Credit Where Credit is Due...

And if this is true, I'm going to have to change my opinion on the usefulness of the French as anti-terror allies. Maybe Charles Martel isn't rolling in his grave after all.

But if it is true, why is it not reported in the leftist press? If the French are Gitmo+1, surely that's a provocation to further bloodshed, and even if it isn't, don't the terrorists win if we in the West become like them?

Adeimantus nails it again:

One of the subsidiary paradoxes of relativism is that each of its proponents considers himself an intellectual superior.

Read the whole thing.

A Few Changes

One of the things I hoped to do with this blog was steer away from the usual back-and-forth, minutaie-reporting. This I freely admit to being unsuccessful in doing, as much out of habit as anything else. Still, I'd like to change that, and so have set aside a seperate space for the numbered works, "The Essayist" series. Not all of them are as good as I'd like for them to be, but they're all where I'm aiming. So if you missed them, enjoy, and suggestions are welcome.

Fixed the link to the Belmont Club, too.

See!

Miracles do happen.

What does Africa Need?

One of the reasons I switched from one political point of view to another in my late teens to early 20's was the realization that humans were meant to make their own way in the world, not to depend on handouts from an all-powerful state. With that in mind, read this piece on Aid to Africa and see if you can disagree.

This is a theorem that has been spoken many times (for example, here), but it does not, of itself, produce a solution. So, to return to the title question, what does Africa need?

1. Property rights
2. Rule of Law
3. Universal Education
4. A government that does not interfere with 1, 2, and 3.

1 is the basis for any functioning market economy. 2 allows disputes to be resolved peacefully and end the cycle of putsch, civil war, and purge that is as much a drag on Africa as anything else. 3 levels the playing field for the native genius of the people. The need for 4 is obvious, and unfortunately, it's the only thing the military power of the West may be in a position to supply.

I submit that if we aren't helping Africans achieve these four things, we aren't helping them at all. It's well past time for a change in the political cultures of the poorest region on earth. It's well past time for the left to realize that Mugabe has done more to harm his nation than any white man. It's well past time for American and other G-8 businesses to consider what profits would be had by making Africans into customers instead of laborers.

It's time to stop flagellating ourselves, and start dealing with the problem.

Always and Forever on the March

The great and depressing thing about history is that nothing changes. For example, guess what Russia's doing?

If you said pestering the Baltic states, you win.

They Used to Fight Crusaders on Their Own Turf...

It appears that al Qaeda has decided to spend the summer peppering Europe in much the same way it's allies have been peppering Iraq and Israel: that is, blowing things up and killing civilians.

So far, so typical, although it gives something in the way of truth to those who would argue that the Iraq and Afghan wars haven't made us all that safer. But I wonder why they've decided to try this now. Surely, London, and many other important European cities have been pretty well infiltrated by those professing terrorist and Islamist ideologies. What made them wait?

Those that claimed credit for the bombing were quick to apply "linkage," as the saying goes, to Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming that "all the Crusader governments" will face similar bombings if they do not leave Iraq and Afghanistan.

Further grist for the anti-war mill, it would seem, along the lines of the "blowback" argument. Yet still I wonder, why now? The Counter-Terrorism Blog suggests that this "Secret al-Qaeda" is so only in name, an inspired group of emigrant malcontents rather than an actual cell bearing orders from bin Laden. If so, this may well have been triggered by yesterday's announcement of the location of the 2012 Olympics as by anything in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, we ought well be prepared for anything. The tempo of attacks might increase, or not, as the summer goes. But of one thing we should be sure. The fanatics have brought this war, and intend to fight it on their terms. To respond to them, many options may feasibly be employed, excepting one. We must give them nothing. They are not reasonable men, and their terms for peace will never be ones under which we can live.

History is Too Important to be Left to Historians

One of the numerous habits that family and friends castigate me over is my habit of re-reading books. That happens to be the one I will not give on. As far as I'm concerned, he who never re-reads a book gains nothing from it, and a book that will not bear re-reading was probably not worth the first effort. Why do we keep them in shelves in our houses, if not to use them when we would, however many times?

So yes, I'm now on the fourth or fifth re-reading of Shelby Foote's three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and have been since the summer began. The thrill of the story does not abate. The pagentry of ambition was never so rythmically rendered, as Mclernand and Meade and Rosecrans and Hooker and Buell and Burnside and McClellan and Pope and Fremont rose and fell, each one a bit better suited to the war they were fighting than their predecessor, yet not good enough, until leadership fell into the hands of Grant and Sherman, who, like Ulysses, understood the nature of the conflict. And that's just the Northern side. Watching to the gamecocks of the South preen, ruffle, and charge is likewise a mystifying experience. Proud as Roland they sound to us, and proud as Roland they stood, against the waves of history, and now they sound truly ancient, truly dead.

And yes, I know my politico-socio-encomic arithmetic 'bout the U.S. of the 1860's as well as the cynics would like, and I am confident in the truth of the assertion that no man, however grand, arises from nowhere. Yet cannot we take our Marx with a grain of Virgil? If Foote's epic teaches us nothing, it teaches us that different men drive the same chariot at different speeds to different ends. Would it kill us to again make our history larger than broken pottery, to find in it something other than a hair-shirt for the modern world, to make it human rather than a vast cosmic cog?

Because I prophesy thusly: until we learn to love our history again, we shall never learn it, much less learn from it.

Fair is Fair...

And if I'm gonna fling poo at the lefties on the high court for okaying corporate feudalism with Kelo, then it's only just that I lay a few choice ones for our good President, who used eminent domain to get land for the new stadium for the Texas Rangers back in the day.

It appears that, just as both lefties and righties can find common ground on this issue, so can they find common shame. Thuis, the New York Times, who broke the Bush story with appropriate condemnation, gets to savor the taste of their own words, as they recently had New York City condemn a whole neighborhood next to the Port Authority Terminal so they could build a snazzy new high-rise.

Reason has the scoop, for both.