reasons than "Two Towers". The second movie was an epic adaptation of Christ's story to a situation parallelling the world in the middle of the 20th century; redemption and salvation beyond death.

"ROTK", despite having bigger and more cataclysmic battles than Helm's Deep, has a smaller focus - on Sam, who started the series almost as comic relief, and ends as the focal point of the story. And it's wonderful.

Because after two films that focused on the larger than life - the arthurian Aragorn, the etherial Elves, the Christlike Gandolf - the "Return of the King" is about the return, not so much of Aragorn to the throne, but of the real king of this story, the little guy - literally, the hobbit, Sam - from his immersion in war between good and evil, back to the precious mundanity he spent so long trying to protect from unspeakable evil.

And this is the beauty of the story - in the end, like so much of the greatest Western art, it's the little guy that overturns the immense evil. It's the peasants lining up behind the priest at Tolstoy's Borodino, in War and Peace (as good a parallel to the battle of Helms Deep as exists in Western Literature), or Private Ryan, or Stanislaus Schmajzner in Escape from Sobibor (a true story and not really literature, but the story's elements play like literature, if you've never read the book), or Gary Cooper in High Noon - it's the little figures that are the most interesting story, and the most important ones.

I'm starting to read Garth's Tolkein and the Great War - and it's interesting seeing the parallels between Tolkein's experiences in the war and incidents in the movie (which I assume are the tip of the iceberg compared to the books) - the doomed charge on Os Giliath (sp?), with it's references to the New Model Army in the Somme, was revelatory.

ROTK is sad and intense in a way that the other two weren't. It's more personal.

And in the end, I think it's the movie of the three that I'll like the most. It certainly has the lessons our society needs.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/21/2003 09:17:52 AM

Person Of The Year - Time has released their person of the year for 2003.

But according to Tim Blair, we weren't supposed to know it yet...
Time magazine is obsessively secretive over its annual Person of the Year selection. This year’s choice is due to be announced in the US on Monday...

US troops are the People of 2003 -- and someone in Time’s online imaging department will be looking for a new job in 2004.
Well, it's still up as of 8:20 Central time...

And David's Medienkritik sends its contgrats from Germany.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/21/2003 08:25:02 AM