perfidy

When even jihadis are telling you to chill the hell out, it's a cinch you've gone too far. Citizen Smash reads the latest letter between international terror superstar Ayman al-Zawahiri and blowin-up-in-Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. His take: we're winning.

To wit, Zawahiri admonishes Zarqawi that the average Joe (or Jawarhalal, Jafar, or Jakub) really hates the "blowing people up and cutting off heads" thing he's doing so maybe stop that please, begs Zarqawi (currently on the lam in Iraq) to send cash to him, thinks that Iraq is turning out juuuuust like Vietnam (which implies that the terrorists, what... have the material backing of a gigantic and wealthy world power? Read the Democratic Underground? Oh-kay.) and, well, just go read Smash's thing.

It's a cautiously good sign that all the misery Iraqis are bearing might some day not be in vain. Given that an abatement in terrorist acts is probably a prerequisite for long-term stability in Iraq, and given that "you broke it/ you bought it" is currently the USA's lot, here is cause for hope.

(Of course, I'd'a been happier if things had never gotten to this juncture, but hey... you play what you're dealt when it's heads-up time.)

The correspondence between Harriet Miers and the President - all of which is sappy cards and birfday notes since that's the only stuff that doesn't land behind some penumbral state sekrit curtain - is both sad and disturbing. Best governer evar! So cool!

You know what? I hope she gets confirmed. I want her sorry ass on the court for the next twenty-odd years. Because either she'll turn out well and we all win (or, anyway, conservatives probably win), or she'll be a quarter-century embarassment, a wet public fart of a Presidential legacy alongside a massive prescription drug benefit, a mind-boggling deficit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the decline of global American soft power. Somebody shat in my Wheaties this morning, and I want that bland cipher to stand for everything that drives people like me up a wall - the cronyism, the exaltation of the average, the notion that religion is a major qualification for public service, fiscal profligacy, the infallibility of the executive, the nannyish social-engineering moral tightassery - all of it, and I want the wing of the Republican party that thinks all that is a dandy way to be an American pants down and crying in the street by 2008.

When the stinkfinger comes, they will all be touched.

I found this slightly disturbing image over at Rocket Jones. It's funny to a cold hearted conservative like me. But what really made me snort my soda was this sequence in the comments:

Has the five second rule lapsed on this one yet? I mean, if you guys aren't going to eat it, I got a woman to feed over here.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:27 PM

I have one of a similar style at home. I like them. They're very simple, yet visually powerful, the more you look at them, the stronger their pull gets.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:35 PM

Oh jesus. I just posted on the wrong thread. That second post was for your "Answer" thread.

---Posted by shank at October 11, 2005 06:36 PM

To which I replied,

Shank, your second comment makes you look impressively sick if you're like me and didn't follow the link until after I read the third comment. Though I did wonder why, if you have one at home, you hadn't fed it to your woman.

I ran across a James Bennett article from a couple years ago about differing conceptions of Columbus Day. The whole thing is worth a read, but one thing in particular caught my eye:

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Fairly apt. I first encountered this phenomenon when I worked for an environmental lobby group back in the nineties. It quickly became clear that what they felt was more religion than public advocacy. There I was, proto-conservative in Ohio but with legitimate concerns about pollution and the condition and future of the environment. The environment, after all, was where I lived. While I can tolerate a certain (my wife might say large) amount of mess and filth in my personal habitation, there are limits beyond which it is unsafe to go. At that point, I start cleaning. My views of the larger environment were similary constructed. We'd made a bit too much mess, and cleaning up and forestalling future mess was in order.

However, I didn't view my apartment as a sacred place that was despoiled by the very presence of the works of man. And this was what the environmentalists I worked with did believe. I found it ironic that even though they lived in the same world I did, somehow they were pure and I was not. Even though they wore leather jackets, drove cars and took advantage of aircraft, telephones and in general the entire panoply of modern technology and infrastructure. The concept that I was missing at the time was that they were the Elect, and I was not. Like wealth for the Puritans, there are outward signs of inner grace. For the enviroweenies, it was Birkenstocks, a set ideology of beliefs and a distinct lack of personal hygiene.

Here's yet another view of the Miers nomination, from John Fund of the Opinion Journal. At first Fund was fairly positive about the Miers, but after talking to some people who knew her, he is less sanguine about the likelihood that she will be the staunch conservative that Bush and other Miers boosters claim she is.

The key point that Fund makes is that there are disturbing (for conservatives) parallels between Miers and O'Connor:

What is clear is that her association with George W. Bush has affected her worldview.

David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, who describes Ms. Miers's role in the White House as largely that of a "bureaucrat who couldn't see the forest for the trees," nonetheless believes that Team Bush is right--but only for a while. He believes she will be remain a conservative justice at least until Mr. Bush leaves office in early 2009. "But then the Bushies will have gone home, and she will develop new friends, and then the inevitable tug to the left may prove irresistible."

A friend of both Mr. Bush and Ms. Miers disagrees. He notes that for eight years Justice O'Connor remained largely true to Ronald Reagan's judicial views, even though she had no personal ties to him. "I think Harriet has morphed her views into those of the president," he told me. "I think she will be pretty much the same justice she starts out being for 10 or 15 years. And she is now 60."

Indeed, in many ways, Ms. Miers resembles the early Sandra Day O'Connor, another elected official who backed some liberal positions during her time in the Arizona Legislature. As Justice O'Connor began drifting to the center she became the crucial swing vote on a host of cases. Legal scholars began referring to the "O'Connor Court." Now, with Ms. Miers slated to take the O'Connor seat it may become the "Miers Court."

"This is the most closely divided court in history," says Jay Sekulow , a conservative legal activist who backs Ms. Miers. "Everybody knows what is at stake here." With such high stakes, it should disappoint everyone that the Senate will now have to debate the confirmation of a nominee who, when it comes to Constitutional law, resembles a secret agent more than a scholar.

Despite the at times intense grumbling from the right, I don't think that Miers will be yanked. President Bush is renowned and reviled for his stubborness and loyalty. These factors will not predispose him to pulling support unless research reveals some hidden, fatal flaw in Miers. Short of some evil-doing in her past, she will go before the Senate. And Senate Republicans are unlikely in the extreme to vote against her.

EDog reminds us that a very special time of the year is approaching. A time when we are encouraged not merely to spew mediocrity into the unplumbed depths of the interweb in a haphazard and random way as we do all the time, but rather to spew mediocrity in a focused and methodical way. The charmingly if cluckily named NaNoWriMo gives us an excuse to vomit forth 50,000 words of moderately crappy to horrific prose in a single calender month. Yes, we are asked to write an entire novel in 30 days.

Last year, EDog participated and crafted a compelling and heartfelt homage to the sword-wielding milkman locked in mortal combat with his eternal enemies the aliens. This year, he will enter the fray yet again with a Roman à clef concerning the existential plight of forklifts. I am tempted to join in myself, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to write something besides long and rambling screeds about the multifarious shortcomings of NASA and our imminent subjugation by inteliigent and ill-tempered robots.

Maybe I'll write a story about flowers...

Flowers with guns and a lust for world conquest...

And the efforts of lichens and pine trees to resist angiosperm domination...

Dude, have you seen my bag?

This is something that has always fascinated me. Constitutional Amendments. There's the constitution over their, writ in stone. It’s the law we live by. Yet, by jumping through some (admittedly rather high up in the air) hoops, we can change that constitution, and rewrite the operating code for our nation. There have been 33 amendments passed by Congress and sent to the states. Twenty-seven of those have been adopted. (This process has actually happened only seventeen times, though. The first through tenth, twenty-seventh, and one of the pending amendments were all submitted at once. You could even argue that the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth were so close together that they were in effect one process, like the Bill of Rights.)

Here's what happened to the six that didn't make it in (yet).

There are four pending amendments, which, having been proposed by the required majorities in both houses of Congress were submitted to the states. Unlike more recent amendments, none of these included expiration dates so theoretically they could be adopted at any point provided enough state legislatures voted yea. They are:

• Article I of the twelve initially proposed amendments in 1789 (1st Congress), ten of which became the Bill of Rights in 1791, and one of which became Amendment XXVII more than 200 years later in 1992. The unratified Article I would have regulated the size of the United States House of Representatives and is still technically pending before, and subject to, ratification by the state legislatures. It became moot, however when the population of the United States exceeded ten million people, and an additional 26 states would need to approve it.
• The Titles of Nobility amendment proposed in 1810 (the second session of the 11th Congress) came extremely close to being ratified by the legislatures of the requisite number of states. Its provisions would have stripped the citizenship of any American citizen who accepted a title of nobility from a foreign nation. It remains pending before, and subject to, ratification by the state legislatures. Like Amendment I, it would require another 26 state approvals to take effect.
• The Corwin amendment, proposed in 1861, sought to prevent future amendments that would have permitted Congress to interfere with the practice of slavery:
  

  "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

  Interestingly, this measure passed the Congress through, in part, the lobbying of President Elect Lincoln, and despite the fact that seven states had already seceded from the Union and were no longer represented in Congress at all. From the Wikipedia:

  Today, with 50 states in the Union, ratification by the legislatures of 38 states is required for a proposed amendment to find its way into the Constitution—and with specific regard to the Corwin Amendment, 36 more in addition to those two whose previous ratifications remain valid. Because the amendment uses the term "domestic institutions," and because that term is quite broad, a belated ratification of the Corwin Amendment in modern times might not pertain to slavery at all.

• A Child labor amendment proposed in 1924 would grant Congress exclusive authority to legislate on the subject of child labor and to force state law to yield to federal law. This is rather a moot point since the Feds already have that power thanks to a broad reading of the Commerce Clause. This proposed amendment led to the later use of deadlines amendment language when several states that had earlier balked at approving the amendment later reconsidered. The case Coleman v. Miller established that unless amendments have a deadline, they come into effect whenever ¾ of the states approve it. Even if, as in the case of the 27th amendment, that is more than two centuries after it was proposed.

Beyond the those still considered "active," only two others have been passed by the Congress and submitted to the states. These two had expiration dates that have passed without gaining the required number of state approvals. One was the arguably redundant Equal Rights Amendment, the other the DC voting rights amendment that would have granted DC representation in the US Congress as if it were a state. (Interestingly, it would also be counted as a state for purposes of Article V, amending the constitution, even though DC has no legislature.)

But beyond that, there is the vast field of amendments that have been suggested but never passed by Congress, or sometimes never even got out of committee. And, sometimes not even into committee. Over ten thousand have been introduced in Congress, and sometimes hundreds in a given session. Some are proposed repeatedly, year after year, like the Flag Burning Amendment. (Which sounds as though it's for flag burning when you say it that way.)

Some of the recent, or at least more interesting amendment proposals include:

• A Continuity of Government Amendment that would provide for replacing large numbers of Congressmen or other officials in the event of terrorist attack or natural disaster wiping out Congress. You know, like in Mars Attacks.
• In 2004, Zell Miller proposed repealing the 17th Amendment that provided for direct election of Senators.
• Someone's always proposing repealing the 22nd, for Presidential Term Limits.
• There's the Schwarzenegger Amendment, which would allow foreign born citizens to become President.
• Perennial favorites also include Marriage Amendments, Anti-Flag Desecration Amendments, and School Prayer Amendment.
• A Balanced Budget Amendment might be a good idea. Of course, they'd have to include a lot of text defining what a budget is.
• A Human Life amendment would give fetuses the protection of the fifth and fourteenth amendments.
• The Bricker Amendment would limit the powers of treaties with foreign powers to affect US law.
• Victim's rights amendments have also been proposed to limit the liberal-squishiness of the justice system.

But that's not all. Here's a buttload more amendment proposals from usconstitution.net:

• To specifically permit prayer at school meetings and ceremonies
• To allow non-natural born citizens to become President if they have been a citizen for 20 years
• To specifically allow Congress to regulate the amount of personal funds a candidate to public office can expend in a campaign
• To ensure that apportionment of Representatives be set by counting only citizens
• To make the filibuster in the Senate a part of the Constitution
• To provide for continuity of government in case of a catastrophic event
• To lower the age restriction on Representatives and Senators from 30 and 25 respectively to 21
• To ensure that citizens of U.S. territories and commonwealths can vote in presidential elections
• To guarantee the right to use the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto
• To restrict marriage in all states to be between a man and a woman
• To remove any protection any court may find for child pornography
• To allow Congress to pass laws for emergency replenishment of its membership should more than a quarter of either house be killed
• To place Presidential nominees immediately into position, providing the Senate with 120 days to reject the nominee before the appointment is automatically permanent
• Calling for the repeal of the 8th Amendment and its replacement with wording prohibiting incarceration for minor traffic offenses
• To specify that progressive income taxes must be used
• To specify a right to "equal high quality" health care
• To limit pardons granted between October 1 and January 21 of any presidential election year
• To require a balanced budget without use of Social Security Trust Fund monies
• To allow for any person who has been a citizen of the United States for twenty years or more to be eligible for the Presidency
• To force the members of Congress and the President to forfeit their salary, on a per diem basis, for every day past the end of the fiscal year that a budget for that year remains unpassed
• To provide a new method for proposing amendments to the Constitution, where two-thirds of all state legislatures could start the process
• To allow Congress to enact campaign spending limits on federal elections
• To allow Congress to enact campaign spending limits on state elections
• To declare that life begins at conception and that the 5th and 14th amendments apply to unborn children
• To prohibit courts from instructing any state or lower government to levy or raise taxes
• To force a national referendum for any deficit spending
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 12 years
• To prohibit the early release of convicted criminals
• To establish the right to a home
• To define the legal effect of international treaties
• To clarify that the Constitution neither prohibits nor requires school prayer
• To establish judicial terms of office
• To clarify the meaning of the 2nd Amendment
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 6 years
• To force a two-thirds vote for any bill that raises taxes
• To repeal the 16th Amendment and specifically prohibit an income tax
• To provide for removal of any officer of the U.S. convicted of a felony
• To permit the States to set term limits for their Representatives and Senators
• To allow a Presidential pardon of an individual only after said individual has been tried and convicted of a crime
• To allow Congress to pass legislation to allow the Supreme Court to remove federal judges from office
• To provide for the reconfirmation of federal judges every 10 years
• To provide for the recall of Representatives and Senators
• To remove automatic citizenship of children born in the U.S. to non-resident parents
• To enable or repeal laws by popular vote
• To define a process to allow amendments to the Constitution be proposed by a popular ("grass-roots") effort
• To force a three-fifths vote for any bill that raises taxes
• To prohibit retroactive taxation
• To provide for run-off Presidential elections if no one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote
• To prohibit abortion
• To bar imposition on the States of unfunded federal mandates
• To disallow the desecration of the U.S. Flag
• To allow a line-item veto in appropriations bills
• To expand the term of Representatives to four years
• To provide for direct election of the President and Vice-President (eliminating the Electoral College)
• To force a balanced budget
• To prohibit involuntary bussing of students
• To make English the official language of the United States
• To set term limits on Representatives and Senators
• To repeal the 22nd Amendment (removing Presidential term limits)
• To guarantee a right to employment opportunity for all citizens
• To grant protections to unborn children
• To provide for "moments of silence" in public schools
• To allow Congress to regulate expenditures for and contributions to political campaigns
• To provide for the rights of crime victims
• To provide for access to medical care for all citizens
• To repeal the 2nd Amendment (right to bear arms)
• To prohibit the death penalty
• To protect the environment
• To repeal the 26th Amendment (granting the vote to 18-year olds) and granting the right to vote to 16-year olds
• To provide equal rights to men and women

I also remember suggestions for amendments to establish a ten year sunset for all US laws, and to establish a general line-item veto.

And I'm sure there's plenty more out there. More information, and more links than I was willing to include here can be found at the wikipedia and at the wikipedia. Also, at the wikipedia.

Here's an online book for you. A detailed look at Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, or molecular nanotechnology replicating assemblers, or little things that will turn you into grey goo when you're not looking. I read the first chapter, and it's fascinating stuff, and it's really not that far off.

Sounds vaguely obscene, no? New research shows that stereotypes of national characteristics have little basis in fact. Individuals from diverse cultures scored more or less the same on basic personality indices. All very interesting, in a we're all pink and bloody on the inside kind of way. But these national characteristics are more typically just that - national characteristics. Of course there are sloppy, lazy and cowardly Germans and clean, martial and brave Frenchmen. But it seems to me that national sterotypes are useful in getting an idea about how large groups of people will act, rather than individuals within those groups.

There's an old joke, attributed to of all people Hermann Goering: "Take one German you have a good worker. Two Germans and you have a Bund. Three Germans and you have a war. One Italian, you have a good tenor. Two Italians and you have a retreat. Three Italians and you have a unconditional surrender. Take one Englishman and you have an idiot. Two Englishmen make a club. Three Englishmen and you have a world spanning empire.

National characteristics do not necessarily have a direct relationship to the characteristics of the individuals that make up the nation.