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“The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,” Mohammed said. “I saw it myself.”

I still want us to bring our troops and our civilians home. We don’t belong in Iraq, and I don’t care if it descends into another Mideast hellhole, I only care that it is not allowed to pose a serious threat to the US. But since the Iraqis will no doubt mistake a withdrawal for some kind of weakness it will probably be necessary to turn places like Fallujah into large sheets of glass. That should make the point clear.

This is why the decision to occupy Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, pissed me off. I don’t see a good outcome for us there. Better to take the win and quit while your enemies are dead and you’re manifestly ahead than to hold on too long and end up leaving looking like a loser. Every gambler at Vegas and every entrepeneur interested in obtaining investment knows that you have to have an exit strategy before you go in, and I don’t believe that the Bush administration ever had one. Remember that the jihad considered Afghanistan a win, and the Soviets were there beating the hell out of them for twenty years. I suspect that the only way we’ll ever have peace with the Middle East is to take out the leaders every so often and allow them to keep busy fighting each other for supremacy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear reactor is literally weeks away from going online; I wonder who will hit it first?

UPDATE: Jamie writes on his blog: The general population has seen enough random terror around the world to know there is no defensive strategy in the war against islamofascism – we go on the offensive in the lands where the genesis of those ideas are and defeat them, or they will come get us. I for one, do not want to see the Neville Chamberlain strategy employed, and then be riding on the new Ghan railway in five years and have bombs go off left right and centre on the bastard.

This is surely true. But we’re not on the offensive in Iraq. We haven’t been for almost a year now. This is the equivalent of taking Niedersachsen during the WWII and parking there. Play offense or play defense, but either would be better than this half-assed war-on-method that piles bad tactics on top of bad strategy. It severely annoys me to hear how George Bush is a great war leader because he has this “secret strategy” that he can’t share with the people he’s supposedly leading:

“What’s the game plan, coach?”

“Can’t tell you, son But trust me, it’s a great one.”

“Well, can you at least tell me who we’re playing?”

“I can tell you who we’re not playing. We’re not playing against the team in the red jerseys. No, we’re only playing against those who try to tackle us.”

“But the guys in the red jerseys ARE trying to tackle us!”

“Shhh! Keep your voice down! The ref might hear you!”

The fact that the US military successfully destroyed a third-rate military dictatorship does not make George Bush a great wartime President. We’re supposed to be able to defeat third-rate military dictatorships. The jury is still out on the actual war, and at this point, there are more questions than answers. Remember, it took all of five years, 1939-1944, for Hitler to wax and wane. We’re already halfway there.

The new liberal radio network Air America made a last-minute landing in the Twin Cities Tuesday with the news that WMNN Radio (1330 AM) will carry satirist Al Franken’s new show when it makes its national debut today.

I’ve lived in Minnesota for years and I’ve never even heard of WMNN. But that’s good news… when someone figures out Franken’s studio number, send it along and I’ll post it here. And then, we can start calling….

Let’s get it on!

Kyle Williams sent the following note: Just wanted to alert you to this thread at Free Republic. Inspired by your column, posters are arguing with each other through poems.

Yes, I am the poetical inspiration of the nation. And somewhere, the White Buffalo just blew coffee out his nose.

From Drudge: CNN has lost more than half its audience from a year ago, according to NIELSEN! In 24-Hour Time Period for the first quarter of 2004, FOX NEWS CHANNEL averaged 824,000 viewers, down 36% vs. a year ago, which saw heightened viewership due to the Iraqi War. CNN plummeted 52%, averaging 458,000 viewers, while MSNBC dropped 49% averaging 234,000 viewers.

In PrimeTime, FOX NEWS decreased 36% from its 2003 viewership, averaging 1,394,000 people. CNN plunged 48% with 806,000 viewers and MSNBC fell 50% with 333,000 viewers. Eleven out of the top 12 cable news shows so far in 2004 appeared on FOX NEWS. Only one of CNN’s shows, Larry King Live, made the list at number four with 1,302,000 viewers.

I was saying this for years. Supply and demand. Supply and demand. There’s no real need for CNN anymore. Divide your 50 percent of the American audience among the ABCNNBCBS cabal, not to mention NPR, and it’s not exactly a surprise that the only station offering anything different to the other 50 percent is going to do very well. If the country is split 50/50 and the media is split 90/10, then that 50/10 media is going to clean up. As Fox is doing.

Would “fiat visus” be “let there be sight” in the sense of seeing, to be able to see?

From the Washington Times: Al Franken and a host of garrulous progressives ease onto the airwaves tomorrow morning on America Left, broadcasting live from 6 a.m. to midnight on weekdays via XM Satellite Radio and three AM radio stations — in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Mr. Franken will debut at noon with “The O’Franken Factor,” a three-hour daily show airing opposite conservative host Rush Limbaugh, who has 20 million listeners. Mr. Franken once wrote a book titled “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and has named his show as a parody of “The O’Reilly Factor,” hosted by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

Three markets and he can’t even find a creative title for his show. Yeah, he’s doomed.

Here’s an interesting and insightful article by a former school nerd. He’s no homeschool advocate, although he, too, sees schools as prisons, even if he considers them to be necessary in post-industrial society in order for adults to get things done. Here’s the section I found most interesting:

Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age. This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn’t help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen year old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

This certainly appears to be true of the Middle East, particularly the Palestinian refugee camps, where most of the adults aren’t permitted to work. I have on more than one occasion been struck by strange way that thirty-something Palestinian men often appear to behave like teenagers – I always thought they were acting up for the cameras, but now I’m not so sure.

Another interesting point he makes is the inevitability of the school culture’s cruelty, as it is a hierarchy of popularity, not skill, which he compares to court intrigue: Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It’s kill or be killed. This is the sort of society that gets created by default in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn’t realize at the time, and in fact didn’t realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

From Malaysia: Police have arrested 14 Fifth Formers to help investigations into the death of Mohd Farid Ibrahim (left) of Sekolah Menengah Agama Dato Klana Petra Maamor in Ampangan. Farid, 16, of Taman Desa Anggerik, Senawang, was found sprawled in a toilet of the school about 4pm, bleeding profusely from head injuries. A school warden took him to the Seremban Hospital, where he died about 30 minutes after admission. A school clerk lodged a police report last night, stating that Farid had fallen in the toilet, but police found bruises on his head, right ear and abdomen…. Farid’s uncle, Mohd Marzuki Ishak, 52, said his nephew had complained of constant ragging and bullying at the school since enrolling there a month ago, and had wanted to be transferred to another school.

The evils of public school aren’t caused by bad teachers or inept principals, they are endemic and inherent to the very nature of the classroom. They aren’t even necessarily limited to the public schools per se, although it is there that they see their fullest flowering. The end results of same-age classroom education become disturbingly similar over time, across racial, class and linguistic boundaries. This Malaysian beating is just another anecdote, of course, but you’d be surprised at how the debates over the dismal state of education in England and Switzerland, to give two examples, sound almost exactly like the debates in the USA.

From the Star Tribune: Family members and friends from Minnesota walked through woods and marshes and along lakeshores Monday as a massive search intensified for a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin who grew up in Rockford.

I was on a plane a month ago with a friend of Dru Sjodin’s family. And now, we’re on to the next disappearance of a pretty girl and the ritual gathering of search parties. Instead of a cell phone, why not consider buying your daughter a compact .38? Wouldn’t you rather call a defense lawyer instead of Missing Persons?

The editor writes: Conservatives, it seems to me, only forestall the inevitable slide into tyranny. I don’t want to forestall it. I want to prevent it. I want to reverse that slide. I want to restore the dream that was America.

Professor Friedrich von Hayek, author of “The Road to Serfdom,” is a hero to many conservatives. Yet, he, too, rejected the label – not only for him, but for his mentor, professor Ludwig von Mises, as well. “I cannot help smiling when I hear professor Mises described as a conservative,” he wrote. “Indeed, in this country and at this time, his views may appeal to people of conservative minds. But when he began advocating them, there was no conservative group which he could support. There couldn’t have been anything more revolutionary, more radical, than his appeal for reliance on freedom. To me, professor Mises is and remains, above all, a great radical, an intelligent and rational radical but, nonetheless, a radical on the right lines.”

I agree. That’s what I want to be. Was George Washington a conservative? No. He was a revolutionary. He is known throughout the world – or was when people appreciated such concepts – as the “father of freedom.”

That’s what I want to be too. A radical of the right. It’s why I won’t vote for George Delano, who isn’t even a conservative anyhow, but a moderate liberal. It’s why I left the Republican party, which doesn’t even bother to try forestalling the slide into tyranny anymore. I don’t care that Christian Libertarians, or Constitutionals or the Southern Party aren’t going to win the election this year. We have two choices: stick with something that we already know doesn’t and won’t work, or move out in a new direction. I choose the latter.