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The rush to condemn the Covington high school boys over an imagined slight against a native American and the clamor to ditch Virginia Governor Ralph Northam over a yearbook photograph depicting two figures, one in blackface and the other in KKK costume -- when they would not criticize him for his views on infanticide -- underscore the excruciating sensitivity of American politics to race, gender, and victimhood. The latest example is an op-ed in the Daily Beast alleging that "Tom Brady’s New England Patriots Are Team MAGA, Whether They Like It or Not." Their star quarterback, coach, and owner all supported...

  Belmont Club October 30th, 2009 12:43 pmThe Lordlings Peggy Noonan adopts a meme that has been sweeping the blogs of late, the idea that America’s elite is broken; so broken she says, that it doesn’t know it’s broken. In a WSJ article, she describes the current and disastrous reign of “callous children”; people who have “never seen things go dark” and are leading their nation into the abyss.  For the first time, she says, the national mood is one of despondency. There are no solutions because the problems come from within. The heirs have grown strange and wayward. They...

   Link to Page 1   |  Link to Page 2    |  Link to Page 3   |  Link to Page 4   9 4:04 am The man who broke the bank Steve McIntyre, whose previous careers included mineral exploration and policy analysis for the Canadian government, has been one of the foremost critics “of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.” His detailed look into the data quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph (see below) upon which much of the Global Warming thesis has been...

About three days ago, when the clash between the Iraqi Army and the Madhi army was in its fourth day, I asked a senior officer returned from Iraq after his presentation whether Maliki would go all the way against Sadr. He said he didn't know, but added that militias were a problem that had to be eventually addressed. Another questioner asked about the quality of the Iraqi Armed forces, and on this point the answer was more definite. The quality was uneven. Many parts of it were rudimentary; some parts of it were extraordinarily good.But the subject of the talk...

There's an interesting article in the NY Sun describing the conclusions reached by Iran's equivalent of the "Iraq Study Group". One key conclusion the Iranians reached was that in order to forestall Sunni attacks against Shi'a groups it was important to for Teheran to reach out to both sides of the sectarian divide. Equal opportunity terrorism. But maybe it went beyond that. One of the documents captured in the raids, according to two American officials and one Iraqi official, is an assessment of the Iraq civil war and new strategy from the Quds Force. According to the Iraqi source, that...

Wednesday, August 23, 2006 Forward Together One story that went the rounds in the Philippine National Penitentiary concerned the Cockroach Men. To hear the Bat tell it, the guards were always listening for escape plans being tapped out on the walls. "If you started tapping on walls, the guards would figure out you were trying something." No one asked the Bat how he knew, though he unquestionably belonged in the Big House. But you forgot that part and listened to the story. "So these two guys were about three cells apart on the row and they had to communicate without...

Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, East Timor. Four states currently in the headlines the most worrying thing about which -- apart from that each has a Western presence which may continue for years -- is that they may be joined by other countries jolted into collapse by any unpredictable crisis. A huge natural disaster, epidemic or internal conflict could precipitate many of the countries referred to as "failed states" into complete collapse. For two successive years (2005, 2006) Foreign Policy has listed the 'most failed' states based on twelve indicators which attempt to measure the degree to which each has broken...

Years ago, while with Mangyan tribesmen I concluded that these hill people could read an alphabet unknown to me. The foliage, sounds, the shift in airs, scents -- all of these -- spoke to them as directly as words in a book, though I scarcely imagined how. Later I discovered that psychologist Julian Jaynes had advanced the theory of the bicameral mind, which helped explain what I'd seen. His book, the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind suggests that our ancestors were instructed by voices and visions. They understood through a process of unconscious thinking...

The Belmont Club History and History in the Making Friday, March 31, 2006 Pretty pictures 2 It's kinda nice when an Iraqi resistance conference provides some confirmation for the pictures I've been drawing. Iraq the Model's latest posts throws more light on the relationship of the "political struggle" in Iraq to the insurgency. These days in Beirut, the fourth conference for supporting the "Iraqi resistance" is being held. It came only less than a year after their grand failure 3rd conference which we wrote about back in August.The most notable statement given during this conference was made by Hasan...

The Belmont Club History and History in the Making Friday, March 31, 2006 Pretty pictures The situation in Iraq is sometimes hard to understand without drawing diagrams. Let's diagram the situation in Iraq according to Jill Carroll, a hostage who was recently released. Voice: Why didn’t they save you?Carroll: Well, I think the Mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people the American Army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here and more clever, despite all the technology of the American Army, still more clever and...

Then the US Army did something the Spaniards had not been able to accomplish in three hundred years. It seized tactical control over the entire area of Mindanao, including the hinterlands, using combined American-Filipino teams whose exploits were almost unbelievable.

The past as prologue The Ranting Sandmonkey, an Egyptian blog, illustrates just how bogus the MSM refusal to discuss the Danish cartoons "out of respect for Islam" is: Freedom For Egyptians reminded me why the cartoons looked so familiar to me: they were actually printed in the Egyptian Newspaper Al Fagr back in October 2005. I repeat, October 2005, during Ramadan, for all the egyptian muslim population to see, and not a single squeak of outrage was present. Al Fagr isn't a small newspaper either: it has respectable circulation in Egypt, since it's helmed by known Journalist Adel Hamoudah....

Sunday, January 29, 2006 The root of all ... The Council of Foreign Relations describes the Palestinian Authority's financial system this way: Where does the PA government get its funding?From a combination of overseas assistance and tax collection, Abuznaid says. He estimates that taxes—from businesses in the territories, as well as a customs tax collected by Israel and then paid to the Palestinians—account for about 40 percent of the PA budget. Donations from abroad make up the rest. The PA has run into budget trouble lately, running a massive deficit and sparking the wrath of European donors by adding thousands...

Sunday, November 27, 2005 Netwar One of the coolest posts I've read in a long time is Chester's Globalization and War. His reference links to Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and the really nifty eMachineShop alone are worth the read. The fundamental issue he discusses is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people. Many activities, from community building to earning a living have jumped over traditional boundaries. Criminal and terrorist organizations have been among the first to exploit this fact. Viewed from one angle, modern Islamic terrorist cells are not so much a...

In a situation rich with irony, voting was heavy in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, secured by the USMC in November 2004. Most of the Fallujans chose to reject the proposed Iraqi constitution, though the nationwide results are expected to heavily confirm it. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad didn't seem to mind whether people voted for or against the proposed constitution, so long as they voted. "With hours to go before the polls closed Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad made his first trip to Fallujah since he took over the post in July. ... Khalilzad congratulated residents on their participation...

In February 1945, a woman now dying of lung cancer grabbed two of her children and jumped out the window to escape Imperial Japanese Marines crashing through the door intent on bayoneting everyone in the burning house. Finding no one, they went on to the next house to continue their massacre on a street not far from the Rizal Memorial ballpark, where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth both played in sunnier days before the forgotten Battle of Manila. The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War -- more than at Hiroshima -- are not...

Echoes of past war resound as Manila recalls Liberation   Memories of a fierce battle that left Manila a vast wasteland 60 years ago will be summoned at an oral-history conference on Thursday and Friday. The conference, entitled “The Battle for Manila: The Price of Freedom,” is sponsored by the National Historical Institute (NHI). It will be held at the Resource Center, NHI Building on T.M. Kalaw Avenue from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Battle of Manila, which raged from February 3 to March 3 in 1945, was marked by savage street-to-street fighting between US soldiers and well-entrenched Japanese...

What thread runs through today's top world headlines? (This selection was obtained by running the search URL "http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=w" at July 23, 2005 03:00 Zulu) Blasts in Egypt Kill at Least 49 at Sinai Resort Police seeking London bombers shoot man dead Blast rocks Beirut after surprise visit by Rice Kidnapped Algerian envoy had refused Iraqi offers of bodyguards Ummah must initiate joint war against extremists: Musharraf Sunnis to continue boycott until demands met Tribal elders who aided hunt for al-Qaida-linked militants shot ... Terrorism: brigades threaten Rome, Amsterdam and Copenhagen Rice: Israel must coordinate disengagement with PA UN reform to...

It was lost before it started. And yet it was not, strictly speaking, a military defeat. As Martin Windrow pointed out in his wonderful history of Dien Bien Phu, The Last Valley, of the three Chinese Communist challenges to the West in the immediate postwar period, the other two being the Malayan Emergency and North Korea's invasion of the South, only the French were unambiguously driven from the field. And yet If France herself had not been overwhelmed by a sense of hopeless catastrophe, Dien Bien Phu could easily have proved a Pyrrhic victory for General Vo Nguyen Giap ......

One of the hardest things to read over the past few days have been the Memorial Day blog posts. Some quoted the last letters of soldiers and marines recently dead in Iraq; others cast memory back further. But the events recalled in each case stood the same distance away from everyday life. It's a gulf which no words can bridge. They've left us behind; and we are irremediably alone with a tale begun long ago and whose ending is now in our care. Memory is a burden; and the memory of love the heaviest of all.