Bill's Legacy
Indeed, by the summer of 1998, according to a former Saudi intelligence chief, Mullah Omar had agreed to send Mr. bin Laden packing. But then came the 1998 lethal bombings of two U.S. embassies in Afria, to which the U.S. replied by raining down cruise missiles on a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan. The retaliation had fateful consequences. It turned Mr. bin Laden into a cult figure among Islamic radicals, made Afghanistan a rallying point for defiance of America and shut off Taliban discussion of expelling the militants. It also helped convince Mr. bin Laden that goading America to anger could help his cause, not hurt it.
--The Wall Street Journal, Friday, August 2, front page (article headlined Inside al Qaeda's Afghan Turmoil)

Well gee, ah tried to go after him but ah missed him by about an hour.

The point is: You don't do the half-assed things that you think will make you look good. You follow through and do things right.

Another thing to be thankful for:
The U.S. has a large middle class and extreme economic mobility.

Places like Pakistan don't. Nearly everyone lives in opulence or squalor, mostly the latter.

Granted, U.S. culture is arguably bland, at least if one tries to reduce it to uniquely American things. The problem is that what makes U.S. culture great is precisely the set of things that we got from people's places of origin. Food especially. Where else could I eat Korean food, Pakistani food, and a burrito, all in a week's worth of lunch?

Two things I'm thankful for,
both of which came up indirectly on the way to lunch today:

1. I don't have to listen to a crying baby all day, neither at home nor at work.

2. I won't be subject to an arranged marriage.

A new colleague, the mother of a six-week old baby, has just begun work again. Many of us are in awe. The father stays at home. One other female colleague was happy to hear this, in that it breaks the stereotype/tradition. Why should it always be the mother and never the father who stays home? (Paraphrasing.) Someone -- male but definitely not me -- mentioned breastfeeding.

A minute or so of conversation later (I listened but didn't contribute), someone concluded that the current state of affairs (both parents working, often out of necessity) is just not natural and therefore will change, or at least will need to. The "obvious" solution was greater societal acceptance of bringing one's baby to work. The baby makes a lot of noise? Tough -- people used to be accustomed to the sound of a baby crying.

(There's a paradox here, the idea that we can call something "natural" even though the only way to get (back) to that state of affairs is social engineering. I'm not sure if you'd call this idea too conservative or too liberal. I guess more to the point, if one insists on labels, is that it seems anti-libertarian.)

You may disagree but I think that the act of getting a way from things like that is an act of realized preference, of trying to optimize our lives. In general I'd do what I can to avoid working around crying babies. Cellphones are bad enough as it is. (That paragraph didn't come out quite right. Let me know if it makes no sense and I'll try to clarify.)

The discussion of arranged marriage came about at the Pakistani restaurant. Apparently those have surprisingly low divorce rates. People spoke of arranged marriages, if not favorably, then at least with an air of relativism/moral equivalence. To each his own, I suppose, although it's an example of why I'm really glad this country exists (even gladder to have been born here) and not at all surprised that people from other places try so hard to get here.

Striving to make a better life for oneself and one's descendants...

Rebellion at the Airport
When did my dad start a weblog?

(Note: Not my actual father. Just sounds exactly like something Dad would do. I bet this doesn't surprise you.)

MBT(CY)A
Readers probably know a lot more about this story than I do but it stinks. Everyone, of course, is trying to deny responsibility even though somebody made a serious lapse in judgment that cost the guy his life.

Are people that afraid of being sued?

"You have nothing to fear from customs..."
Unless you live in the land of the Limey pricks. This seems vaguely similar to how Massachusetts cops with nothing better to do troll the state border for people making sin-runs to New Hampshire.

Link via Reason online.

This.

Fuck Hamas.

Yet more charming men.
Hope this guy enjoys prison.

"We beat our wives."
Charming. (Via Opinion Journal.)

I hope this whole thing ends (victoriously, for Israel and/or U.S.) before I meet a living breathing Palestinian (or even militant Muslim). Right now I fear I'd be just too bigoted to have useful human interaction.

"I reject the notion that a nation founded on the ideals of freedom can willfully abandon the goal of defeating drugs," Ashcroft said. "We will defeat drugs."

For crying out loud. This is one reason why nobody I know will ever believe good things can come from the Bush administration and maybe you shouldn't.

The "War on Drugs" is such an awful concept. Drugs are a thing; they can't be "defeated" as such. Terrorism is a tactic. There are terrorists whose asses we should be kicking, and maybe some drug users who need help. If the "War on Terror" either loses out to the "War on Drugs" or (worse yet) becomes a monstrosity like that, then we're all fucked. Sorry, we just are.

What he said.

I hate our government sometimes, almost as much as I hate our media. There's a very easily identifiable group of nutballs out there who want to kill us all. Instead of actually fighting them, let's exploit their existence for cheap rhetoric that makes us look good.

"Retaliates"
USA Today doesn't get it.

Let's see... the country that's defending itself kills a military leader. The people attacking that country decide to "retaliate" by... killing more civilians.

Good old false moral equivalence.

Savage Sociopolitics
I've plugged Dan Savage before. Time to riff on him though. I have no real point here; it's just interesting. Feel free to tell me off anyway.

(What I think about things like this has changed a lot in the last few years. But I still remember old arguments that left a bad taste. Maybe it's all too emotionally charged to discuss rationally?)

Savage writes:
There's an important distinction between homosexuality and incest, one that defensive incest fans can't seem to grasp. To wit: Homosexuals are people and incest is an act.

Isn't sodomy also an act? Well, bad example. Toe-sucking is an act too but the defining features of that act aren't analogous to the defining features of a gay (or incestuous) sex act. It's not what you're doing, but who you're doing it with.

I guess before the act comes the thought. Consider a man who has a crush on another man. Or a brother who has a crush on his sister. Or any adult who has a crush on a child. Since desires come to us seemingly beyond our control, I'll say any of these is blameless/harmless. (Your mileage may vary?)

It's possible to have any of those thoughts but still refrain from the act. In at least two of those cases (probably exactly two), refraining from the act seems intuitively right. But to distinguish the first act from the other two, Savage needs something more than just distinguishing actions from people.

Fortunately he also writes (in response to a different letter):
All families, even the healthiest families, are swept by swirling currents of obligation, guilt, mind games, and emotional blackmail. How can children, even adult children, freely consent to sex with their parents? Likewise, older or more domineering siblings can hold enormous power over their brothers and sisters. How does one divine consent when one sibling is having sex with another, or a son is having sex with his mother, or a father is having sex with his daughter? In those situations, it's impossible to define where "family life" ends and "consent" begins.

The consent issue is also a problem for adult-child sex, but not a problem for gay adults.

(Somewhere here I should mention falling in love but it's unclear what to say about that. I've known gay couples who seemed to be in love. As it happens, I've never known an adult-child or same-family couple who felt that kind of love, at least not that I know of. Is it theoretically possible? *shrug*)

Okay, what do you do if you are in love with a family member, or with a child? Move on, I suppose, painful though it may be, and find love elsewhere if you can. And here Savage might say something about how a true homosexual can't fall in love with someone of the opposite sex. (Do there exist people who feel incapable of attraction to adults and/or non-family members? Not that I know of.)

IF (big if, since it's almost certainly false) there were a compelling reason for members of some society to avoid gay liaisons, analogous to the consent issue with incest/child sex, would it follow that the society should admit that it's asking gay people to make a really big sacrifice but nonetheless ask them to make it? The relevance here would be if someone belonged to a religious faith with a strong homosexuality taboo. As far as I can tell I'm not part of such a faith. We're Reconciled in Christ, and I'm content -- actually pretty happy -- with that.

She is too!
Three words, Matt (post titled Things aren't quite what they seem, third item):

Universal health care.

In fairness I suppose a lot of otherwise moderate (and even conservative) people honestly believe that the solution to health care problems in this country lies in nationalizing the entire industry. It worked so well for the Post Office, you see.

But in any case, this is (I suspect) the first political position that most people associated her with. There was spirited argument all around the country, and then, thankfully (if you believe that free markets generally work better than regulatory fiat), her plan went down in flames.