Book Review: No True Glory

There's a section at my local library that through the miracle of Mr. Dewey's numbering system only contains books written about the American-led wars in Iraq. I have more trouble picking there than I do in front of the ice cream freezer at Kroger....which means that like pints of Ben and Jerry's, I want to consume it all. Again like Ben and Jerry's, I know I have to use moderation. But dang, I'm to the point that I really wish I get some books that don't have an Iraq theme for Christmas, only because it's probably getting unhealthy.

Today's review is of No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. The subject matter ought to be pretty obvious from the title. Perhaps a more accurate title would have been The Retaking of Fallujah. The basic narrative is that we had the city, we backed off due to political nonsense, let the city fester into a jihadist enclave, and then went back in and kicked some ass.

West's prose is engaging, and doesn't flinch when it comes to describing conditions on the ground. The chapters dealing with the CPA-military interface barely hold back West's disdain for Bremer and his minions, but as a former Leatherneck, can forgive his lack of objectivity. The best parts are of course the descriptions of the tactics and execution as the Marines went back in to Fallujah in 2005. The combat is harrowing. The personal details of the grunts on the ground (occupations, conditions for joining the Corps, etc) add some depth to the narrative. Some of the guys in the book feel just like guys you went to high school with, and you root for them. That's one hallmark of a good writer, in my opinion.

In closing, this is probably the best book on the Iraq war I've read to date (not that I'm the best-read person in the world, but taking my recent Iraq-war obsession into account, I'm probably better-read than most on this topic). Its scope is pretty narrow, but that allows for the detail that make it a page-turner without making the book 1,000 pages long. I can't recommended it enough for someone who wants to get an idea of the combat and political calculations that go in to fighting an insurgency.

*Lance out*

So Much Sloth.....

The week's half done, and no posts yet, so let's make it complete, and punt.

*Lance out*

Climategate....My First and Last Post

I'm not going to beat a dead horse, there's commentary than you can shake a stick at out there already.

In case you've been living under a rock, about two weeks ago a hacker pulled about 10,000 documents off a server at the University of East Anglia in England. Most of the emails were from the resident Climatic Research Unit's director, who is in charge of a large chunk of what goes into the dire predictions the IPCC makes every time they convene. After letting other bloggers wade through the minutiae of most of it, I've come to see nothing that changes my opinion of global warming research or the people that undertake it. Then again, I always believed the people doing the research were willfully fudging data, obstructing those who wanted to check their work, and basically just sustaining their own station on the U.N.'s sugar teat through their "research". So fine, to me, the emails confirm, or at least add weight, what I already believed.

For others....riddle me this: why have the attitude in the first place that these so-called "experts" had regarding their work and data? If their work is so exemplary, and the science is concrete and irrefutable, why refuse requests for information, like the source code? Why conspire to keep people who disagree with you from out of the scientific literature? Why would a person so sure of their position behave so obstinately and obtusely?

My guess is because deep down, they know that it's all built on a foundation of sand, and if one corner of the rickety structure gets knocked wobbly, the whole thing comes crashing down on them. No more corner office, no more jetting to fancy locales to discuss how to change the lifestyle and spend the wealth of all mankind (with an appropriate payment made to carbon-credit supplier to absolve them of their guilt), and no more accolades. These guys revert to being just tired old scientists with computer code that doesn't work. There are three questions that I always put to people who are acolytes of global warming of the man made variety. If ever once a technical expert or layperson could answer these satisfactorily, without resorting to ad hominem or some blathering fallback statement involving the words "scientific consensus", I would switch sides in the debate. The questions are:

1. If we're going to make these sweeping changes based on a computer model, and the computer model fails to get things right in the short-term, why should we believe it's going to get things right in the long term, as errors compound as a function of time?
2. Why is it ground-based temperature measurement techniques give data sets that don't agree, and that are much warmer than satellite measurement (unfouled, presumably, by things like concrete and asphalt) that agree with one another to a much better degree?
3. If global warming is only or mostly a function of atmospheric carbon dioxide, where's all the warming these last ten years?

A good example of the shrill, holier-than-though attitude extreme proponents of global warming usually posses is embodies in English environmentalist George Monbiot, who would write a daily tract detailing the dangers of incremental sea level rise if the Guardian let him. As it is, he gets a weekly rant space to throw darts at anyone and anyone who variously flies on airplanes, drives, eats meat, and buys anything that isn't second-hand. In short....what an asshole. This is a good example of the kind of hyperbolic vitriol he's made his millions from, at the expense of Canada of all countries. If Al Gore could write as well as Monbiot, he would.

So I think I'll leave the Climategate stuff here. I'm not a climatologist, but I do keeps the lights on and put bread on the table via the scientific method. I know a rat when I smell one, and this one stinks bad enough that people might just catch on, and decide to throw the whole thing out the window. One can hope.

*Lance out*

Around the World in One Post

More catching up to do - here we go.....

In what I can only hope starts a trend for prosperous, English-speaking countries, Australia's government soundly rejected a cap and trade scam. Throw another shrimp on the barbie!

Maybe the supporters of Iran's "right" to nuclear power don't want to see this: Iran is having a field day crushing dissent not only within their borders, but outside of them as well. Nothing screams "transparency" like holding people's families hostage for something they said on Facebook.

The Swiss banned construction of new minarets via referendum. Now, I don't like the political side of Islam, which I feel is one step on the slippery slope towards church-state interdependency. But I feel like banning religious iconography in any form is a bad idea. I'm sure they won't ban church steeples, so this wreaks of outright xenophobia to me. The country has exactly 4 minarets (a minaret is the high tower placed next to a mosque, which traditionally calls for prayer ring from several times a day. Swiss minarets are already forbidden for the prayer calling). I just don't see this as a big problem. In a free society, you've got to tolerate things you don't agree with....but I guess in a free society, a vote is a good way to take care of issues like this. Yes, I know I just contradicted myself. It's my blog, I'll do what I want.

Finally, I ran across a really good article showing the economic evolution (or lack thereof) of Singapore and Jamaica. In the 1960's, the countries were equal in terms of average income, but today, Singapore outpaces Jamaica by a factor of six. The article seeks to find out what the causes are. The conclusions are pretty standard, but bear repeating: free markets, smart government investment made by a government that then gets out of the way, low barriers to entrepreneurship, and tax incentives that encourage risk-taking. Surely many outside factors play a role as well, but time and time again, it's proven that as the barriers to enter business, register property, and perform other rudimentary tasks to start or maintain a business stay low, a population flourishes. Too much government means less people will be willing to stick their necks out. You hear me, Obama?

That's all for me. Weekend's almost here....

*Lance out*

1 Timothy - Do What I Say, Boy!

I like 1 Timothy because it's so fatherly. Paul, writing from jail, probably in Rome, is trying to simultaneously encourage, goad and control his young charge in Ephesus on everything from the treatment of widows to the requirements for eldership. The part that makes me chuckle in Paul's writings is usually something like 5:23, which just comes out of nowhere, tacked right on to a bunch of dry doctrinal exhortations about paying the elders:

²³Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

So basically Paul is dispensing medical advice too - what couldn't this guy do? But hey, anybody prescribing wine for a stomach ache is my kind of health care professional. I'm being a little facetious, of course. But it's nice to run across things in the Bible that can make you smile like the above does - Christianity isn't supposed to be some kind of forced death march. It can be fun, too.

*Lance out*

Recapping U.S. News

I've been away from here for a while, so there's lots to get to.

First, the Atlantic shows no love for Hillary. I think the knives on the left have officially come out against the Obama administration. In a sense, that's not surprising. Presidents usually have a difficult time governing from one extreme of the spectrum or another (cue Clinton in 1994, and Bush from about 2007 on). Consequently, they come to the middle, which riles up the nuts on the fringes, who are usually the same people who supplied alot of grass-roots support to elect them in the first place. The lesson to take away is to govern as you campaign. I'd argue that up until now, Obama is a textbook case in how not to do that.

Case in point - Obama campaigned in a most craven way when it came to the most powerful unions in the US, namely the AFL-CIO, trial lawyers, and the teachers union. But since most people actually care about their kids' education, the message towards the teachers has changed for the better, to one of merit as opposed to seniority. So in a rare instance of a school board administrator standing up to the local union, the DC school chief, with the backing of the Obama administration (implicitly, more than explicitly) is trying to change the nation's most deplorable public school system for the better. More power to her.

On to healthcare. In what is probably the most dishonest headline the New York Times has recently published that does not involve a Republican Presidential ticket, they have the gall to say that "No Big Cost Increase Seen In Heath Care Bill". Granted, they're just toeing the line on the CBO's report. But here I thought that the job of a newspaper was to see through the BS and publish some actual reporting, rather than just regurgitate government reports. No cost increase.....for people with employer-provided care. Great. The bill isn't written to affect those people, so it's like saying the bill won't affect the price of shrimp cocktails at Red Lobster. Totally spurious, but it looks good. For the people the bill was actually written to "help", those in the individual insurance market, costs would increase in the 10 - 20% range. And when has government ever come in under cost on anything? Not to mention the fact that as always, people under 40 will be totally screwed over to pay for people over 65, who already soak up the vast majority of federal health care spending. Robert Samuelson said it best. We invest too much money in people that don't produce anything. I could go into some long-winded diatribe about how the breakdown of the nuclear family and secularization of our society has led to us clinging onto life to an absurd degree, but I'll spare you. For now.

And finally onto Afghanistan, the land where "maybe" and "definitely" are one and the same. We will apparently send more troops, and definitely withdraw them if conditions on the ground permit it. Orwell is writing Obama's speeches from the beyond the grave, I swear. Not only do I not think 30,000 troops is enough, the NATO contribution of 7000 desk-jockeys is another travesty. A strong President would have said "It's your back yard. If you want the Taliban running around there, be my guest. You need to match us man-for-man." Europe would have said "no, we prefer that you do the fighting", but at least the President would have looked like a man. As it is right now he looks like a naïve child. Apparently with Obama in the White House, we can do in 18 months what we could not in 8 years. Harry Potter has nothing on Obama's magic. George Will called it unserious; I agree. Not a good adjective when you're holding the lives of 100,000-plus American soldiers in your hands.

Grrrrr.....should have written the Afghanistan paragraph first. I need to go hit something now.

*Lance out*

Books Read on Airplanes

I dislike business trips because I have to be away from my wife and kids (not to mention my own bed). Among the few pluses, though, are that I get a chance to catch up on movies and books that I just don't have time for at home. I'm going to spare you any of the half-dozen or so movies that I watched while I was overseas, as none of them were really good enough to worry over. But I did read a couple of pretty good books, mostly on the ten-hour flights over the Atlantic and back again.

On the way over, and during most of the ensuing travel around Europe, I read S.L.A. Marshall's World War One. Three guesses what it's about. Though on the surface just a rote accounting of the origin and battles of the Great War, the book does a good job of captivating the reader with anecdotes and visual descriptions of the battlefield. If you're looking for a fast-paced spy novel, read Ludlum. This is an honest accounting of the conflict, and not much else. Worth reading if you want a good primer on the war, but not something the casual reader is going to pick up instead of Dean Koontz. If you're going to read this book, you need a dictionary. I consider myself pretty verbose, in that I can whip out words that belong in the verbal section of the S.A.T. and use them correctly in a sentence. Marshall takes it to the next level, which gives me perverse joy, because I get to learn some new words. The thing to take away from the book is the volume of humanity that was killed or maimed in the conflict: while people and politicians whine hysterically about 4000 US servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were few major battles in WWI that didn't claim ten times that many lives. That's a single battle. Everything is relative.

On the plane ride back, I read Tim Harford's The Logic of Life. Harford's first book, The Undercover Economist, sought to explain everything from airline ticketing to Walmart in terms of economics for the layman, and I thought he did a good job of it. The Logic of Life seeks to do much of the same, but instead of the business side of things, Harford applies economic theory to social behavior. In a sense, I thought that was a silly idea, and dangerous to boot. But really all he's peddling is the idea that people look out for their own rational self-interest. After I realized that, round-about chapter 7, I was fine with the book. He does gloss over a few things that I thought were intellectually disingenuous. For instance he talks about how black children are often fatherless, due mostly to the fact that since so many young black men are in prison, young women compete for men, and they use sex as a bargaining chip. No surprises there, I don't think. But he goes on to say that "black culture" isn't therefore to blame for the multitudes of fatherless black children, it's all rational self-interest. Well, what puts all the young black men in jail? He seems to stop when he should go one step further with many of his examples. But at a scant 250 pages, the book was an easy read, and a good way to kill a couple hours between the bad food and crummy movies. It's worth checking out from the library.

That's it for me. Peace.

*Lance out*

Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can't...Educate Your Children

Here's a link to a sobering, frightening piece from City Journal, on just how detached the United States' math and science cirriculum is from what's actually needed.

And here I thought math was math. To me, "2x+3=7" has never hinted of oppression by white men, nor has a geometrical proof ever been a slight on minorities. Practical math is one thing: for instance, everybody ought to be able to calculate a tip or tax in their head. But people should be expected to know more, even if we won't use it. To some, our brains are these fragile, friable things that will fill up with nonesense if it weren't for the prowess of education professionals, who see it as their job to pick and choose what information we put into our grey matter. Your brain never fills up. There's no reason why you can't have a complement of drill-based math (times tables, etc), rote proofs, and applied math. In fact, they all compliment each other. We pay too short shrift to the first two, thinking them outdated. Well, they landed a man on the moon with slide rules.

Your brain never fills up, but its' structure does change. The act of doing a proof, or memorizing something and then applying it, knits and stiches highways in your brain that can be used at a later time to speed up your thought process. That's a complicated way of saying that it makes you smarter. I'm not calling for kids barking out times tables and derivates under pain of a ruler across the knuckles. But knowing certain things is the basis for being able to do more complex tasks later on. Other countries do this, and it works better than our "touchy-feely" math. However in all this are the education professionals (code word for "B.S. Artist"). If their brand of math goes by the wayside, they lose their jobs. It's funny when a group of people professing to want to help America's students would do better at their jobs if they did not do them at all.

*Lance out*

Taking Some Time Off

Too much time spent away from home these last few weeks, and not much reliable internet anywhere in Europe. So I'm punting for a couple weeks. I'll probably be back after Thanksgiving.

*Lance out*

The Silence is Deafening

Did you know that Yemen and Saudi Arabia were at war? I didn't....seems like the media only pays attention to Muslim rebels being bombed by a more affluent oppressor when the bombs have a Star of David embossed on the side. Huh.

*Lance out*