Author: VD

Shocking shots of sexcapades involving Pfc. Lynndie England were among the hundreds of X-rated photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shown to lawmakers in a top-secret Capitol conference room yesterday. “She was having sex with numerous partners. It appeared to be consensual,” said a lawmaker who saw the photos. And, videos showed the disgraced soldier – made notorious in a photo showing her holding a leash looped around an Iraqi prisoner’s neck – engaged in graphic sex acts with other soldiers in front of Iraqi prisoners, Pentagon officials told NBC Nightly News.

“Almost everybody was naked all the time,” another lawmaker said. Many members of Congress left the 45-minute viewing session early, thereby missing the porno performance by England, but there were enough other images of torture, humiliation and intimidation to sicken anyone. “It was pretty disgusting, not what you’d expect from Americans,” said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). “There was lots of sexual stuff – not of the Iraqis, but of our troops.”

Not what you’d expect from Americans? In what country does Norm live? We invented the Internet, for Pete’s sake! If we’re going to continue with this idiotic policy of allowing women in the military, why not just go all the way and name Jenna Jameson to the Joint Chiefs of Staff? At least then we’d be putting our best pornographic foot forward.

These latest revelations should shut up all those see-no-evil Pentagon defenders who have been arguing that the whole Abu Ghraib situation was a cunning plan to intimidate the Arabs. There was quite likely some MI involvement in the abuse, but the overall theme, from the beginning, has been one of idiotic and unprofessional behavior by a bunch of reservists “commanded” by a terrible woman general. If Rumsfeld is going to resign for anything, it should be for continuing to allow women in the military to destroy discipline in the armed forces.

David Frum exposes the limits of his imagination: The Arab Middle East has spawned murderous ideologies that threaten the peace and security of the whole world. You can’t “withdraw” from the Middle East: not when millions of Middle Easterners live in the West, not when the Middle East produces one-third of the world’s oil, and not when you can get from Riyadh or Baghdad to Boise, Idaho, in less than 24 hours. So our options resolve themselves to basically four:

1) Try to find some way to calm the extremists down. This was the policy the US followed in the 1990s – it was the ultimate justification for Clinton’s Palestinian diplomacy. By now it should be obvious that the people we are concerned about won’t be calmed. The appeasement option isn’t an option: It’s a wish.

2) The Bush approach – try to deal with the sources of extremism by promoting democratic change in the region. By curbing tyrannies that foment extremism to justify their hold on power – like Iraq’s, like Saudi Arabia’s – the US and its allies can promote what the president calls “the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”

3) But let’s suppose that the Bush policy fails too. Let’s suppose policy-makers decide that the Middle East cannot be changed any more than it can be calmed. What then? Then I’m afraid we are going to see the emergence of a harsh new pseudo-realism that will in effect try to seal the Middle East off from the rest of the world. Hire new dictators to police the region, lock the people in, and “let them kill each other” as they say in the line at my supermarket.

4) But any policy so self-consciously dismissive will be anathema to the soft spirit of American liberalism. And so the likeliest consequence of a Bush defeat and a turn away from his policies will be: nothing at all. We’ll end up averting our eyes, telling ourselves that we can protect ourselves by chasing down al Qaeda fugitives, and basically forgetting about the whole problem – until of course it strikes again.

This is either incredibly shallow or incredibly disingenuous. We certainly can withdraw from the Middle East. Millions of Middle Easterners can be easily deported, as simply enforcing existing immigration laws and sending home the illegals would eliminate half the problem. The US uses very little Arabian oil and isn’t even drilling in its largest reservoirs.

The Bush policy will fail. It is absolutely doomed to failure. Democracy as we understand it isn’t even in the cards, since anyone who’s actually paying attention knows that a true representative democracy would lead to a one-vote, one-time election of Shiite jihad-sympathizers. Indeed, many of the administration’s champions support the president precisely because they see the occupation of Iraq as a charade meant to cloak the foundation of an undercover low-intensity WWIII. If option one is not an option because it is just a wish, that goes doubly for option two.

We are not responsible for the world. If we try to play that role, it will complete the destructionn of our country as quickly as it destroyed the Roman and English empires. Neither empire was truly bad, not compared with the alternatives, but that doesn’t change the fact that empire and nation-building is a late-stage societal development. We cannot hope to bring freedom to the world while simultaneously and systematically eroding it at home. We must lead by example, not by force.

I fully support crushing those who have declared war on America. Unfortunately, we have chosen to ignore most of our enemies while manufacturing new ones in a stupid and futile cause. You cannot build a nation where one does not exist.

It was good to see that Space Bunny inspired someone to quote one of my favorite poets. Of all his poems, this is the one I like best; I once read it at an event in which a string quartet was playing pieces from various eras and I had selected poems from each period.

Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull

Start not -nor deem my spirit fled:

In me behold the only skull

From which, unlike a living head,

Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaffed like thee;

I died: let earth my bones resign:

Fill up -thou canst not injure me;

The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape

Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,

And circle in the goblet’s shape

The drink of gods than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,

In aid of others’ let me shine;

And when, alas! our brains are gone,

What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst; another race,

When thou and thine like me are sped,

May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,

And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not -since through life’s little day

Our heads such sad effects produce?

Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,

This chance is theirs to be of use.

The Fraters Libertas’ discuss media Jeopardy:On Monday Tucker Carlson staged a late rally to pass Peggy Noonan and win the day. According to Shawn, Bob Woodward was doing his best Mark Dayton impersonation. Here’s Shawn’s recap of Tuesday’s show: Maria Bartiromo: A doorknob. Holy crap. I don’t think that she just has a slow thumb. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt (slow thumb, or using the marker as a signaling button) until she answered “Computer worm” where “Earth Worm” was the right question. And it was obvious, the answer was about moles, digging, eating these types of worms or something. She was like a supermodel, or Jessica Simpson. Lots to look at, nothing between the ears.

Keep that in mind when she’s touting stocks and rosy economic growth stats. As some of you may recall what I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s hardly an accident that the journalists can’t keep pace with the commentators. I don’t know how I’d do on Jeopardy, as my pop cultural knowledge has some pretty serious holes in it, but I daresay I wouldn’t sweat much about taking on any reporter. However, I have a terrible habit of looking for trick questions that might trip me up in this sort of thing. Sure would have loved to take on Alice, though.

I’ve been messing around with the beta and found that the Linux version is significantly improved. The fonts look good – better than straight-up unaliased Mozilla – and the new icons are not only spiffy, but tiny too. In coordination with Blogger’s new update, the Blogger hotlink button should work now. Adios, bane of my blogging.

It’s always been good under Windows, but now it’s even better. Truly new and improved, I’m impressed. Check it out.I’ve been messing around with the beta and found that the Linux version is significantly improved. The fonts look good – better than straight-up unaliased Mozilla – and the new icons are not only spiffy, but tiny too. In coordination with Blogger’s new update, the Blogger hotlink button should work now. Adios, bane of my blogging.

It’s always been good under Windows, but now it’s even better. Truly new and improved, I’m impressed. Check it out.I’ve been messing around with the beta and found that the Linux version is significantly improved. The fonts look good – better than straight-up unaliased Mozilla – and the new icons are not only spiffy, but tiny too. In coordination with Blogger’s new update, the Blogger hotlink button should work now. Adios, bane of my blogging.

It’s always been good under Windows, but now it’s even better. Truly new and improved, I’m impressed. Check it out.

Spoke too soon, clearly. What you should have seen was a hotlink to “Check it out.” and an end to the post. I still like it for my surfing, but I’ll have to keep Mozilla around for posting. Well, shoot.

What gets me even worse are the big name guys who come on like all they have is an honest opinion to share. I remember sitting next to Mario Gabelli. I brought up my position that the “investment theme” of buy and hold is nothing more than a sales pitch and the best way for sales reps and brokers to get upset customers off the phone. “I know the fund is down 12 pct Mr. Doe, but that happens in a buy and hold strategy. Over the last 80 years…” What nonsense.

I have to agree with him. The lies are even worse when they try to use an index – which changes from between once a year (Nasdaq-100) and every five years (the Dow) – to justify buying individual stocks. Over time, stocks generally pace inflation on the average. We’ve had a great run until 2000, we’ve had what looks like a nice counter-trend second-wave up, and now we’re getting rolling on wave three down. If the Fed had more bullets, I have no doubt they’d cut rates again, and they may try it yet.

Oh, but the economics statistics are so wonderful, you say? I am a fiction writer. I know fiction when I see it. Cuban’s blog is great – no wonder the Dallas fans love him.

Space Bunny was tired of the speculation as to her appearance, so she asked me to post a picture of her and get it over with. As the Vox Cave is not yet ready for business, I asked the infamous Gargler of Pan-Galactic fame to host this and he kindly agreed.

His first words in response to getting the file were pretty funny. “HOLY CRAP! She does look like Alison!”

On April 28, Sen. Miller, the last genuinely conservative Democrat we will likely ever see in the Senate, laid the blame for what ails that august body at the door of the 17th amendment to the Constitution. This is the provision that provides for the popular election of senators.

Few people today know that the Founding Fathers never intended for senators to be popularly elected. The Constitution originally provided that senators would be chosen by state legislatures. The purpose was to provide the states — as states — an institutional role in the federal government. In effect, senators were to function as ambassadors from the states, which were expected to retain a large degree of sovereignty even after ratification of the Constitution, thereby ensuring that their rights would be protected in a federal system. The role of senators as representatives of the states was assured by a procedure, now forgotten, whereby states would “instruct” their senators how to vote on particular issues. Such instructions were not conveyed to members of the House of Representatives because they have always been popularly elected and are not expected to speak for their states, but only for their constituents.

When senators represented states as states, rather than being super House members as they are now, they zealously protected states’ rights.

Most regulars here are aware of this of course. I don’t think this would make my first day’s list as confidential Presidential advisor, or even second – that meeting with Greenspan is likely to take awhile as I was planning to invite the Mogambo Guru to provide color commentary – but, hey, let’s try it.

Last weekend, I hit a treasure trove of digital piracy – the entire collection of Dilbert in PDF format. I’m not sure where I stand on digital rights in the abstract, although seeing how Disney managed to ram another 25 years of copyright protection through the Congress has me leaning towards the “DR is a myth” crowd. In practice, I’m a lifelong software pirate, which may be part of why my computer game company became “the most profitable game developer you’ve never heard of” in the words of Computer Gaming World, through our focus on bundled distribution.

Since game companies happily send me whatever games I ask for now, that’s taken all the fun out of the hunt and so I don’t bother anymore except for the occasional emulator ROM. But it’s still fun hunting down ebooks, although I wish someone would write a decent ebook reader/text converter for Linux. Doesn’t this directly contradict my existence as a writer? Not at all. In fact, I’ve even lobbied my publisher to release my books as free and open ebooks, since the main obstacle to book-selling success is not people reading for free what they could have bought, but people never having heard of you or your work in the first place.

Pirate readers don’t pay, but they still engage in word of mouth, and from my own experience, I know that people buy what they like and want to support. I have an ebook of QUICKSILVER that I’ve never read, because I am a Neal Stephenson fan and I wanted to support him by buying the big fat tome. I have multiple copies of Umberto Eco’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE simply because I love the book, and that’s not even counting the .PDB files.

The problem is that for-sale ebooks are still priced too high. We can separate out the value of the author’s contribution from the publisher’s fairly easily. The publisher’s and distributor’s shares of production and distribution are the major components of the total price of a book. The actual value of the copyrighted aspect, then, is approximately 10 percent of the retail price if we average out hardcovers, trade paperbacks and mass-market paperbacks. Now, the production cost of an ebook is trivial; the Original Cyberpunk converted REBEL MOON in about a day. Even at his lofty, big-brain rates, that’s a trivial amount compared to the cost of printing 20,000 copies.

So, in other words, the value of an ebook as determined by the market is around 70 cents. Make it 75 to cover the production and transaction costs. That’s the model that authors should be pursuing – perhaps a big-name author can command a premium of 2x or 3x. The challenge is that it has to be made as easy to pay for the book as it is to otherwise pirate.

My suggestion would be to follow the newsgroup example. Sell a subscription for $7.50/month (+ whatever distribution cost is required – that’s outside the example). Subscribers can download ten books per month, and be billed an additional .75 for each additional book they download. The books are properly formatted and the buyer knows that .75 is going directly to the author. People are already paying $12/month for access to poorly formatted texts that often need to be reformatted; presumably more people would pay an equivalent sum for proper, fully legal texts as well.

This will frighten the publishers, of course, but in the meantime, the market will be served, legally or illegally, just as it always is. Anyhow, back to my intended point….

I talked with a friend of mine last week and asked him about four things. He wasn’t sure about what I meant by one of them, so he provided answers to none of them. It’s no big deal; there was nothing urgent about the questions but it was so utterly uncharacteristic of him that I was truly taken aback. Then, after reading through a year or three of Dilbert, it suddenly occurred to me that this was a corporate version of what I wrote about two weeks ago.

Your environment will affect you, whether you are a child in a public school, an employee at a giant corporation or a bureaucrat in a government agency. The frightening thing is that you will probably not even realize that it has modified your customary behavior. After all, unless one is very ill or desperately unhappy, everybody thinks he’s fine.

The reports are that a 26-year old American, Nick Berg, was murdered in a particularly violent manner in response for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. That’s not true, of course, considering that Daniel Pearl was killed in precisely the same way. I believe that the truth must be freely released and the perpetrators, up to and including General Lapinsky, must be disciplined firmly and appropriately.

But I scoff at the notion that the abuse causes Arabs to hate us any more than they do. Those who hate Americans have hated us for decades. What are they going to do, hate us infinity plus one? Arab terrorists have been killing hostages for thirty years, yet we still haven’t taken out the father of Arab terrorism. I’d like to see the administration do something about that before they start posturing about how they’re going to wreak havoc on Nick Berg’s murderers.

Make a list, check it twice and hunt them down. This doesn’t require occupying an entire country, but as long as they’re doing that already, they might as well make use of it.

However, this sort of comment is just crazy. Republican Senator James Inhofe said: “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. These prisoners, you know they’re not there for traffic violations,” Inhofe said. “If they’re in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”

Right, because no one ever gets arrested by mistake. And when did Iraqis become terrorists? Sure, there are foreign fighters there, who are certainly jihadi terrorists, but most of the reports were of Iraqis being mistreated. If you are a foreign invader, you can’t expect the entire population to welcome you with open arms even if you are invading them in their best interest. What a stupid, stupid thing to say. If you’re going to play Russians-in-Chechnya, you play by one set of rules. But if you’re going to try to win hearts and minds, you have to play by another, more civilized one.