Bring me your poor!

Lately I've been bugged by this photo as a full-page advertisement in The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal. On the left is somebody named Ali; on the right is the rock star Bono, who I am pretty sure is not the late Sonny Bono, who for all his faults at least had the decency to employ two names. The lightplane in the background looks like a contemporary update of the venerable Piper Cub.

It seems that Ali, Boni, the wannabe Cub, and the photographer were all in Africa for a photo shoot to help the poor and downtrodden. Yes! I found the photographer's website, which helpfully explains:

For the Core Values campaign, both Ali and Bono wear Edun clothing. Ali carries a Louis Vuitton/Edun collaboration bag. This collaboration bag is a brown Keepall 45 in Louis Vuitton’s embossed Monogram Révélation leather. The bag is accessorized with a Monogram charm hand-crafted in Kenya by Made, a fair-trade fashion accessory company which strives to provide employment and promote ethical trade in Africa. Made regularly partners with Edun. Both the charm and the inside of the Monogram Révélation bag bear a plaque with the inscription “Every journey began in Africa.” Along with his guitar case, Bono carries a waterproof Keepall travel bag in Monogram canvas.

Kinda makes your eyes water, don't it? How could any two individuals (well, three, counting the photographer) be so big-hearted? I feel like running right out and buying a Louis Vuitton billfold, or watch fob, or whatever they make in my price range. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Grab 'em by the nose and kick 'em in the ass

Whenever I run out of books to read, I turn back to Mr. Sawyer's interesting but very difficult The Tao of Deception. Last night I broke up laughing when I spotted this advice, quoted from the One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies:

"When engaging an enemy, frighten them in the front and overwhelm them in the rear...."

Which put me in mind of General George Patton's speech to the troops in May 1944, just before the D-Day landing in France. His words, which are usually misquoted in the more pungent form above, went like this:

"We're going to hold onto [the enemy] by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass."

Do you suppose Patton was reading the Chinese military classics at the time? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sloppy work at the Natanz plant

Here's that Iranian nuclear plant that may or may not have been attacked by a computer virus. The NYT has a more thoughtful piece on the cyber assault in today's paper, with the most interesting bit being the conclusion that the attack was terribly sloppy. When have Israeli spooks every been sloppy? As an example of how good the IDF and Mossad are, the same story mentions that when Israeli jets destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor three years ago, the Syrian anti-aircraft batteries had been switched off, so they couldn't intercept.

The photo is credited to Majid Saeedi. Who do you suppose he works for? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Has the Israeli attack begun?

Almost in passing yesterday, the New York Times reported rumors that Iran's nuclear program is under attack by computer warriors--spooks that actually have access to the Iranian computers, which aren't connected to the internet. That requires three things: sophistication in cyberwarfare, a great desire to stop the Persian Bomb, and agents on the ground in Iran. The Gray Lady lists three leading suspects: the U.S., Israel, and Britain. Post-Blair, I think we can rule out the UK. The U.S. of course is a possibility--the Obama administration seems to favor standoff warfare to the belt-buckle sort, as it has displayed with its generous use of drone attacks in Pakistan. But after years--generations!--of emasculating the CIA, where would we get the agents capable of slipping a thumb drive into the computer that runs the Persian version of Los Alamos?

No, I'll lay my bet on Israel.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Here's an idea: a mosque to memorialize 9/11!

Bill Clinton, who when he was in a pinch much like Mr. Obama's today proved himself a genius at winning over the public, has an idea to salvage the mosque next door to Ground Zero. (Or "ground zero," as the New York Times prefers to call it, just as it prefers to refer to the mosque, formerly known as Cordoba House, as "Park51.") As Mr. Clinton points out:

Much or even most of the controversy…could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want to build the center were to simply say, 'We are dedicating this center to all the Muslims who were killed on 9/11.'

Is that a great idea, or what? Let's see: Park51 is decided to the memory of Mohammed Atta,  Waleed al-Shehri, Wail al-Shehri, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Satam al-Suqami....

Oh, wait! Mr. Clinton actually wants to memorialize only the Muslims who were killed because they were visiting or working in the Twin Towers on the day! Yes, that does sound better. It's also true of course that a whole bunch of German citizens died at Auschwitz. So here's an idea: why don't Mr. Clinton, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Times, and all the Good People turn their attention to building a Lutheran church and German cultural center next door to Auschwitz, dedicated to the memory of the Germans who died in the Holocaust? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The case against the burqa

 

France has attempted to ban the burqa by prohibiting people from masking their faces in public. It won't work, of course, but nevertheless--good for France! Here's a nation that knows that women are a public benefit, and that forcing them to disguise themselves as blue turnips is a crime against human nature.

This news photo was taken during the first Afghan election in 2004, so the bright little girl is probably old enough now to be required to hide herself from public view. Should such beauty ever be hidden away? Not in France, one hopes, and not in any civilized country. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We gave you laws; why don't you respect us?

New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who is thrilled by the prospect of a mosque and Islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero, got rich by creating a financial news network. The Bloomberg.com website published a wonderful headline and "news" story the other day:

Congress Enacting Most U.S. Laws Since '60s Gets No Respect
The 111th Congress returned to Washington this week with a record of legislative achievement that rivals President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Voters may show their thanks by throwing lawmakers out of office.

To which one is inspired to answer: Yes! Exactly! Of course the humorous aspect is that the Bloomberg journos take it as a given that the more laws Congress passes, no matter how destructive to our liberty and our prosperity, the more Congress is to be applauded. Do you think they'll ever figure out that the poll ratings aren't despite the legislation, but because of it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

America as No. 2

Here's a great essay in Asia Sentinel about the seemingly inexorable rise of China as a superpower, equal to or the superior of the United States:

Two important questions for the second decade of the 21st Century are whether China can be satisfied even by becoming a coequal of the United States; and whether the latter would be amenable to accepting China as its coequal? A very important, but a tacit, aspect related to the latter question is that the United States should also be ready for the scenario of China becoming number one among the hierarchy of nations within a decade or so.

The economic superpower is almost certain to become a military superpower as well, though perhaps not following the models we are familiar with: Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the United States in the 1990s. China will dice and slice, building its space- and electronic-warfare capabilities as a counterweight to the U.S. military; turning the small and eventually the large nations of Asia into pliable states on the model of Finland, whose testicles were owned by the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War; and gradually expanding the sphere of its dominance:.

What is interesting to note is that, as China continues its awesome economic rise, it seems to have initiated the process of expanding the list of its core interests. In the past, only Taiwan and Tibet were included in that list. Lately, however, it has also added the South China Sea as a core issue. Considering the fact that the PRC has shown no inclination to negotiate on the "old" core issues, it is expected to do the same regarding the South China Sea. There is a major difference between its old and its new core issues.

On its old core interests (Taiwan and Tibet) no other country is claiming sovereignty over them (even though one can argue that Taiwan claims to be a sovereign nation and its sovereignty is recognized by numerous countries, but their numbers are steadily dwindling). However, in the case of the South China Sea, the interests of other states of East Asia come into conflict with that of China.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On targeting the oil well

This story didn't make the front page of the New York Times today, unlike a freak storm, a 103-year-old judge, and a plan to give speaking roles to dancers. Still, it's worth noting: some two miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, BP's relief well has linked up with the rogue well that spilled a guesstimated 4 million gallons of oil over the summer. Over the next four days, enough cement will be poured into the hole to kill it for good. This is a truly remarkable feat. One wishes that it hadn't been necessary, but since it was, let us be glad we have engineers and roughnecks with the ability to pull it off. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Deadbeat bureaucrats

Something about this Washington Post story really tickled me--the circularity of people whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, but who themselves don't bother to pay taxes! What could be neater than that?

• Federal employees nationwide owe $1 billion in unpaid taxes
• Senate and House employees alone owe $9.3 million (the WaPo doesn't say whether that includes any actual Congressmen, but I'll bet it does)
• While those working in the White House itself owe $831,000 

Alas, the WaPo story doesn't give a deadbeat figure by executive department, but one assumes that the Treasury under Timothy Geithner runs a cleaner ship than most. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you buy a used mosque from this man?

According to the Newark Star-Ledger, there's a bit more to the Imam with a Plan who wants to build a 31-story mosque and Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. It seems that he's a slumlord well known to the building inspector of Union City: 

"He’s a terrible landlord who’s unresponsive to the residents who live in his building," said [a spokesman for the mayor]. "City officials and inspectors have reached out to him to express the urgency in correcting problems in his buildings, and it’s unfortunate that it’s gotten to this point, but it’s our responsibility to insure that residents receive the care that is needed." 

After being cited repeatedly for fire hazards, and after a fire did break out in one of his buildings, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did what any good slumlord would do: instead of fixing the mess, he boarded up the building and wouldn't let the tenants back in.

The city is trying to put that building and a neighboring one into receivership, so it can collect rent from the tenants and make needed repairs. I eagerly await the assurances from President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York Times that Imam Rauf is just the sort of neighbor that the Freedom Tower should have. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The parrot who died for love

My granddaughters live on a boat, which is presently in Uruguay, and they are schooled by their mother. She decided recently that they ought to learn to catch a ball, so she sent them out with their father, Hamish to pitch, they to catch. The younger is named Anna. As her mother emailed:

Earlier in the afternoon, a parrot flew into Anna's head and died, possibly of a broken neck, possibly of a heart attack, or even, perhaps of a broken heart.  Hamish and Anna were playing catch with a bright yellow tennis ball (Anna's catch is coming along enormously, as is Helen's.  They can also walk along a 1" wide board fence in crocs, but that's another story). Hamish threw the ball straight up in the air and caught it, and then tossed it to Anna.  The next thing she knew, a parrot came screaming out of the tree and crashed into her nose.  We can only assume that it  was a territorial male and it thought the tennis ball was a handsome rival.  Fortunately, it did not get her in the eye!  It lived briefly after the encounter, but is now interred under a very fine tombstone (with portrait) under a nearby tree.

Or possibly the poor bird thought the ball was a pretty female. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
 
 

Ailing hiker for sale

Is Iran a great country, or what? Having jailed three American hikers for over a year, it is now offering one of them for sale at a knock-down rate of $500,000. It seems she is sick. What do you suppose a healthy male American goes for, in the demented minds of the mullahs? A million, I suppose. D'you think they might sell the three captives as a package, say for $2 million? Or perhaps, like North Korea, they'd settle for a visit by Jimmy Carter. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Remembering Vietnam

Karl Marlantes has quite a record: he graduated from Yale, was a Rhodes Scholar, and commanded a Marine rifle company in Vietnam. He won the Navy Cross, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. For all that, it took him 35 years to get Matterhorn published. It's a great war yarn, in a tradition that the Vietnam War nearly killed off. Indeed, it reminds me of The Naked and the Dead for its starving infantrymen, their relentless grunge, and their foul language. ("Oh yes," Tallulah Bankhead supposedly said of Norman Mailer: "The young man who can't spell 'fuck'." Mr. Marlantes does not have this problem.)

I particularly liked the easy way he shows a casualty count being inflated, from one North Vietnamese shot in the face by the point man, which becomes three dead and six probables by the time the count is processed through headquarters ... and nobody's being dishonest! As a result, Bravo Company is ordered to stay out in the bush for another week, to its great cost.

On the other hand, I was puzzled by the quantity of leeches Mr. Marlantes's Marines encounter. I rattled around South Vietnam for three months and never saw leech one, thank God, though I heard stories similar to the one he presents here as happening to one of his squad leaders. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The mosque is needed for our own safety!

The kooky pastor behind Burn A Koran For Jesus has given up his plan. He has conceded that his constitutional right should not be exercised, because what he proposed is offensive, gratuitous, and injurious to America's image of itself.

Not so the kooky imam behind the Ground Zero mosque.("Kooky" is the kindest word I can think of in his connection. "Smarmy" is another.) If he had it to do over again, he assured the media in a full-press public relations offensive the other day, he would certainly choose another site. Alas, it's too late! For our own good, he must press ahead! As ABC News reports:

A Muslim imam behind a proposed cultural center two blocks from New York's Ground Zero said he must build there despite angry protests in order to defend America and its citizens against a "danger from the radicals in the Muslim world to our national security."

When the Mafia does this, it's called the Protection racket: if you don't contribute to our pension fund, who knows what terrible things might happen to your restaurant?

Imam Abdul also had the gall to call upon Pastor Jones to cancel his Koran-burning exercise--again, for the sake of America's national security, and indeed to show the true Christian spirit! As he explained:

"We have freedom of speech, but with freedom comes responsibility. ... This is dangerous for our national security, but also it is the un-Christian thing to do."

The imam evidently feels no such obligation. He'll take the freedom, plus public financing if he can get it, but responsibility? That's for Pastor Jones to display. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Don't know much about historee

Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel prize in economics, has just shown us why students need a broad liberal education--one that includes some courses in history. In an op-ed for the NYT, Mr. Krugman explains why we must throw more trillions of dollars after the stimulus programs that got us to our present dismal situation: it worked so well in 1938!

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections. 

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

The "recovery that followed" the 1938 election is better known to history as World War II. It wasn't Franklin Roosevelt but Adolf Hitler who ended the Great Depression, by sending the Germany army and air force into Poland. Fearing for their own safety, Britain and France began to buy war materiel from the United States. American factories began to hum again, and in 1940 the draft began to take unemployed young men off the streets. Will that miracle happen again? Doesn't seem at all likely. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mayor Bloomberg, meet Pastor Jones

The wonderfully named Dove World Outreach Center plans to burn one or more Korans on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities at Ground Zero and the Pentagon (and an aborted one over Pennsylvania). The man behind this scheme is a certain Pastor Terry Jones, who also wouldn't mind selling you a book entitled (or a coffee mug inscribed) Islam Is of the Devil.

I think we owe Pastor Jones a great debt for clarifying the matter of the Ground Zero mosque. Let's run through it briefly: does he have a right to burn the Koran? Absolutely! It's in the First Amendment, as understood by the U.S. Supreme Court. Burning stuff is protected speech.

So where are Mayor Bloomberg and the New York Times on this matter?  Are they supporting Pastor Jones's First Amendment rights? Hell, no. They find his proposal offensive and injurious to American interests--which of course it is.

And the same of course is true of the Ground Zero mosque. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Not So Lone Eagle

Good grief. It seems that Charles Lindbergh led a double (triple? quadruple?) family life, with three DNA-certified children in Germany with one woman and uncertified others with her sister and with a woman  who was his "private secretary" in Germany.

How does it feel to have written a 628-page biography of a very public man, one that follows the current convention of giving almost equal weight to the man's family life, and then to discover that you have missed half or perhaps three-quarters of his wives?

Even more amazing, how in the world did Lindbergh pull it off? Scott Berg calls him "the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth." Yet year after year this very public man donned a beret, rented a Volkswagen, and drove up to the homes of his common-law wives in Germany and Switzerland. If all the kids attributed to him are truly his, he fathered seven of them in eight years, meanwhile micromanaging the lives of his own five children by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and all the while being tracked by paparazzi. Really, it's a feat that relegates his New York - Paris flight to comparative insignificance. I look forward to reading Reeve Lindbergh's Forward From Here, which tells of meeting her half-siblings. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

DVD recommendation

For My Father is at once sweet, utterly convincing, and hugely depressing. The hero is a Palestinian suicide bomber who somehow gets through most of a weekend with a defective load of explosives strapped to his chest. (He can't buy a replacement trigger switch because it's the Sabbat!) Don't let the title put you off. This is one of the all-time great war flicks, along with Katyn and Paths of Glory. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The chaplain's assistant

There's a wonderful story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: A Chaplain and an Atheist Go to War. The chaplain is Navy lieutenant Terry Morna, right; the atheist is Religious Programs Specialist 2nd Class Philip Chute, on the left with the assault rifle. "We're here for security," RP2 Chute explains. "We're not junior chaplains." They are a wonderfully mismatched pair. Not only is the chaplain a believer; he really seems to think he's bullet-proof. And not only is RP2 Chute an unbeliever; he's a committed atheist who will quote scripture to correct the chaplain on matters of faith.

My favorite line in the story (by Michael Philips) is the anguished cry by a Marine gunnery sergeant when Lt. Moran dallies before taking cover: "Tell the [expletive] chaplain to get behind the goddamn vehicle!" Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lindbergh

After I reviewed The Flight of the Century, Scott Berg mailed me a copy of Lindbergh, his 1999 biography of the Lone Eagle.

Lindbergh was our first mega-celebrity, adored in the 1920s for showing that America was inextricably linked to Europe, and reviled in the 1940s for having urged that America stay out of Europe's wars. (Roosevelt so hated him that he wouldn't let Lindbergh serve in uniform during WWII.) He was quite a prophet. As he wrote in 1938:

... the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler's destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot, and barbarism of Soviet Russia's forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.

Western Civ would survive, but it was a bad forty years for that portion of it that fell behind the Iron Curtain.

And after the German army and air force blitzed Poland in September 1939, Lindbergh wrote:

We must either keep out of European wars entirely or stay in European affairs permanently.

Seventy-one years later, we remain very much involved in European affairs. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let's remember pearl harbor!

I see that the New York Times now regards "ground zero" as a generic phrase, akin to band-aid, so there's no need to capitalize the initial letters. What's next, the holocaust? The u.s. army? Not al-qaeda, I shouldn't think--that would be disrespectful to muslims, wouldn't it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Final Gulp or Two as the Party Winds Down

Pity the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper but now is a collage of liberal pieties, some feebly muted (those are called news stories) and some screamed at full volume (the editorials and op-eds). But what about the obligation to review automobiles for its wealthy readers, especially those who want something stronger than Starbucks coffee to start the day? Today's paper offers a hilarious example: the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG. The reviewer just loves driving it, but feels he must alternate his praise with disgust at its road-muscling, gas-guzzling ways: the Benz, he says, "feels like a two-ton burrito in habanero sauce: driving it is akin to the last gas-spewing binge before the diet begins." As St. Paul might have said, give me 50 mpg, Lord, but not just yet.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford