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I join a lot of people, probably indeed the famous Conventional Wisdom, in thinking Dean will win the Democratic nomination. I will just add that the campaign "season" has obviously become much too long. With more and more individual races--mainly primaries--gaining in importance, what matters most is "momentum." It's not so much whether you win a particular race, as whether you did "better than expected." For Kerry to lose New Hampshire, or Gephart Iowa, is to do much worse than expected. Dean has done better than expected in becoming the front runner, and even some early losses need not be fatal.
But all of this seems to have been decided before a single vote is cast. Vice-President Humphrey became the Democratic nominee in 1968 without running in a single primary. Granted, that was unusual even at that time; President Johnson had delayed his decision as to whether to run, and had even had a "stalking horse" in the race. Nevertheless, HHH put together the nomination largely at the famous convention in Chicago, working the phones and shaking hands. (My favourite story: the busy Humphrey looked down from a hotel room at the demonstrations, later to lead to the "Chicago Seven" trial, and asked what the hell was going on. The true answer would have been: you are being defeated by Nixon, thanks to the hippies).
JFK ran in only a few strategic primaries--mostly to prove he could win away from his home base--in 1960.
But I digress. I mostly want to question the idea that Dean cannot possibly win against Bush. I grant that he is going to have problems in the South. There is no indication that he is attracting any black vote to speak of--Zell Miller says this vote can go to Sharpton, and this will cause lingering problems for the party. (I'm linking to The Corner, which links to WSJ--requires registration). Mickey Kaus says Dean is "cluelessly pre-Clinton on race." (Scroll down to "Dealing with race". Dean is also not appealing to southern whites--his sudden religiosity is suspect, and when he refers to southern whites, he does so in a patronizing manner. (William Saletan has fun here and here with the fact that in the Iowa debate, Dean referred to the "milieu" of the South). He is hoping that being basically pro-gun and pro-death penalty will go a long way.
On the other hand, he is kind of an unpredictable, angry guy, and this may go some way toward being different from Gore or Dukakis.
(William Burton: "The Republicans will attempt to paint Dean as a McGovern/Mondale/Dukakis lilly-livered liberal. Oddly enough, Dean's noted irritability will partially inoculate him against this. Stereotypical liberals are mild and apologetic, not irritable and possibly violent (as Matthew Yglesias has observed, it's easy to imagine Dean wanting to blow lots of shit up if need be)."
This can come across as really caring. Obviously his first priority was to build a base of voters for the Democratic primaries--even, to some extent, new voters--and to forestall a Nader campaign, such as the one that harmed Gore in 2000. This, Dean has achieved. I have referred before to Dean's flexibility, and he is now speaking of moving to Bush's right on foreign policy--specifically on homeland security, weapons of mass destruction, and the Saudis. (See summary of article in New York Times magazine, in Slate).
Richard Perle and David Frum are apparently recommending tough action against the Saudis, among others, in order to continue the momentum of the exciting victories for democracy we have already seen. What if Dean is the only presidential candidate to say he is willing to act on this (neo-con) advice?
Update:
Mickey Kaus has been working on "why Dean is so much less promising than Clinton." As Glenn Reynolds says, this is "must-read" stuff. Clinton persuaded the general voter, or the undecided voter, from early in the 1992 race, that he was prepared to seriously disappoint some major "special interests" associated with the Democratic Party. ("End welfare as we know it," cut taxes especially for middle-class families, ensure government benefits flow to those who work, more death penalty, and even "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare"). That is, he wasn't blindly or narrowly partisan. Bush did the same vis-a-vis his Republican identity with talk about compassionate conservativism, "no child left behind," prescription drugs for seniors, and yes, amnesty for illegal aliens. Dean has not managed anything like this yet. In a way it is a race between him and Clark as to which can be flexible enough to come up with a solid policy initiative that is not (quite) blindly Democratic.
Kaus has also suggested, even before last week, that Dean move to the right of Bush not on foreign policy, but on illegal immigration. Now that seems very "ahead of the curve."
Great article in Harper's (January 2004): "War Crime and Punishment," by Guy Lesser.
I tend to see the whole movement toward war crimes trials as one of many interventions of morality into foreign policy. Such interventions are obviously not always a bad thing, but just as obviously they can lead to bad results. Perhaps most importantly, we can obscure our thinking about what is beneficial (what is in our interests) to focus on trying to harm morally bad people, or prevent morally bad actions.
Lesser is much more sympathetic to the war crimes movement. He provides a lot of details that I did not know about developments in the 19th and 20th centuries. A big part of what emerges is that many intellectuals expected the 20th century to be a new golden age of peace and protection of civilians during wars. Instead, it was arguably the most vicious and even nightmarish century, especially for innocent civilians, in human history. There is a very natural desire to "do something" about this, or prevent future incidents that are as bad as the worst episodes we have seen. The best rationale for Nuremberg was two-fold: to ensure justice was done to specific individuals, based on reasonable evidence; and to achieve an international commitment that "never again" would something like the Holocaust happen.
In 1993 there was supposedly planning underway for a permanent criminal court under the auspices of the UN--but planning had been stalled roughly since Nuremberg. In May 1993 the Security Council used its emergency powers to establish an ad hoc tribunal to deal with events in the former Yugoslavia (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia--ICTY). In November 1994 another tribunal was set up to deal with Rwanda, [update] and tribunals have also been set up to deal with East Timor and Sierra Leone. The International Criminal Court (ICC), established by a multinational treaty in 1998, is "a version of the original U.N. plan, although no longer technically under the umbrella of U.N. operations." Of course the U.S. is not among the 92 nations that are parties to this treaty.
Lesser is impressed by the quality of the work that has been done by the Yugoslavia Tribunal, and by the initiative that many individuals have shown in order to make this Tribunal a success. By way of a comparison that is fresh on my mind thanks to an article on Slate, this tribunal may have more successes to show, both in terms of convictions and the creation of a useful body of law, than all U.S. special prosecutors and independent counsels at the federal level since Watergate (which may mean, practically in U.S. history).
"During the ten years the ICTY has been in existence, it has completed, against many less celebrated defendants, a score of trials that are bound to have lasting importance, first in establishing the specific judicial facts of what happened in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2000 but also (and potentially of far greater importance) in establishing exactly what kind of conduct within the context of armed conflict actually constitutes, for example, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and Grave Breaches of the Geneva Convention." There has also been progress in deciding who in the chain of command can be held responsible for specific actions.
On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore the fact that a fair legal procedure, applied to events in a war zone, is very complex and time-consuming. This one Tribunal now has an annual budget of about $125 million a year, and a staff of about 1,300. It is not expected that the Tribunal will end its work before 2012. A reasonable estimate suggests that it will have tried about 100 cases at a total cost of more than $1.5 billion.
Of course Milosevic is a special case, and Lesser spends some time on a few days of Milosevic's trial. It has become clear that Milosevic wants to delay and draw out proceedings as much as possible. For him, it is better to be a martyr to the Serbian cause, fighting the vast forces arrayed against him, than a criminal serving the rest of his life in prison. Officials at the Tribunal still disagree as to the main goal of the proceedings. If they want the fullest possible account of what happened, "strict time limits are a major failing." On the other hand, if they simply want to "get the bad guy," even one conviction will do, and this could probably be done fairly quickly.
Lesser ends by saying he is not sure whether any of these proceedings will actually affect the behaviour of "future Hitlers, Stalins...and Milosevics." He is more confident that law-abiding nations will be changed. On the one hand, leaders may have to think harder about whether to resort to extreme means to achieve apparently worthy goals. On the other hand, international law and human rights may become more acceptable rationales for intervention in other countries. The "argument that they must take action because it is their legal duty to do so will start to sound like a winning one."
Lesser is able to work in one footnote on Saddam. (His long article must have been virtually finished when Saddam was captured). He suggests that it may not be wise to subject Saddam to a full international tribunal-type proceeding. Once again, if there is a desire to consider Saddam's whole career as leader, the proceedings could take years, and would give Saddam a forum to play to his supporters, as Milosevic is doing. On the other hand, the families of victims would presumably want the fullest possible investigation. The notorious gassing of Kurds, for example, happened in the 1980s.
Lesser also has some more pointed observations: "...it is quite easy to imagine that much would be made of active U.S. support of Hussein's regime during the country's conflict with Iran, that the 'legality' of the United States invasion would be vigorously contested...and that every effort possible would be made to play to the region's anti-American audience...."
Hussein might be portrayed as both a "martyr" and as "something of a pawn, turned upon and betrayed by his former ally, the United States."
The United States might even be portrayed, during the period prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, as "an accomplice that supplied and trained Hussein's armed forces while turning a blind eye to ... crimes they were fully aware of and might have done something to prevent."
I would simply add: Many Americans are now suggesting that the main reason for the invasion was to defend human rights. Whether or not this agrees closely with the historical record, it suggests that there might be a new way of thinking about such things. In foreign policy, many Americans would prefer to see themselves as either isolationist, like Bush before 9/11--perhaps not making things better, other than by setting an example, but at least not making them worse--or as fighting for a noble cause. The UN itself was once seen as such a cause. Perhaps international tribunals to deal with war crimes and human rights could be seen that way as well.
Update: South Africa has set a great example for dealing with both regime change and justice for criminals, with their "Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The emphasis on reconciliation means they admit, at least tacitly, that some people who enthusiastically supported the old regime, and perhaps even some specific crimes, can become very useful supporters of the new regime. (For a somewhat less optimistic view of South Africa, see here).
Lesser alludes very briefly to the fact that any international court will eventually have to hand a lot of the hard work of investigation to domestic courts.
In the case of Serbia, they seem to be saddled with a poor constitution, including a stupid rule that a president can only be elected if there is 50% or more voter turnout (see Article 9). This seems to have helped reinforce the idea that the country is unable to have stable government unless they put the old Commie and Serb nationalist crackpots back in charge. In the election last month, Milosevic actually won a seat in parliament.
A great talk by Michael Crichton, delivered last January, on how certain claims by scientists, with no real scientific evidence, have become popular beliefs or superstitions. Crichton focusses particularly on nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and of course, global warming.
(Link via Charles Austin, who I just re-discovered via Andrea Harris's new blog).
Highlights:
Carl Sagan, who more or less emerges as the King of the Liars here (my expression, not Crichton's), was a leader on "nuclear winter."
"According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute."
Fortunately for the cause of popular enlightenment, Sagan undermined his own cause by going too far:
"A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a 'year without a summer,' and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that 'it should affect the war plans.' None of it happened."
Paul Ehrlich, another top liar, responded to criticisms by saying the myth didn't come only from him and a few colleagues; there was a "consensus." Chrichton:
"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."
There are many famous examples where the scientific consensus was wrong, and inhibited progress by a few brave skeptics: the consensus that the fever suffered by women after childbirth was not infectious (wrong); the consensus that pellagra was infectious, not caused by diet (wrong); the consensus (until 1960?) that there was no continental drift (wrong).
"And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy...the list of consensus errors goes on and on."
On second-hand smoke, Crichton says the EPA, instead of spreading the best evidence to the public, has spread statements that amount to "openly fraudulent science." He doesn't mean that second-hand smoke is life-giving, that we should expose pregnant women to it, or it should be part of the regimen at every spa; he simply means that there is no reliable evidence about its effects.
On global warming, Crichton makes it clear he thinks something important may indeed be going on, and it should certainly be studied; yet he seems to have reached the point where he does not trust any of the alleged "heavy hitters."
"Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?"
"Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the modelmakers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd."
Again he gives lots of examples--of how wrong anyone in 1900 would have been in trying to predict much of anything about the year 2000. One old example I always like: many very bright people were probably worried about how enough horses would be raised to serve a growing population, and what the hard-pressed public sector would do about the mounting piles of horseshit (the literal kind). By 1910, these were non-problems.
Crichton seems convinced that in an age of "entrepreneurial" science, there is simply too much incentive for scientists to tell funders (including government) what they want to hear on public policy questions, in order to get more and bigger grants, instead of sticking to a truth that might be boring or unpleasant.
"Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this."
Rousseau indicates in his First Discourse that he has nothing but respect for real scientists such as Newton; but it is difficult to think of anything lower than a scientific popularizer, who gets slightly literate people to repeat buzzwords, and believe pseudo-scientific dogmas. The name "Carl Sagan" reminds us that this is a big part of the role that publicly-supported broadcasting plays in our world. Has any organization been more reliable in repeating the nonsense that Crichton discusses than the CBC? PBS? The BBC?
Of course the private sector lies, too, but their lies are usually transparent by comparison: smoking isn't bad for you, nicotene isn't addictive, people who wear white smocks brush with Crest, and if you drink a certain brand of beer, you'll get the attractive young woman who seems to come with it.
Update: Moira Breen links to an organization called Friends of America's Past. They want to make sure the best evidence is available on the aboriginal peoples of North America. In some cases, recognized "tribes" are allowed to identify certain remains, and certain sites, as "theirs," even where there is evidence to the contrary, and then bury the evidence so that it can never be studied. The most famous example is the "Kennewick Man" case.
The point, of course, is that there may have been several "immigrations" to North America before the best-known European one. In some cases the first nations of today are allowed not only to keep what is clearly theirs; they are allowed to prevent scientific investigations that would uncover, among other things, what is "theirs" and what is not.
The political agenda that might stand in the way of science here is pretty obvious. A certain kind of guilt might cause officials of the U.S. government to capitulate in order to make up for past sins. Today's tribes don't want to admit that there might have been wars, conquests, taking of land by force, and even something that looks a bit like genocide, all before the modern Europeans got here.
I have tended to stay away from speculations about who's in and who's out in the White House. There are a lots of indications that the President makes his own decisions.
Having said that, here is a good discussion of the decades-long struggle between neo-cons and realists within the Republican Party. (Link via Josh Marshall).
The bad news: when the neo-cons convince Republican office-holders that now is the time for action, they have an audience of people who know very little about most of the world, and may be inclined, in the heat of the moment, to take their word for a lot of things. Also: the neo-cons seemed somewhat outside the loop until 9/11. Reagan allowed them to stage Iran-Contra, and that hurt their credibility for a while. Now, however, they are perhaps harder to displace than they have ever been, since they are more or less heroes in the eyes of the fundamentalist Christians and other "hard core" conservatives (many of whom may be "natural" isolationists except on the issue of Israel + Christianity vs. Islam).
The author puts this in a nastier way: "They've acquired a new set of patrons on the populist right--supremely ignorant men like Tom Delay and even (God help us) Rush Limbaugh, men who need a foreign policy world view to go with their crude notions of American supremacy, their loathing of Islam, and their bible-based support for Israel.
"Providing ideological world views to the ignorant is how neocons make their way in the world. And their new customers are the modern center of gravity of the Republican Party. They're the leaders of The Base--that mystical block of true believers the Bush II administration feels it cannot afford to offend in any way."
The better news is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not really neo-cons. (See the same author on the question: Who are the neo-cons?)
As I have said, Bush apparently makes his own decisions. Even in the most intense days after 9/11, "The neocons didn't win every battle--the decision to seek a UN Security Council resolution in support of the invasion being the most glaring example." I have suggested that the long process of UN negotiation, followed by an invasion without any agreement, was somewhat incoherent, and may have sent a confusing signal to Saddam.
This author is convinced the neo-cons are now losing influence at the White House, basically because things in Iraq are...er, not going as well as had been confidently predicted in some quarters.
"Providing ideological world views to the ignorant" seems unduly nasty to a group of highly intelligent people, but there are real questions as to whether they see things straight. They focus on an immediate action which they are convinced is necessary, for reasons that may not be at all convincing to most Americans. They persuade the decision-makers to go ahead, partly with almost unbelievable promises that the whole strategic situation is going to change in America's interests. Then they work with these decision-makers to cook up a spin that voters will buy.
Iraq was one of the few countries many Americans had heard a certain amount about in the last ten years or so; Saddam had been on the receiving end of at least one round of "he's the worst tyrant in the world," along with Khaddafi and Khomeini. So the foundation had been laid. The tricky part was cooking up something on WMDs and a link to 9/11, and then acting brave about the post-conflict re-building of Iraq.
Of course, as I have said before, the re-building may go reasonably well--but this will have to be as a result of luck, not the wisdom or influence of Ahmed Chalabi or anyone else involved in the planning for March 2003.
All of this has taken me back to Iran-Contra. I seem to recall a moment in Ollie North's testimony when he was asked about a specific plane ride to Iran. Did anyone on board actually speak Farsi? Yes, one person. So ... that would mean a lot of trust was put in that person--presumably Albert Hakim, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen who worked on arms sales to Iran for his own profit (and that of his partner General Secord).
No one was ever required to make a full accounting of what happened to the proceeds of these arms sales; very few hostages were freed, contrary to some promises that were made, and relatively little of the proceeds actually went to the Contras in Nicaragua, who were supposedly the intended beneficiaries as far as North and Poindexter were concerned.
I have never been convinced that there was a clear-cut constitutional issue here; Congress can pass laws about foreign policy, but that doesn't mean the President has to follow them. It is the stupidity of Iran-Contra that is so striking. Kissinger, the arch-realist, much hated by many moralistic conservatives, apparently said: they were looking for moderates in the Iran of the ayatollahs; That's like looking for a vegetarian in a tank of piranhas.
Update Jan. 10: Not surprisingly, Ahmed Chalabi was involved in Iran-Contra, as well as the fiasco of a "Bay of Pigs" type operation in Iraq in 1996. He is now front and centre in U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Update Jan. 18: Here's an account of another stupid neo-con plan, this time from the Afghan war in the 1980s. Link via Josh Marshall.
There has been some good discussion of how to treat Saddam Hussein. I gather the U.S. decision now is that he will be turned over to Iraqi authorities for trial unless it is proved that he was directing the insurrection after March 2003. In that case, he may be tried under U.S. law.
George Will has made a case for leaving it to the Iraqis--partly because this will be good for nation-building, and partly in order to avoid the logical and logistical problems of Nuremberg. Basically, there may be convictions based on evidence that would not hold up in our courts; and indeed charges laid against the defeated, even though some of the victors may have done some of the same things. In short, "victors' justice." It always bothers Will that Stalin was well represented at Nuremberg--among the judges, not the accused.
John Keegan has given a rather fuller presentation of the issues that arise.
The British struggled to decide what to do about Napolean. Decision-makers definitely did not want him tried in either Britain or the U.S. Both because of a lack of legal precedents, and because of public opinion, he might not have been convicted of anything.
According to Keegan, it is still difficult to find way to try sovereign heads of state for anything they do in that capacity. The cases of Pinochet, Milosevic, and now perhaps an African leader or two don't exactly establish a real body of law.
However, the ambiguities will not save Saddam: "None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen--and that Saddam unquestionably is--for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country."
Keegan even says that given the ambiguities in World War II, it was a relief when Mussolini was killed by a mob, and Hitler committed suicide.
In Churchill's memoirs of the War, he objects strongly to the lawless killing of Mussolini, and especially of Mussolini's mistress, who was presumably not charged with any crime. But then, Churchill adds, "at least we were spared an Italian Nuremberg."
As I have suggested in my article in "Finest Hour," the Churchill magazine (unfortunately still not on line), Churchill tended to think war crimes trials were a bad idea. People like him, making life and death decisions, should not be treated like criminals when they are more or less pursuing noble goals.
My wife asked for a Hewlett Packard package that was sold in Loblaw's supermarkets here:
This digital camera, along with this photo printer. She took some shots today when we visited our daughter, and printed a couple off this evening. Her comment: "It's a miracle!" So there's a satisfied customer for HP.
My wife and son got this stuff working between the two of them; I haven't done anything with it yet. But I will.
I got the Looney Tunes/Bugs Bunny stuff, as I hoped. The 4-disc set (56 cartoons), not just the 2-disc set! Blockbuster wanted 80 or 90 bucks for it, but my wife got it at Walmart for just over 50.
Isaac Hayes greatest hits. Of course, the "Theme from Shaft"--which no one else has ever performed or recorded successfully. I haven't heard the whole disc yet (my wife keeps re-playing her Christmas CDs), but "Never Can Say Goodbye" is also very good.
My surprise CD is by Michael Buble (Boo-blay). My wife has seen him on at least one TV show, and I have seen a bit of a special about him. He sounds more or less like a young Frank Sinatra, and he loves doing the "old standards"--not just Sinatra's tunes (on this album he does "Summer Wind" and "Come Fly with Me"), but Peggy Lee ("Fever"), etc. (Other tunes: "The Way You Look Tonight," which keeps getting brought back by the movies; "Moondance" (yes, Van Morrison); "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" (Beegees; Al Green did a great version which featured in a chick flick; "Notting Hill?"); "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (Queen; words and music by Freddie Mercury)). So he is stretching, and all that--but he sounds like an old-fashioned "standards" dude.
The strange part of the story is this. There is no radio station that will play him. Those that play "oldies" want the "oldie" artists, beginning with Sinatra--not some young guy who has the sound down. Nobody else wants to play him at all. Yet when he appears on TV (often with a heavily female audience), sings a ballad, kisses a host like Katie Couric, sales of his CDs go through the roof.
Buble was kind of "discovered" by the famous Canadian producer, David Foster, performing in lounges and what not. Presumably he could be huge on cruise ships, and he was fairly contented the way he was. But he and Foster kept having this conversation: how to get him to the next level, where he can at least sell some CDs? They approached another business guy (possibly Humberto Gatica, now listed as co-producer) and he told them flatly he had no interest. He now says Buble is unique: he must get on TV in order to sell, but literally every TV appearance has brought a huge increase in sales.
Do radio people no longer know what side their bread is buttered on?
Update: I've actually had kind of a Michael Buble day. My wife rented the movie "Down on Love," and Buble sings on it twice: once for the opening number, and the second time, you guessed it, for the closing one. The closing number is "For Once in My Life," written by Paul Anka, also on the album I now own. (This song was made famous for me by Stevie Wonder, but according to Google Sinatra did it as well).
For comparison, the movie juxtaposes Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon" with a lovely female version. It sounds like Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 (with Lani Hall singing lead?), but I think the closing credits say it is Astrud Gilberto (better known for working with Antonio (Tom) Jobim and Stan Getz). I guess the obvious thing to say is that Buble lacks something the young Sinatra had; an edge?
As a stocking stuffer, I got a big Annual dog magazine--the kind of thing I can read for hours, with details on different breeds, etc. It struck me again how much the entire dog "business" is driven by breeders selling adorable looking pups. In this case, any breeder who wants to be listed, even in fine print, pays for that; if they want red and bold font, they pay extra; and they can get big display ads for even more money. The magazine carefully says they don't endorse any breeder, or any claims that are made about the health or breeding of puppies.
Breeders make a big deal of saying their dogs are "CKC (Canadian Kennel Club) Registered" (or the equivalent in the States). The magazine says: this is a legal requirement for selling pure-bred pups. If a breeder says there is a choice between an expensive dog with registration, and a cheaper one without, watch out.
But again: CKC registration means very little; there is no system for inspecting kennels, or doing anything to verify any claim that is made by any breeder. (Presumably if they say they are breeding from such and such a champion, this can be checked up to a point; but as to the parents of a specific pup?)
My rant on this would be: this is basically retail--selling animals to a fickle public. A premium has been placed on "cuteness" or photogenic quality for all breeds. (One change in the 19th century was from a great variety of working dogs, many of them quite ugly, to a smaller variety of breeds, many of which still had working qualities, all cute). A Disney movie about dogs literally generates huge demand for a specific breed--although the Beethoven movies, understandably, haven't done much for sales of St. Bernards. Even idiots know it is expensive to feed and house them.
The question: since profits are maximized by making all puppies look as much as possible like some idealized cute picture, do breeders generally tend to do too much in-breeding, reinforcing health problems? Of course the official answer is: only the unscrupulous ones, not the ones who are the salt of the earth, blah blah.
Does anyone really know what goes on? Besides consumer pressure, there is the pressure of the dog shows to ensure that every dog precisely fits a narrow "conformation"--if it doesn't look like that, it can't win, and with no championships you can't charge top dollar for pups, etc.
I picture people out in the country, figuring ways to make money from city people. Breeding dogs is one. The whole exercise of "defining" breeds, establishing the shows, and prettying-up the breeds that were recognized, came about in the 19th century. As I understand it, dog lovers could foresee the possibility of most breeds becoming extinct as the population shifted from rural to urban. At most city people would want smaller house or apartment dogs. So it is a great triumph that there is still so much variety--so many dogs with proven "working" qualities, even if they never get to hunt or herd animals.
But is the corruption of "money from perfect looks, and that means reinforcing health problems" right at the core of the dog business?
Update: I should probably have reminded readers of my personal reason for this rant: our Westie tore a ligament in the summer, and that was a very sad event for me. I had always thought of him as a very sturdy dog. Then the vet who recommended surgery said pure bred dogs probably have smaller and more fragile ligaments than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
One dog book I read (I don't remember which one) said the legs of Dachsunds should be longer--for the sake of the dog's health--and this would be easy to do. Yet breeders don't do it.
Bruce Fogle, in his great breed book, emphasizes that there have been breeding problems in the past: bulldogs with heads so large, many had to be born by Caesarean section, and features such as "short noses, excessive facial folds" and "short, crooked legs." He concludes "Breeding dogs to comply with breed standards that lead to disease or discomfort is inhumane, and such standards should be modified. Today, many breeders are highly knowledgable in the genetics of breeding, and work to reduce the prevalence of known disorders through selective breeding of specimens that do not carry inherited diseases." I wonder if this really covers the many possible issues here.
Anyway, our dog is fine now--acting like a puppy again.
Update: Stephen Budiansky, while not wanting to let dog owners off the hook for improper training, delicately suggests breeders may be breeding for more aggressiveness, of a kind that can be a problem for owners, simply so that dogs will "perform" at dog shows. (See p. 206, for example).
Similarly, websites on dog vision suggest,again very diplomatically or circumspectly, that many dogs have poor eye sight of a kind that goes beyond having sight that is different from human eye sight, i.e. works better at dawn and dusk. This is likely to be an inherited problem. What is more, some breeds are worse off than others. Presumably breeders do not deliberately breed for poor eye sight (although the floppy ears on hounds may have been bred into dogs to keep them from being distracted by sounds); but the point would be that they don't really care whether dogs see well or not, and they keep going back to the same gene pool.
We are used to a quiet Christmas; most of our relatives are out West.
We let our 13-year old son open his "main" gift: PS 2. I gather he is enjoying it. We'll all open stockings and other stuff tomorrow.
This is the only time of year I find myself wanting more church in my life. For a few years I took our son to a carol-singing service in an old Anglican church on Christmas Eve. He stopped wanting to go, and I didn't want to go without him.
So I just played a few carols for my own enjoyment on an electronic keyboard we have.
I guess I'm the classic example of someone who grew up Protestant, church on Sunday, with both the Christmas and Easter seasons especially important; and now, very little church at all.
I'm struck, like so many other people, that concerts at public school are either secular or "open to diversity," with old-fashioned Christianity the one thing for which there seems to be no room. I'd like to at least hear the old carols once a year.
Of course there are now hundreds of secular or pop "Xmas songs," and the lite FM stations play them for about six weeks. That drives me up the wall, and I get sick of songs even if I once thought they were OK.
Besides the old carols, I like slightly bluesy or melancholy Christmas music. I like the music from "Charlie Brown Christmas," although I wish there were more of it. I like Wynton Marsalis' "We Three Kings."
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Since early November, under the terms of an agreement struck with Britain, France, and Russia, Iran has been turning over evidence of its nuclear weapons program to UN inspectors. (See an earlier post with a paragraph on how the U.S. would have preferred to take a more aggressive approach to Iran, but Putin persuaded Bush to accept this multilateral deal).
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that some of this information suggests Pakistan has been a major supplier to Iran. In response to this information coming to light, the Pakistan government of Musharraf has hastened to assure the world--especially, no doubt, the U.S.--that it has not officially been supplying weapons to Iran. It must be rogue scientists who have done so.
Defenders of President Bush will see more dominoes falling in favour of the U.S. and the West. In fact, it seems difficult to tell exactly how co-operative either Iran or Pakistan are being, or can be expected to be.
On Iran see Jim Hoagland here.
On Pakistan, a number of articles suggest that Musharraf truly wants to help the U.S., but he has a radical fringe to deal with even in his own military and security service. Thus he seems to cooperate, both on anti-Taliban measures in the mountains and on questions such as dispersing weapons, only after the fact, and grudgingly. Some of this was touched on in an earlier post.
Christopher Hitchens has jumped on these developments on Slate with great gusto. He says the liberation of Iraq has greatly increased the likelihood that the regimes in Libya and Iran will both be gone soon. At the same time, however, he suggests that Pakistan has hardly been dealt with at all.
"The greatest act of public diplomacy that the Bush team could now perform would be a high-level initiative to detoxify and denuclearize the Kashmir question. This is a far more dangerous and urgent question than Palestine. (Indeed, al-Qaida probably originates more from the Kashmiri swamp than it does from the Middle Eastern one.)"
So Bush has been expending a great deal of effort on relatively minor theatres of action? Well, that's probably not what Hitchens means, and I shouldn't put words in his mouth.
The other thing Hitchens wants Bush to do is challenge Israel on its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
"For a start, where was Israel thinking of using such devices and under what circumstances? In the war against jihad, Israeli nuclear weapons are even more useless than our own. Precision-guided munitions, which take out the tyrant and spare the population, are the wave of the future."
Update: Josh Marshall points out: "New information from North Korea and particularly from Iran is starting to show us that, in essence, there really is no global weapons proliferation problem so much as there's a Pakistan problem."
So maybe international terrorists come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan; and nukes from Pakistan? Er...not from the Axis of Evil, in either case?
Brian Doherty, on the Hit and Run blog, links to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, and says: "Who to Conquer Next? Pakistan?....It's a big, expensive, bloody world to subdue, and a rigorous application of Bush administration foreign policy wisdom could see the red, white, and blue mixing it up in 2004 from Persia to Peshawar to Pyongyang." And those are only some of the P's!
The Monitor article on Pakistan is here.
I used to summarize Chapter 18 of Machiavelli's Prince by saying: forgiveness is always easier to get than permission.
President Bush seems to be demonstrating this fact in spades.
An intelligent case can be made that he has made war on Saddam's regime, not as part of a war on international terrorism, but as an alternaive to it. Saddam was virtually no threat even to his immediate neighbours. The proportion of Iraq's population that could be threatened by him was probably steadily diminishing. It's most unlikely he had anything to do with 9/11. Yet the Coalition victory over Saddam is deeply satisfying to a lot of people, as the celebration over the capture of Saddam indicates.
This is not necessarily merely a sleight of hand, or a successful attempt to give Bush more of a tough guy image. The larger argument was always that something had to be done about the whole Middle East. The trend was too much toward more terrorism, rather than less. In many cases, it was clear that the active collaboration and support from governments was aiding terrorism. I think part of the point of saying "international terrorism" after 9/11 was that merely national or local terrorism might be acceptable to the U.S. The "usual" terrorism against Israel had almost become background noise for many Americans. Bush and other Republicans had argued against "humanitarian intervention," such as the NATO attacks on Bosnia and Kosovo, during the Clinton years. "International terrorism" is a bigger enemy, requiring bigger and more dramatic interventions and solutions.
If Saddam was weak, but taking him out will do some good on the international front, so much the better. The cost/benefit analysis works. Khaddafi's decision to give up all WMDs is one sign that this is occurring.
As Colby Cosh points out, one could argue that Khaddafi has been working toward international respectability for a long time; but the timing of his new decision seems to be related to the fall of Saddam. (The more subtle point is that Bush kept up U.S. sanctions beyond the ending of the UN sanctions; the New York Times, no less, now says Bush was right; link via Instapundit). (Update: see also today's NYT on the sequence of events).
(On signs that Khaddafi became more serious about laying down his arms about the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see here).
Afghanistan is still a mess, but is anybody really arguing that it was better off under the Taliban? There is an argument that opium production is back up again, but some observers said before the fall of the Taliban that they did not punish opium production, they simply punished trade that they didn't control.
(Update on Afghanistan: here is a pretty hopeful account, emphasizing the views of Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; here is an article which reaches the same basic conclusion--that bin Laden will be caught--but gives more sense of the difficulties.)
For some time to come, Iraq may have a number of problems that didn't exist in the same way or degree under Saddam. Maybe this is an aspect of freedom? In any case, despite the talk of democracy, maybe noone will blame the U.S. if things remain unsettled, as long as there is a relatively stable regime which is more respectful of human rights than Saddam was.
In a way, Bush's best argument, both in the upcoming election and internationally, is that he did something rather than nothing. What exactly would his opponents have done? If they think Bush made the wrong war, would they actually have supported a full-scale pursuit of Osama bin Laden into the mountains straddling the Afghan/Pakistan border, risking more casualties and other costs, and a confrontation with the government of Pakistan?
(Update: General Clark, when he was acting as part of a multilateral NATO mission, failed to capture two Serbian war criminals; but that didn't prevent him from having an apparently enjoyable social visit with one of them.)
Bush's defenders keep saying: the opponents, including Dean, would actually have done nothing at all. This is a difficult charge for many of them to answer. The true "anti-war" movement doesn't seem very big, but it seems to go right back to Cold War days. At their worst, its members argue more or less seriously that it is better to have a stable regime that protects the poor, or provides a minimum standard of living for the survivors of various round-ups and killings, than to have a regime of individual rights with a variety of inequalities. This is surely something Americans in general don't accept. Insofar as they believe foreign policy should work toward "ideals," and not simply protect "self-interest," they think it should be for democracy and individual rights.
As far as I know, Baghdad today has a university that is very good, if not excellent. Havana does not.
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