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The Good: The Prestige Alliance wins its #5 game in the pick-16.

The Bad: I’m playing Chokechain, (my partner in The Prestige Alliance), this week. He’s got Tom Brady. Brady threw for 335 yards and 3 TDs.

The Great: NFL Football is back! I could almost go Bane* over this.

*I mean in the mawkish and weepy sense, not the more commonly used meaning of being a hair-trigger provocation away from going postal on someone’s posterior.

Fresh from their takedown of Jim Boyd and the Star Tribune, the bullies of Powerline are now beating up Dan Rather and CBS:

It isn’t pretty. Over the next few days, we’ll be commenting on the significance of the mainstream media’s frantic effort to drag John Kerry over the finish line. In the meantime, following the 60 Minutes story is like watching a train wreck. Tonight, the Associated Press weighed in:

“The authenticity of newly unearthed memos stating that George W. Bush failed to meet standards of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was questioned Thursday by the son of the late officer who reportedly wrote the memos. “I am upset because I think it is a mixture of truth and fiction here,” said Gary Killian, son of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984.

News reports have said the memos, first obtained by CBS’s “60 Minutes,” were found in Jerry Killian’s personal records. Gary Killian said his father wasn’t in the habit of bringing his work home with him, and that the documents didn’t come from the family. The personnel chief in Killian’s unit at the time also said he believes the documents are fake.

Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software, which wasn’t available when the documents were supposedly written in 1972 and 1973.

Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript – a smaller, raised “th” in “111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron” – as evidence indicating forgery. Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said. “I’m virtually certain these were computer-generated,” Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer’s Microsoft Word software.”

Powerline is doing excellent work. It’s too bad that they’re too gaga over Michelle Malkin to turn their guns on her shoddy work justifying internment as well. But then, they are Republicans and one cannot serously fault them for adhering to Reagan’s 11th Commandment: thou shalt not criticize fellow Republicans.

Dick Morris sees it coming:

How big is Bush’s lead? Don’t believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points.

The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.

I’ve changed parties, I know many people who have changed parties in their lifetime. Even those who don’t change parties, like Zell Miller, are capable of crossing party lines to vote. A static political model is as short-sighted as a static revenue model for predicting the results of tax changes, and is as unlikely to be accurate.

However, a huge victory for Bush does not mean the country has become more conservative, it simply means he has picked up more support from the Left than he has lost from the Right. Which is hardly surprising, given his consistent drift away from conservative and Constitutional principles. I won’t be surprised if the Libertarian and Constitution parties more than double their votes from the 2000 election, even as George Bush crushes the hapless John Kerry.

Umberto Eco is one of my favorite novelists, despite being notoriously difficult to read. He’s also considered very difficult by native Italian speakers, as in addition to his unusually long, complex sentences, he makes frequent use of a verb form that is not used in modern Italian speech. For my birthday, Space Bunny was kind enough to call me on my possibly overoptimistic confidence in my linguistic abilities and obtain a copy of his latest novel, La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana, which I began tackling last week.

It’s rough sledding, as you might expect, but I’m rather pleased with the progress that I’m making so far. I decided not to use a dictionary while I’m reading as I’d be looking up every sixth word otherwise, but to attempt to grok the fullness via context instead. I’m a natural speed reader, so I tend to do a degree of word-skipping anyhow; what’s been a surprising discovery for me is that reading slowly is actually more pleasurable.

Big Chilly discovered this many years ago – he was also a natural speed reader – and actually trained himself to read slowly, in order to better savor the Piers Anthony novels he was devouring at the time. (Relax, Sarah, I’m talking about the Xanth and Adept series.) I don’t think I could bring myself to do that, as I find the utility of reading quickly to outweigh any lost pleasure, but I very much doubt I’ll ever have the facility in Italian. Nor would I want to take the risk, as Big Chilly would like to be able to speed read again, but for some reason, he can’t do it now.

Anyhow, I’m only nine pages in, so it’s entirely possible that I’ll give up in despair at some point, but it’s nice to be forced to stretch the little gray cells in the meantime. My goal is to finish it before the English translation is published and the temptation to cheat becomes overwhelming.

Palooka posts, for the last time:

Notice how Vox is emphasizing a point I made about the nature of World War II warefare to obscure his own weak argument.

This point, typically inaccurate and tangential, weirdly insisted that World War II was bound to be short because of “mobile blitzkrieg-type warfare”. When I noted that it would be rather difficult to mount a blitzkrieg on the ocean, he then stated that submarines and aircraft carriers were the equivalent of blitzkrieg. This not only reveals a complete ignorance of what blitzkrieg was – driving tank columns deep behind enemy lines and encircling the hapless enemy to create a pocket and force surrender – but is possibly the strangest statement with regards to military history and theory I have ever heard. Aircraft carriers are used for hit-and-run raids, anti-submarine warfare and mobile air support. Submarines are used for raiding and blockade/siege purposes. None of this has anything to do with “blitzkrieg” or WWII ending quickly, a point Palooka was making to escape the ominous implications of his argument for the current War on Terror.

He has dismissed espionage and sabotage as irrelevant. Let them spy, let them destroy our industrial capacity! We kick ass!

I did not say they were completely irrelevant. I mathematically proved that no amount of espionage or sabotage that could have conceivably been performed by the 112,000 Japanese-Americans interned could have reduced our production to the point that it would have slowed the war effort, much less crippled it as Malkin suggests. Nor did I state that we should leave our production facilities unguarded. Malkin’s book claims that the internment was militarily necessary due to the potential sabotage, and I was responding specifically to that erroneous claim.

He has presented a false dichotomy. He presents an argument which justfies internment only if internment, taken in isolation, swings the balance of the war. No single decision can do that. Victory is a cumulation of decisions which collectively result in victory. Vox has framed the debate dishonestly, and he has done nothing–absolutely nothing–to respond to this criticism.

Again, Palooka demonstrates that he has serious reading comprehension problems My argument does not justify internment in any way, and I have not presented any false dichotomy but have instead responded, directly and specifically, to the issues that Michelle Malkin raised in her book. It is Malkin that framed the debate, not me. Finally, I had already warned Palooka once; as he has now seen fit to falsely accuse me of dishonesty, he can find somewhere else to post and is henceforth banned.

I wish I had my set with me, but this is an interesting bit from one of the appendices of Churchill’s illuminating History. Note Churchill’s attitude with regards to invasion possibilities is not only heavily sarcastic, but completely focused on the logistics:

My favourite example appears in Appendix C to Volume III, The Grand Alliance, where Churchill responds to General Brooke’s report on an invasion exercise called VICTOR, which presupposed that the Germans landed five divisions on the Norfolk coast and established a beachhead within forty-eight hours. Churchill writes:

“I presume the details of this remarkable feat have been worked out by the Staff concerned. Let me see them. For instance, how many ships and transports carried these five Divisions? How many Armoured vehicles did they comprise? How many motor lorries, how many guns, how much ammunition, how many men, how many tons of stores, how far did they advance in the first forty-eight hours, how many men and vehicles were assumed to have landed in the first twelve hours, what percentage of loss were they debited with? What happened to the transports and store-ships while the first forty-eight hours of fighting were going on? Had they completed emptying their cargoes, or were they still lying in shore off the point protected by superior enemy daylight Fighter formations? How many Fighter airplanes did the enemy have to employ, if so, to cover the landing places?…I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast at the same extreme range of our Fighter protection and assuming that the Germans have naval superiority in the Channel….”

From Slashdot:

Defense Tech reports the U.S. government is proposing to exempt satellite images from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The proposed exemption has already passed the Senate and awaits House/Senate conference committee this month.

I’m sure they’ll have a truckload of arguments prepared about why this information shouldn’t be accessible by the people who supposedly control the government, a concept that is steadily becoming less and less relevant.

But that’s a good thing, I’m sure, since we’re so much safer now as a result.

From Inside the Ring:

Asian military affairs specialist Richard D. Fisher says North Korea’s new long-range missile “poses a significantly increased threat to the United States and Japan.” The missile is described by Mr. Fisher as derived from the Soviet-era SS-N-6 submarine-launched ballistic missile. It was Moscow’s first sub-launched missile.

Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, also said recently that the danger of ship-based missiles is growing. “I believe it’s just a matter of time until the terrorists try to use a … maritime attack against us,” he said. “I believe that attack could come in terms of bringing a ship into port, whether it’s [carrying] high explosives or whether it’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Notes Mr. Fisher: “Should North Korea adopt this strategy, it would have the option of trying to infiltrate and pre-position its missiles in Canada, Central America or even the continental United States. U.S. missile defenses do not currently defend against either launches from the south of or within the contiguous 50 states.”

Clearly the Korean fifth column in this country would be tremendously helpful in infiltrating and pre-positioning these missiles in the continental US. The military necessity is obvious; if only we could get access to Mr. Fisher’s diary we’d have the incontrovertible proof that we need to lock up those treacherous yellow dogs now!

From Inside the Beltway:

“We need to talk about government workers differently,” advises the latest report from the Partnership for Public Service. “Using the word ‘bureaucrat’ has a devastatingly negative impact.”

How so?

“The word ‘bureaucrat’ is used frequently by politicians, the media and others as if it were a neutral descriptor, when in fact it carries very strong editorial freight,” the report states.

My suggestion is that we adopt a policy similar to the Human Society. Give them a week in their office for a private employer to hire them and put them to productive use, and if after a week it’s clear that no one has any use for them, it’s bye-bye bureaucrat.

That splashing sound you hear is Palooka pouring gasoline over himself. He has been stubbornly, and almost randomly, throwing out wild and unsupportable defenses of the internment. His case boils down to his assertion that certain things were unknowable, such as the implications of the delta between the two nation’s productive capacities, the amount of sabotage necessary to have a perceptible effect on the war effort, etc, and therefore it was right to intern people on the basis of their ethnicity in order to save American lives and shorten the war.

And yet, when it’s pointed out that his arguments in defense of internment can just as easily be applied to justify similar internments in “the War on Terror”, he suddenly does a 180, saying: “World War II promised to be concluded–one way or another–within a relatively short historical time frame.”

And why is that? Surely, he can’t be suggesting the 42,000 troops Japan could have landed were going to first wipe out the 260,000+ American troops in California, then march their way across the country to Washington in a relatively short period of time. No, he must be talking about the American defeat of Japan. And why did it promise to be concluded in a short period of time? Because the production delta demanded it, spot raids and sabotage notwithstanding.

Palooka understands this too, for all his unwillingness to publicly admit it. But admit it he now inadvertantly has, unless he wishes to argue for the impossibility of a Hundred Years War, or even a Thirty Years War.

scratch, hiss, FWOOMP