After U.S. troops opened fire on protesters near an
Iraqi school, Col. Arnold
Bray of the 82nd Airborne Division explained that his
troops had exercised restraint amidst the shots being
fired at them. Bray said there were infiltrators in
the crowd, including some who were armed and on nearby
rooftops. “Which kind of schoolboys carry AK-47s?”
Bray asked.

That’s a great question! What kind of a sick culture
equips its school-aged boys with automatic weapons so
they can kill foreigners to achieve political
objectives?

Excerpted from this sad article by David Pryce-Jones in the NEW CRITERION:

Whatever is the remedy? According to the more pessimistic contributors, the case is hopeless. Several of them speak of France as irredeemably decadent, the sick man of Europe. In one of the most thoughtful and eloquent of these essays, Alain Besan�on accepts that there are �no more solutions.� For him, the country is blocked in an attenuated version of Brezhnev�s Soviet Union. The Right has been fragmented beyond recovery by the National Front, the Left is ineducable. Besan�on alone has the courage to ask whether the Muslim immigrants can be assimilated, and, if so, on what terms. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie also suggests that the professionalization of unemployment, as he calls it, allows France rightly to be compared to the Soviet Union.

In Alain-G�rard Slama�s view, French society has decomposed into tribes with selfish claims, amounting to free-for-all extortion. In a startling image, Marin de Viry likens the country to a blind man feeling for an electric switch in a splendid but darkened library. Didier Maillard and Christian Saint-Etienne are convinced that the determining factors are in place for a major and violent explosion in the near future, which they date to 2005 or thereabouts.

There is no cause to gloat; the loss of France is a loss to the West, and I, for one, could wish that things would go differently.

Marseilles of footsteps, Notre Dame of rot,
Clipboard carrier of Vichy wounds,
Miser who throws pennies in the Seine
Because the Sorbonne stalks a waxing moon,

(Excerpted from Dick Allen’s poem France)

I happened to come across this common error today in a piece by David Kelley and William Thomas:

While many libertarians would agree, others are anarchists who believe that some “free-market” system of competing law courts and for-profit police agencies can ensure a “non-monopolistic” system of rights protection. Objectivists would reply that freedom cannot come from the marketplace: it is a precondition of the marketplace, which can operate only to the extent that individuals can act, trade, and own property by their own choice, free from the use of force. It is thus impossible to have the market provide the protection that frees one from force in the first place. Anarchism, in practice, would amount to civil warfare (Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 112-13).

International markets clearly and simply refute Rand’s argument. American and Canadian individuals trade without any common government to resolve their disputes. Throughout the international community of nations the prevalent condition is a market, not the general war that Rand’s argument predicts for agencies not under a common authority. This of course doesn’t apply just to Rand, statists routinely predict that anarchy must reduce to a general war of all against all even though though the example of the relative anarchy between nations has long demonstrated that this is not the case.

While I followed the news about the war in Afghanistan between the Taliban and Al Qaeda versus the Northern Alliance and the United States of America as closely as I could, I knew I’d have to wait a while for the real story of Operation Enduring Freedom to be told. Now, it has been told, in the book my girlfriend gave me for my birthday, “The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger - On the ground with the Special Forces in Afghanistan”, by Robin Moore.

Moore is also the author of “The Green Berets,” which was the basis for the John Wayne movie, and co-author of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Moore is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the overthrow of the Taliban because of his excellent connections with the Green Berets (U.S. Army Special Forces). Since they were the only U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan for most of the war, they’re the only ones that know the “ground truth” of it. Moore went to their secret bases in Uzbekistan & elsewhere to interview those who fought the Taliban & Al Qaeda forces.

The simple version of how they operated is easy to tell: they went into the parts of Afghanistan that were controlled by the Northern Alliance, teamed up with the Northern Alliance, then proceeded to call in air strikes against their Taliban & Al Qaeda opposing forces in co-ordination with NA ground attacks. However, Moore is able to provide a level of detail that is both fascinating and often highly amusing.

For example, Moore tells about the relationships between specific Green Beret teams and specific Northern Alliance commanders. For instance, Dostum liked to call up his enemies on the radio (they knew each other’s radio frequencies) and tell them that the Americans were there with their “death ray” - actually an infra-red laser target designator for smart bombs to be dropped by U.S. bombers - and that if they didn’t surrender they would all be killed. The Taliban or Al Qaeda commander would say: “Please send the Americans to fight us, we want to fight them. “Good,” Dostum would then say, “I send them to you,” and the bombs would start dropping on the enemy positions, often right ahead of a Northern Alliance cavalry charge. There are some other funny stories in it, too, such as the one about the “Angel of Death,” which I’ll leave for you to find out about when you buy and read the book.

The total number of Green Berets in-country was between 200-300 men, who landed without any formal plans or orders other than to hook up with the indigenous resistance and help them against the enemy as best they could. The result was that within about 60 days, the Taliban were overthrown, Al Qaeda was in hiding, and the Green Berets were helping the Afghans build their first democratic government in decades. Their success is eloquent testimony to the high quality of the Green Berets.

Moore also provides a good critique of how conventional U.S. forces tried to move in and take over operations against the Taliban & Al Qaeda in Operation Anaconda, which ended up resulting in the highest U.S. casualties of the war due to many mistakes. That, and his account of what really happened in the prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif, is part of what makes this book so fascinating.

This book is also quite relevant to the question Billy Beck raises over on his blog:

“…it’s not a hard sell to organize a military defense, any more than anything else that millions of people are buying every day.

“…

“Someone should run some numbers on what a rational force would cost. I’m serious. I see no one doing it, and I don’t have the patience for it.”

A good start would be to figure out what the budget was for Operation Enduring Freedom, including recruitment, training, equipment, supplies, intelligence, airpower, etc. Since the Green Berets have been operating on extremely limited budgets for a long time (they’re relatively less well-funded than their Navy, Air Force, and Marine equivalents within the U.S. Special Operations Command), and since it took so few of them to get the job done, I would imagine that the cost per American citizen won’t turn out to be very high.

I’m sure that Operation Iraqi Freedom will turn out to be a lot more expensive, since it involves a lot more troops - and not just Green Berets, but a lot of conventional forces as well as a much bigger SpecOps contingent - but I still don’t think it will work out to anything close to what the U.S. Federal budget has been in recent years.

So, buy the book now - it’s what all good cutting-edge anarcho-warmongers will soon be reading. :-)

In today’s article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute Paul Birch and Gene Callahan take me to task for my recent piece on what I call Economic Secession.

I will soon answer at greater length. Briefly, economic privacy critically damages the ability of government to impose an economic monopoly on it’s residents. This is precisely why governments are attempting to forge a global tax cartel. Unless these governments succeed in creating such a global cartel or a monopoly world government (and I’m prepared to argue it’s unlikely they will succeed) then they will have to compete in a global market and taxes will largely become prices, with all that implies.

From that happy, friendly island in the sea, Japan. (and the brilliant KYMGA)

Unusually aggressive poor little match girl. (Animated gif - wait for it to load.)

(”lung is kind of like that sometimes” - lung)

(An excerpt from A SCANNER DARKLY, by Philip K. Dick, 1977)

Hearing them talking in the lounge.

“Very good, Bruce,” they said.

Liberal web-blogger uggabugga indulged in this piece of wishful thinking a couple of months ago.

From the looks of things, there aren’t all that many people devoted to civilian control. Perhaps 20,000 in a country of 24 million. One in a thousand. (We strongly suspect that’s a smaller ratio than that which prevailed in East Germany back in the Stasi days.) In any event, it may not be true that the Iraqis are wildly in favor of a regime change. Thus, the quick collapse predicted by administration hawks might not happen - and a longer, more difficult fight may be in store for U.S. troops.

Alas, the hopes of the anonymous progressive were to be sadly dashed. In passing, one notes an inexplicable fondness on the part of the truth-speaking “uggabugga” site for elaborate, meaningless flowcharts and tables. A commentator less charitable than myself might suspect the baleful influence of the beautiful crystal palace of Western rationality.

In a previous post, I made the error of ascribing the line “it’s a daisy age” to Dee-Lite instead of to De La Soul. And thinking about that error, I remembered another track from the same De La Soul album (Three Feet High And Rising).

You know, it seems inarguable that we live in a world of destruction. In the bleak moral wasteland of the Clinton years, it seemed as if everything that made America was being taken away. Worst of all was the perception that Americans were giving up being Americans, out of base fear or envy or simple hatred.

The State is still taking away our freedoms, the situation is still grim. Sure, that’s all true enough.

And yet we’ve seen something else now. In Iraq, good has triumphed over evil. The enslaved have been set free. American soldiers lounge cheerfully in the palaces of the former tyrant as their grandfathers once did in Berchtesgaden.

It almost seems as if “Clintonism” and all the rest of that foul rot we all endured was the superficial and the easily discarded - that, somewhere at the center, somewhere previously hidden, Americans hadn’t really changed at all.

The good may be transitory. The freedom gained may not be perfect. But even if nothing else goes right from now on, the liberation of Iraq and the joy of the liberated is something worth being alive to see. “There are some things to console one for not being able to decide to die” if I may quote a decent, long-dead Frenchman, General Gallifet.

So better just to hang on. There may be hope yet, however distant. Better to hang on and, as De La Soul advises…

“Tread Water”

“I was walking on the water when I saw a crocodile
He had daisies in his hat so I stopped him for a while
He delivered me a message a massage to soothe my stage
What it was was more then plug up dosage
More than DAISY age
Conversation drew a rule
Which the crowd will roar by millions
Mr. Crocodile said ‘Dove you must look
For now the villains try to hold you underwater
But one thing we all must heed
Sony Walkmans keep us walking
De La Soul can help you breathe when you tread water’ “

“He decided with this accomplished,
He would put me on to the path
He to my to live by the Inner Sound, y’all
Which would bring me health in showbiz
Then to use them, not abuse them
And then in the words that got me to ‘em
And that is to tread water “

All honor to our brave and noble servicemen and women, to our great Allies in the fight for liberation. All honor to the dead who gave their lives for freedom. And the best of wishes to the Iraqis who suffered under a foul tyrant and who now may hope for liberty and a better life. May the noble cause and the sacrifice not be in vain.

A certain verbose giant rubber monster has accused me of being fond of “cartoons or references to bad movies…” and implies that my writings are usually neither “cogent” nor “readable”.

If that were really true, of course, I’d be quoting Greg Swann much more often than I usually do.

But I won’t let Guiron’s peevish rumbling deter me from bringing to my faithful readership the news of Western Civilization’s most significant advance - the availability of the Drinky Crow PVC statuette!

(From the Diamond Comics merchandise description)

Drinky Crow comes to life! Abducted from the Maakies strip by Tony Millionaire, Drinky Crow is the perfect companion for all your debauched activities. The bottle fits nicely into The Crow?s beak, that he may suck easily on the fountain of despair. When he?s done, pop in the “drunken” eyes, for a realistic feeling! Set him on a shelf in a dark room, get drunk, and see how depressed you can get staring at him! This miracle of plastic

* stands approximately 6″ tall
* comes with a bottle of booze and interchangeable eyes
* comes packaged in a full-color window box

The Crow is available at better comic book stores (i.e. in general, those who carry Fantagraphics comics.) Buy yours today!
Go here to experience the beauty that is Maakies!

Dook, dook, dook!

Achewood is brilliant. Go take a look.