A Glorious Day for the Feline Theocracy

Today is a wondrous day in the Feline Theocracy! Today we invest three new members who have served our Maximum Leader in links and blog posts. Quickly bring the finest catnip and let us roll in it; put a new mousie toy on the floor and drag a string around as well. Take the fattened tuna and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because these bloggers have come into the fold.


The first is the inestimable Hugh Hewitt. He is hereby granted the title of "Patriarch of the Airwaves for the Feline Theocracy." He has been extraordinarily solicitous and supportive of our blog. We are deeply grateful.

The second is Gaius Arbo of Blue Crab Boulevard. Gaius is named "Prelate to the Primates" in honor of his blog's founder. You'll just have to visit his site and see what we mean. Gaius has been very generous in his links and comments. We pledge not to shed on his sofa should we ever come over to visit.

Finally, we have The Ugly American from The Real Ugly American. The Ugly American may hereby use the title "Vicar of Victory". In the last week, he has been an active linker, far surpassing the required link to this blog and tithing of 10% of his traffic. His title doesn't refer to victory in war, but to his very impressive accomplishments in life.

Thank you all. The Official Artist of the Theocracy, Justin, produced this handsome graphic. Feel free to use it on your blog if you'd like.


Technorati tags: feline theocracy

The Saudis Must Love the Resupply of Israel

Hugh Hewitt notes that the New York Times is fretting about American replacement of Israel’s arsenal of precision-guided munitions as they get used up against Hezbollah. The New York Times completely misses the boat with their analysis.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

Angering Arab governments? What are they talking about? The Arab governments have come out strongly against Hezbollah. They’re all scared to death of Iran’s violent rhetoric and have no intention of assisting Iran’s client state, Syria. There are two increasingly polarized camps in the Middle East and it’s no longer Israel vs. the rest.

Put yourself in the shoes of the Saudis. They have money, power and lives of luxury. The last thing they want is some bunch of maniacs bringing instability to the region. Saudi Arabia and the others have no illusions about attacking Israel ever again. Michael Medved’s notions of Israeli land grabs aside, they’re also not concerned about an imperial Israel taking over the region. All they want is stability so they can enjoy their bank accounts. If they have to pay off the Palestinians from time to time and a pizza parlor in Tel Aviv gets blown up, well that’s fine. At least it wasn’t a pizza parlor in Riyadh.

With all that in mind, why would they care whether or not Israel gets resupplied? The bombs will be used against Iran’s puppet terrorists, and the Arab world will be far better off with less of them around. Sure, they’ll tut-tut about it and make fussy pronouncements to the media, but the die was cast when they came out and publicly chastised Hezbollah at the start of this whole thing.

That brings me to another thought. The Europeans are in a real quandary. Fanciful notions of the EU being a counterweight to America notwithstanding, they’re playing to the guys with the oil. They can’t very well come out and take a side against the Saudis. I would bet that’s why the one thing the G8 could agree on was criticism of Hezbollah. Supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia means domestic unrest from their pro-Palestinian immigrants. What a mess. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a great article on possible internal motivations driving Syria’s support for Hezbollah.

Syria faces serious economic problems at home -- unemployment and poverty are rising, while oil reserves are about to run dry -- the pro-Hezbollah foreign policy provides the regime with a convenient rallying cry to shore up support among citizens.

That pipeline of missiles from Syria to Hezbollah won’t last forever. The timing of the attacks may have coincided with purges in Syria and the feeling that it was now or never.

The state-dominated economy is stagnating, and the Baath party, after tentative steps of economic overhaul, appears to have slowed down the pace. The economy is dominated by inefficient industrial and agricultural production, while oil, which Syria has long used to finance its bloated public sector, could run out as early as 2008, presenting the government with serious economic problems, particularly among the restive, unemployed youth. "A potential crisis is around the corner, because of oil," says Mr. Sukkar, the economic consultant.

For the Saudis and their friends, Israel blowing Hezbollah into the hereafter is the best of all worlds. It depletes Syria’s stock of ammunition that could be used against them if Syria ever went critical and best of all, someone else is doing all the dirty work for them.

Other bloggers discussing this:

The Real Ugly American, who rocks vigorously, has a great post.

All Things Beautiful has a great bit of artwork followed by an artful post.

The Partisan Times has a good one, too.

Hyscience connects the dots.

Captain's Quarters goes to town on this, too.

From the Mailbag: Supreme Leader vs. Maximum Leader

Sometimes we get email queries from people who are curious about the Feline Theocracy and want to know more, people who ask for autographed photos of our Maximum Leader or Jacob, people who want to sell us Viagra, Swiss watches or enlarge our organs (which ones?) and people who were married to the finance minister of Nigeria and he just got caught in a threshing machine and all his money is just collecting dust around the house and gosh wouldn't it be nice for us to have some of it.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the mailbag. Anyway, we recently received this letter.

"Dear K T Cat,

We hear on the radio about Ali Khameini, the Supreme Leader of Iran. We know that you are the Maximum Leader of the Feline Theocracy. What's the difference between a Supreme Leader and a Maximum Leader?

Edward Neephus
Billings, Montana"

Well, Mr. Neephus, the two are fairly easy to tell apart. One makes messes on the carpet, claws your drapes, throws up on the floor and brings dead things into your house hoping for a treat. The other is a cat.

It's a subtle difference, but we think that from these photos you'll be able to tell them apart.


Here, Supreme Leader Khameini is appearing on public access TV late at night to warn us about the dangers posed by silverfish. Or something like that.


K T Cat, our Maximum Leader, quietly shares her beauty with us all.

You can tell a lot about a person by the friends they keep.


Many of the Supreme Leader's friends have suffered terrible burns on their faces from accidents freebasing cocaine and have to wear masks.


Our Maximum Leader's friends are gorgeous creatures with their own blogs.

Their karaoke style is quite different, too.


Supreme Leader Khameini needs the lyrics written on a piece of paper. Here, he's performing some ghastly Peter, Paul and Mary protest song without any feeling at all.


Here, our Maximum Leader belts out The Girl I Knew Somewhere by heart. The crowd is rockin' out off camera.

The most notable difference, Mr. Neephus, between a Supreme Leader and a Maximum Leader is best defined by Taco Bell. A Supreme Leader is a leader covered in sour cream and guacamole. Just try doing that to a Maximum Leader.

Feline Milk Attack!

I'm sitting here trying to surf a few blogs while I eat a bowl of cereal and what happens? Our Maximum Leader executes a classic Milk Attack. First, there is the frontal assault.


After the bowl is put out of her reach comes the reconnaissance.


Not to be denied, she explores bridging the gulf that separates her from her objective.


In the end, she withdrew, tempted by a sunbeam in another room. Whew! Was that a close call.

General Sherman Correctly Predicted the New York Times

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are." - General William T. Sherman from the Civil War.

Alien Thought Process

When I started writing this post, I had planned to make the point that the thought processes of Hamas and Hezbollah were utterly alien to us by showing how they were allowing their countries to fall into ruin while they spent their energies pointlessly attacking Israel.

For example, here is the Google Earth image of the only port in the Gaza strip in the town of Gaza.


The port is crude with no facilities to load freighters and virtually no roads leading to it. It is useless for anything more than small fishing boats.

The per capita income in Gaza is about $600. A comparable country is Yemen, whose per capita income is $900. Here's the port at Aden.


Aden, in contrast to Gaza, has paved roads and significant port facilities. I was also going to point out the state of the airport in Gaza.


Check out the unrepaired bomb damage that has made the runways useless. The point I planned to make was that Gaza, where there is a practically endless supply of cheap labor, was using their labor to dig tunnels under Israel's wall to capture Israeli soldiers by the ones and twos instead of repairing their airport and improving their port.

The analogy I wanted to pose was this. If you lived in a house that looked like this


would you work with whatever was at hand to repair it or would you tunnel under your neighbor's fence and kidnap his dog? The Palestinians (and by analagous, associative action, Hezbollah with its rocket attacks) chose tunneling.

That's a thought process that might as well come from Pluto for most of us. It represents a value system totally incompatible with our own, to the point where negotiation is impossible because we are negotiating to achieve orthogonal ends.

I was disappointed with the images of condemned houses I found and I began to search for images of homes in Gaza when I came across this site from David Sauveur.

This image from Gaza made me start thinking of the problem in terms of a mental disorder.

(Translated from French by Babelfish) In the district El Brazil, thus named because it was built thanks to assistances of the Brazilian government, a man makes his nap in what remains of its living room. The house with half destroyed at the time of an Israeli raid does not have any more a frontage.
I began to see the Gaza Strip with the Israeli wall as a sort of gigantic mental institution. The difference between that image and this one from Skid Row in Los Angeles seemed to be immaterial.


As I surfed through David Sauveur's photos, a totally different thought occurred to me. If you translate Mr. Sauveur's text it reads as if the Palestinians are victims of a heavily armed Israeli gang that just won't let them alone. My first thought after reading the translation above was that it lacked the context of the Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel. After all, the Lebanese border with Israel was quiet for years until Hezbollah decided to attack. Mr. Sauveur's photos and text cried out for sympathy for the Palestinians, but all I could think of was "What did you think it was going to be like? That's what war zones look like."

Then it finally hit me. It is a war zone. The reason it still goes on is that the Palestinians don't realize that they've lost. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, but the Germans fought on. If you read first hand accounts from German soldiers, they all knew the war was lost so when the Nazi government surrendered, the soldiers laid down their arms. Compare photos of Gaza with this.

Gaza, today.
Germany, 1945.
The difference is that Hamas and Hezbollah don't think they've lost.

During the Civil War, General Sherman said this. "This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war." There is a better quote of his that I cannot find right now where he states that because they are fighting an idea rather than a government, victory will only be had when everyone who holds that idea dear knows, deep in their hearts, that they are beaten.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what we face today.

Blue Crab Boulevard suggests that the people of Gaza may be getting a clue.

Update: Thanks for the links and welcome to readers of The Real Ugly American, Woman Honor Thyself and The Random Yak!

Hot Diggity! The WSJ is Linking in the Blogosphere!

It may have been there for some time, but I just saw that the Wall Street Journal, at the bottom of every article online, uses Technorati to link to all the blogs who link to their articles. I used to read the Washington Post and blog from time to time about their articles, but now that I see the WSJ is throwing some linky love our way, I'll drop the WaPo like a rock and reference the best newspaper in the country.

The WSJ is getting in tune with blogging in other ways, too. For example, they offer a blog link aggregator a la Pajamas Media and TTLB giving their favorite blogs from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. My favorite of their favorites was this entry from Israelity:

Suburb North of Tel Aviv: On Israelity, Maven offers an interesting take on news that Hezbollah's longer range rockets can reach deeper into the country. "All of a sudden it wasn't about those poor folks up north. It was about us. And we got the strangest instructions from the IDF: residents of Tel Aviv northward were told only to 'stay alert.' Stay alert? What did that mean? I followed orders and immediately made myself a strong cappuccino. OK, so I was alert. Now what? The order sounded suspiciously like the government was merely trying to say, 'if this happens, you can't say we didn't warn you, but really, we don't have a clue.'"

Declining Test Scores at the Columbia School of Journalism?

If the New York Times and its brethren are seeing lower circulation numbers and the network newsmedia are seeing fewer viewers, what does that do for people considering a career in journalism? Wouldn't you expect to see fewer people applying for journalism schools?

An interesting metric would be the average combined SAT or GRE scores of those entering into the Columbia University School of Journalism. With fewer applicants, you would expect those numbers to decrease.

Actually, you'd probably see it first at the secondary journalism schools. Hmmm. I wonder where you could find such data.

Thursday 13, Totally Random Thoughts Edition

1. My new gaura lindheimeri are blooming. It sure didn’t take them long to get used to their new home.


2. My home router died this week. It had been slowly getting worse and worse and I had suspected the cable modem but when it finally gave up the ghost, I was able to quickly isolate the problem.

3. The key to solving problems like this is to simplify the system and then add components until it fails. I started by removing everything and hooking a single laptop up to the cable modem with nothing in between. When I found that it worked, I knew the problem was probably the router.

4. The speed increase is amazing. I must have been living with near dial-up speeds for quite a while.

5. While the router was down, the computers were off. It was a nice break.

6. I still looked forward to blogging some more. I would get ideas for posts, but not be able to write them. It was frustrating. Of course, the new router doesn't solve the blogger photo upload problem. It is still a dog. I've got a gaura photo to bring up, but I can't seem to get it to work. Update: My blogging buddy Justin suggested www.tinypic.com and it is the best! That's how I got the gaura photo up there.

7. I planted some festucas last week. What’s a festuca? This is.


They’re teeny right now, but they eventually grow to 8-10” tall. I can’t wait.

8. In the last two weeks I have become comfortable with cooking homemade spaghetti sauce and slow-cooked barbeque. I had done spaghetti sauce before, but I always needed a recipe. I’m used to Cajun cooking and I can do that by memory.

9. The key to the ribs is to use a dry rub of spices on them and then cook them in the oven at 250 degrees for 2-3 hours before putting the sauce and grilling them briefly.

10. Yum. I love ribs.

11. The death of my router stopped me from doing a World of Good (WOG) post this week. That’s two of the last three weeks without a WOG.

12. I’ve got two great WOGs waiting to be written and posted.

13. I usually visit lots of other Thursday Thirteens on Thursday mornings and leave my links. I don’t have time for that today. Let’s see what happens when I don’t. Update: I gave in when I came home tonight and I'm stopping by others' TTs.


Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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This Had to Hurt

Asymmetric Naval Warfare

The cruise missile attack by Hezbollah on the Israeli Saar 5 corvette this week threatens the entire Israeli Navy with obsolesence. Other bloggers have discussed the missile. It has a range of about 50 miles, can be launched from a truck and by all rights should have sunk the corvette if its warhead hadn't been a dud. This is just a guess, but I would bet that the corvette costs on the order of $100M fully equipped. That's a lot of money to lose from a single truck-launched cruise missile.

CDR Salamander has a timely post that suggests that the Saar 5's Close In Weapon System (CIWS) was not turned on due to the presence of friendly air assets in the area and the concern that the CIWS would shoot down Israeli aircraft.

The consensus is that the Saar 5 should have been able to stop this threat cold. It's designed to do so. I've got another question. What will the Israeli Navy do when Hezbollah launches shore-based torpedoes? If they've got one, it's not unreasonable to think they've got the other.

The Culprit has been Found!

It turns out that my Internet connection was just fine. Stellar, in fact. The problem was my router. It must have been clogged up with bits in its filters. I probably sent too many 1's.

As soon as I can replace the router, there is much blather to come!

Dead Home Internet Connection = No Blogging

Being unable to blog with so many cool things going on in the world to blather about is like being on the Cindy Sheehan liquid fast for peace diet at K-Paul's.

Giving In

This is an entirely vain post. Before I go on, let me see if I have something to reward the people that took the time and clicked over here to see what was going on at The Sratching Post. Hmmm. How about this?



As I was saying, this post is all about subject matter choices and how to handle comments. I've discovered that I am a spastic blogger. I can't entirely direct my writing energies. If something looks interesting, I write about it. I've tried to stop writing about politics, but sometimes the call is too great. I then put some mild disclaimer at the top of the post about how I wish I wasn't doing this and then go on to blather for another 8-10 paragraphs. No more. When I feel the need, I will embrace the Dark Side.

The primary reason I wanted to avoid politics was to the nastiness that crops up in the comments sections of such blogs. Yesterday I discovered a way to do both. I went 16 rounds with an anonymous commenter on this post and discovered a way to calm things down.

It's said that you can get a loud drunk to quiet down if you whisper to him. I tried the same thing in that comment thread. Ever time he tried to be aggressive, I didn't resist and came back in (what I hoped was) a kind voice. At then end it seemed to work. See for yourself.

Rationalizing My Gloating

In the past, I have gloated over the decline of the Mainstream Media (MSM). Sifting through the blogosphere today, I've come across some outstanding posts by Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters that discuss the Saddam-era Iraqi documents currently being translated. Mr Morrisey's work has been stellar and are helping describe the inner workings of the Baath Party and it's relationships to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this to be found in the MSM.

I find the lack of this kind of contextual analysis utterly immoral on the part of the MSM. The documents paint a picture of a very active enemy bent on sowing chaos and destruction across the globe. If it weren't for blogs like Captain's Quarters, we'd never know about this.

I've written numerous times about the dire financial straits of the MSM. Read CQ and you might come to the same conclusion that I did: they deserve it.

CQ links:

Baathist Iraq plans terror campaigns against the West.

More linkages between Osama and Saddam.

Baathist concern about radioactivity problems following Clinton's cruise missile strikes. Radioactivity problems!

Saddam's subsidies for terrorism.

My previous posts on the MSM:

The MSM using bad news as cheap filler material.

An economics discussion of the decline of the MSM.

Comparing the MSM to ignorant, rioting French students.

Comparing the decline of the MSM to the French Revolution.

Syria's Already Lost

I know I swore off political posts a while back, but recent world events have been too tempting and I can't resist playing the parlor windbag one more time.

Preliminaries

Someone asked if what happened to the Israeli corvette could happen to US Navy ships. Not likely. Our ships are equipped with point defense systems designed to shoot down incoming flying things. You'd need many, many flying things all at once to hope to get one through. Picture the Japanese kamikazes in World War II.

With all due respect to the Israeli Navy, they are the JV team. When the varsity squad shows up, it's time to run away.

Update: My bad. Both the Saar 4 and Saar 5 Israeli corvettes have the Phalanx close in weapon system. The Saar 5 that got hit had its turned off because of friendly aircraft in the area and ignorance about Hezbollah's missile technology.

The Israeli campaign to date is a classic prelude to invasion. They've gone after sensors and transportation. Knocking out radar installations, bridges, power plants and the rest effectively blinds and paralyzes the people on the ground. Hezbollah had better be ready to fight with what they've got right now because there isn't much new stuff on the way.

That also means that every rocket they fire is one less they have. After firing, what, 500-800 rockets they've managed to kill 5-10 people? That just won't cut it. Yes, I know, the MSM has a mayfly's memory and images of Berlin and Tokyo in ruins may as well be from Cromwell's era, but in reality that's a pretty poor strategic bombing campaign.

When the Israeli Air Force is finished, the Israeli army will be able to choose the time, place and duration of all engagements. Maybe they're coming to stay this time, maybe not. The choice will be theirs, not Hezbollah's, Lebanon's or Syria's.

Which brings me to my main point.

Syria has already lost.

Big Pharaoh has the scoreboard. Syria's buddies in the Middle East have smacked them down hard in public. They are most displeased with Hezbollah.

"These acts will pull the whole region back to years ago, and we cannot simply accept them," Saudi al-Faisal told his counterparts.

Supporting his stance were representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, delegates said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

By my count, that's 8 Arab states taking the side of Israel over Hezbollah.

Put yourself in Syria's shoes. You're surrounded by enemies on all sides. Your only friends are the Iranians and there are three or four US divisions, two carrier battlegroups and 1/3 of the US Air Force between you and them. Your economy is a Stalinist train wreck. Your army is designed for killing your own civilians. You've lost your proxy government in Lebanon to a local revolution.

Now your only remaining friends in Lebanon, Hezbollah, have pulled off a stunt that is the equivalent of whacking a beehive with sticks and then chucking it over the fence into your yard.

What's the end result?

Your Arab brethren have taken the side of the Jews over you. The Jews! Once this is all over, you're going to have a lot of wheedling and whining to do to get back in their good graces. Unlike Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, you don't have any oil money to do it with.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are revealing you for the cowardly blowhard you are. You don't dare march in to help your Hezbollah buddies in Lebanon because you know the Israelis would mop the floor with you.

Of course, there's an easy way for Syria to get back on the good side of her neighbors. Some Syrian general could put a shiv in the back of el presidente, have a quick, but hyper-violent purge and then inform the world that there is a new regime in Syria and can't we all just get along?

I really don't see what Syria has gained from all of this.

By the way, if you've come across this from a link, here's what this blog is really all about, in addition to photos of our Maximum Leader and the Syrian hamster.

Update: Commenter Carol Herman on the Captain's Quarters blog has hit the nail right on the head.

The Israeli demand that Syria make sure the hostages are released assumed that there is some kind of command and control link between Syria and the kidnappers. It may be that this whole thing took Syria, Iran and even the Hezbollah leadership by surprise. I'd bet that right about now Syrian leadership has almost no clue as to what the tactical situation on the ground looks like.

By the way, I think you can just forget about the idea that this will be a distraction for the West while Iran marches ahead with it's nuclear program. Unlike dictatorships and the MSM, free societies can multitask like there's no tomorrow. The folks working on the Iranian situation will get up and go to work on Monday and work on the Iranian situation. It's not like they're all rushing over to deal with Syria. We empower and entrust our subordinate organizations to do their jobs without the constant oversight of their hierarchy.

OpFor's got a good take on the Israeli's prepping the battlespace.

Update #2: Michael Totten suggests that Israel's spasm of violence was a bad idea in the way it was practiced because it went too far north into Lebanon. They could have separated southern, Hezbollah Lebanon from the rest and gone crazy against them. He certainly knows more than I do. I bow to his superior knowledge.

Rescue Me - Or Maybe Not

Yesterday I was getting ready for work when I heard our Maximum Leader crying out in her "I fell asleep in the closet and you didn't notice me and closed the door and that was OK, but now I want out and I'm trapped" meow. Expecting to find her behind one of our doors I searched until I found her on top of our stackable washer-dryer unit, looking down and crying.

It was all a false alarm. She could get down easily, but she wanted me to come and resuce her or at least notice where she was. I told her she could get down by herself. Typically when these things happen and I try to rescue her, she moves away from me so I can't reach her and makes me get a taller ladder. I don't think cats like to be picked up by someone under them. It must be more comfortable to be picked up from above.




Be sure to visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

Two Quick Thoughts

Two thoughts I had today while reading the news out of Israel.

1.  The two alternative concepts for dealing with the Islamofascists have been tried.  The Coalition invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and tackled them head on.  The Israelis disengaged.  The result of both efforts was war.  One war fought on Israel's homeland and the other fought on the Islamofascists homeland.  This leads you to conclude that the West did not declare war, the Islamofascists did.  No matter which way you turned, you got war.

2.  If Saddam were still in power, he'd be working feverishly to get the bomb.  He couldn't afford to allow his arch-enemy, Iran, to have it and be without it himself.  Imagine a Middle East with both Iraq and Iran nuclear powers.

The Left Side of the Blogosphere as Mrs. Jellyby

Charles Dickens described the current left side of the blogosphere quite accurately in his novel, Bleak House.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair--Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing--received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if--I am quoting Richard again--they could see nothing nearer than Africa!

The left side of the blogosphere is finally weighing in on the Israeli actions in Gaza and their conclusion, like their conclusion to every event, is that the Bush administration has screwed everything up.

E. J. Dionne:

Today, with Israeli troops battling on their northern and southern borders, with Iran ignoring calls for negotiations on nuclear weapons, with Baghdad in flames and with many of Iraq's moderates living in fear, those Cheney sentences stand as the most telling indictment of the administration's failures.

Taylor Marsh:

Hey, but by the time I wake up out here in the western United States, who knows what could have happened. One thing I believe, no matter the outcome, is that none of this would have happened if Hezbollah and Israel, our ally, didn't feel we were in a weakened state, due to Iraq and President Bush's lack of credibility, which has set us all on an unknown course.

Carl Nyberg:

Some in the Bush administration clearly want to widen the conflict to the United States attacking Iran. What are the drawbacks of attacking Iran? How is the Israel lobby pushing the United States toward war with Iran?

jmsjoin:

As we watch the latest sparring between Israel and Lebanon I had a lot to discuss with you. However I find it necessary to mention the latest and include links for you to read.  We are hearing many say they fear this conflict could lead to a total middle east breakdown. It has broken down and the world better realize that, act accordingly, and thank Bush for setting it in motion.

There are mighty strategic end games being played out across the globe.  Iran and Syria, surrounded by enemies, yet implacable in their hate for the West, are drawing to an inside straight in the hopes of destabilizing the region and gaining power in the chaos.  At the same time, bombs are going off in Indonesia, Russia, India and elsewhere, driven by the same forces.  Some in the civilized world, such as Europe, are on the sidelines while the US, Britain, Israel and Australia are striving to protect civilization.  The day is coming when India as a neutral will be a thing of the past.

Nothing from the left side of the blogosphere addresses the geopolitical situation.  Nowhere is Iran or Syria or the wider global Islamofascist Jihad discussed except within the context of American blundering.  It's as if we are the primary agent of instability in a region that without us would be peaceful and prosperous.

The right side of the blogosphere, with uneasiness which we can not help showing, is debating and examining the issues.  The left has cultivated the curious habit of seeming to look past these issues, as if they can see nothing but their hatred for George Bush.

A special thanks to Hugh Hewitt, Austin Bay and Pajamas Media for providing outstanding summaries of the situation.

KT and Orchid

You Know You Should Have Used a Stud Sensor When...

...the result of drilling your pilot holes makes the wall look like this.

Thursday 13, Favorite WOG Photos Edition

This week my Thursday 13 is a bit of a vanity post. Once a week I try to do a World of Good (WOG) post whose purpose and nature are described here. Today I give my 13 favorite photos from the WOG posts.

1. In case you didn't know it, the US Navy was on the scene providing aid and comfort following the terrible tsunami in Asia. Here are some photos from that post. I get tears in my eyes from this one, taken aboard the USNS Mercy.


2. The USS Abraham Lincoln coming home.


3. What did you do in Indonesia, daddy? I helped people, honey. Lots and lots of people.


4. The Aussies were there, too. Here's a photo from their homecoming.


5. A group of students from a Catholic high school in Nebraska drove down to lend a hand after Katrina.


6. There's a Boy Scout troop that has an annual event to help baby sea turtles make it from their nests to the sea. The result is more beautiful creatures like this.


7. Lots of people donate their time for MS walks. Here's a participant with MS.


8. I went to a local Special Olympics event and donated some time. They repaid me in experiences.


9.
10. There's a local group that brings dogs to nursing homes and sunshine into some lives.


11.
12. Some folks donate their time to act as mentors to at risk children.


13. Finally, Spirit of America is a non-profit organization that organizes donations for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, some Afghani boys get new backpacks and school supplies.


I hope you enjoyed these photos. Be sure to take a look at those WOG posts and stop by on Wednesdays for the new ones. If you've got a blog and would like to link to them, let me know and I'll alert you when new ones are up!


Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Technorati tags: Thursday+thirteen

Lefty Blogosphere Responds to Israeli Conflict

Welcome Pajamas Media, Austin Bay and Blue Crab Blvd. readers - more updates are at the bottom of this post.

As the Syrian (hamster) part of this blogging duo, I thought it my duty to blog about Israel's response to the attacks against it. On the right side of the blogosphere, there has been considerable discussion and analysis of the conflict facing Israel. One of the bloggers asked offhandedly what the lefty bloggers were saying. After scouring Kos and his linked sites, this was the best I could find.

I have believed from day one that the Iraq war was just step one in a scheme to engage in a regional war in the Middle East...We all know through various reliable reports that the neocons have thirsted for a regional war. Iraq was always intended to be phase 1. The neocons and Israel apparently believe that they will never be able to "solve" the Palestinian problem by diplomacy...their solution appears to be to invade all the countries they believe are causing this problem... Remember, they create reality. The reality they are creating in the Middle East certainly looks like a regional war meant to take out Iran and Syria.

Thirsting for war and creating reality? Just what are these neocons and what do they look like? Hmm. Let me do some research...

Aha! Here's one now!

Artist's conception of a neocon.
Good Lord! No wonder everyone is so afraid of them!

You ninny! That's a Dalek, not a neocon! - KT Cat

Oh. Sorry. Well, anyway, there you have it. The entire lefty analysis of the conflict in Israel. Bush and the neocons are behind it all. Who knew?

Much saner analyses of the situation can be found at Pajamas Media, Austin Bay, Flopping Aces, Blue Crab Boulevard, and Barking Moonbat Early Warning System.

Update - In all seriousness, this is pathetic. I just spent another hour looking through the blogs and found nothing but the standard raving about President Bush poisoning wells and devouring infants. Not a thing about the Hamas tunneling under the wall to kidnap a soldier and Hezbollah ambushing a patrol to kidnap two more.

Update 7-13-06 AM - Here's a new one.

Ok, Israel just killed over three dozen civilians in Lebanon. Over TWO KIDNAPPED SOLDIERS. Let's just take stock of the region one more time.

The ridiculously unstable and already horrible situation in Iraq. Which was made far worse in the very recent past by the open news of some of the more criminally insane of our soldiers raping and murdering children.

Summary: Israel is overreacting and our soldiers are raping and pillaging. By the way, can these people order breakfast without attacking the country?

"I'll have the two eggs scrambled and the bacon crisp, please. And please tell the cook that we're oppressing the people of Iraq."

And another.

At the time, critics called the whole neocon idea of remaking the Middle East as a peaceful, Democratic, pro-Western region via the transformation of Iraq misguided, naive, and flat-out wrong...it looks like the invasion of Iraq not only hasn't worked, but has backfired vis-a-vis the regional power balance...The bottom lie (sic) here is that the war in Iraq, which was sold to us by the Bush Administration as supposdly a way to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, has now led to the exact opposite. Today, we face possible war between the United States and Iran, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

It's President Bush's fault.

Hugh Hewitt is trying to sewer dive the lefties himself without much luck. Really now, Hugh, you should know better than this. Leave this to the professional loonies like us. Surfing the left isn't a job for a logical, educated person. It's a job for a Syrian hamster. Or are you a closet rodentophobe?

If all that hate has got you down, check out this post describing how the US Navy was there to help after the Asian tsunami.

World of Good Blogburst, Project Match Style

Welcome to another World of Good (WOG) post here at The Scratching Post. The purpose and past of our WOGs can be found here.

The biblical injunction to all of us is to care for the poor. To some that means handouts to the transient standing on street corner with a sign. To others, it's providing free medical services to the poor. To the people of Project Match, it's applying sophisticated techniques to permanently change the lives of the needy.

I found Project Match following a Wall Street Journal article and as I read more about them I was amazed at how hard these people and their colleagues in other programs were working to continually improve their understanding of the best techniques to help the poor raise themselves out of poverty.

From Project Match’s website:

Founded in 1985 in Chicago, Project Match conducts program development and research in the fields of welfare-to-work and workforce development… Project Match provided some of the earliest evidence of the widespread phenomenon of job cycling among current and former welfare recipients. While the intervals between jobs were short for some people, they were much more extended for others, resulting in a pattern of intermittent work.

It’s impossible to improve your lot in life when you’re working irregularly. If you think of your own career, imagine where you’d be if each of your jobs had lasted only 3-6 months. No raises, no promotions, no opportunities.

Project Match picks up where standard social programs leave off.

“Entering the workforce is really the starting point, whereas programs are being designed today as if the job is the end point. For people to make a permanent attachment to the workforce and earn a living wage, they’re going to need assistance—help to return to school or advance to a better job—after they enter the workforce. At this point programs are not designed to provide that.”

In short, getting jobs was not the problem. Keeping jobs was. Without consistent employment, advancement, training and raises don’t come. My summary of Project Match is that they are taking the place of constructive parenting in a dysfunctional culture. I would bet that most of the people reading this blog came from families where your parents taught you the connection between work and pay and the connection between effort and success. Without those conceptual foundations, the world seems to capriciously reward some and punish others.

By combining psychology with social work, Project Match showed how you could teach people to stick with jobs and change their way of life. Project Match rewards it’s participants the way you would reward your children, giving them positive reinforcement as they learn new skills.

(It) is built on the concept that an "incremental ladder" exists that, with the discipline provided by regular diary entries, allows participants to climb to economic independence. For those on the lowest rungs of the ladder…some parents mark successes by taking their children to school on time or to extracurricular activities. Others volunteer at school, become members of their tenant management board, or join a school safety patrol. These gradual activities help parents learn to organize their lives, a lesson that can be expanded later into work preparation training.

How well does it work? Here's one success story.

Project Match helped convince Crawford-Bailey to obtain her high school equivalency degree, then a part-time job, and enroll in college. When Crawford-Bailey was ready to give up, Project Match counselors persuaded her otherwise…Eight years later, she was finishing up her college degree while working full time at a local hospital as a case manager who explained to teenage moms why they should remain in school.

And another.

Dare's journey has been neither quick nor easy. It's been three years from beginning her GED classes to getting her associate's degree. It took her eight months to get her GED, a signal accomplishment that gave her the first sweet taste of success. "I thought: Yes, I did it." With that step behind her, she took another — a big one. She enrolled in college, where she found new obstacles. … Her family was supportive, but not her boyfriend, who didn't think she needed to go to college, nor that she was capable of it. She had her own doubts. "That first semester was hard," she says, recalling a class load that included psychology, speech, English and dental science. "College was a lot different than getting my GED. There was so much studying. I remember crying a lot."

…"It helps a lot," says Dare, "when you've got someone who cares." Gradually, the tears evaporated, as did the fears of failure. Now she bubbles with confidence and with goals: "I want to work for awhile first, but I'm thinking of going to SIU to become a dental hygienist. Before, I was so down on myself I didn't know I could do it. Now, I know I can."

Throughout the articles I read, the phrase “complicated lives” arose again and again. The people trying to escape poverty are indeed leading complicated lives. Here are some statistics.

• 54 percent of new participants during one 12-month period were living in domestic violence situations.
• 13 percent had been victims of rape or incest.
• 14 percent had severe mental health problems, including depression and schizophrenia.
• 14 percent were abusing alcohol and using drugs, mostly marijuana and cocaine.
• 28 percent came from households with at least one child who had a severe physical or mental disability.

Imagine trying to work your way out of poverty in situations like those.

"I'm the first college student in my family," she says, "and it's a big family." …Now I have a sister who's going to go to college and another who's going to graduate from high school. With me doing something, it's changed the whole attitude of my family. I have plans for my son," a junior in high school. "He ain't stopping at high school.

"I have made a difference," Crawford-Bailey says. "There comes a time when you have to mature out of public aid. But if it weren't for Project Match, I'd have given up a long time ago."

The people working in Project Match aren’t just trying to improve the lot of the poor, they’re building a structure of knowledge and techniques to help future generations deal with these issues. Through research and trial and error, they are developing an understanding of the mechanisms of poverty. From reading their research you can tell that they deeply care about the people they work with.

Other websites used as sources include Welfare to Work is Possible by Donald Sevener and Welfare to Work: Real World Experiences from the Joyce Foundation newsletter.

Previous WOGs and an invitation to join the WOG Squad can be found here. We deeply appreciate those who link to these posts and welcome other bloggers who would like to do so.

Advertising on the Web vs. TV

Hugh Hewitt has a short piece today describing one more reason why advertisers will find blogs and website more attractive than TV. He mentions the fact that most people leave the room during commercial breaks on TV. On the web, the ads are integrated into the content.

It's a good point and there's many more. Here's my three favorites.

1. The web provides a much more direct connection between advertising a sales. You can track IP addresses and referring sites and figure out how a customer found out about you. You can then go back and increase your advertising on that site. It can all be done automatically. In the TV and print world, the firm has to produce those annoying customer comment cards that ask "How did you hear about us?" They then have to collect them, enter them into a database and analyze them. They pay employees to do that every step of the way.

2. The web provides a much more effective marketing tool for market segmentation. Ford and Chevy can run SUV and minivan ads on kids' soccer sites and then run sports car ads on MySpace. On TV, you have to pick between the two and know that a bunch of 20-somethings are watching the NFL game where you're spending a ton of money advertising your SUVs.

And the best one of all for the advertisers:

3. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Those Adsense ads to the left are free advertising until someone clicks on them. For political candidates, this is golden because they can get name recognition practically for free. On TV or in the papers, you pay whether the ad works or not.

Technorati tags: marketing advertising TV web

Interviewing the Butcher

Glenn Reynolds posted a link to a video of CNN's show, Reliable Sources, where there was a long discussion about how the New Media will replace the old. As the host leaned forward in practiced interest, the guests all discussed how the network model followed by CNN was terminally screwed, totally outperformed by bloggers, amateur videographers using YouTube and podcasts.

It was surreal. At the time, all I could think of was all of the cameramen and crew around the set listening to the discussion and deciding to polish up their resumes and get out as soon as they could. It was like cattle interviewing the butcher. "And then what will happen to us, Mr. Butcher? We'll get stunned by a big electronic shock? And then? We get our throats slit? How fascinating!"

I've been in situations before where the employees all figured the company was doomed. No one did their best job for the firm, everyone was going on interviews and trying to get out before they were laid off. It's a snowball effect. Once this starts happening, even if the company could turn it around, it won't because all of their experienced people will be gone.

Learning Dreamweaver

I spent part of this weekend learning to use Macromedia's Dreamweaver to create web pages. It's capabilities are far beyond my level of sophistication, but I'm thinking about using it to compose blog posts.

Unfortunately, Blogger does strange things to the layout. Tables that are butted right up against one another in the Dreamweaver layout show up miles apart on Blogger. Also, in order to edit this, I need to switch back and forth between Blogger and Dreamweaver. When I make a change, I need to delete everything in Blogger and then cut and paste from Dreamweaver.

Hmmm.

This Week in the Theocracy

Good Lord, is it Sunday already? You caught me out gardening and I almost forgot to come in and do this week's This Week this week.

Hi, it's me, Jacob the Syrian Hamster, faithful beadle of the Feline Theocracy here to lead you through the best posts from the feline theocraticians for the week. I've got ribs in the oven and some weekend chores still to do, so we will be brief.


First up is Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocean Whitefish with an open letter to Star Jones-Reynolds.

Our Knight-Protector and Defender of Yarn Balls has a Friday Funny. By the way, lawman, about that moth...there's never a cop around when you need one. :-)

The Grand Almoner of England has a post about finding validated information on line.

The Abbess of the Priory of Small Princesses has a new project called Wide Awakes Radio. Check it out!

Sister Jane of Perpetual Purring has a great caption the photo contest.

Our Monsignor of Breweries needs an email or two. Or three. Thousand.

The Theocracy's Official Artist is looking for people to play tag.

Since it's the Feline Theocracy, we just had to go with this Ask the Cats post from the Archibishop of Texas.

Our Holy Scribe writes a touching obituary for his mother.

The Poet Laureate of the Theocracy has this poem.

Lurking on the Protected List, Heidi has this cute story about British pensioners facing down some thugs.

The Anchoress has a very nice post about President Bush.

And now on to our Holy Scribes and members of the WOG Squad:

Mark Shea could use some kind thoughts. His mother is fading fast.

Georgette writes about nuns of Mother Theresa being arrested. Bad stuff, that.

Eric Scheske has a thought-provoking post about choosing who lives and who dies.

Happy Julie is a beautiful person. Go see why.

Finally, our Court Jester has some .great photos to share.

That's it for this week! We'll see you in 7 days for another This Week next week when next week will be this week and this week will be last week!

Kim Jong Il's Next Tantrum

The Alliance, in its infant infinite wisdom has asked the question: Given North Korea's recent pronouncements, missile tests and so on, what other bizarre cries for attention should we expect from North Korea?

Here at The Scratching Post, we have researched this carefully. We actually made it through half a cup of coffee before settling on this concept so we could have a post that would get some automatic links from The Alliance and boost our Technorati score.

Did I just say that? I only meant to think it.

Anyway, here's what we've come up with:

+

+

+

You do the math.

Technorati tags: projectile vomiting blindness

We Need Incentives to Avoid Poverty?

There's a well-written and researched, but odd article by Jonathan Keg on page one of today's Wall Street Journal. I'm really not quite sure what to make of it. It discusses a small scale effort in Chicago to give incetives to low-income families to change the behviors that lead to poverty.

For the past year, residents in a low-income neighborhood here have been earning rewards for paying their rent, getting their children to school every day and seeking work...

The "Pathways to Rewards" program, run by a nonprofit organization called Project Match, has awarded about $19,000 in prizes to about 130 people since its inception a year and a half ago. It is one of several small, locally based programs around the country attempting to use incentives to motivate the poor to improve their lives...

Participants meet with counselors to establish goals. Some goals are modest: keeping a clean house (10 points), paying rent on time (5), or decorating a home for the holidays (5). Others are more ambitious, such as finding a job (10), getting a promotion (15), or receiving a high-school-equivalency certificate (50). Children earn 5 points for improving school attendance or grades, signing up for library cards or participating in extracurricular activities.

The program recognizes that behviors need to change in order for these people to escape poverty. It seems to take the place of a missing cultural education connecting effort to success.

Then comes the real head-scratcher.

Rich Sciortino, president of Brinshore Development, the private company developing much of the new housing in the community, says he's encouraged by early results of the experiment. But he, too, says the program needs to include middle-class families. "I hope it's priming the pump for something that serves the larger community and integrates people," he says.

Huh? The middle class people are almost certainly already doing all of these things. They don't need incentives to do the things they already know are required for success. How many of you need a program to give you bonus points for keeping your job or making sure your kids go to school?

I can't quite figure out what this article is telling us about the situation in these neighborhoods. The first thing that strikes me is that the program is like one you would give your child, associating allowance with work so that they grow to link work with pay. It's as if this lesson was never taught at all. A key quote from the article is this:

Ms. Herr, 63, taught fourth grade at a school in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project before starting Project Match, a welfare-to-work program, in 1985. Her office was in a broom closet and she drove welfare recipients around town for job interviews. Soon she says she realized that finding jobs was relatively easy, but getting people to keep them was difficult. "That was the 'a-ha!' " she says.

She decided to add incentives for people to get jobs, hang on to jobs or reduce the amount of time they spent between jobs. She says she demanded high levels of accountability and wanted social workers to step in quickly when problems arose.

The program got results, and the concept of tracking workers to promote job retention and advancement caught on with government agencies and other nonprofit groups.

It's absolutely marvellous that she's doing this and I'll look into doing a World of Good post about her, but it's a curious thing, this need to help people keep going to work.

There's much more to the article. I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

Technorati tags: poverty work incentives

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Q: What wants tuna in the morning, sunbeams at noon and catnip in the evening?


A: Our Maximum Leader!

Be sure to visit this week's Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

Technorati tags: catblogging sphinx

Stop Messing with My Favorite Brands!

The Wall Street Journal has a terrific article by Deborah Ball today about KitKat bars and Nestle's ill-fated attempt to market new flavors of them. KitKats are probably my favorite candy. I don't like candy as a rule, but I love KitKats. They are also a favorite candy in Britain.

KitKat bars have been among the best-selling candies in Britain since they were invented here in the 1930s. One of the chocolate-covered wafers is eaten every 47 seconds in the United Kingdom, KitKat says.

Nestle decided to bring out all kinds of new flavors.

So it was natural for its maker, Nestlé SA, to apply to KitKat a marketing strategy that is becoming increasingly popular at food companies world-wide: extending a popular brand into new flavors and styles. The world's biggest food company brought a hotshot executive in from Australia in 2003 to find ways to add variety to the basic KitKat brand in the U.K.

Over the course of the next year, the company rolled out a dizzying array of new KitKats. For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came "Christmas pudding" and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone.

The experiment was a failure.

The experiments flopped. In just two years, KitKat's overall sales in the U.K. dropped 18%, to $253 million for the 52 weeks ending in April. Nestlé recently abandoned virtually all of its exotic flavors.

This parallels something I experienced this weekend in preparation for making barbequed ribs and chicken for the 4th of July. Of all of the mass-market BBQ sauces, my favorite is KC Masterpiece. I went to the store to buy some and what did I find? The KC Masterpiece shelf space filled with all kinds of exotic flavors. There was chipotle, hot n' spicy, extra smoky, country style, city style, octopus and mollusk style and muskrat bloodwurst style. By the time they had stocked the parakeet gizzard style, there wasn't much shelf space left for original flavor. I had to root around in the bottles to find the last two. It was annoying.

That's the whole problem with rolling out new flavors. It would be fine if there was an infinite supply of shelf space for each brand. Then you could have black licorice and anaconda liver flavored BBQ sauce or cotton swab and machine shop waste flavored KitKats. No one would care. They'd walk right past them and buy the original.

Shelf space in stores is a scarce resource. Like any scarce resource, companies that do not husband theirs carefully suffer the consequences. Next time you go into a grocery store, check out all of the flavors of your favorite sauce or coffee or candy and see which ones are scarce and which ones are plentiful. It will tell you how much shelf space a company has wasted on unpopular variations.

Blogging will be Blargh Today

Blogging will be blargh today because I got almost no sleep at all last night. Had a great party with friends, saw fireworks from our balcony, put the kids to bed and then realized that the caffeinated drink at 8PM was a mistake. This morning, my psychotic fire alarm decided to go off at 4AM.

Blargh.

No World of Good today, either. Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.

Hamas and the New Orleans Saints - a Comparison

Inspired by Laurence Simon, I give you this photographic comparison between my beloved New Orleans Saints and Hamas.

First, there is the team performance.

Aaron didn't really throw it backwards again, did he?

All we heard was a whoooosh and then a huge explosion!

Then comes the fans' reactions.

Another crummy season!

Another crummy season!

Lastly, there are the press conferences explaining away another defeat with one crucial difference.

I've been fired.

I haven't.

It's an Adsense Fight!

I just checked my blog for comments (yes, I am that vain) and I noticed I have two Adsense ads on the left hand column fighting with each other. Dig this

Your Opinion Worth Cash
Get Paid For Giving Your Opinion Online. Sign Up For Free Here!

A few ads down, there's one that reads

Paid Opinion Scams
Don't join a paid for opinion website until you read this article.

Aiiieeee! I have Adsense schizophrenia!

Technorati tags: internally / conflicted / blogger

Happy 4th of July!

Tonight we're having friends over and barbequing ribs and chicken. Then we'll watch fireworks from our balcony. I'll try and get some photos of it to share. Hope you all have a great 4th!

You Know You're Blogging Too Much When You Have a Post Like This

I just sneezed.

Technorati tags: wasn't that fascinating?

Tag, You're It!

My buddy Justin over at Justin's Random Thoughts has tagged me and for the sake of our family honor, I may not refuse. Here we go.

4 jobs I’ve had:
1. Tropical fish expert at several pet stores.
2. Road crew for an asphalt laying company.
3. Programmer for a video game company – helped make Ken Griffey Baseball for the Nintendo 64.
4. Newspaper delivery boy.

4 movies I could watch over and over:
1. Live and Let Die
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn version)
3. Airplane!
4. The Caine Mutiny

4 Places I’ve lived:
1. Boston, Massachusetts
2. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
3. Alexandria, Virginia
4. San Diego, California

4 TV shows I love to watch:
1. NFL games, particularly New Orleans Saints games
2. San Diego Padres games
3. Green Acres reruns on TV Land
4. Spongebob Squarepants

4 Places I’ve been on holiday:
1. Maui, Hawaii
2. Weggis, Switzerland
3. Toronto, Ontario
4. Vancouver, British Columbia

4 Websites I visit every day:
1. Hugh Hewitt
2. This Blog is Full of Crap
3. Justin’s Random Thoughts
4. Mark Steyn

4 of my favorite foods:
1. Jambalaya from my kitchen
2. Gumbo from my kitchen
3. Sushi from Sushi Ota in Pacific Beach
4. Two chicken tacos, rice and beans from JV’s taco shop in San Diego

4 lucky people to tag:
1. Happy Julie
2. Catymology
3. Cathouse Chat
4. One of my Thursday 13 visitors, Tricia

If you'd like to be tagged next time (this is a great way to get links and traffic for your blog) please leave a comment and I'll be happy to oblige.

Technorati tags: tag

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

Stoptheaclu brigns to our attention an article in the Los Angeles Times written by former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer. Wendy was discilpined for...well, you read the excerpt.

Recently, the ACLU again considered censoring its board members, weighing new rules that would prohibit them from criticizing the organization publicly. This startling proposal was the culmination of a bitter internal battle over the organization’s integrity and fidelity to principle that has spilled out into the media.
Why would such a rule even be considered by a free-speech organization? According to ACLU leaders, some board members had been abusing their right to speak.

My son is currently reading George Orwell's Animal Farm as a summer assignment from his High School. Maybe he and his classmates could have shortcut the whole effort by reading Wendy's article.

Technorati tags: aclu free speech orwell

Theoreticians Should Have Only Theoretcial Impacts

I just read Mark Steyn's latest article, The Right to Jihad. In it, he talks about the Supreme Court's rulling that the terrorists have the same rights as soldiers and remarks

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling...

Justice Stevens rules not on how things actually function, but on how they should function. In a perfect world, the terrorists would have their own oversight committees holding inquests into whether or not this or that captive should have been tortured and beheaded. Guilty parties would be publicly punished so that their enemies on the battlefield could be reassured that such horrific acts did not go unchecked. That's not the real world.

If you then go and read Hugh Hewitt's take on the New York Times' and Los Angeles Times' decisions to expose secrets of national security, he comments on their lack of experience working in or around the NSA and it's sister organizations.

Keller and Baquet don't know counterterrorism. And because they don't, terrorists have been given a gift, and innocents will die.

The editors' arguments make sense in a theoretical world, but not a practical one. Exposing secrets does not cause well-informed debate among citizens, but instead is exploited by the nation's enemies to disastrous effect.

I wrote earlier about the upper management where I work attempting multiple, parallel organizational improvement techniques simultaneously.

Assume your typical executive has one day a week to devote to strategic planning. The rest of their time is devoted to tactical matters such as budgeting, VIP meetings, program reviews, travel and the like. With 6 simultaneous management efforts going on, that means that each gets 80 minutes of their time per week.

Each of these techniques is a new tool. Like any new tool you need time to become facile with it. How good would you be with a scroll saw with only 80 minutes per week of practice?

In a theoretical sense, each process improvement effort should provide a substantial return on investment. In practice, they cannot be fully executed because in the aggregate the proper application of these techniques requires more work-hours to implement than are available. The end result is an enormous waste of time.

The consistent theme is that theoreticians are just that. Strictly applying theory in the real world without allowance for the true mechanisms of how things work can have terrible side effects.

I'm trying to close this post, but many more examples are coming to mind. Take all of the unintended consequences of social support programs by various governments. Certainly the legislatures of France and Germany had no intention of crushing their economies. In theory, it was right and proper to support the poor and unemployed. In practice it is stifling their countries.

It could be argued that the farther removed you are from the application of these rulings and policies, the less you should have to do with them. You certainly would have fewer events like we've seen in the last few weeks.

Technorati tags: supreme court new york times

Light Updates Until the 5th

The staff of The Scratching Post is busy with various projects this weekend and we won't be posting much until the 5th of July. We wish you and yours a very Happy Fourth of July weekend!

Update: Publishing these kinds of posts is like washing your car. One is guaranteed to bring the rain and the other to bring long posts. I was inspired by a Mark Steyn article to write the post directly above this one.

Hangover from a Dream?

I just woke up from a dream where I was having a drinking contest with someone I've never met before. We were seeing who could drink a half glass of wine the fastest. It tasted like a white zinfandel, something I don't usually drink. We kept having to redo the contest and drink more wine because we couldn't figure out who had won. Then I realized that she was drinking out of a normal glass and I was drinking out of a wine glass and the shape of my glass slowed the flow of wine into my mouth. The cheater!

Anyway, I woke up with a hangover headache. What's weird is that I only had one beer last night, and that at about 7PM.

Can you get a hangover from a dream?

Technorati tags: hangover dream

Cat Massage Video

A friend of mine left a link to this YouTube video in a post below. I love it!