Brain Fertilizer

From Karl, guest-blogging at Protein Wisdom.

I can't really blockquote anything, because it's all that good.

Go check it out. Well worth your time. Lots of links to specific examples.

...it struck me:
Liberal Democrats were wrong about the Rosenbergs. They were wrong about Algiers Hiss. They were wrong about McCarthy.

Which started me thinking:
They were wrong about Communism. They were wrong about the Soviet Union. They were wrong about Socialism. They were wrong about welfare. They were wrong about the Laffer Curve and Taxation.

They are really pushing hard to be wrong about European societal standards. They are really trying hard to be absolutely wrong about Iraq and the Global War on Terror. They are wrong about hate crimes, racial quotas, the nature of free speech, racial profiling, and politically correct speech/thought. They are wrong about educational standards/systems, and wrong about abortion.

Of course, all that's just from my perspective, so take it for what it's worth.

Still, it seems like the Democrats biggest problem is they can't get over that they've been wrong about pretty much everything since the early 1900s.

They want the sort of government interference/control of citizens' lives that results in things like this:

The reaction of that nurse to a patient's increased pain medication is the predictable result of concern shifted to the cookbook medicine now required by the payee. God help you if your problem isn't in the cookbook of prescribed--and proscribed-- treatments. Her reaction also indicates the danger a doctor puts himself in when treating a patient. Frankly, I'd prefer my doctor to be thinking about my care, not whether or not giving me adequate care will result in putting his license in danger, and being called on the carpet by some government agency.

Most people seem to think that this increased regulation and oversight by the government protects them somehow, but they are gravely mistaken. If you look at the record of performance of the government in almost any area you choose, this fact become readily apparent. A bureaucrat cares for his rice bowl just the same as everybody else. At least your doctor is there and is directly responsible to you, or rather WAS responsible. Nowadays, he carries his responsibilities, and those of the "disinterested" bureaucrat, who dictates much of what can and can not be done to care for the patient, but who won't lose his job no matter what happens.

That's an excerpt from a rant in the comments of this post.

You'll have to follow the link to get the story. But here's the author's bottom line:

The real problem here seems to be with a legal system that is unable appropriately to deal with risk. The truly interested parties – the parents, acting for the child – seem to ready and able to sign off with a full appreciation of the risks involved. And yet the legal system puts the risk on those who are essentially agents: they suffer the full weight of any failure, but get only a limited share of the benefit. This includes the firm, of course, which gets little benefit from the child's surviving, but bears a significant risk that the child's death will also kill the firm.

True dat.

I'm not a libertarian, but I certainly like to co-opt some of their precepts into my conservative philosophy.

The problem is, the market really doesn't help in this case, either, because there isn't much of a market when there is only one customer, the family of a dying 4-year-old. Still, relying on market forces prevents government interference from applying additional friction to the system.

One of brainfertilizer's rules of life: any time you try to draw a legal line to separate good, right, legal, acceptable (etc) actions from those bad, wrong, illegal, unacceptable (etc), you will exclude some actions unfairly. It's the nature of the beast. Some actions are good/right/acceptable only under certain circumstances...but law can't deal with special circumstances impartially...but justice cannot operate even halfway well without impartiality...

There's always an exception, and encoding exceptions into law just makes things unnecessarily complicated.

There shouldn't be legal punishments on failing in an effort to save someone's life.

Interestingly, today's installment comes from (centrist?) Democrat Mickey Kaus. (scroll down to the 1:16am entry----does this guy have cool working hours, or what?)

Mickey quotes this article* written by Robert Samuelson that asserts "the increase in poverty in recent decades stems mainly from immigration." :

Compared with 1990, there were actually 700,000 fewer non-Hispanic whites in poverty last year. Among blacks, the drop since 1990 is between 700,000 and 1 million, and the poverty rate—though still appallingly high—has declined from 32 percent to 24 percent. ... Meanwhile, the number of poor Hispanics is up by 3 million since 1990.

So let me get this straight: Democrats encourage Hispanic immigration, as well as encouraging illegal immigration and even voting by illegal immigrants (via the "Motor Voter" laws and attempting to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get identification ("Matricula Consular") and driver's licences) because Hispanic immigrants tend to repay such largess with votes for Democrats. They need the votes to be able to gather power to aid the poverty-stricken. They point to the rise in poverty as evidence that America needs the Democrats in power to deal with the rise in poverty...except the rise in poverty is apparently solely due to the enacting of Democrat immigration principles.

To be fair, Republicans aren't much better. I don't really like Karl Rove and George W. Bush's pandering to Hispanics to increase their support, although I can understand it, with such high Hispanic populations in both Texas and Florida, where the Bush brothers were/are governors. At least the Republican Party has one sub-group that strongly opposes the tacit and overt encouragement of illegal immigration, even if this group (led by Michelle Malkin, et al) doesn't have enough power to influence the Republican Party as a whole.

Something needs to be done. The short-term political jockeying is certainly adversely affecting the long-term welfare of current U.S. citizens.

From today's electronic issue of the NRO:

Speed indeed: When Iraqi SWAT commandos hit a target, they hit it hard. Racing forward in white pick-up trucks emblazoned with the unit's emblem — a black scorpion and dagger (an emblem designed by the Iraqis) — the raiders leap from the vehicles and rush toward their objective almost before the enemy has time to panic. The attackers — primarily in their early to mid-twenties — are armed with a variety of personal weapons including AK-47s and SIG Sauer assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and grenades. They all wear khaki-colored assault suits (similar to zip-up flight suits) with an Iraqi-flag patch stitched on the shoulder. Khaki or black balaclavas cover their heads, concealing their faces. "The Iraqis like wearing balaclavas," says Douglas. "It makes them look fearless, and terrifies the enemy."

And:

The success of the new unit has instilled "great confidence" in both SWAT-team members and regular Iraqi soldiers, says Col. Salaam Abdul al Kathom, the commander of the Iraqi SWAT team. It has also increased pride and a greater sense of security for the Iraqi people.

I'll repeat again: This is exactly what needs to happen for Iraq to become a stable, free nation. The Iraqis themselves must be able to defeat the insurgents and maintain the peace. And like a train pulling away from the station, or an aircraft carrier accelerating from a dead stop, the motion is imperceptible at first as the mass overcomes inertia. In Iraq, they are overcoming the inertia of decades of "keeping their heads down" in the hostile threat environment of Saddam al-Hussein's tyranny. The speed and progress is nearly unmistakeable now, what with stories like this and the Shia insurgents turning in weapons in Sadr City. Things will pick up speed as they move toward the election, as well, I think.

Expect us to be able to withdraw from a stable, independent, free, democratically-run Iraq by January of 2006, less than 18 months from now. It will be a beautiful day.

Why do they keep citing the less accurate Establishment Payroll Survey?!??!?!

The discrepancy between the job numbers produced by the Establishment Payroll Survey and those produced by the Household Survey has finally been getting attention in the last few months. I never payed attention to the Establishment survey because I never worked directly for an establishment. In fact there has never been a time when the money which supported me came from a countable job. Those whose premises are supported by the lower Establishment numbers tend to dismiss the new ways of earning a living as not being "real" jobs. I have no doubt that some of the tens of thousands of people who now support their families would really rather be back in that nice warm foundry, or working rotating shifts at the tire plant, but not many of them.

The "UN Oil-for-Food" Program.

McQ summarizes up the significance of recent successes in Samarra, Iraq.

The most important part is right at the beginning:

In a remarkable display of skill, elements of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division and newly trained Iraqi national forces drove the terrorists from the city of Samarra last week. Killing over 100 of freedom’s enemies and capturing many more, our troops lost a single soldier.

The two-day sweep through Samarra incorporated lessons learned on the ground over the past several months especially the need to win swiftly in urban settings. Our soldiers performed flawlessly under difficult conditions. Iraqi commandos, backed by our Special Forces, liberated two key mosques before a hostile media could intervene on terror’s behalf. The city’s population is glad that their oppressors are gone.

This is very significant and highly important, because as I've stated several times before, the difference between Afghanistan's success and Iraq's little-success-in-sight is that we were increasingly able to turn over military actions to the locals in Afghanistan. It started with co-opting the warlords' private armies into a militia, and has continued with the training, organization, and development of a professional national military to displace the militias. It's working in Afghanistan, and we are finally getting the same process under way at speed in Iraq.

Sure, we've had setbacks there, and will have still more. But what does the best military in the world do when it encounters a setback?

The NTC has set up MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) training as an integral part of all rotations. Concurrent training is taking place at the home bases of units. CALL (combat arms lessons learned) are collected and disseminated throught the military giving up to the minute tips, tactics and techniques from lessons learned in Iraq. The best trained military in the world simply shifts focus, trains and retrains, and then takes on one of the most difficult military operations there is. If Samarra is any indication of success in that focus shift, I’d say they’re well on their way to digging the terrorists out of the "no-go" cities.

The true "October Surprise."

Oh, sure, they'll tell you now that they knew it all along, while out of the other side of their mouth they'll be talking down the progress made. But that was a different story before, wasn't it?

Oh, wait, that's not liberals,, it's the fringe players, right?

See, these people want to believe that WWII was the last "just" war. They'll admit it was right to fight Germany because they killed millions of Jews, but they don't care that we have an enemy that wants to kill every non-Muslim in the world. They'll admit it was right to fight Japan because of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but refuse to admit that the attack on the World Trade Center Towers put us at war just as much.
They want to believe that history is safely in the past, that we are just one step from Utopia. I'd like to believe that, too, but I can't afford to live in a dreamworld, protected from naivete and foolishness: I've got kids to raise.

I don't question their patriotism, no, but I do question their common sense.

Jeff G. gets serious for one post.