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Vox, she mentions that she didn’t appreciate her comments getting into your column on WND without her permission.

King Hûi of Liang once asked Mencius, “Why is that dog wet? And why, venerable sir, does it stink like the flesh of rotting swine left three days in the field?”

Mencius answered, “Your majesty, the little dog, which in its foolishness attempts to piss on the big dog, should not be surprised when the golden showers arrive.”

Jonathan Podhoretz on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza:

I have a nephew who is serving right now in Gaza. It’s his job, his duty, to help manage the forcible evacuation of the setlements. As it happens, he does not agree with the policy. But he is a soldier, and a good man, and he is doing his duty. When those resisting the evacuation — most of whom are now not residents of Gaza but people who live outside Gaza and have come in to take a stand — throw paint and sand and kick and fight, they are throwing paint and hurling sand and kicking and fighting against my nephew, an Israeli born and bred. So while I feel immense sympathy for the Gazans and certainly think that opposition to the evacuation policy is more than a respectable position, the behavior of those who are injure and provoke my nephew and his brethren in the Israeli military is, quite simply, beyond disgusting. They deserve no sympathy for their conduct. They are not pursuing civil disobedience. They are behaving in appalling fashion, as Sharpton-like goons and hooligans, and I hope they serve a nice stretch in jail.

I can’t say that I’m surprised. NRO’s Jews think that the Jews of Gaza should behave like good little Germans and obey the authorities, which is exactly the line taken by Mordechai Rumkowski, who hoped that cooperation would save the Jews of the Lodz ghetto. It didn’t.

Now, there are significant differences. The Jewish settlers are not being dragged off to Auschwitz and the Jews of Lodz were not compensated to the tune of 300 grand for their humble habitats. But the correlation is real nevertheless and it’s truly appalling to see how these supposedly conservative Republicans are openly supporting this overt ethnic cleansing.

As for the actions of Mr. Podhoretz’s relative, I seem to recall that with regards to matters such as these, the argument that a man simply doing “his job, his duty” is considered no defense.

Furthermore, the settlers are obviously engaging in pure civil disobedience. They are rather well armed, after all, and are capable of delivering more than a few kicks and grains of sand should they have chosen to resist violently.

Jonah Goldberg isn’t sympathetic either:

John Pod’s post reminds me again of how subdued the support for the Gaza Jews has been among the supposedly irredeemably Zionist corners of American media and politics. Indeed, I think we may have hit another tipping point yesterday. Several friends of mine and emailers — some Jewish, some not, but all pro-Israel — have started expressing attitudes along the lines of what John says below. The Gaza settlers have made their point and they’re starting to look bad.

I suspect he may be surprised about this. The Christian Right is unlikely to harbor much enthusiasm for Ariel Sharon now, and even if their support for his government is not completely withdrawn, it will be markedly more lukewarm than before.

UPDATE: ETHNIC CLEANSING: “The systematic elimination of an ethnic group or groups from a region or society, as by deportation, forced emigration, or genocide.”

My use of the term is correct.

DH was kind enough to email me: “She fights back…. Apparently she has her own blog – boy did she give you the business!“

This is “the business”? I get far worse in my fantasy football league and we haven’t even DRAFTED yet. Anyhow, here’s her explanation for her inanities of last week’s response:

My original post will be in blue and my futher thoughts will be in regular print.

First: the point where I was going, and where I arrived at the end of this random, small, newsgroup post were two different places. As I said before, halfway through my thoughts I decided it was a waste of time…. I should have just deleted the whole thing….

But my base thinking was that one couldn’t pinpoint it as the influx of WOMEN in the work force, more just the influx of PEOPLE in the workforce.

“Yes. It’s defintely the influx of WOMEN into the workforce that caused this low ‘real wage.’ It’s not:
a) the exponential increase in child births. I meant the baby boom of the 40’s & 50’s that put alot of peole into the workforce in the 70’s and 80’s.
b) the exponential influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal) After WWII, there has been a huge influx in immigration. I’m not just talking about lettuce pickers in the San Juaquin valley. I’m talking about the influx of hi tech workers from Asia and then later, India .
c) the increase in the retirement age, thus putting exponential increases of people working later in life in the work force It is a known fact that people are, infact, working later in their lives, with many returning to the work force after retirement.
d) the exponential growth of corporations in this country I’m not entirely sure where I was going with this point (remember, I was workign against the clock, I knew the moderators would close this obvious flame bate thread). But I think I was thinking of the dot com bubble. That there were in the late 90’s an INCREASE in companies…. dot coms popping up everywhere, and then when that bubble burst, that would cause a decraese in real wages –i.e people being laid off.
e) drops in economy because of exponential offshoring of jobs This one was rather obvious. If you’re laid off, I’d say that’s a big drop in your real wages.

a) It still doesn’t compute. The US birth rates in the 1950s, while higher than the 1930s and 1940s, was still much lower than the rates from 1910 through 1925. The increase was not only not “exponential”, but in percentage terms it was still a decrease, for this time frame as well as the 1970-2000 period I cited.

b) The amount of immigration did increase, but the total, let alone this increase, was far smaller than the increase in additional women working. Furthermore, as I already explained, immigrants offer more consumption in addition to more production. Domestic women only offer more production.

c) This is simply wrong. Lisa Lisa might wish to try researching the requisite labor statistics instead of relying on what someone’s mother’s friend read in the New York Times’ Style section about how hip and cool older people are working at Starbucks these days.

d) I’m also at a complete loss. I have no idea where she was going either.

e) Again, the economy did not drop, it more than doubled. Jobs going offshore are lost, but jobs are not a zero-sum game since new jobs are created all the time. Since most new jobs are created by small companies and most offshoring is done by large companies, the correct question is to ask if one trend outweighs the other. Lisa Lisa hasn’t even begun a reasonable analysis.

Think before you spout off. Think before you write. For the love of sweet Cthulhu, most people writing on the Internet would do well simply to try thinking at all!

Derb, the lone Republican pessimist at NRO, posts:

On O’Reilly last night, Bill discussed the current state of play in Iraq with Zell Miller and Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (US Air Force, Ret.) The following exchange took place:

—Bill: Insurgent attacks on a daily basis have almost doubled from 2004 to 2005. What does that say?

—The General: It says that the terrorists, the insurgents, are fighting even harder because they know they are losing.

So I guess if the insurgents are killing twice as many people again this time next year, we’ll know we really have them on the ropes!

Ye gods.

The frightening thing about this administration is that it is actually beginning to make Bill Clinton’s look like a shining example of veracity. As pessimistic as I was about the Bush crew – I met a few of the Houston inner circle during his father’s 1988 campaign – I had no idea it would be this bad.

Or that so many Republicans would cheerfully swallow their nonsense.

Mogambo points out a potentially significant synchronicity:

Samex Capital has observed that mutual fund cash levels have again reached historic lows. According to the Investment Company Institute, mutual funds decreased the amount of cash on hand to very low levels. How low? Well, cash is 2% LESS than what they are required to hold! They have sunk more than every available dime into the market!

Now, I am sure that there are lots and lots of very good reasons why this could be so. After all, they are hotshot investment type guys pulling down the big money because they are so smart and handsome and bathe regularly, and I am just a guy sorting through the neighbor’s trash as my tentative entry into the lucrative “identity theft” racket. But the stock market has been flat, despite all of this buying, and so that means that somebody was taking money OUT of the market at the same time as all this money was flowing INTO the market. Hmmm I smell a big, fat, stinking conspiracy here! Only this time it does NOT involve brain-sucking lizards from outer space or the CIA.

Samex writes, “This is only the third time in history that mutual fund cash-to-assets ratios have been this low. December 1972 marked the high point for more than a decade, and was followed by a 50% loss. March 2000 has marked the high point for more than five years to date and was followed by a 50% loss.”

I suppose a few people will rightly point out that I completely jumped the gun on the likelihood of the stock market’s imminent decline two years ago. I’ve noticed that this is a continuing pattern among bears and wave theorists, which I suspect is due to overthinking things.

Mogambo, who is not a big-time waver, nevertheless outlined the basic Elliott principle rather nicely in this piece when he pointed out that the usual wave 2 correction to wave 1 move was a .618 percent retracement, so the corrective rally to the S&P 500’s 777-point bear move from 1552.87 on 03/24/00 to 775.80 on 10/09/02 would be expected to top out around 1256. It’s taken an amazingly long time to get there, but two weeks ago, on August 3rd, the SPX hit 1245.86.

Is it possible that the wave theory could be correct in spite of its advocates’ innacurate predictions? Have they simply been unable to apply it correctly? It’s impossible to say. But a number of signs do appear to be pointing in a distinctly negative direction.

Yes, Virginia, the police do kill people and then lie about it to cover their posteriors:

The crucial mistake that ultimately led to his death was made at 9.30am when Jean Charles left his flat in Scotia Road, South London. Surveillance officers wrongly believed he could have been Hussain Osman, one of the prime suspects, or another terrorist suspect.

By 10am that morning, elite firearms officers were provided with what they describe as “positive identification” and shot De Menezes eight times in the head and upper body.

The documents and photographs confirm that Jean Charles was not carrying any bags, and was wearing a denim jacket, not a bulky winter coat, as had previously been claimed.

He was behaving normally, and did not vault the barriers, even stopping to pick up a free newspaper.

It appears that the only true thing the police said was that the late Mr. De Menezes was running… only he wasn’t running from them, he was running because he was late for his train. No bulky coat, no jumping a turnstile, just another straight-up murder by police followed by a coverup.

When will you people learn? From the CPI to killings-by-cop, the official version put out by the government authorities is DEPENDABLY inaccurate. It is always far safer to assume they are lying and think about why, how and where than to assume that for once, just this time, they are honestly providing the full and complete truth to the public.

UPDATE: “But campaigners said there should now be a full public inquiry to clear up whether CCTV footage had captured his final moments on film, or why cameras were not working as media reports have suggested.”

Interesting, that last bit. If the various authorities are to be taken at their word, there would appear to be a veritable plague of equipment failure and disappearance surrounding these terrorism-related activities. For we’ve been told that in addition to every camera on both the De Menezes train and the 7/7 bus failing, none of the six black boxes from flights 11, 175 or 77 were ever found.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Apparently both of the flight 77 black boxes were found, but FBI director Robert Mueller declared that they contained “nothing useful” and no information was publicly released. Nothing to see here, move along….

Jonah Goldberg defends himself:

Anybody who’s been on the receiving end of the “chickenhawk” epithet knows what I’m getting at. Various definitions of chickenhawk are out there, but the gist – as if you didn’t know – is “coward” or “unpatriotic hypocrite.” The accusation is less an argument than an insult.

It’s also a form of bullying. The intent is to say, “You have no right to support the war since you haven’t served or signed up.” It’s a way to get supporters of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, or the president simply to shut up.

As does his fellow supporter of the struggle against violent extremism:

The “chickenhawk” argument is dishonest. It is dishonest because the principle of republicanism is based on freedom of choice about behavior (as long as that behavior is legal) as well as freedom of speech about political issues. We constantly vote on activities with which we may or may not be intimately involved. We vote on police policy, though few of us are policemen; we vote on welfare policy, though few of us either work in the welfare bureaucracy or have been on welfare; we vote on tax policy, even if some of us don’t pay taxes. The list goes on and on. Representative democracy necessarily means that millions of us vote on issues with which we have had little practical experience. The “chickenhawk” argument — which states that if you haven’t served in the military, you can’t have an opinion on foreign policy — explicitly rejects basic principles of representative democracy.

Neither Goldberg’s point nor Shapiro’s is particularly salient, and Shapiro’s borders on disingenuousness. Both men are attempting to steer clear of the appellation’s personal implications and dilute it by responding to its general nature.

The chickenhawk argument is unfair when it is applied ex post facto. One of an age to have fought in the Korean War might well have refused to volunteer for service because it was a UN war, not a US war, for example, and later come to the conclusion that the Iraqi invasion was worth supporting because of the threat posed by WMDs talked up by the administration.

However, the chickenhawk label applies perfectly to a young man who publicly asserts that war and empire is of supreme importance and the nation’s solumn duty, while assiduously avoiding any such service himself. Ben Shapiro may not like the label, but he is a chickenhawk of the very worst degree, one who sits on the sidelines and urges other men to go and risk their lives in his stead.

Calling someone like Shapiro a chickenhawk isn’t an insult, it is a simple and justifiable demand to see him walk the talk.

Anonymous plays word games:

Conservative and FEAR are synonymous.

There’s a WHOLE lot of fear from the right on the blogosphere. Fear of the “other”. Other people, other cultures, other ideas. All the hording of guns and homeschooling and seperating from your fellow human beings. Kinda sad. It’s all about the fear.

Conservative bastions are markedly segregated compared to those notoriously integrated havens of left-liberalism, such as the academy, Carmel, Marin County and the Hamptons. For example, Marin County is “world-renowned for its stunning natural beauty, liberal politics and extreme affluence” and yet features a population that is 84 percent white in a state that is 55 percent non-white.

To be honest, I haven’t seen left-liberals demonstrate much openness to other ideas which seem to be fairly popular around the globe, such as female circumcision, Judenhassen and that always controversial law of supply and demand.

As for fear, that’s risible. The entire Democratic political program is based on fear! The Republicans are going to take your Social Security away! Refusing to sign Kyoto will cause the ice caps to melt! Everyone who owns a gun will go on a killing spree someday! All men are rapists!

Homeschooling and gun ownership aren’t about fear, to the contrary they are about responsibility. It is the difference between being an adult and being a child. The modern liberal expects the government-mommy to take care of him, the modern conservative knows it won’t and relies on himself.

Once, to be liberal meant to be an open-minded advocate of human freedom. Now, it is simply a synonym for immature and maleducated lunacy.

Blackfive shares my take on the media’s crocodile tears:

Do they really care about the men and women “Over There”?

Ask yourself, “Where were the protests and the speeches on Capitol Hill when we lost an entire SEAL squad and one of the best helicopter crews in the Army during combat in Afghanistan?” Ask Dick Durbin THAT the next time you hear him spout off about our losses in Iraq.

The answer is obvious – they are using us, our friends and our families to make political hay. It’s disgusting and, since I’m not afraid at offending them with this well-deserved title, un-Patriotic.

While I am completely opposed to what I consider to be the futile attempts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am, like Blackfive, disgusted by those who have never given a damn about the individuals serving in the US military attempting to use their sacrifices to score political points.

The warrior’s honor is not dependent upon the sagacity of his commander or even the justice of his cause. Soldiers around the world have long recognized this code, which can be seen in the chivalry of the medieval knights, the Bushido of the Samurai and the refusal of the early fighter pilots to target enemies who had been forced to bail out of their stricken planes. It can be seen today in Iraq, when the U.S. Marines do their best to save the lives of wounded men who only moments before were trying to kill them.

I note that the fact that I do not believe the Iraqi Occupation is a winnable enterprise does not mean I do not respect, support and honor the soldiers who are risking their lives to do their duty. Indeed, history regards those who serve in the full awareness of inevitable failure as the greatest of heroes, from Leonidas to Davy Crockett, they are the immortals of military history. Even in America, we did not forget the Alamo simply because the Texans could not hold it against Santa Ana.

But it is beyond inappropriate for those who loathe the US military and its traditions, who have actively worked to weaken and destroy it, to suddenly turn and use a feigned concern for the welfare of the troops as a foundation for opposing the current administration. The truth is that the Left has no problem with military intervention, indeed, the majority of America’s 20th and 21st century wars have been initiated by Democratic presidents and Democrat-dominated Congresses.

There is always room for genuine disagreement with regards to the wisdom of military actions. I myself have repeatedly criticized the administration’s strategy and noted how it appears to be inadequate when compared with the actions of past military leaders and the classic advice of military strategists such as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Those are legitimate grounds for debate, indeed, it would have served both the nation and its warriors well had the media been interested enough to bother engaging in such a discussion.

But the fraudulent compassion now being served up by the legacy media is nothing but a mark of their low regard for their audience’s intelligence and deserves to be dismissed with the utmost contempt.

Stephen Roach sees history repeating itself:

In the two oil shocks of the 1970s, the personal saving rate averaged about 9.5%, whereas in the oil shock just prior to the Gulf War of early 1991, it was around 7%. That means that in each of those earlier instances, US consumers had a cushion of saving they could draw upon in order to maintain existing lifestyles. Today’s “zero” saving rate underscores the total absence of any such cushion. The only backstop available to support the spending excesses of American consumers is the saving that is now embedded in their over-valued homes. Yet with the housing bubble now in the danger zone, that’s not exactly a comfort zone.

There is another eerie parallel with earlier energy shocks that should not be taken lightly. Just prior to the two oil price spikes of the 1970s, discretionary spending by US households had also gone to excess. The GDP share of consumer durables and residential construction — the latter being a proxy for the discretionary demand for shelter — was running at peak levels of around 14.5%. In the aftermath of those two earlier energy shocks, discretionary spending collapsed — with the combined share of consumer durables and homebuilding falling to 11.5% in the mid-1970s and 10.5% in the early 1980s. These were the most severe consumer-led recessions on record in the United States. In the current expansion, discretionary household spending has moved into a similar zone of excess. The combined share of consumer durables and residential construction has averaged 14.3% of GDP over the past year — virtually identical to peak shares hit just before the two energy-shock-induced consumption collapses of the 1970s.

In other words, just as the energy shocks of the 1970s hit US households at a point when their spending behavior had gone to excess, the same is the case in the present climate. Yet unlike those earlier periods, today’s asset-dependent, overly-indebted American consumer is lacking any semblance of a backstop of income-based saving to shore up the downside. It would be one thing if American consumers were committed to defending modest lifestyles. It is another thing altogether in today’s era of excess — there is much more room and greater urgency for consolidation.

But what does he know? He’s only the chief global economist for Morgan Stanley. My real estate agent – who went to law school and passed the bar two years ago on her third try – says real estate is the best investment I can possibly make! I don’t have to put anything down, and with a zero-down Adjustable Rate Mortgage, I can cash out my equity later, buy some new clothes and have total flexibility.

Those banks sure are stupid. As soon as interest rates go up, I’ll just switch to a fixed-rate mortgage. I bet they never thought of that!