Great Balls of fire….

Men may be carrying in their testicles an almost limitless supply of spare part cells for treating disease and injury, research has suggested.
times of london

I am praying that by the time I need spare parts these will be parts I can spare.

Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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On Power…Ian Welsh Explains it all

As ever, Ian Welsh writes a striking primer on power and on how the Americans in Iraq simply missed the boat:

In Iraq, when the US did not stop the rioting in the early days, when it did not challenge the militias during the first few months, it gave up its sovereignty over Iraq. As militias, religious leaders and tribal leaders became the ones who enforced such law as there was, they became, such as it is, the real government of Iraq.
tilting at windmills

Ian goes on with great insight on how leadership and the exercise of power works; but the key to the protracted - if diminishing - insurgency was the gross oversensitivity of the Americans and the rest of the coalition at the beginning of the ocupation following the war.

The transition from the tyranny of Saddam to a free market, democratic society was not and is not an overnight proposition. It may not be a fifty year proposition for Iraq. And part of the issue was that the failure of the Americans to shoot looters in the very early days left a vacuum. That vacuum, as Ian points out, was quickly filled by just the people whose interests were contrary to the happy chat notion of Iraq as a unitary secular state.

I have always thought a huge element of the difficulties the US faces in Iraq was its incapacity to even consider the idea of partitioning the country. But Ian is certainly right when he points out that the more immediate problem was the inability of the US to face down the criticism which shooting a few looters would have brought.

Civil order begins when an authority asserts a monopoly over physical force in a particular territory and backs that assertion with more than pious hopes.

I have no doubt that the foray into Iraq to depose Saddam was a useful and entirely justified exercise. However, it often appeared that the soft power people refused to think through the consequences of Saddams removal and the necessity of using overwelming force early in the peace to ensure it was clear exactly who was in charge.

Back in May 2004, over at TechCentralStation I wrote:

To go from a climate of terror to a civil society is about tens of thousands of small things adding up to a sense of security and freedom. But for those small things to begin to accumulate, the thugs of Falluja and the fat little trouble maker in Najaf need to be taken down. Hard.

If the Bush administration is unwilling to use force then it should indeed get out of Iraq with Spanish efficiency. Which would almost certainly mean a return to barbarism in Iraq and the sure conviction on behalf of the jihadis that they had defeated the United States as convincingly as they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan.
techcentralstation

Falluja duly fell - hard - but Muqtada al-Sadr was left unarrested to fight another day.

War is not pretty and there is no use pretending that it can be made more attractive. To their great credit the Americans have always been rather bad imperialists or conquerers. They are much better at going in, cleaning up the particular problem and then getting out. It is, realistically, almost impossible for a nation founded in the rejection of colonialism to be much good at imperialism. A fact which America should recognize.

Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with no comments.
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Not Quite Dan Rather…

Live by the blog, die by the blog. Ben Domenech resigned from the Washington Post three days after the debut of his Red State column. There is no question at all that the through going over which his past received at the hands of the lefty blogs who went nuts when he was appointed ensured he couldn’t continue.

Interestingly, the lefty blogs went nuts initially without the slightest evidence that Comenech was anything other than provocative and a Bush supporter. That was enough. But a bit of digging apparently suggests that Domenech had a way of using material without crediting it.

This is considered a major ethical breach in the journalism biz - less of one in the political/speechwriting/blogging world where Domenech had been operating. However, with the assorted disasters which have been occuring in the fact checking/crediting end of the MSM recently that was not a hill the Editors of the Washington Post were going to die for.

All of which adds up to a win for the lefty blogosphere and, I would argue, new media in general. While it is sad that it was over something as essentially matter of fact as the appointment of an online columnist - hardly a position of huge influence - it is a furrther demonstration of the power of a citizenry which can fire off a hundred thousand emails an hour or crash the Washington Post’s servers.

This is a fact which should not be lost on the people who run legacy media. As the Washington Posts dead tree circulation drops fast its one hope for the future is online. But online is a very different world from the more genteel and less interactive world of newspapering. The Post is going to have to learn how how to function in that world.

Update: Comenech rebutts the lefts attack with this post at Red State:

I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past. But these charges have also served to create an atmosphere where no matter what is said on my Red America blog, leftists will focus on things with my byline from when I was a teenager.

I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here.
The most recent accusation, is that I stole a music review from Crosswalk and passed it off at National Review Online. In fact, I wrote both lists myself; I was one of Crosswalk’s music review contributors at the time.

The Left has also accused me of foisting Sen. Frist quotes and some descriptive material from the Washington Post for a New York Press article on the Capitol Shooter. But the quotes I used were either properly credited or came from Sen. Frist’s press conference, which I attended along with many other reporters. So it is no surprise that we had similar quotes or similar descriptions of the same event. I have reams of notes and interviews about the events of that day. I also went over the entire piece step by step with NYPress editors to ensure that it was unquestionably solid before it ran.

Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I’ve seen comes from a single semester’s worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17.
red state

No, not quite Dan Rather.

Assuming for an instant that what Comenech writes is true then the Washington Post should not have made his resignation necessary. What it should have done, quickly and quietly, is found out whether what Comenech was saying was true and then made a decision.

The problem here is that we are left with a lefty blogswarm smear which has been rebutted by its target but which has not been properly investigated. It is a lousy way to end the matter.

Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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