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According to an Associated Press story today Wal-Mart “facing lawsuits for alleged gender bias and unfair treatment of workers, will cut top executives’ bonuses if the company does not meet its diversity goals.” The article says that the pay cuts will be made “if the company does not promote women and minorities in proportion to the number that apply for management positions.” It then quotes company chief executive Lee Scott: “If 50 percent of the people applying for the job of store manager are women, we will work to make sure that 50 percent of the people receiving those jobs are women.”

If I was a lawyer, I’d bring a bias suit against the NBA. Clearly, the number of white men are shockingly underrepresented there, as no team should have more than 13 percent black players. Let’s nick David Stern’s salary if he can’t get some more white boys suited up next season.

This has got to be a parody. I think my favorite bit is the notion that “women have been kept in the dark about this for a reason.” How thoroughly and psychotically self-obssessed do you have to be to believe that the powers-that-be have a particular interest in your various excretionary options, which one would assume to be reasonably self-evident to any creature with more synaptic connections than a rotted stump?

Thanks a lot, Desert Cat.

Nancy Pelosi spoke on Meet The Press: “I made that statement that I did, and I think with great courage, if I might say about myself, because I am worried about the troops on the ground in Iraq or wherever our troops serve.”

The most powerful woman in American politics thinks she’s got great courage criticizing the other party’s foreign policy because she is vaguely worried about the troops, wherever they might happen to be. (It’s too bad Russert didn’t ask her where else she thought they were; that could have been funny.) She probably couldn’t face the obstacle course at boot camp without crying, forget the nasty, irregular guerilla warfare the troops are currently facing in Iraq. Great courage, mm hmmmm….

It’s strange, but women in front of a microphone cannot seem to resist the urge to talk about themselves. I, I, I, I, I. Margaret Thatcher, one of the few public women I admire, was a notable exception to this, as she discussed ideas, not how she felt about ideas.

Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton. The prosecution could easily rest on that evidence alone.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70% of men favored smaller government, but only 48% of women believed the same way. So men are far more likely to view big government as part of the problem, not the solution.

PJ O’Rourke once said: “Advocating the expansion of central government is a crime against humanity!” It’s pretty clear to me that one of the most destructive forces in our society has been women’s suffrage. Women consistently and reliably turn towards government as a solution for perceived problems, which creates more intractable problems, which then is used to justify more government intervention. This process is unlikely to stop until the entire edifice collapses of its own weight.

It’s too bad that the concept of the states as laboratories of democracy has been abandoned, because I’d love to see the difference between two neighboring states, one of which permitted women to vote and the other that did not. It would be particularly interesting to see in which state women would prefer to live. I suspect the answer might surprise a lot of people.

The fact that the Kerry campaign would run these canards reveals an unsettling truth – that in order to win the female vote, Kerry believes that he needs to continually nurture women’s sense of grievance and victimization.

He has no other choice. Feminist women believe that they exist for no other reason than to be aggrieved. “I am a victim, therefore I am” could serve as the motto for the entire movement. I’m not advocating some sort of sharia here – as far as I’m concerned, women can work wherever and wear whatever they want. But allowing them a voice in government and politics is disastrous, if not suicidal, and has led directly to the loss of more American lives in three decades than in every war since the Revolution.

Someone had to say it. I just did.

VDH gets his history wrong: Neoconservatives? Let us be frank. This appellation is no longer a descriptive term of so-called “new conservatives,” those members of the eastern intelligentsia who were rather liberal on some domestic hot-button issues (tolerant of open borders, quiet about abortion, indifferent to gay marriage, etc.), but promoted a proactive neo-Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy (whether in the Balkans in taking out Milosevic or in trying to replace Saddam Hussein with democracy rather than a Shah-like proconsul).

Instead, face the ugly fact: “Neocon” is now a slur for “Jew.” General Zinni (who once boasted that 600 to 2,000 Iraqis were eliminated from the air in his Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign) is now ubiquitous on television hawking his new book, criticizing the war (on Memorial Day, no less), and being praised in the Arab news as he talks about “Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith” and all those who purportedly got us into Iraq.

That’s just bizarre. How does this make sense when Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are usually described as neocons, considering that none of them are Jewish? As for Zinni, he never made any reference to the ethnic or religious backgrounds of those he was criticizing. First Mowbray, now Goldberg and Hanson… National Review is running a serious risk of making itself a laughingstock on this issue.

Neocon is a slur for a fake conservative, Victor.

L writes on Nate’s blog: women who have the same credentials and the same responsibilities as the men in their fields are often paid less than their male colleagues. women are often denied promotions and tenure. women are often denied the opportunity to attend school. women are often subjected to the decisions of the male figures in their lives without ever being given a chance to think or to speak or to express their own opinion.

Ah yes, the whiny meanderings of a self-professed feminist are always amusing. Since they’re all afraid to post here, or even email me anymore, I’m forced to make do with the leavings of others.

I should mention that the above is just a selection of her stream-of-barely-consciousness, but it is nicely representative. As to her complaints: 1) Women are paid less when they work less. 2) So are men. 3) 56 percent of U.S. college students are female, so clearly we need to deny even more women the opportunity to advanced education if we’re going to have gender equity. 4) It’s impossible to deny anyone the chance to think, although Nate’s visitor seems to have passed on her opportunity to do so before writing.

Bah – this is child’s play.

The price of war does not stop being paid when the guns fall silent. This was driven home to me when I bought my first house from an older couple who had lived there for many years. My grandfather, a Marine who’d fought on Guadacanal and Tarawa, recognized the home seller as an Army veteran and asked where he’d served.

In Europe, the man answered, and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. He turned away for a moment, and then, composed again, he apologized and explained that he’d lost his brother in Normandy. This conversation was taking place 53 years later, but it was clear that the pain still lingered.

It is almost impossible for us, sixty years later, to understand the grim realities of D-Day. Yes, we are unfortunate enough to live in what a Chinese sage described as the curse of interesting times, and yet, we do not yet live in a real state of war. Most of us know a few soldiers who are involved in the present conflict – I was relieved to receive an email yesterday from my Italian cousin in Baghdad, telling me that he was fine after the embassy attack – but it is not the vast majority of young men of our acquaintance who are in uniform and in danger as was the case back then.

A few years ago, I took part in a massive simulation of Gold Beach, using the Advanced Squad Leader system. Each player was responsible for a section of the beach; I was commanding three companies of British troops plus 12 Shermans and a few funnies. The experience drove home how a relatively small number of defending German troops were able to inflict terrible casualties on the landing Allies, and it was sobering to see the pile of cardboard casualties grow and realize that each piece represented the lives of ten men.

To the left, I lost an entire company, and only a lucky shot and a wildly aggressive charge by one Sherman commander allowed me to take out the two AT-guns and get the two surviving companies off the beach. It was only a game, and yet, it is true that the valiant action of a single brave man can make all the difference in the world to the rest of the men involved.

In the end, after many hours, the Allies triumphed on the table just as they had many years before on the real beaches. But there was no celebration by the winners, instead we found ourselves standing quietly around the massive array of maps, contemplating those who had fought and died so long ago. Some may think that it is strange and silly, if not downright disrespectful, to view the tragic loss of human life through the lens of a wargame. But, sixty years later, this is the only lens that many of us have.

Soon, all the young men who stormed Normandy will be gone. But as long as there are other young men who are curious about history, who want to know what happened when, where and why, neither they nor their sacrifice will ever be forgotten.

The Paratrooper of Love emailed me a recommendation yesterday: The Gunner Palace, which is a milblog chronicling some of the challenges, frustrations and absurdities of war. It features, among other things, freestyle rap from Baghdad and a Hendrix goes to Iraq version of the Star-Spangled Banner.

The blog makes for fascinating reading: Over the weeks, a rhythm developed: sleep late to avoid the heat. Try to eat an MRE-anything without pork in it. Drink water, lots of water. Smoke fake Marlboros from the Haji stand and wait for something to happen-anything: a patrol. An escort. An OP. Most of my time was spent talking to the younger soldiers. I enjoyed being with them. For such a violent place, there was a lot of laughter-much of it from a very dark strain of humor…. After seeing this war firsthand, I don’t have any easy answers. In fact, I may have no answers. You try to find good in something like this; you try to find a reason. You try to explain death. I asked soldiers what they thought and their answers were simple. After nearly a year, it wasn’t about Iraq, the Iraqis, democracy, Donald Rumsfeld or oil. It was about them. They just wanted to finish the job they were sent to do so they could go home.

Larry writes:Furthermore, if more recently developed theories of oil formation are correct, and oil is not of biological origin, we may have used only a fraction of the total oil that is available.

I’ve never believed that oil was a byproduct of dead dinosaurs or whatever the common understanding is. For one thing, unless there was a secret dinosaur graveyard to which all dinosaurs in a 1,000 mile radius went to die, the non-random placement of oil fields made no sense. I know literally nothing about the subject, but the usual layman’s notion never made any sense to me.

As you know, I had the benefit of a dinner with Cheney some years ago. He was refreshingly honest about his motivations. With your forebearance, I’ll tell you what he told me:

1. The stability of the US economy is critically dependent upon the ready availability and supply of cheap oil.

2. Within ten years the US will be primarily dependent upon foreign suppliers, the majority of whom are muslim arab nations.

3. One of the major sources of oil is Iraq, which controls 11% of the world’s known economically viable reserves.

4. Hostility to the US had resulted in Iraq contracting its oil extraction to European nations, principally France, Russia and Germany.

5. The US response to these contracts was to impose an embargo on these contracts through the mechanism of the UN.

6. A stalemate ensued between these European nations and the US. (At the time of our dinner we were less than a quarter of the way through the stalemate that would cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children who were starved or denied medical treatment by the UN sanctions and a corrupt Iraqi regime for over ten years).

7. At the time of the first Gulf war, Iraq’s capacity to conduct an offensive strike against its neighbours was eliminated. The coalition flew several thousand subsequent bombing runs over Iraq taking out all possible military targets over the ensuing years without the loss of a single plane to ground fire.

8. And yet the Iraqi intention to sell their oil to the Europeans in Euros remained firm.

9. In order to secure US control of supply, it was envisaged that a sequenceo f military conquests was nece ssary. For some time (in 1993) Russia had been attempting to control Afghanistan. The primary purpose was to secure theregion in order to pipe newly discovered Russian oil across Afghanistan to the (Caspian?) sea. If the US could control Afghanistan, it could control the supply of this Russian oil. (Since the invasion of Afghanistan, it has been realised that the Russian oil is of much inferior quality and less economically accessible than was previously thought – hence the loss of interest in this region since).

10. The next cab off the rank was to be Iraq, followed by Syria and eventually Iran.

11. However, the stumbling block for these excursions remained US public opinion. Cheney was frustrated that the average American would never endorse such a substantial and long term military strategy until there was an oil crisis, by which time it would be too late. In the meantime, the Russians and Europeans would have seized the advantage and there was a real risk theUS would end up having to pay Euro for their oil which would be an economic disaster and end the US dominance of global finances.

12. He remained bitterly disappointed in Bush (Senior) who had squandered the opportunity to unseat Hussein in Gulf War I.

I have stated on numerous occasions that I find the notion of war to defend the imperial dollar more credible than the notion of “blood for oil”. While this is likely only one of several factors, I don’t think that it’s an accident that the Arab countries, as well as some Islamic allies such as Indonesia, have chosen this moment to begin bruiting about the gold dinar.