The Greatest Logistician

In today's gospel, Jesus is confronted with a a crowd approaching ten thousand, and asks how they will be fed:

Matthew 15:34 And Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven, and a few little fishes.15:35 And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground.15:36 And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.15:37 And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the broken meat that was left seven baskets full.15:38 And they that did eat were four thousand men, beside women and children.

Truly, Jesus is the greatest logistician! If this situation arose in a military situation:

1. Several clerk's would have had to identify the proper NSNs to order.
2. MILSTRIP requisitions would have had to be prepared and entered in the DLA wholesale system, unless of course, the command has a government credit card.
3. If the requisitions were coded properly, for example 02 Priority, 999 Required Date, etc., the orders once received at the CCP, would have been airlifted and would arrive in about three weeks; and that's assuming the items were properly palletized, had proper shipping labels, had no frustrated cargo, the convoy on ASR Michigan didn't get delayed, another services didn't keep a few items, customs and food service inspectors signed off on the shipment, no food spoiled, and there were no rocket attacks at the moment -- then, the people would have been fed.

And, since He was a fisherman, doesn't that mean he was a man of the sea, a sailor?

Lite Sunday Reading...

Sometimes, you gotta wonder about...

Idiot Sightings

Sighting #1: I was at the airport, checking in at the gate, when the airport employee asked, "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?" I said, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?" He smiled and nodded knowingly, "That's why we ask." Idiot

Sighting #2: The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it is safe to cross the street. I was crossing with an "intellectually challenged" co-worker of mine, when she asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals to blind people when the light is red. She responded, appalled, "What on earth are blind people doing driving?"

Idiot Sighting #3: At a good-bye lunch for an old and dear co-worker who is leaving the company due to "downsizing," our manager spoke up and said, "This is fun. We should have lunch like this more often." Not another word was spoken. We just looked at each other like deer staring into the headlights of an approaching truck.

Idiot Sighting #4: I worked with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the life of her could not understand why her system would not turn on.

Out All Night Drinking

An Irishman's been at a pub all night drinking. The bartender finally says that the bar is closed. So he stands up to leave and falls flat on his face. He figures he'll crawl outside and get some fresh air and maybe that will sober him up. Once outside he stands up and falls flat on his face. So he crawls home and at the door stands up and falls flat on his face. He crawls through the door and up the stairs. When he reaches his bed he tries one more time to stand up. This time he falls right into bed and is sound asleep.

He awakens the next morning to his wife standing over him shouting at him. "So, you've been out drinking again!!"

"How did you know?" he asks.

"The pub called, you left your wheelchair there again."

Backyard, Shade, Rain and Mississippi

From this desert oasis, the things I miss. The obvious and the not so obvious.

Annie

Trip and Em

Trip's chu

Emily and the Colonel

Ole Miss

Rebel

My backyard; shade; rain; Mississippi

The Tree of Life in Bahrain

Five Score Ago!

THE YEAR 1905

Think things have changed? I remember when a Mustang advertised for $1,995.00. Thanks to my old fraternity brother "Rabbi" for the Hat Tip.

Here are some of the U.S. statistics for 1905:

-The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
-Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
-Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
-A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
-There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
-The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
-Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.
-With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the 21st most populous state in the union.
-The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
-The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents an hour.
-The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
-A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
-A dentist $2,500 per year,
-A veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and
-A mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
-More than 95 percent of all births in the U.S. took place at home.
-Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education.
-Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and -by the government as "substandard."
-Sugar cost four cents a pound.
-Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
-Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
-Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
-Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason.
-The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
*Pneumonia and influenza
*Tuberculosis
*Diarrhea
*Heart disease
*Stroke
-The American flag had 45 stars.
-Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
-The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was 30!!!
-Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.
-There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
-Two of 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.
-Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated high school.
-Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
-Eighteen percent of households in the U.S had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
-There were only about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.
-And I forwarded this from someone else without typing it myself, and sent it to you in a matter of seconds!

Convoy Pics: Habbaniyh

A few pics of my latest convoy to Habbaniyh, which with Ramadi and Fallujah completes the triangle aound Camp TQ.

Below is the gunner in the truck ahead of us. All military vehicles must either be up armored with a gunner or up armored in a convoy of gun trucks. That's the new Army duds, a darker version of the Marine DCUs.

The gunner, by the way, is female. Her profile would be a lot lower once off base.

Also below is the famed Euphrates River. We are very close to where the Euphrates meets the Tigres - The Cradle of Civilization.

The highway you'll see is ASR Michigan, where on any given day there are up to ten "events". Not your garden variety jaunt up California Highway 1 to the wine country.

Lady Jo: Meet Miss Peggy

My mother died several years ago, and as I said in a prior post, we all miss her dearly. She left eight brothers and sisters, her husband (my Dad) and her four kids. If I had a picture of her here in Iraq with me, I'd publish it.

Update: Laura B., my brother Tim's gorgeous wife, herself a good Republican, sent me the picture at left, Doe with Tim. That's Tim before the Bruce Willis look he sports today, not entirely by his choice!

In any event, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is a very creative writer and a Flaming Red Irish girl. While her articles make me laugh, I wish she was on our side, making fun of the Democrats. But alas, even the enemy has worthy sharpshooters, and Ms. Dowd is one.

Peggy Dowd, who at 97 recently died, was Maureen Dowd's beloved mother. As you read Maureen Dowd's tribute to her mother, if you knew my mother, whom many called Lady Jo (all of her grandchildren and all kids who knew her called her Doe), this article will remind you of the silent soldiering my mother did all of her life (always for the good of others), the bourbon and water, the zest for life, the certainty that her way was "right". I miss her every day.

Here's the article:

Woman Who Found a Way to Write
By MAUREEN DOWD

MY mom always wanted to be a writer. In 1926, when she was 18, she applied for a job at The Washington Post. An editor there told her that the characters she'd meet as a reporter were far too shady for a nice young lady.

But someone who wants to write will find a way to write. And someone who wants to change the world can do it without a big platform or high-profile byline.
Besides raising five kids in high heels, my mom wrote with a prolific verve that would have impressed one of her idols, Abigail Adams.

In her distinct looping penmanship, learned from the nuns at Holy Cross Academy in Washington, she regularly dashed off missives to politicians. I'd often see form-letter responses on her table from the White House or Congress.

She loved Ronald Reagan and when he landed in a firestorm, she'd write to tell him to buck up. She also appreciated Bill Clinton - his sunny style, his self-wounding insecurity and his work on the Ireland peace process - and would write to compliment him as well. (Literally catholic, she liked both Monica and Hillary.)

She wrote to any member of Congress who made what she considered the cardinal sin of referring to Edmund Burke as a British, rather than Irish, statesman.

In 1995, after reading a newspaper analysis suggesting that Al Gore was not sexy enough to run for president, Mom swiftly dashed off a note reassuring the vice president that he was sexy and that he'd done a great job as host of Pope John Paul II's visit to Baltimore.

She carefully addressed it, "The Honorable Albert Gore Jr., Home of the Vice President, Observatory Circle; 37th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C." The letter was returned a few days later, stamped "Addressee Unknown."

It was an omen.

She wrote her last name in black marker on the bottom of the Tupperware she used to bring food to anyone in her building or sodality or family who was under the weather or having a party. On holidays, plates of food were always handed out to those in the building who had to work or might be lonely before she served her family.

When her dinner rolls stuffed with turkey and ham were snapped up at my first cocktail party, as the expensive catered cheese wheel and goose pâtés went untouched, she told me with a smug smile: "Simplicity pays."

Mom - a woman who always carried a small bottle of Tabasco in her purse - wrote out hundreds of recipes, adding notations of her own, including Mamie Eisenhower's Million Dollar Fudge (1955), which she deemed "Rich as Croesus, but oh so good," Mrs. Nixon's Hot Chicken Salad and Barbara Bush's High Fiber Bran Muffins.

In the middle of her recipe cards, she wrote down a quote that appealed to her: "The Talmud says, If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"
When my mom still hoped I would transcend takeout, she'd write away for booklets for me: "150 Favorite Pickle Recipes From Iowa," "Confessions of a Kraut Lover" from Empire State Pickling and "How to Cook With Budweiser," including a chocolate beer cake.

Without ever mentioning it to anyone, she constantly wrote out a stream of very small checks from her police widow's pension for children who were sick and poor.

She didn't limit her charity to poor kids. When 6-year-old Al Gore III was struck by a car in 1989, she sent him a get-well card and a crisp dollar bill. "Children like getting a little treat when they're not feeling well," she explained.

She had a column, "Under the Capitol Dome," in the National Hibernian Digest. In 1972, she chronicled her debut, at 63, as a protester.

After Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers fired on a Catholic demonstration in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people, Mom went to the Kennedy Center in Washington to picket the British ambassador, who was going to a performance of the Royal Scots Guards. She proudly wore her green Irish tweed cape and waved a placard reading, "Stop killing innocent civilians."
"The triumph of the evening," she wrote in her column, "was when the British ambassador had to be taken in through a basement door."

She wrote me relentlessly when I moved to New York in 1981 with everything from fashion tips ("Hang your necklaces inside your blouse so your bra will catch them if the clasp breaks") to strategy on breakups ("Put all his pictures in a place you won't see them, preferably the trash") to health tips ("I hope you will never take a drink when you are unhappy. It would break my heart to think you had become a jobless derelict, an easy prey for unscrupulous men, me dead, and a family who held you in contempt because you had tossed aside your beauty, youth and talent.").

Mom was not famous, but she was remarkable. Her library included Oscar Wilde, Civil War chronicles, Irish history and poetry books, as well as "Writing to the Point: Six Basic Steps," and the 1979 "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing.'"

As her friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, eulogized her last week: "She was venerable without any of the fuss of venerability; worldly, but thoroughly incorruptible; hilarious, but ruthlessly in earnest; unexpected, but magnificently consistent; wicked, but good. She could be skeptical and sentimental in the very same moment. She set things right just by being in the midst of them."

When I told her I was thinking of writing a memoir, she dryly remarked, "Of whom?" And when reporters just starting out asked her for advice about journalism, she replied sagely: "Get on the front page a lot and use the word 'allegedly' a lot." The daughter of a manager of an Irish bar named Meenehan's, with a side entrance marked Ladies' Only, she grew up in a Washington that was still a small Southern village with horses and carriages. As a child she saw the last of the Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and as the wife of a D.C. police inspector she made friends with her neighbor, Pop Seymour, the last person alive who saw Lincoln shot at Ford's Theater. (He was 5 and saw the president slump in his box.)

Intensely patriotic, a politics and history buff, in her life she spanned the crash of the Titanic to the crash of the twin towers, Teddy Roosevelt to W. One of her big thrills came in 1990 when she went to the White House Christmas party with me and President Bush gave her a kiss. On the way home, she said to me in a steely voice, "I don't ever want you to be mean to that man again."

As my mom lay in pain, at 97 her organs finally shutting down, my sister asked her if she would like a highball. Over the last six years, Mom had managed to get through going into a wheelchair and losing her sight, all without painkillers or antidepressants - just her usual evening glass of bourbon and soda.

Her sense of taste was gone, and she could no longer speak, but she nodded, game as ever, just to show us you can have life even in death. We flavored her spoonful of ice chips with bourbon, soon followed by a morphine chaser.

Peggy Dowd died last Sunday at 6:30 a.m. I'm not sure if she was trying to keep breathing until the 8:30 a.m. Mass for shut-ins or Tim Russert's "Meet the Press."

I just know that I will follow the advice she gave me in a letter while I was in college, after I didn't get asked to a Valentine's Day dance. She sent me a check for $15 and told me to always buy something red if you're blue - a lipstick, a dress.

"It will be your 'Red Badge of Courage,' " she wrote. And courage was a subject the lady knew something about.

Truth <> Logic

Thanks to a picture forwarded to me by Joey F., who received it in an email from his lovely and gracious daughter, Heidi F., a Republican beauty if there ever was one: What is Truth? Well, the obvious at left.

Truth

Philosophers and logicians have proposed a number of broad theories about truth, which are now frequently sorted into two camps.

Robust Theories

Some theories hold in common that truth is a robust (sometimes inflationary) concept. According to these theories, truth needs explanation and is something about which significant things can be said:

The correspondence theory of truth sees truth as correspondence with objective reality. Thus, a sentence is said to be true just in case it expresses a state of affairs in the world.

The coherence theory sees truth as coherence with some specified set of sentences or, more often, of beliefs. For example, one of a person's beliefs is true just in case it is coherent with all or most of her other beliefs. Usually, coherence is taken to imply something stronger than mere consistency: justification, evidence, and comprehensiveness of the belief set are common restrictions.

The consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group.

Pragmatism sees truth as the success of the practical consequences of an idea, i.e. its utility.
Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, and it represents the power struggles within a community.

Semantic theory of truth

The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language: 'P' is true if and only if P where 'P' is a reference to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.
Logician and philosopher Alfred Tarski developed the theory for formal languages (such as formal logic). Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression is true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an object language, the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences like the Liar: This sentence is not true. See The Liar Paradox. As a result Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Tarski thought of his theory as a species of correspondence theory. Donald Davidson (philosopher) used it as the foundation of his Truth-conditional semantics and linked it to Radical interpretation in a form of Coherentism.

Subjective vs. objective

Subjective truths are those with which we are most intimately acquainted. That I like broccoli or that I have a pain in my foot are both subjectively true. Metaphysical subjectivism holds that all we have are such truths. That is, that all we can know about are, one way or another, our own subjective experiences. This view does not necessarily reject realism. But at the least it claims that we cannot have direct knowledge of the real world.

In contrast, objective truths are supposed in some way to be independent of our subjective beliefs and tastes. Such truths would subsist not in the mind but in the external object.

Relative vs. absolute

Relative truths are statements or propositions that are true only relative to some standard or convention or point-of-view. Usually the standard cited is the tenets of one's own culture. Everyone agrees that the truth or falsity of some statements is relative: That the fork is to the left of the spoon depends on where one stands. But Relativism is the doctrine that all truths within a particular domain (say, morality or aesthetics) are of this form, and Relativism entails that what is true varies across cultures and eras. For example, Moral relativism is the view that moral truths are socially determined. Some logical issues about Relativism are taken up in the article on the relativist fallacy.

Relative truths can be contrasted with absolute truths. The latter are statements or propositions that are taken to be true for all cultures and all eras. For example, for Muslims God is great expresses an absolute truth; for the microeconomist, that the laws of supply and demand determine the value of any consumable in a market economy is true in all situations; for the Kantian, "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" forms an absolute moral truth. They are statements that are often claimed to emanate from the very nature of the universe, God, or some other ultimate essence or transcendental signifier. But some absolutists claim that the doctines they regard as absolute arise from certain universal facts of human nature.

Absolutism in a particular domain of thought is the view that all statements in that domain are either absolutely true or absolutely false: none is true for some cultures or eras while false for other cultures or eras. For example, Moral absolutism is the view that moral claims such as "Abortion is wrong" or "Charity is good" are either true for all people in all times or false for all people in all times.

But don't confuse Truth with Logic. My cousin, Dr. Jenny F., is an expert in the field at Cal State, and drives a motorcycle to boot.

Logic

Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος (logos), originally meaning the word, or what is spoken, but coming to mean thought or reason) is most often said to be the study of arguments, although the exact definition of logic is a matter of controversy amongst philosophers (see below). However the subject is grounded, the task of the logician is the same: to advance an account of valid and fallacious inference to allow one to distinguish good from bad arguments.

Traditionally, logic is studied as a branch of philosophy. Since the mid-1800s logic has been commonly studied in mathematics, and, even more recently, in computer science. As a science, logic investigates and classifies the structure of statements and arguments, and devises schemata by which these are codified. The scope of logic can therefore be very large, including reasoning about probability and causality. Also studied in logic are the structure of fallacious arguments and paradoxes.

Due to its fundamental role in philosophy, the nature of logic has been the object of intense disputation, and it is not possible to give a clear delineation of the bounds of logic in terms acceptable to all rival viewpoints. Nonetheless, the study of logic has, despite this fundamental controversy, been very coherent and technically grounded. Here we characterise logic, firstly by introducing the fundamental ideas about form, then outlining in broad terms some of the most influential rival conceptions of the subject, giving a brief overview of its history and then give an account of its relationship to other science, and then go on to provide an exposition of some essential concepts.

History of Logic

While many cultures have employed intricate systems of reasoning, logic as an explicit analysis of the methods of reasoning received sustained development originally only in three places: China in the 5th century BCE, and India and Greece between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century BCE.

The formally sophisticated treatment of modern logic apparently descends from the Greek tradition (although it is suggested that the pioneers of Boolean logic were likely aware of Indian logic (Ganeri 2001) but comes not wholly through Europe, but instead comes from the transmission of Aristotelian logic and commentary upon it by Islamic philosophers to Medieval logicians. The traditions outside Europe did not survive into the modern era: in China, the tradition of scholarly investigation into logic was repressed by the Qin dynasty following the legalist philosophy of Han Feizi, in the Islamic world the rise of the Asharite school suppressed original work on logic, and in India, though innovation in the scholastic school continued into the early 18th century, it did not survive long into the colonial period.

The "A" Word

The "A" word is abortion. The following article cuts through much of the BS associated with the abortion fight.

Constitution holds the answer to abortion
By Mark Davis

I'm prepared to make a deal with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. I don't care whether he is for or against abortion rights, and I don't want him to care where I stand on that spectrum.

Let's all join that pact. None of us will agonize over whether President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court is pleased or displeased with the availability of abortion. In return, we ask him not to moisten his finger and test the winds of public opinion on the issue.

What will this achieve? It will clear the air of irrelevancies and allow us all to focus on the only thing that matters in a judge's consideration of the right to abortion: Is it in the Constitution?
The answer to that question is unaffected by the passions of abortion-rights advocates and opponents. If the nation were to unanimously rise up one day as either 100 percent for or against abortion rights, that would not change one word of the Constitution.

And there is not one word of the Constitution that bestows a blanket federal right to terminate a life in the womb. Judge Roberts was right in 1990 when he said Roe vs. Wade was improperly decided.

As such, it should be overturned, not because he or anyone wants less abortion in America, but because the Supreme Court should not make stuff up, and when it does, it should be corrected.
Judge Roberts is Catholic and, by all accounts, a conservative. Neither of those should be the reason he votes to overturn Roe. It should be because objectively, factually, there is no right to abortion in the Constitution.

Clarity on this matter seems impossible lately, and there is no reason for optimism. Abortion-rights advocates are already scribbling storyboards for the ad campaigns that will portray women dying from botched back-alley abortions because Judge Roberts reached the high court.
Can no one grasp the obvious? The Supreme Court cannot ban abortion. It cannot ban anything. It is legislatures that outlaw things, and the Supreme Court merely rules whether they violate the Constitution by doing so.

The 10th Amendment is crystal clear. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The moment Roe swirls down the drain, abortion will remain legal in every state that wishes to keep it. I don't believe any state would forbid it outright. America wants less abortion, but I'd bet the reddest of red states would stop short of a complete abortion ban.

I dream of confirmation hearings in which this can be discussed honestly and civilly. I have no problem with senators asking Judge Roberts his view on Roe vs. Wade, and I would hope he would answer with candor.

Like I said, I'm dreaming. I still remember the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, when he told senators he had never had a casual conversation about abortion. I'm a big fan of Justice Thomas, but that was a knee-slapper for the ages.

Will Judge Roberts have to play the same game? He might, because the question will come. It should come. I know future abortion cases will come before the court, and he can use that as a basis for declining to answer, but there is simply nothing wrong with someone asking him very plainly whether he believes the Constitution contains a right to abortion.

And there is certainly nothing wrong with him replying very plainly that it does not.

"Two score and eight years ago"

Update: I originally entitled this Four Score and Eight Years Ago...I was two enamored with Lincoln, I guess.

Annie sent in a very heartfelt email addressed to your host, born two score and eight years ago. We've been married twenty-five years:

48!!! Damn! That means I'm right around the corner from you. When did we get so old? I know that for the most part that for the last 12 years at least you have been away on your birthday. It always seemed that you AT was right around your birthday. But it never ceases to amaze me that it always makes me a little sad that we can't be together on your birthday. And why do we always think that WE were the only ones born on that particular day? For some reason we feel that the world and life did not begin until the day that WE took our first breath. For us it did, but we always think that this day is the most special in all creation.

On this day, 48 years ago, a little boy was brought into this world not weighing more than a mite and no bigger than his father's hand. We wonder with our small little minds if it was meant to be that at that moment your destiny was sealed to become the husband of a little girl yet not born and the father of her two children. We look back on all the things that brought you to me and they are not necessarily extra-ordinary events. In fact, the first 20 or so years went unnoticed by me. It could have gone another way. You could have met someone else. But somehow, at some moment in time, you chose the road that led you here.

After counting up the days that we have been apart, not to mention the other days of our lives together when you traveled and taking into account that we are both getting older, it saddens me to think of how much time we have not been able to be together either by choice or 'duty'. When we got married we promised to love, honor, and cherish each other until death, and chose to be with each other for the rest of our lives. I am ready to spend the rest of my life with you.

I want to be in your presence, not typing these dumb emails. We've had a relatively strange relationship because of those time intervals and those distances we have spent apart. I have nothing for your birthday except my words, and those seem insufficient to be able to tell you what I am feeling right now. I miss my best friend. You are my other half. I've been with you (or part of your life) for 26 of those 48 birthdays, just a smidgeon over half of your life as we know it. The only gift that I can give you on this day that is only for you and the most special, is the gift of myself and my heart. Seems inadequate to make up for not being together right now and not being able to make this day special for you if you were home.

In the grand scheme of things, this is 'just another day'. But to me, it is the most significant day of my life. Not the day that I married you, and not the day that I was born. But the day that my best friend was born who found his way into my life and into my heart. I do so love you, my dear and miss you terribly right now. With each birthday you celebrate, I celebrate another year of life with you. The older we get, the more precious those days are and should never be taken for granted.

I love you with all of my heart and am ready to spend the rest of my life WITH you, not apart from you.

Love you,Annie

One Horse Power

It's too hot to write today, so I'll just post a picture of a one horse power sports car made in Bahrain.

[This phot was actually submitted to the London Sun Online, by a poster named Davey B, which happens to be my brother's name and initial. No insinuations made...]

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Theoretically, the bull didn't hit the guy. It looks to me that he head-faked the bull left, then went right. A simple move for a high school running back.

One Thing Leads to Another

Once this hitch ends, I shall be looking to land gracefully back in the civilian world, to ply my trade as an IT/Logistics project manager. I've created a resume website to market yours truly.

You never know who sees what when - that determines one's future...




















The website is www.gotechnical.com.

Dog Bites Intruder

Why do I like dogs better than cats? Dogs live their lives like men do. One day at a time, one meal at a time. A dog thinks, If I'm minding my business, eating my food, bite anyone or anything that goes after the food.

Case in point: See here.

The Long Goodby: Snake Bites Fence

As you now know by now, as a bona fide city boy, I hate snakes, and kill 'em when I see 'em.

To prove there is justice in this world, see the following two pictures of a snake biting its last electric fence.

Annie: "SNAKE!!"

You should know that the Burns' men are famous for our bravery when it comes to snakes. I've never in my life seen a snake I haven't attempted to kill, no questions asked, except of course those I couldn't get to, like in a zoo. I have taught my son what I have learned about snakes: It's not how you kill 'em, it's..just kill 'em. Well... I got this hilarious email today from home.

In Annie's own words: "I saw our first snake this afternoon and let me tell you, I was NOT all too happy! I went out on the back porch to talk on the phone and THERE going into the bushes by the air conditioners was a SNAKE.....ooooooouuuuuu GROSS! It was about the size of a small alligator, tongue darting in and out sniffing out its next victim, mouth wide with 2 inch fangs! Well...almost! It was actually about 2 feet long (1 and 3/4 TOO long) and about the size of a quarter round. Still gross! I screamed and Trip came out. Much like his father before him, he took a broom handle and stood at least the length of it plus an arm's length and poked around the bushes. Such a He-Man! We spotted it twice more cowering by the air conditioners. Finally we let Reb out and fearless dog that she is, she sniffed around....but produced no kill! Trip tired easily of not getting the snake, went inside and watched me poke around a bit longer from inside. So...to make a long story even longer...the snake is still at large and hopefully has gone back to the little snake village from whence it came! "

My initial thought, as I read the email...



Then I thought...



Once, at dusk, in Houston right before a hurricane, I came home to find Annie and all the neighborhood kids pointing at something in the azalea bushes in the front of the house. I (think Mr. Incredible) walk up and see a huge snake, thick as a werf football, coiled around the azalea. So, immediately I head to the garage to grab my weapon - a seven iron (proven to be the best snake killer on the links).

Using proper technique taught to me by my father - at extreme arms length away from the monster should it uncoil itself in a flash and attemp to make its own kill - I proceed to hack up the snake, and bushes, until the anaconda is butchered and dead.

The hurricane comes and goes that night. Next morning, I go out to see my kill...and, NO SNAKE. It's gone! I look all over the yard. Nothing. Then, down the street: There it is! Butchered, and still slithering to get away to meet up with its family of little snakes, to kill again. This time, I ran over it with the car, and back over it. I left it there as an example to other snakes.

The Future of the Middle East: The Burj

See the picture at left: It's the Burj Dubai (much more below). This is what the Middle East is capable of.

Last year I had the good fortune of being stationed in Bahrain for five months. One of my assignments - real tough duty - was to visit several of the business hubs in UAE (involving Navy communications). I flew a C-130 from Bahrain to Fujarah (not Fallujah), then drove (actually, my Avis driver drove me) across country to Jebel Ali, where the Navy pulls in. From there, we drove to Dubai. Dubai, the city of buildings from Space 2010! Unbelievable architecture, unbelievable commerce. Dubai reminded me of a combination of Chicago, Dallas and LA, though hot as hell when I was there (in August).

Driving around UAE I never felt threatened. Walking around Dubai, likewise.

I tell my Syrian friends back in the states that one day, our efforts here will hopefully help restore sanity to the Middle East, where walking around New Baghdad is the same as walking around Dubai.

It will happen one day. Once the Iraqi people reclaim their land.

The Burj Dubai (Arabic for "Tower of Dubai") is a skyscraper currently under construction in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Its exact height remains a closely-guarded secret, but is believed to be approximately 705 meters (2,314 ft).

Expected to be completed in 2008, the Burj Dubai is a formidable threat to other bids to the title of world's tallest building. These include the 1,776-foot (547 meter) Freedom Tower in New York City, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and the current record holder, Taipei 101. The Burj Dubai's developer Emaar Properties has suggested that the Burj Dubai will become the tallest manmade structure of any kind in history. The highest structure was the 645.4 meter (2,120 feet) Warsaw radio mast built in 1974 which collapsed during renovation work in 1991.

The Burj Dubai has been designed to be the center of a large-scale, mixed-use development that will include commercial, residential, shopping, entertainment, and leisure outlets. The complete development, including the US $800 million tower, will cost about US $8 billion.

The Burj Dubai will be the latest feather in the cap of Dubai, which is also building the largest man-made marina (the Dubai Marina), the world's largest man-made island (Palm Islands), and already had the world's tallest 5-star deluxe hotel (the Burj al-Arab).

Developers say the silvery glass sheathed concrete building will restore to the Middle East the honor of hosting the earth's tallest structure -- a title lost circa 1300 when Lincoln Cathedral upset the 38-century reign of Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. However, it may not hold this title for long if the enormous 1,000 m (3,281 ft) Solar Tower project that has been proposed in Buronga, New South Wales, Australia is completed as planned.

A hotel will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will have 700 private apartments (which, according to the developer, sold within eight hours of going on sale). Corporate offices and suites will fill most of the rest, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor observation deck, with an outdoor terrace for the brave. The spire will also hold communication equipment.

Architecture

The design of Burj Dubai is derived from the geometries of the desert flower, which is indigenous to the region, and the patterning systems embodied in Islamic architecture. It combines historical and cultural influences with cutting edge technology to achieve a high-performance building which will set the new standard for development in the Middle East and become the model for the future of the city.

The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core. As the tower rises from the flat desert base, setbacks occur at each element in an upward spiraling pattern, decreasing the mass of the tower as it reaches toward the sky. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes views of the Persian Gulf.

ACLU Offended

What in the world is the ACLU offended by in the picture below? Answer below the picture. Hat Tip to my coozahn Joey.


















A - Prayer

George Carlin On...

COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington and they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.

CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and we're not using it anymore.

TEN COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse? You cannot post "Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians! It creates a hostile work environment!

MARTHA STEWART
"Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she's behind bars. O.J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the one woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard and haul her ass off to jail."

To Kill an American

You probably missed it in the rush of news last week, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American.

So an Australian dentist wrote the following to let everyone know what an American is... so they would know when they found one. (Good on ya, mate!!!!)

An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek.

An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan.

An American may also be a Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim.

In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world.
The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need.

When the Soviet army overran Afghanistan 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!

As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

Americans welcome the best, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes. But they also welcome the least!

The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America.

Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001 earning a better life for their families. I've been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 other countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must.

Hitler did.

So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in the history of the world.

But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.

Author unknown

Weeds among the Wheat

I went to Mass this morning and cooled off before the service. I just sat and relaxed, and contemplated three more months of this...

The Gospel today struct me as very pertinent to what this war is all about. I make the obvious judgement that those who target and kill children are evil. See if you can see the profound eternal truth in today's Gospel.

Mt3/24-43

24 Jesus then told them this story: The kingdom of heaven is like what happened when a farmer scattered good seed in a field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, an enemy came and scattered weed seeds in the field and then left. 26When the plants came up and began to ripen, the farmer's servants could see the weeds. 27The servants came and asked, "Sir, didn't you scatter good seed in your field? Where did these weeds come from?" 28"An enemy did this," he replied. His servants then asked, "Do you want us to go out and pull up the weeds?" 29"No!" he answered. "You might also pull up the wheat. 30Leave the weeds alone until harvest time. Then I'll tell my workers to gather the weeds and tie them up and burn them. But I'll have them store the wheat in my barn."

Stories about a Mustard Seed and Yeast

31Jesus told them another story: The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when a farmer plants a mustard seed in a field. 32Although it is the smallest of all seeds, it grows larger than any garden plant and becomes a tree. Birds even come and nest on its branches. 33Jesus also said: The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when a woman mixes a little yeast into three big batches of flour. Finally, all the dough rises.

The Reason for Teaching with Stories

34Jesus used stories when he spoke to the people. In fact, he did not tell them anything without using stories. 35So God's promise came true, just as the prophet had said, "I will use stories to speak my message and to explain things that have been hidden since the creation of the world."

Jesus Explains the Story about the Weeds

36After Jesus left the crowd and went inside, his disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the story about the weeds in the wheat field." 37Jesus answered: The one who scattered the good seed is the Son of Man. 38The field is the world, and the good seeds are the people who belong to the kingdom. The weed seeds are those who belong to the evil one, 39and the one who scattered them is the devil. The harvest is the end of time, and angels are the ones who bring in the harvest. 40Weeds are gathered and burned. That's how it will be at the end of time. 41The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather from his kingdom everyone who does wrong or causes others to sin. 42Then he will throw them into a flaming furnace, where people will cry and grit their teeth in pain. 43But everyone who has done right will shine like the sun in their Father's kingdom.

If you have ears, pay attention!

The Secret Agent 99 (Plame) Farce

This will be old news soon, but it sure has the DC lightweights stirred up. Ever notice that the MSM spend their time and energy in indirect proportion to the importance of an issue. Case in point:

Plame security breach? It just ain't so, Joe

July 17, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Karl Rove? Please. I couldn't care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway I wouldn't be interested in who ''leaked'' the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press. As her weirdly self-obsesssed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a ''clandestine officer'' and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only ''leak'' her name in the sense that one can ''leak'' the name of the checkout clerk at Home Depot.

Back when Woodrow Wilson was running for president, he had a campaign song called ''Wilson, That's All.'' If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song. But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

This controversy began, you'll recall, because Wilson objected to a line in the president's State of the Union speech that British intelligence had discovered that Iraq had been trying to acquire ''yellowcake'' -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This assertion made Bush, in Wilson's incisive analysis, a ''liar'' and Cheney a ''lying sonofabitch.''

In fact, the only lying sonafabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Why Yellowcake Joe then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what he'd been told by senior figures from Major Wanke's regime in Niger is known only to him.

As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his. What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that that's the side they want to be on, good for them.

But ''leaking'' the name of Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't ''endanger her life'' or ''compromise her mission.'' Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivably prevent the American people having their lives endangered.

Here's the thing: They're still pulling body parts from London's Tube tunnels. Too far away for you? No local angle? OK, how about this? Magdy el-Nashar. He's a 33-year old Egyptian arrested Friday morning in Cairo, and thought to be what they call a ''little emir'' -- i.e., the head honcho in the local terrorist cell, the one who fires up the suicide bombers. Until his timely disappearance, he was a biochemist studying at Leeds University and it's in his apartment the London bombs were made. Previously he was at North Carolina State University.

So this time round he blew up London rather than Washington. Next time, who knows? Who cares? Here's another fellow you don't read much about in America: Kamel Bourgass. He had a plan to unleash ricin in London. Fortunately, the cops got wind of that one and three months ago he was convicted and jailed. Just suppose, instead of the British police raiding Bourgass' apartment but missing el-Nashar's, it had been the other way around, and ricin had been released in aerosol form on the Tube.

Kamel Bourgass and Magdy el-Nashar are real people, not phantoms conjured by those lyin' sonsofbitches Bush and Cheney. And to those who say, "but that's why Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror," sorry, it doesn't work like that. It's not either/or; it's a string of connections: unlimited Saudi money, Westernized Islamist fanatics, supportive terrorist states, proliferating nuclear technology. One day it all comes together and there goes the neighborhood. Here's another story you may have missed this week:

''Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Tuesday.''

Got that? If you don't let us go nuclear, we'll go nuclear. Negotiate that, John Kerry. As with Bourgass and el-Nashar, Hossein Moussavian and Cyrus Nasseri are real Iranian negotiators, not merely the deranged war fantasies of Bush and Cheney.

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

What's this really about? It's not difficult. A big chunk of the American elites have decided there is no war; it's all a racket got up by Bush and Cheney. And, even if there is a war somewhere or other, wherever it is, it's not where Bush says it is. Iraq is a ''distraction'' from Afghanistan -- and, if there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would be a distraction from Niger, and Niger's a distraction from Valerie Plame's next photo shoot for Vanity Fair.

The police have found the suicide bomber's head in the rubble of the London bus, and Iran is enriching uranium. The only distraction here is the pitiful parochialism of our political culture.

Qantas: Ground Crew to Pilot

After every flight, Qantas pilots fill out a form, called a "gripe sheet", which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics correct the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews lack a sense of humor.

Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by Qantas' pilots (marked with a P) and the solutions recorded (marked with an S) by maintenance engineers.

By the way, Qantas is the only major airline that has never had an accident.

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit!

P: Dead bugs on windshield.
S: Live bugs on back-order.

P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.

P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.

P: Friction locks causing throttle levers to stick.
S: That's what they're for.

P: IFF inoperative.
S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

P: Suspected crack in windshield.
S: Suspect you're right.

P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.

P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget

'I stayed in the box'

Hat Tip to the Left Coast Rebel for bringing the following article to my attention. It deals with the contention of many misguided members of the MSM and the Democratic Party who insist that American's at GITMO are mistreating the detainees. Remember, these detainees are not POWs. They don't fight under rules of the Geneva Convention and therefore are not to be accorded those protections. Yet....they are treated as POWs. By the Americans.

The following contrasts our treatment of POWs with how we are treated. Anyone bitching and moaning about GITMO see any differences?

Mistreated POW
James H. Warner on what it’s REALLY like to be a "mistreated POW"

By James H. Warner June 29, 2005

As a Marine Corps officer, I spent five years and five months in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. I believe this gives me a benchmark against which to measure the treatment which Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, complained of at the Camp of Detention for Islamo-fascists Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The senator's argument is silly. If he believes what he has said his judgment is so poor that his countrymen, assuming, of course, that he considers us his countrymen, have no reason not to dismiss him as a witless boob. On the other hand, if he does not believe what he said, the other members of the Senate may wish to consider censure.

Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial blindness or ischemic heart disease as a result of beriberi, a degenerate disease of peripheral nerves caused by a lack of thiamin, vitamin B-1. It is easily treated but is extremely painful. Did Mr. Durbin say that some of the Islamo-fascist prisoners are suffering from beriberi? Actually, the diet enjoyed by the prisoners seems to be healthy. I saw the menu that Rep. Duncan Hunter presented a few days ago. It looks as though the food given the detainees at Guantanamo is wholesome, nutritious and appealing. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf can be compared to moldy bread laced with rat droppings.

In May 1969, I was taken out for interrogation on suspicion of planning an escape. I was forced to remain awake for long periods of time -- three weeks on one occasion. On the first of June, I was put in a cement box with a steel door, which sat out in the tropical summer sun. There, I was put in leg irons which were then wired to a small stool. In this position I could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Within 10 days, every muscle in my body was in pain (here began a shoulder injury which is now inoperable). The heat was almost beyond bearing. My feet had swollen, literally, to the size of footballs. I cannot describe the pain. When they took the leg irons off, they had to actually dig them out of the swollen flesh. It was five days before I could walk, because the weight of the leg irons on my Achilles tendons had paralyzed them and hamstrung me. I stayed in the box from June 1 until Nov. 10, 1969. While in the box, I lost at least 30 pounds. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how this compares with having a female invade my private space, and whether a box in which the heat nearly killed me is the same as turning up the air conditioning.

The detainees at Guantanamo receive new Korans and prayer rugs, and the guards are instructed not to disturb the inmates' prayers. Compare this with my experience in February 1971, when I watched as armed men dragged from our cell, successively, four of my cell mates after having led us in the Lord's Prayer. Their prayers were in defiance of a January 1971 regulation in which the Communists forbade any religious observances in our cells. Does Mr. Durbin somehow argue that our behavior is the equivalent of the behavior of the Communists? Actually, I was one of the lucky ones.

At another camp, during the time I was being interrogated in the summer of 1969, one man was tortured to death and several were severely beaten. In fact, according to Headquarters Marine Corps, 20 percent of my fellow Marines failed to survive in captivity. Have 20 percent of the Islamo-fascists failed to survive Guantanamo?

The argument that detainees at Guantanamo are being treated badly is specious and silly. In the eyes of normal Americans, Democrats believe this argument because, as Jeanne Kirkpatrick said 20 years ago, they "always blame America first." This contributes to the increasing suspicion, in red states, a problem that Democrats are aware of and are trying to counter, that Democrats cannot be trusted with our national security.

Only the Democrats can change this perception, most recently articulated by White House adviser Karl Rove. The ball is in their court and I am certain there are steps that they can take to change this perception, but making silly arguments about imaginary bad treatment of enemy detainees is not a move in the right direction.

James H. Warner is corporate counsel practicing intellectual property law in Northern Virginia. He served as domestic policy adviser during the second Reagan administration.

Pass the hors d'oeuvres, please.

I've been contemplating for a week how to describe the politics of the nominations to the Supreme Court. My thought was this: Most justices were liberal because they wanted to feel good and fit in with the liberal "in crowd" in Washington. The following article hits its the sweet spot, which reminds me, why didn't I bring my sand wedge?

July 11, 2005
Our House of Lords

By Michael Barone

The Supreme Court is our House of Lords. It is a deliberately, necessarily unrepresentative body of government that from time to time makes binding decisions on public policy -- some of which spark great protest.

The House of Lords, curiously, is also Britain's highest appellate court, although in fact cases are judged only by certain members called Law Lords. But the decisions of the House of Lords, like those of the Supreme Court, are final. The difference is that the House of Lords has traditionally not been able to declare laws unconstitutional -- not so surprising in a nation that does not have a written constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court, though it is nowhere stated in our written Constitution, can.

Today, the Supreme Court is much more powerful than the House of Lords. Since 1911, the lords have been able only to delay legislation, not to defeat it. The Supreme Court has been declaring laws unconstitutional since 1803. Power is also much more concentrated in the Supreme Court. The House of Lords has 500-some voting members, the Supreme Court only nine, serving for as long as they wish.

That can be a long time. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor put in 24 years on the court; Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 33.

The Supreme Court has long made important public policy decisions. In the early 19th century, under Chief Justice John Marshall, it helped establish the legal rules that made possible America's bounteous economic growth.

In 1857, it attempted to settle the burning political question of the legality of slavery in the territories and instead plunged the nation toward civil war. In the early 20th century, the Court struck down laws limiting work hours and child labor, and created a political backlash that resulted in a reversal of those decisions in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1954, it reversed itself and ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. In 1973, after 16 states had already liberalized their abortion laws and others were on the verge of doing so, it legalized abortion everywhere in the United States.

More recently, it has struck down attempts to prohibit gruesome "partial-birth" abortions. It has ruled that the First Amendment protects student armbands, nude dancing and flag burning, but not the right to spend money to attack incumbent officeholders in the run-up to federal elections.

Unsurprisingly, Supreme Court nominations have become politically controversial. Liberals have tried to block the nominations of those they think might overturn decisions they like. Conservatives have noted with dismay that nominees who were considered conservative become, some time after confirmation, staunch liberals.

This is partly a function of the unrepresentativeness of the court. Its members are drawn from a small segment of society -- elite lawyer -- and tend to crave the good opinion of editorial writers, law school professors and Georgetown hostesses -- all liberal constituencies.

Each justice is provided with four 20-something law clerks who are recent graduates of elite law schools; the late Justice Harry Blackmun, as Linda Greenhouse's recent book shows, became something of a creature of his left-leaning clerks. It's no surprise that over the past half-century, lots of justices have moved left and few or none have moved right.

Until Tony Blair's 1999 reforms, the House of Lords had the opposite institutional bias: Its hereditary peers made it eternally conservative. Blair's reforms reduce the number of voting hereditary peers to 90, and they are now outnumbered by life peers -- people of distinction from a variety of fields -- and so no party has a majority. Interestingly, this has made the Lords more willing to disagree with the Commons.

In the United States, justices have typically felt little compunction about overturning laws and making public policy, and have been rewarded with copious praise when they do.

Conservatives are hoping that George W. Bush will appoint justices immune to the temptations that have moved their predecessors to the left. They fear that the man who may be the leading candidate, his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is one who can't resist.

Liberals hope for just such a person and will oppose anyone they think won't succumb. That's what's at the heart of the fight over the composition and character of our House of Lords.

© Copyright 2005 US News & World ReportDistributed by Creators Syndicate

A Defensive War Against Terrorism Will Ensure Terrorism

I've been TAD to Kuwait and will have a recap of that trip once I return. Below are two good articles that analyze England's 7/7.

July 10, 2005
Time for stoic Brits to come out swinging

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7:30 and 9 that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 percent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against the British Crown, two generations of politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd ''crack in the system'' through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on 9/11 the failure of the system was total.

Thursday, al-Qaida hit three London Underground trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the Central Zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains across the furthest reaches of the Tube map, from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.

The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue -- literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty's government prioritizing terrorism and ''security'' above all else -- and the failure rate was still 100 percent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by a spate of "comic" security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St. Stephen's Tower at the Palace of Westminster, a Daily Mirror reporter bluffs his way into a servant's gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William's birthday party. As I wrote last March: "History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm -- the queen, her heir, her Parliament -- should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism.''

To three high-profile farces, we now have that high-profile tragedy, of impressive timing. The jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G-8 summit and managed to pull it off -- at a time when the ports and airports and internal security of a small island were all supposed to be on heightened alert.

That's quite a feat. The only good news is that the bombs were, by the standards of what's out there, small. One day they won't be.

Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with elderly rocker Sir Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G-8 summit and tie up the police with their pitiful narcissist preening: the papier-mache Bush and Blair puppets, the ersatz ethnic drumming, etc.

The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid. That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism.'' In reality, unless it's clear a threat is primal, most democratic peoples and their political leaders prefer to regard bad news as a peripheral nuisance which can be negotiated away to the fringe of their concerns.

That's what Britain thought in the 1930s -- back when Hitler was slavering over Czechoslovakia, and Neville Chamberlain dismissed it as "a faraway country of which we know little." Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists -- the IRA, the Basque separatists -- operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G-8 militaries can't manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.

Did we learn enough, for example, from the case of Omar Sheikh? He's the fellow convicted of the kidnapping and beheading in Karachi, Pakistan, of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. He's usually described as "Pakistani" but he is, in fact, a citizen of the United Kingdom, with as English a resume as you can get: born in Whips Cross Hospital, educated at Nightingale Primary School in Wanstead, the Forest School in Snaresbrook and the London School of Economics. He travels on a British passport.

Or take Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati, a senior al-Qaida member from Morocco killed by Saudi security forces in al Ras last April. One of al-Majati's wives is a Belgian citizen currently residing in Britain. In Pakistan, the jihadists speak openly of London as the terrorist bridgehead to Europe. Given the British jihadists who've been discovered in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Israel, Chechnya and Bosnia, only a fool would believe they had no plans for anything closer to home -- or, rather, "home."

Most Britons can only speculate at the degree of Islamist penetration in the United Kingdom because they simply don't know, and multicultural pieties require that they keep themselves in the dark. It's not just the British left that's been skeptical of Washington's war on terror. Former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and many other Conservative grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis-a-vis the Balkans in the early '90s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalized by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.

Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanized Muslim radicalized by the 250,000 corpses of Bosnia. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: It was what Donald Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterized as an "unknown unknown": a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the political class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a suicide cult. The question now is will the British return to the fantasy agenda of Bob Geldof or avenge their dead?

8 July 2005
WE CANNOT SURRENDER
States which shelter these killers will know no peace

By Christopher Hitchens

SOMEWHERE around London at about a quarter to nine yesterday morning, there must have been people turning on their TV and radio sets with a look of wolfish expectation.
I hope and believe that they were disappointed in what they got. There just wasn't quite enough giggle-value for the psychopath.

It must have been infernal underneath King's Cross, but above ground no panic, no screaming, no wailing and beating the air, no yells for vengeance.

I'm writing this in the early aftermath, but I would be willing to bet there will have been little or no bloody foolishness, either: no random attacks on mosques or shops or individuals. After all, devices on our buses and tubes are an open proclamation that the perpetrators don't care if they kill Muslims. Which, of course, is part of the point. When we use the weak and vague word "terrorism" we imply indiscriminate cruelty directed at civilians.

"Sadism" or "fascism" or "nihilism" would do just as nicely: all the venom that lurks just on the sub-human level of the human species.

In a tightly interwoven society, all that this poison has to do is ally itself with a certain low cunning.

People are afraid of plane crashes and of heights: in that sense 9/11 was the perfect strike on the collective unconscious. People are likewise afraid of fire and of crowded or subterranean conditions: the mind of the fascist is naturally attuned to exploit such dreads. I am guessing the planners of this coordinated atrocity hoped for more mayhem than they got, but the casualty figures are in a sense beside the point.

WE all knew this was coming, and that one day a homely and familiar name like Tavistock Square would become a synonym for barbarism. The good old red London bus, a worldwide symbol of our capital, ripped to shards in an instant.

Random and "senseless" though such violence may appear, we also all know it expresses a deadly ideology; indeed that in some ways it is that ideology.

The preachers of this faith have taken care to warn us that they love death more than we love life. Their wager is that this makes them unstoppable. Well, we shall have to see. They certainly cannot prove their point unless we assist them in doing so.

My American friends have been impressed by the composure of the Londoners they have seen on the screen: I bet London Transport runs again rather sooner than US airlines resumed flying after 9/11.

I remember living in London through the Provisional IRA bombing in the 70s. I saw the very first car-bomb explode against the Old Bailey in 1972. There was no warning that time, but after a while a certain etiquette developed.

And, even as I detested the people who might have just as soon have blown me up as anyone else, I was aware there were ancient disputes involved, and that there was a potential political solution.

Nothing of the sort applies in this case. We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London.

The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

FOR a few moments yesterday, Londoners received a taste of what life is like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose Muslim faith does not protect them from slaughter at the hands of those who think they are not Muslim enough, or are the wrong Muslim.

It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on "our" values or "our" way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.

A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from that "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes.

Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?

The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.
They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.

We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them will know no peace. Communities that shelter them do not take forever to discover their mistake. And their sordid love of death is as nothing compared to our love of London, which we will defend as always, and which will survive this with ease.

Is July 7 England's September 11?

At least six blasts rocked the London subway and tore open a packed double-decker bus during the morning rush hour Thursday, police said, killing at least two people and injuring nine, prompting officials to shut down the entire underground transport network.

The near simultaneous explosions came a day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and as the G-8 summit was getting underway in Scotland. Initial reports blamed a power surge, but officials were not ruling out an intentional attack.

"There have been a number of dreadful incidents across London today," said Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Britain's top law enforcement officer. He said there were "terrible injuries."
One witness, Darren Hall, said some passengers emerging from an evacuated subway station had soot and blood on their faces. He told BBC TV that he was evacuated along with others near the major King's Cross station and only afterward heard a blast.
Police confirmed an explosion destroyed a double-decker bus at Russell Square in central London and said they suspected a bomb caused the blast. Dow Jones Newswires reported that police said there were explosions on two others buses.

A witness at the Russell Square blast said the entire top deck of that bus was destroyed.
"I was on the bus in front and heard an incredible bang, I turned round and half the double decker bus was in the air," Belinda Seabrook told Press Association, the British news agency.
She said the bus was packed with people.

"It was a massive explosion and there were papers and half a bus flying through the air," she said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was hosting the world's most powerful leaders at Gleneagles, Scotland, was expected to make a statement at 7 a.m. EDT. It was not clear if the G-8 gathering focusing on climate change and aid for Africa — but from which Iraq has largely been left off the agenda — would have to be postponed.

Police said incidents were reported at the Aldgate station near the Liverpool Street railway terminal, Edgware Road and King's Cross in north London, Old Street in the financial district and Russell Square in central London, near the British Museum.

London Ambulance Service said several vehicles had been dispatched to the area near Liverpool Street station.

"We believe there was some sort of explosion. There are some walking wounded at Aldgate," said a spokesman for City of London police, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"We are not sure of the scale of the incident. Reports are still coming in."

Bradley Anderson, a subway passenger, told Sky News that "there was some kind of explosion or something" as his train reached the Edgware Road station in northeast London.

"Everything went black and we collided into some kind of oncoming train," Anderson said.
Simon Corvett, 26, who was on an eastbound train from Edgware Road station, said: "All of sudden there was this massive huge bang."

"It was absolutely deafening and all the windows shattered," he said. "There were just loads of people screaming and the carriages filled with smoke.

"You could see the carriage opposite was completely gutted," he said. "There were some people in real trouble."

Unanticipated Consequences

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article as to why Roe v. Wade is actually BAD for Democrats, pasted below:

The Roe Effect: The right to abortion has diminished the number of Democratic voters

BY JAMES TARANTO

Roe v. Wade is a study in unanticipated consequences. By establishing a constitutional right to abortion, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt thought they were settling the issue for good, accelerating a process of liberalization that was already under way in 1973. But instead of consensus, the result was polarization. The issue of abortion soon after, and for the first time, took a prominent place in national political campaigns. By 1980, both major political parties had adopted extreme positions--Republicans favoring a "pro-life" constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and Democrats opposing virtually all regulation on "pro-choice" grounds. Every presidential and vice-presidential nominee since then has toed the party line on abortion.

Polarization over abortion coincided with a period of Republican ascendancy. Since the parties split on abortion, the GOP has won five of seven presidential elections, and no Democrat has had a majority of the popular vote. Republicans took over the Senate in 1980, and both houses of Congress in 1994. Obviously, many other factors have contributed to Republican success, but it is hard to look at these results and conclude that abortion has been a winning issue for the Democrats. Thus, the politics of abortion has favored the party that opposes the court-imposed "consensus."

This is not to say that America has embraced the near-absolutist pro-life position that the Republican Party formally endorses. Most Americans are moderate or ambivalent on abortion, rejecting the extreme positions on either side. One reason Republicans have an advantage is that as long as Roe remains in effect--taking off the table any restriction that imposes an "undue burden" on a woman seeking to abort her pregnancy--Republicans are an extreme antiabortion party only in theory. When it comes to actual legislation, the GOP favors only modest--and popular--regulations. The Democrats, on the other hand, must defend such unpopular practices as partial-birth abortion, taxpayer-subsidized abortion, and abortions for 13-year-olds without their parents' knowledge.

Compounding the GOP advantage is what I call the Roe effect. It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have.

The Roe effect would have made itself felt before post-Roe children even reached voting age. Children, after all, are counted in the population figures that determine states' representation in Congress and the Electoral College. Thus, if the greater prevalence of abortion post-Roe affected statewide fertility patterns, the results would have begun showing up after the 1980 reapportionment--in the 1982 election for Congress, and the 1984 election for president.

The first post-Roe babies reached voting age in 1991, in time for the 1992 election. In 1992 the Roe effect would have been minimal, since it was limited to a small segment of the electorate (18- and 19-year-olds), who tend not to vote. The affected segment of the population grows with each election, ranging up to 23-year-olds in 1996, 27-year-olds in 2000, and 31-year-olds in 2004. The Roe effect is compounded over generations. Children who are never born do not have children or grandchildren.

Critics of the Roe effect hypothesis point out that abortion does not necessarily diminish a woman's lifetime fertility. A woman may, for example, have an abortion while in college, but later marry and bear children--children she might not have had, had she been forced to carry her collegiate pregnancy to term. Yet it is not clear how much this might mitigate the Roe effect.

Some women do abort their final pregnancy, and delayed childbearing is one manifestation of the Roe effect. If a woman has a child at, say, age 30 rather than 20, one additional census passes before the child counts toward his state's congressional and electoral college apportionment, and two or three presidential elections pass before he reaches voting age. The compounding element applies here as well; if a woman has a daughter at 30 rather than 20, the daughter reaches childbearing age a decade later than she otherwise would have. Moreover, attitudes about abortion and politics are subject to change with age and experience, and usually in a conservative direction. Thus, some women who delay childbearing contribute to the Roe effect on both ends: by having abortions when they are young, single, and pro-choice, and by bearing children when they are older, married, and pro-life.

Has the Roe effect borne itself out in practice? The results are mixed. In terms of reapportionment, the trend is decidedly in favor of Republican states. The 30 states George W. Bush carried in 2000 had 271 electoral votes, a bare majority. Reapportionment after the 2000 census increased that number to 278. In the 1980s, they were worth only 267 electoral votes, not enough for a majority; in the 1970s, 260. The trend continues: Of the 10 fastest-growing states in 2003-04, Bush carried nine in 2004. (One of them, New Mexico, went for Al Gore four years earlier.)

But Roe effect doubters can point to 2004 exit-poll results that found 18- to 29-year-old voters--i.e., those born after 1975, who correspond closely with the post-Roe generation--were the only age cohort that supported John Kerry over Mr. Bush, by 54% to 45%. Yet caution is in order in interpreting these results. The Roe effect does not predict that younger voters will be more apt to vote Republican than older ones, only than they otherwise would be. Putting the Roe effect to a real test will require a longitudinal look at these voters. How will their voting pattern change, as they grow older and more settled? In any given year, the youngest age cohort will include a high proportion of lower-income and never-married voters, both traits that are highly correlated with voting Democratic. Marriage, in particular, tends to correspond with conservative attitudes on abortion and other social issues, and therefore with voting Republican.

According to 2004 exit polls, Mr. Bush outpolled Mr. Kerry among married voters, 57% to 42%, while Mr. Kerry beat Mr. Bush among singletons, 58% to 40%.

Peculiarities of the 2004 campaign might also have maximized Mr. Kerry's performance among young voters. The Democratic get-out-the-vote effort placed heavy emphasis on the youth vote, employing pop-cultural icons and exploiting the fear of a military draft. The strong youth vote for Kerry may prove to have been less a trend than a spike.

While the Roe effect may give Republicans an advantage, it obviously is insufficient to win elections. National security and the economy still loom larger than abortion in most voters' minds. And although no Democratic candidate since 1976 has won a popular-vote majority, pro-choice candidates collectively (including Ross Perot and Ralph Nader) did so in the three elections from 1992 to 2000. Further, the Roe effect does not necessarily mean that younger voters will end up conservative on cultural issues other than abortion. Opinion polls consistently show, for example, that the young are far more favorable toward same-sex marriage than their elders. This should not be surprising. Even if their parents tend to be conservative, they grew up in a society far more accepting of homosexuality than the one in which earlier generations came of age.

And if Republicans keep winning the presidency and appointing Supreme Court justices, Roe v. Wade may eventually be overturned. (This almost certainly would have happened in 1992 if the Senate had approved Robert Bork's confirmation five years earlier.) If Roe goes by the boards, one would expect fertility to increase in states that outlawed abortion, which would presumably be largely conservative and Republican ones. If the Roe effect continues to operate, though, it would make those states more Democratic and liberal, since women who otherwise might get abortions would no longer have the option in their home states. But in the end, that may not matter. If Roe were overturned, the politics of abortion would change dramatically, and in the Democrats' favor. With the legality of abortion itself on the line, the debate would shift away from the pro-choice extremes, forcing pro-choice politicians to take a more centrist (and popular) position. Republicans would be torn between their antiabortion base and more moderate voters, for whom an outright ban on abortion is a bridge too far.

The best solution for both parties would likely be a return to the status quo ante Roe--that is, for Congress and the president largely to ignore abortion, and leave its regulation to the state legislatures. This would allow politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, to tailor their views to match those of their constituents and their own consciences, and it would remove abortion as a polarizing issue from national elections. Thus, one might say that both Roe and the Roe effect contain the seeds of their own demise.