For All Your Snark Needs, Please Consider Moe Lane

Moe Lane has bringing the heat lately; he writes better one-liners in greater volume than most comedy writing staffs.

To wit, his comment on the Obama Administration's screwed-up communication of "WE GOT BIN LADEN!":

I mention this mostly because I am growing heartily sick of watching this administration muck up a message that is the political equivalent of FREE BEER; worse, I’m getting bored with it, too.

Or his closing line on his "The death of Yamamoto, and other valuable life lessons for countries" piece from last night:

Mind you, I bear up remarkably well under the disapproval of people from slave-owning societies. Particularly the ones that we’ve just set on fire.

So, for all your dry wit needs, please consider Moe Lane (TM).

Fly Navy? No, Fly Neptunus

Neptunus Lex, that is.

If you don;t ever stop by, you really should. He's been blogging up a storm lately, and they're well worth the read. Such as:

•   This piece on the accidental sinking of a Indian Navy frigate by a merchant ship. (We can laugh -and grumble - over this one; fortunately no one was hurt in the mishap.)
  
  Sayeth Lex: "Merchant ships entering harbor at a flank bell is why we can’t have nice things…"

•   Or Lex's laconic summary of Western-Islamic relations:
  

  Anyone who has paid any attention to what’s left of the Ottoman Empire since it faded into dust has realized that the region remains afflicted to a greater or lesser degree by backwardness, economic dysfunction, corruption and political malaise. In fact, apart from Africa, scourged with its own unique diseases, no other region of the world so typifies these characteristics. The question of “what went wrong” to what had- not so very long ago – been one of the world’s most successfully aggressive empires has been asked and (mostly) answered: It will not do for a society desiring the fruits of modernity to, 1) close its mind to science and philosophy, even if it leads in uncongenial directions, 2) idle half its intellectual capital.
  
  Here, from an admittedly Orientalist point of view, is a ridiculously brief history of the last 1400 years or so:
  
  1. Who are you lot, and will you mind removing that spear from my side, it hurts.
  2. I’ll bash you for that, and take back the Holy Land as well.
  3. Fine then, have it. But I wouldn’t mind a bit of that algebra and medical science, if it’s all right.
  4. More Holy Land, please and if you don’t like it we’ll see you off.
  5. Fine then, have it.
  6. Wait, the Mediterranean is our ocean.
  7. Fine, have half.
  8. Wait, Constantinople is the capital of our faith.
  9. Fine, have it. (We need bigger ships.)
  10. It’s called “Spain,” not “al Andalus.” And what are you still doing here? Off you go.
  11. Wait, Vienna is a capital of our culture. And no, you can’t have it. No matter how many times you ask.
  12. (Some of those big cannon would go well aboard those ships, don’t you think?)
  13. We’d like the Med back, and are all too willing to take it – see those ships, and all those cannon? There’s a good culture.
  14. My name is Napoleon. Lovely place you have here, Egypt.
  15. Fine, have it back, courtesy of La Perfide Albion. You couldn’t have done it by yourself, you know.
  16. Train your military? Certainly, why not? We’re dreadfully good at industrial scale slaughter; it takes practice. And industry. We’ve got both.
  17. Fight your military? Certainly, why not? Especially when you’re going to ally yourselves with the Hun.
  18. Rather a mess you left behind, old boy. Shall we help you sort it out?
  19. What’s this, oil? Fascinating.
  20. We’ve invented fascism: Have some!
  21. Sorry about that.
  22. We’re busy among ourselves just now, can’t it wait?
  23. What a bother, you lot. Can’t you see we’re tired?
  24. Just call that fellow over there “king,” and we’ll be on our way. Do write.
  25. We’ve invented socialism: Have some!
  26. Sorry about that.
  27. I know you’re rather a mess, but then you always were. Want some expertise to get that oil out of the ground? There’s money in it. Win-win.
  28. I really wish you wouldn’t treat your people that way. More tea?
  29. I REALLY wish you wouldn’t treat our people that way. Stand by for a case of the a**.
  30. With nation building.
  31. Jesus C*****, this is hard!
  
  All caught up.

•   And then, in a far more somber vein, is this contemplation of The New York Times' revelations about its role in the Wikileaks scandal.
  
  

  There’s obviously a self-serving element in Keller’s description of the events. The NYT and Guardian manage to carefully thread the needle between preserving the public’s right to know while responsibly declining to publish names that might get anyone killed. Directly, I mean. They don’t actually link to the Wikileaks site, containing the unredacted messages.
  
  They just, you know: Publicize it.
  
  The distinction helps them sleep at night.

  
  There's more; read the whole thing.
  

Steyn on Freedom From Want

From his essay in the New Criteron, "Dependence Day":

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.

On Parties and Politics

I meant to get this out here last week, but better late than never. Yuval Levin, in writing on a new sorta-centrist movement, expanded a little more broadly into political philosophy in The Corner last week, and his discussion is worth pointing out:

Our best guide here is Edmund Burke, who was not only the father of a great deal of what we now think of as conservatism, but also quite possibly the foremost theorist of partisanship in the Anglo-American tradition. In a series of pamphlets in the late 1760s and early 70s (and especially Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, in 1770), Burke makes a positive case for partisanship as essential to the politics of any free society. Parties, Burke argues, are often mistaken for factions pursuing private interests (or we might say “special interests”) at the expense of the broader national interest. But in fact, he says, parties represent different views of the national interest—they stand not for what is best for different parts of the nation, but for different beliefs about what is best for the whole.

Politics is not a scientific exercise in which there is a single correct answer out there and the proper application of the proper method will get us to that answer in a demonstrable way. Rather, politics is our means of governing ourselves in an effort to best serve the interests, needs, and desires of the nation amidst great and permanent uncertainty. That uncertainty cannot be overcome entirely by human reason, and so our exercise of reason in politics has to be accompanied by an exercise of prudence, wisdom, and a sense of proportion. Such things are inherently controversial. Every individual’s knowledge is partial (and even the sum of all of our knowledge is partial), and every individual’s reason is limited. That is why individuals have to work together in politics, and parties exist to facilitate that working together.

The whole thing is worth reading.

And Now, A Word From Mongol 482

I recently discovered - thanks to, among others, a reference by Jonah Goldberg - a 1958 essay by Leonard E. Reed, "I, Pencil."

The essay details the wonderous cooperative effort that is required to make something so simple as a pencil - and then notes how remarkable it is that all this happens without a single mastermind running the show:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The essay then turns, not to a defense of, but rather a testimony of, free market economics:

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Please, read the whole thing. It is well worth your time.

Nordlinger in Norway

I've been remiss not sharing this with you sooner. Jay Nordlinger has been sharing his journal from his recent travels in Norway.

As usual with Nordlinger, it's a fun read, with gentle stories interspersed with trenchant observations.

Part 1

Part 2

Aside in the Corner 1

Part 3

Aside in the Corner 2

Part 4

Well worth your time.

Fly It Like You Stole It

From Air & Space magazine, a fascinating look at the world of Sage-Popovitch, the airplane repo men.

Repo pilot Kevin Lacey looks and sounds a lot like the Dennis Weaver character from the 1970s TV series “McCloud.” Despite the folksy demeanor, Lacey has a reputation as a somewhat Machiavellian aero-sleuth who always gets his airplane. He thrives on the sport of it: tracking an errant commuter airliner to its gate at a big European airport, then pouncing in the hours just before passengers arrive for an early flight. When he tells you he regrets not sticking around to apologize to inconvenienced fliers, you believe him. But he’s also sorry to miss “the expression on that airline agent’s face when they realized their plane was gone.”

But it doesn't always work out:

When the crew reaches the airliners, the sight they’re greeted with isn’t always pretty. Cut-rate Tower Air kept its wide-body fleet flying by quietly dismantling a trio of 747s leased from GMAC and dispersing the components among its 18 other airplanes. When Tower defaulted, the repo crew arrived to find little more than a shell of GMAC’s collateral. “The fuselages were still there,” Popovich says, “but most of the engines, all the avionics, hydraulic pumps, flight controls, landing gear parts—missing.” As Tower lurched into liquidation, Sage-Popovich rounded up 16 of the carrier’s intact 747s. It was a sweep of jumbos on a global scale. “JFK, Paris, Israel—they were scattered all over the world,” Nick says.

Fascinating read.

[Found thanks to Instapundit. He found it, I'm just sharing.]

After the Tyrant

Michael Totten has an excellent essay on the modern Romania, twenty years after the fall of Ceausescu.

It's a fascinating read.

A sample:

A few blocks from the old city is Romania's parliament—the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon.

When it was still under construction before he died, Ceausescu called it the "Palace of the People," though ordinary people would never have been allowed to set foot in it. The apartments lining the main boulevard in front belonged to high-level officers of the repressive Securitate. Even today that boulevard looks like an intimidating Champs-Elysees of a totalitarian state, and it's so monstrous in scale that it can only really be photographed from the air...

..."What do you think of this building?" Olivia asked me. She seemed to think I loved it since I took so many pictures. It was certainly more pleasant to look at on the inside than on the outside.

"It's impressive in some ways," I said, "but it's also—well, it's big."

"We hate it," she said. "So much of the city was destroyed to make room for it. And it constantly reminds us of him."

A New Tide of Authoritarianism

From Freedom House:

Democracy seen threatened by new authoritarianism

China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela form a clique of authoritarian states that use their wealth and influence to undermine global democracy and rule of law.

Their findings:

Democracy Redefined: Authoritarian regimes are tarnishing the public understanding of democracy.

Internet Under Threat: Leading authoritarians are using advanced and well-funded techniques to subvert legitimate online discourse, especially in China, Iran and Russia. In addition to controlling access through physical, economic, and technological means, these regimes have deployed armies of commentators and provocateurs like the “Fifty Cent Party” in China and the “Brigades” in Russia to disrupt legitimate internet discussions.

Authoritarian Foreign Aid: By doling out billions of dollars in no strings attached foreign aid, these regimes are hobbling international efforts to improve governance and reduce corruption.

Rules-Based Organizations Under Siege: As part of a broader effort to export authoritarian influence, these regimes are disrupting key international rules-based bodies that support democratic and human rights, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Court of Human Rights. At the United Nations, they have formed ad hoc coalitions to blunt criticism, obstruct proposed sanctions, and advance antidemocratic measures. The governments of Venezuela, Russia, and China have been particularly active in creating new institutions to serve as counterweights to existing rules-based multilateral organizations.

Illiberal Education—Tainting the Next Generation: By either actively promoting or enabling the distortion of history through a nationalistic or extremist lens, authoritarian regimes are inculcating in the next generation attitudes of hostility toward democracy and suspicion of the outside world.

Their summary of the challenges facing us:

Today’s authoritarians recognize that absolute control over information and economic activity is neither possible nor necessary. Instead, they have adapted their traditional coercive mechanisms with more subtle methods. Political discourse is “managed,” rather than blatantly dictated, through the selective suppression or reshaping of news and information. And while the most important business entities are either co-opted or swallowed up by the state, the days of the command economy are over. Their citizens are allowed to enjoy personal freedoms—including foreign travel and access to consumer goods—that would have been unthinkable in the era of Mao and Brezhnev.

During the Cold War, the nature and goals of the dominant authoritarian states were clearer. In contrast, modern authoritarians, integrated into the global economy and participating in many of the world’s established financial and political institutions, present a murkier challenge.

In a 21st-century context, isolation of or disengagement from these states are not viable options. And generally speaking, in order to advance economic interests, these regimes would prefer engagement with the United States and its allies, but only on their terms.

And while the new authoritarians continue with this sophisticated approach, we become less so. ("If we just talk to them, they'll like us!")

The 1930s were often described as an authoritarian age, as it witnessed the rise of Hitler, the consolidation of Mussolini, and the ascendancy of Stalin. It was even worried about here, as FDR pushed the limits of government power to their limits.

And today doesn't seem too dissimilar, does it?

More worrying still - we know how the 1930s ended.

Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Some interesting articles have come out in the wake of the successful rescue of the captain of the Maersk Alabama.

The first discusses the training and tactics of the snipers who took out three pirates in a heartbeat.

The second is a column by Ralph Peters, who advocates taking on the pirates and providing a reason not to practice piracy - namely, that a pirate stands a a good chance of getting killed. His column has the fantastic title, "The Audacity of Rope."

A third can be found by Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal: "Why Don't We Hang Pirates Anymore?"

It's a safe bet, dear reader, that the title of this column has caused you to either (a) roll your eyes and wonder, What century do you think we're living in? or (b) scratch your head and ask, Yes, why don't we? Wherever you come down, the question defines a fault line in the civilized world's view about the latest encroachment of barbarism.

Andy McCarthy at National Review has two excellent pieces, "Pirates Test the 'Rule of Law,'" written soon after the captain was taken captive, and "John Wayne to the Rescue" written after. Both are worth a read, but the first is the one I wish to quote:

“Civilized” is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the “rule of law” crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the “rule of law” was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel.

That’s not our position anymore. The scourge of piracy was virtually wiped out in 19th century because its practitioners were regarded as barbarians — enemies of the human race (hostis humani generis, as Bret Stephens recently reminded us in a brilliant Wall Street Journal essay). They derived no comfort from the rule of law, for it was not a mark of civilization to give them comfort. The same is true of unlawful enemy combatants, terrorists who scoffed at the customs of civilized warfare. To regard them as mere criminals, to assume the duty of trying to understand why they would brutalize innocents, to arm them with rights against civilized society, was not civilized.

We don’t see it that way anymore. Evil is now just another negotiation.

The last is by the ever-readable Mark Steyn - "Our Reprimitivized Future." It is rather somber.

So many distractions, aren’t there? Only a week ago, the North Korean missile test was an “annoying distraction” from Barack Obama’s call for a world without nuclear weapons and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming... No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administration’s plans for federally subsidized daycare, just as Pearl Harbor was an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s dinner plans.

[SNIP]

Once upon a time we killed and captured pirates. Today, it’s all more complicated. The attorney general, Eric Holder, has declined to say whether the kidnappers of the American captain will be “brought to justice” by the U.S. “I’m not sure exactly what would happen next,” declares the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower. But some things we can say for certain. Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

[SNIP]

When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever-bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future.

Revitalize the Counter-Establishment

Jay Nordlinger, writing in National Review Online:

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a little about Dick Cheney’s image. This stems from a lunch a group of us had with him last week (and I wrote about it here). Cheney is an unusual person: very sensible, very measured, very trustworthy. No wonder he has been entrusted with so many sensitive government positions. He is a calm person, and he has a calming effect on others. He is the kind of man you want in public service — party or partisanship quite aside.

In the course of our lunch, he said that the recent Democratic victory was “part of the normal cycle of a competitive two-party system,” and “fundamentally healthy for the nation.” He also talked about how wondrous it was to swear in the first black president.

And what is his widespread image? He is a kind of Dr. Evil to people, although, unlike the Austin Powers one, not a comical Dr. Evil. He is a right-wing menace, a scourge of civil liberties, a Torquemada. This is absolutely perverse.

And what of President Bush’s image — at least one aspect of it? They say that he is less than bright: that he is stupid. And stupid is the last thing President Bush is. Call him willful, call him stubborn, call him petulant or cussed or difficult. Stupid, he is not.

Consider one more public figure: Sarah Palin. I keep hearing and reading, in various quarters, that she is a “bimbo.” That is the word I hear about her, rather a lot: “bimbo.” This is a woman, of course, who has been married since her early 20s. She and her husband, Todd, have five children. Sarah is governor of her state; Todd works in the oil fields. From what anyone can tell, they delight in each other, and in their family. They seem almost an advertisement for monogamy: for the married life. And yet people say “bimbo.”

In a nation full of bimbos, Governor Palin is one of the few who aren’t.

It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin’s name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman — more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be — was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose — no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment” (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Where Have the Hollywood Heroes Gone?

Orson Bean, writing at the new website Big Hollywood:

Where are the cinema heroes today, the characters who refuse to surrender, who just won’t give up? Not in Hollywood pictures.

You think audiences aren’t hungry for heroes? There’s a little movie out there called Slumdog Millionaire, which almost didn’t get released and is now being touted for best picture. It takes place in India and tells the story of a young man who overcomes impossible odds to succeed. People are lining up to see it. Why aren’t the many genuinely talented folks in Hollywood making pictures like that? You’d think that simple greed would tempt them to do so. Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

The truth is they’ve forgotten how. They went to college and were taught that their country is wrong, that the system stinks, that to be a hero is to be a sucker fighting for a lie. Like Louis B. Meyer and Sam Warner before them, they want to make picures that have meaning. But their “meaning” is very different from that of the movie makers of my boyhood. When they churn out what’s in their hearts (the depressing view of life as they actually see it), no-one buys a ticket. Then, because they have to make a living, they revert to meaningless special effect extravaganzas and tell themselves there’s no market for “serious” pictures.

Check out the site.

A new link to consider

Just wanted to let you know about a new website* I have been reading. It's called RobinsonandLong.com, and serves as a gateway to some of the best of today's conservative opinion. You can use the above link, and I have also added it to the sidebar.

It's an "aggregator" site - basically, it takes the articles and blog entries from several different websites and puts them together on one page. You just pull up the page and start clicking away, to your heart's content.

*New to me, I should say. It's been up for a couple of months now.

Yes, They Really Were That Bad

Proof positive that the East German border guards had shoot-on-sight orders regarding those trying to escape to the West.

Somehow, I doubt Robert Conquest would be surprised.

Sometimes, the bad guys really are bad guys.



Hat tip to the folks over at The Castle, who found this first.

u have 2 c

Jonah Goldberg's got a new G-File out, and he's in rare form, dismantling the so-called "Queen of Nuts Nice," Rosie O'Donnell, and her latest inanities.

Renowned metallurgist Rosie O’Donnell proclaimed on TV last Thursday that Sept. 11, 2001, was a more significant date than most of us realized. It was, in her words, “the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel.”

This, of course, came as news to steelworkers, blacksmiths, firefighters, manufacturers of samurai swords, and other fools who hadn’t realized that steel is forged in magic furnaces using dragon breath and pixie dust.

It gets better:

Asked if the government was responsible for its collapse, she coyly replied that she didn’t know. All she knows is that it’s “impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved” and that, for the “first time in history, steel was melted by fire.” Wink, wink. For the record, fire can melt steel, and buildings also collapse when heat weakens steel. But that misses the point. The point is we shouldn’t have to argue with crazy people.

Regardless, it appears that not even the heat of ridicule can weaken O’Donnell’s steely resolve to make an idiot of herself.

But the point Jonah goes on to make is all too true - she shares this craziness, and yet she is still on the air.

Why is that, ABC? She's making you guys look like a bunch of idiots.

I'm sure Father Coughlin would approve, though.