lloydtown 

Raptors: Another Candidate for Best Game

129-103 over the Knicks (now 13-22), ending a Knicks 6-game winning streak. Most points ever in a game for the Raptors. The Raptors are now 7 and 2 over the past 9 games, 13-24 overall. Of the two losses, one was against New Jersey, with Vince Carter scoring 42. Not an ordinary day at the office.

Are they 7 wins out of the past 9, or 6 out of the past 10? 4-1 so far at home in January.

"It is probably the most complete game we have played this season," Bosh said. "We played great defense, outrebounded them, had more assists than they did and shot a better field goal percentage."

Toronto was scintillating on the offensive end, shooting a gaudy 59 percent for the game. The unselfish Raptors dished out 29 assists while committing just 11 turnovers.

The Canadian Election

Polls show the Conservatives in the lead.

As much as anything, Prime Minister Paul Martin looks and acts old and pathetic--moreso than Chretien ever did. He's only five years younger than Chretien.

A fake blog in the Toronto Star--a pro-Liberal paper--has Martin constantly saying "I'm so tired. I need a nap. I wonder when I'll get some down time. Stephen Harper looks so young and energetic."

Ideas? Perhaps. Martin and his team seem to think people were scared of Harper before, so they will be again. Low taxes, tough on crime and social issues: that's U.S. politics, which doesn't belong here. "Not our values."

Except: Harper is proposing very non-dramatic tax cuts; lots of people have an appetite for tough crime measures in the wake of the shootings in Toronto; and Harper isn't all that far to the right on social issues.

One writer in the Star or Globe (both require registration, the Globe charges) points out that Martin has had plenty of opportunities to move to the left on social issues before this campaign, but he chose not to. Like Chretien before him, he allowed for free votes on gay marriage. Many Liberals voted nay, and it was only the votes of the NDP and Bloc that allowed it to pass. Now, when Harper speaks of a free vote, this proves he hates gays, whereas Martin loves them? Martin has to save the Constitution by eliminating the "notwithstanding" clause at the federal level?

Harper has said repeatedly he won't campaign for the pro-life cause, and he won't commit to doing what pro-lifers want if he is elected. He has said this in Reform and Conservative gatherings where it probably took some guts to say it--especially if you were ambitious. What has Martin done?

Harper wants to re-consider Kyoto and some recent $5 billion deal for First Nations. So do a lot of other people.

Locally, Belinda Stronach may lose to Lois Brown of the Tories. Belinda won hard-fought race (heavily financed on her part) for the Tory nomination against Lois in 2004; this is a real grudge match.

Irving Layton R.I.P.

I haven't read much Canadian literature for years, but I read quite a bit, including poetry, in high school and undergraduate days.

From Layton, "The Bull Calf":

Below the hill's crest
the river snuffled on the improvised beach.
We dug a deep pit and threw the dead calf into it.
It made a wet sound, a sepulchral gurgle,
as the warm sides bulged and flattened.
Settled, the bull calf lay as if asleep,
one foreleg over the other,
bereft of pride and so beautiful now,
without movement, perfectly still in the cool pit,
I turned away and wept.

At least part of the message here seems to be: "See, this is what happens to guys like me." Layton believed completely in the persona of the poet, larger than life, angry and passionate, breaking many rules (although probably trying to spend most nights in bed with a woman, rather than in prison). Yet of course he largely lived a bourgeois life, stayed free from disease and out of prison, and lived to a ripe old age (probably too old, given the Alzheimer's).

In the life of Nelson I just read, the author (Andrew Lambert) discusses the treatment of Nelson by Byron, among other authors. His conclusion: "In truth Nelson was the original Romantic hero and Byron the imitator: after all, what glory is there in the poet's art?"

This is a harsh thing to say to a lot of professors who like to think they are the most dashing thing going. It's especially hard on a Canadian poet. Er, no armed forces to speak of? No wars? Sorry.

No doubt in the 50s it seemed extremely daring for a teacher to bed young women. It was transgressive--parents would be furious if they found out, and members of the clergy might get involved. Holy of holies--there was a real risk of pregnancy? And just by being in the thick of things, you kept on proving that you still had it.

But with the sixties, it apparently became a lot easier to just ask a young woman, and she was quite likely to say yes. No fuss or muss. The changeover happened, as Philip Larkin wrote, in an "annus mirabilis." But if almost every adult male is scoring, especially if he has some income/has published/has manners or what not, then how special is Layton, Larkin or Byron?

Today a member of Canada's junior hockey team, which just won the world championship, is quoted as saying "chicks like a guy with a medal; they like a guy with a tooth missing and some scars." Well, Layton would probably get into fights in bars.

I've always had a soft spot for this poem, which I guess was classed as a children's poem. I probably don't have it exactly right:

A spider danced a cozy jig
Upon a frail trapeze
And in a far-off clover field
An ant was heard to sneeze.

And kings that day were wise and just
And stones began to bleed
A dead man rose to tell a tale
A bigot changed his creed.

The stable boy forgot his pride
The queen confessed an itch
And lo, more wonderful than all
The poor man blessed the rich.

Mark Steyn's Slightly Weird Case for War

Steyn says early on in this piece that there is not really a "war on terror" underway.

Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror."

Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?

Not good.

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.

Munich: Did the Israelis Kill the Wrong Guys?

I haven't seen the Spielberg movie, but it has obviously been caught up in the debate about the Iraq war. Spielberg has altered his sources to suggest that if the West responds to terrorism with force, as opposed to laws, the result will be more terrorism rather than less. Critics say this amounts to the Chamberlain-like fallacy that it is possible and desirable to negotiate with terrorists and other such creatures.

There has been virtually no discussion of one significant question: in responding to the attack at the Munich Olympics, did the Israelis kill the wrong people? Instead of arguing about morality, as fascinating as that is, we could be considering whether this way-cool vigilante operation was plain stupid.

MIchael Young has written on Hit and Run and elsewhere (here and here) about the memoirs of a Palestinian named Abu Daoud. One claim by Daoud received a bit of attention a few years ago, namely that Abu Mazen/Mahmoud Abbas, who signed the Oslo Accord on behalf of the Palestinians and later became Prime Minister, now President of the Palestinian Authority, was the main bankroller of the Munich operation.

The other major claim by Dauod is more amazing: the Israelis went after a lesser Black September organization, that never amounted to much of anything, and neglected the real Black September organization that had actually carried out the Munich attack.

[blockquote]In February of that year [1973], Abu Daoud was arrested in Amman and held for several months. During this period he endured torture and a death sentence, later reversed by King Hussein on the advice of the head of the Jordanian intelligence services, Abdel Rasoul Kilani. The Jordanians forced Abu Daoud to admit to a version of the Munich operation that, paradoxically, absolved him of responsibility while blaming others. This had the dual effect of discrediting Abu Daoud among Palestinians and sending the Israelis in the direction of men who had not participated in the hostage takeover. Indeed, in April 1973 Ehud Barak--now [in 2000] Israel's prime minister--led a commando team to Beirut to murder a trio of Palestinian officials, supposedly to avenge Munich. Not one of them, Abu Daoud maintains, had been involved in the Olympics affair.[/blockquote]

It's more than possible that the Israelis came to realize that they had killed the wrong guys. This may have contributed to their conclusion that torture doesn't work. You can probably make a torture victim say something the torturers want to hear. You can probably make him sign a false statement incriminating others--or even a false confession, such as John McCain signed under torture in Vietnam. But getting them to tell the truth? Now that is far more tricky.

Did the NY Times Hurt National Security?

Atrios has been very reasonably asking for one, just one reason to think the Times, in revealing Bush's warrantless searches on Americans, told terrorists anything they didn't already know.

Near total silence from Bush defenders, some of whom are calling "treason" on the Times. At a minimum they are saying nyah, nyah, just like the Plame imbroglio.

Orin Kerr has made one fairly sober attemptat answering Atrios's question (although he doesn't mention Atrios).

The more people abroad know that the NSA can easily watch their communications routed through the U.S., the less people will be willing to route their communications through the U.S. Cf. Bruce Hayden’s comment. No doubt it was a long-term priority of the NSA to ensure that lots of international communications traffic was routed through the U.S., where the NSA could have much better access to it. Indeed, Risen’s book more or less says this. The disclosure of the program presumably helps frustrate that objective.

The thing is, through no fault of Orin Kerr, this doesn’t touch on the controversial part of the program. It only explains why we’d keep secret the fact that we were monitoring calls that were routed through the US, but both placed by and received by people outside the US. As Kerr notes, these non-domestic wiretaps are not prohibited by FISA. If the program simply took advantage of foreigner-to-foreigner communications that happened to route through the country, there would be no criminal infraction, and probably no leak to discuss.

Rather, the controversy is about warrantless domestic wiretaps, which are obviously routed through the United States. If there’s a legitimate national security interest in keeping those wiretaps secret, I’m not aware of it.

Endless War?

I guess the clearest statement of the Bushies' view is: the President has practically limitless power during wartime--and it's always, or almost always, wartime. Unless, of course (they think wistfully), we can somehow escape to Mars or somewhere in outer space, and leave the bad people behind. Then Americans can enjoy a full complement of civil liberties again. On "wartime" see David Rivkin in Q2 here (pdf). (Link via Matt Welch, Hit and Run). Also: Kevin Drum here, and Drum praising Jonah Goldberg for saying emergency powers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 are one thing; but when hostilities go on for years, the President should learn to do what he wants to do in a lawful way.

On escaping to the Moon or Mars, see the erstwhile sober, thoughtful Jim Pinkerton, with comments from Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds.

Perhaps our hopes for constitutional government don't depend entirely on outer space. We'll make more or less endless war for a long time, but this will actually have a somewhat utopian goal of establishing democracy, and thus (I guess) endless peace, all over the world. Not endless war, but more or less endless war until there is endless peace. Again, this is somehow adopting Trotsky (Hitchens) to the Republican Party of no books, please, we just have to be resolute.

Raptors: Best Game Ever?

4th straight win. 121-97 over Orlando Magic.

Chris Bosh, in foul trouble early, played only about 15 minutes: 10 points, 1 rebound.
High scorer was Charlie Villanueva, who scored only two in the previous game, but made rookie of the month for December. This time: 24 points (14 for 17, counting all kinds of shots), only 1 rebound.

Mike James: 17 points, 2 rebounds. Mo Peterson: 15 and 7. Matt Bonner: 13 points, 4 rebounds. Jalen Rose: 11 and 2. Derrick Martin: 10 and 2.

Every Raptor who played, scored--Alvin Williams making one basket.

The team shot a franchise best 63%.

Jameer Nelson of the Magic scored 31, but no other player on the team scored more than 12.

Raptors: 7-7 for December

99-97 over Indiana on Dec. 30.

Charlie Villanueva: 25 points, 10 rebounds (his fourth double-double in his rookie season). Chris Bosh: 22, 12. Mike James: 19, 5. Mo Peterson: 16, 4.

The Raptors trailed 75-61 midway through the third quarter, and remarkably, came back.

Bosh is now #17 in the NBA for points per game (22.2); Vince Carter is #11 at 24.7. James is #58; Peterson #76, Villanueva #87.

In rebounds: Bosh is #13 at 9.5.

What Will Iraq Veterans Be Like?

Using a gift certificate, I bought a magazine I've never read before: V Life. Evan Wright has a piece on U.S. soldiers in Iraq called "Dazed and Confused." Since the magazine focuses to a great extent on Hollywood, the main focus is on how soldiers see their experiences in terms of movies, TV, and videogames. (They are probably better prepared for many violent explosions and other incidents than soldiers in Vietnam were). In turn, it is possible to speculate on how the present Gulf War will be depicted in movies.

The most interesting part of the article is an attempt to capture what the soldiers are actually like. There are only a few points of overlap with the cliches of either the left or the right.

There is the upwardly mobile, somewhat disproportionately African-American military, where well-motivated young people from poor or lower-middle-class backgrounds learn cutting-edge technical skills that will give them a leg up in the civilian world. There is the progressive military, where women blaze new trails to leadership positions and perform tasks like piloting jets and helicopters into combat. There are National Guard units whose members tend to be older, have families, some college education and a level of maturity that sadly does not always compensate for their lack of solid training and equipment. As the public glimpsed in the Abu Ghraib scandal, there is also the "Jerry Springer Show" side of the military, comprising America's socioeconomic losers, whose prospects seem dim wherever they end up. These elements of the military have become familiar through media coverage and often play into expectations people have of the armed forces.

If one side of the military resists outside scrutiny, it's the combat infantry units....Many are teenagers led by officers who themselves are not 25. No women are permitted to serve in ground combat, and, based on what I saw in the Army and the Marines, these units are more white and Latino than other areas of the military.

Becoming an infantryman offers few if any job skills that translate into the civilian world. Few are motivated by promises of earning money for college. More than you would expect are middle-class suburban kids who joined to escape boredom. Some are former gangbangers....

Even those who are poorly educated tend to be smart....In their irreverence and humor, which I found never flags in even the most dire situations, they seem to possess a sort of "Jackass" quality. But unlike their goofball TV counterparts, they are highly trained, surprisingly professional and, in accordance with U.S. military doctrine, vicious killers when necessary.

....While recruitment is down in most branches of the military, a hard core of them continues to join and to re-up for second, third, even fourth combat tours.

As I came to know them, I found that many feel disenfranchised by pop culture in similar ways to punk rockers a generation ago. They might be products of that culture, but their attitudes are like those of chain smokers who hate Big Tobacco....Ironically, many possess a contempt for American materialism almost identical to that which I previously encountered while reporting on radical anarchist environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. Both groups (about the same age) seem motivated by a potent mix of alienation and idealism, and in different ways embrace hardship, asceticism and self-sacrifice....

....It might also be that Hollywood doesn't have the stomach for this war.