I think there’s another reason. The big game here is Iran’s program to produce weapon’s grade U-235, and what they need now is time. The big danger, as they see it, is that we’ll get nasty before they have a nuclear deterrent and start bombing.

The political will to do that isn’t there yet; the West hasn’t given up on diplomacy — and that’s a good thing for Iran, because they’ve been extreme adept at stretching negotiations out, making the occasional relatively meaningless concession, sometimes yanking them back again, and in general buying lots of time for the centrifuges to run.

This news report from last September is relevant:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that his country’s nuclear standoff with the West can be solved through dialogue, while calling for unspecified "new conditions" in negotiations.

 

Ahmedinejad, on an hours-long stopover in Senegal en route to Cuba for a summit of the Nonaligned Movement, said the debate over Iranian nuclear enrichment could be solved peacefully.

 

"We’re partisans of dialogue and negotiation. We believe that we can resolve our problems in a space of dialogue and justice — together," he told reporters.

And the reason why he thinks negotiations are the way to go is that it’s Iran’s best chance of stalling until their first successful nuclear test.

The release of the British tars, especially if there was neither duress nor bribery involved, makes the Iranian government look reasonable and pliable, and it encourages those in the West who think that negotiations can convince Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons. That’s a solid victory for Iran.

You know, I’d write about this, but if I did the result would be ten thousand
4-letter words.

Note that right-wing pundits and bloggers don’t seem to be fixating on voter
fraud, despite

documented evidence that the Democrats have been doing that kind of thing?
Note that Republican candidates who lost very narrowly gave in gracefully,
without demanding recounts or resorting to the courts? Why the difference?

I think it’s the basic Democrat culture of entitlement showing through.
Democrats were angry in 2000, 2002, and 2004 because they felt that they
deserved to win. Republicans don’t feel that anyone deserves anything. They
believe that all rewards have to be earned.

There’s another way of looking at this. In 2000, 2002, and 2004, Democrats
explained their defeat by looking to see what the Republicans had done to
inflict defeat on the Democrats. In 2006, the Republicans seem to be explaining
their defeat by
looking
for all the ways they themselves loused up. The Democrats are showing their
investment in the cult of the victim. They didn’t lose because of any fault or
failure of their own; they lost because of the nefarious acts of villainous
Republicans.

It’s another manifestation of their epistemological breakdown regarding the
principle of cause-and-effect. The Democrats do not fundamentally believe that
they are in control of their own fate — or ours. They were victims in 2000,
2002, and 2004. The only reason they weren’t victims in 2006 was that the
nefarious Republicans didn’t successfully pull off their nefarious plots and
plans this time. And in general Democrats demonstrate a broad belief that
there’s no relationship between acts and results, cause and effect. What matters
is motive, not behavior. If you do something with good intentions,
the result will be good.

And never mind what road is paved with good intentions. They don’t believe in
Hell, either.

Raising taxes won’t result in decreased economic growth. There’s no
relationship between the two. What Congress does about taxes won’t have any
effect on the economy, so why not raise taxes so there’s more government
money to spread around to those who deserve to receive it?

Why shouldn’t we decrease defense spending in the middle of a war?
Increased defense spending causes war, it isn’t a response to it. If
we stop fighting, the war will end. If we reduce our defense spending, we’ll be
safer. Anyway, the UN will protect us.

Bailing out of Iraq won’t result in increased radicalism in the Middle
East. (Though we’re told that invading the place did result in increased
radicalism.) "Redeploying" won’t convince the radicals that we’re cowards
who have no staying power and can be worn down in a long fight. It won’t
convince the radicals that they can attack us with impunity and that the price
of doing so won’t be catastrophe for them.

Bypassing the electoral process and using the courts to implement their
radical agenda (e.g. legalization of gay marriage) won’t cause backlash
among the electorate and widespread passage of one-man-one-woman marriage laws.
(Ahem.)

Restricting the use of fossil fuels won’t cause the economy to
collapse. Energy doesn’t come from coal and oil, it comes from service stations
and light sockets in the wall.

If cause-and-effect don’t actually have anything to do with one another, and
if good things happen to good people because they deserve to get good
results, then all those ideas make perfect sense. We should live good lives, and
treat others (e.g. al Qaeda) kindly, and if we do then everything will get
better. The bad things that have happened to us (e.g. the 9/11 attack) are our
own fault because we act in evil ways, and thus don’t deserve good results. Our
lives will become more comfortable and better and safer in every way because
we’ll be virtuous, and thus will deserve it.

Fortunately, there’s another election in 2008. Two years is long enough for
the Democrats to show their true colors, but not long enough for them to louse
things up beyond repair. For six years the Democrats in Congress have done
nothing but complain about nearly everything the Republicans have done, without
ever offering any alternative plans. Now the Democrats are in charge, and will
have to act instead of spending all their time bitching. (Best guess is
that they’ll switch to spending all their time spending.)

It’s definitely going to be amusing to watch them try to lead and to see what
direction they think they’ll lead us. I think the result is going to be a
shambles, leading to a massive reversal in 2008. (Especially if the Republican
message in 2008 is, "We’ve learned our lesson, and we’ll do better next time.")

Technological change always has unforseen side effects, cultural and
political. The invention of movable type printing was one of the great advances
of all time, but most people don’t really understand just how much political and
cultural change resulted because of it. Protestantism happened because of the
printing press. Two centuries of war between Catholic and Protestant countries
happened because of it. The printing press is responsible for the rise of what
we now think of as "nationalism" in Europe. And the printing press was
responsible for converting Latin from the international language of Europe into
a dead language. The printing press was the proximate cause of a drastic
increase in the rate of change of, well, damned near everything.

We’re on the cusp of a comparable change, being brought about by a comparable
advance in communications technology. We just had a really remarkable example of
that come by today.

On Monday at a rally in California, John Kerry stuck his foot in it with a
lame joke that he loused up (he now says). Today

this picture is all over the Internet, and the resulting horse-laugh at
Kerry’s expense has caused him to abjectly retreat. Yesterday he pugnaciously
declared that he would never apologize. Today he
did apologize, or
someone
apologized in his name.

It would seem that he was against apologies before he was for them.

The picture is hilarious, but think about the process: a handful of smartass
soldiers currently serving in Iraq (from the Minnesota National Guard) created
that poster, and someone used a digital camera to take a picture of 8 others
holding it up with (deservedly) big grins on their faces.

Then the picture was downloaded into a computer and, I assume, emailed to
someone in the US. I haven’t got the slightest idea where it first appeared, but
it spread like wildfire and at this point I’ve seen various versions of it on at
least five sites, and many others have linked to one or more of
those. Within just a few hours of when that photograph was taken in Iraq, at
least a million people in the US, halfway around the world, had seen the
picture and laughed at it. Probably by now it’s many millions. And that’s
without any participation by TV or magazines or the newspapers who, considering
the prevailing political bias in such organizations, probably wouldn’t have
given it any exposure if they could possibly manage not to.

One of the reasons that the
invention of printing press was such a seismic event was that among
the earliest things to be printed in quantity were translations of the Bible
in the local vernacular. Instead of listening to the local Priest read
Biblical passages in Latin (which you didn’t understand) and then having him explain to you
what they meant, and what you had to do because the Bible Said So — in Latin,
which you didn’t understand — you could now read it
in your own language. And you could come to your own conclusion about what it
really meant and what you needed to do. You didn’t need the Catholic Church any
longer for that, and that meant you didn’t have to follow the priest’s orders.
That’s a big part of how and why Protestantism happened.

Something like that is happening now. We no longer need Television and Radio
and Magazines and Newspapers to tell us whether something that’s happened is important. We
uneducated ignorant peasants can do it for ourselves. And we can do it faster than the
MSM can. They
fancy themselves to be gatekeepers, but we’re kicking holes in the fence and
going around the gates now. In fact, there isn’t any fence any longer; the gates
stand lonely and alone, and the gatekeepers are

going out of business.

A huge number of unrelated technological lines all coalesced at the same time
to make the printing press possible: advances in metallurgy, paper making, ink
making, jewelry, glue, and many others. The printing press
itself, for example, was an adaptation of a wine press.

And a huge number of only distantly related technological lines coalesced to
make it possible for you to see that picture today. Most of these are in
electronics, of course, but it included development of the CCD, advances in
storage battery technology, modern CMOS-based microcircuits, wide area networks,
communication satellites, and the rockets which put them into orbit, and on and on.

Arrogant patrician John Kerry was humbled today by a squad of Minnesota
smartasses, a digital camera, a notebook computer, a military communications
network, many huge civilian communications networks, and hundreds of bloggers.
And it happened at breakneck speed. (Kerry’s neck.)

We no longer need the priests of the Main Stream Media to tell us what the
news means, and to tell us what we should do.

What is the function of an electoral system? You can argue about that all
day, but it turns out that the deep purpose is to convince people to accept
that they’ve lost. We, as citizens of a republic, have made a compact with each
other that we will make certain decisions collectively through some combination
of voting and representation, and we know that inevitably the process will make
at least some decisions that we as individuals despise.

But our compact with one another is that if the process was reasonably honest
and if everyone participated, the losers will concede defeat. Of course, they
may try to work within the system to change those decisions, and that has
happened many times. But the compact is that such decisions change because the
majority agree with the change, and the activist minority will work to convince
the majority that change is needed, and will accept their defeat in the mean
time.

Some activists in this country have been breaking this compact. It’s been a
particular problem with leftists over the last 35 years. Instead of trying to
convince the majority that certain things should change, they’ve been making an
end-run around the electoral system and getting those changes made via activist
judges.

Irrespective of the merits of individual decisions, the basic problem with
this is that it cheats the electorate by forbidding them from participating in
the process of collectively making those decisions. And the "losers" don’t
concede defeat, because they never got their chance to participate in the
decision.

I support legal abortion but I think that Roe v. Wade was a dreadful
decision. And the abortion issue is a perfect example of the kind of thing I’m
talking about, because 33 years later the issue is still contentious. If it had
been settled through the electoral system in 1973, it would have faded out by
now. But because it was decided by what I really do think of as judicial
usurpation of the electoral process, those who oppose abortion have never let go
of the issue.

And so it is with gay marriage. Activists in favor of gay marriage are
contemptuous of most of their fellow citizens and are impatient. They have
deliberately eschewed that social compact and have taken to the courts, and have
managed to get two State Supreme Courts now to declare that gay marriage is a
right and thus legal.

I think gay marriage should be legal, but this is not the way to go about it.
And that’s why I’m happy to see electoral backlash. Gay marriage is now legal by
judicial usurpation in two states, but it is now explicitly banned in a lot more
states than that. Many, indeed I would conjecture most, of the voters who helped
pass those bans don’t actually feel very strongly about gay marriage as an issue
one way or another.

But they care deeply about that social compact and are damned if
they’re going to let elitist activists run rough-shod over the system that way.

Why am I glad, then, to see those laws and amendments get passed? Because
they can be changed, but they won’t be changed by judges. Leftist activists in
favor of gay marriage who have been trying to violate that social compact will
now be forced to embrace it — because in states where one-man-one-woman laws
have been passed, it will be the only way they can get those laws changed.

I think abortion should be legal, and I think Roe v. Wade should be
overturned. Then this country will actually engage the issue. The social compact
will kick in. Advocates for both sides will make their cases, and the voters and
their representatives will, eventually, come to some sort of conclusion about
it.

That’s how the system is supposed to work. And that’s a lot more important to
me than gay marriage or legal abortion, though I support both. If the price of
legal gay marriage and legal abortion is destruction of that social compact,
then it’s too high.

Lose the 2000 election? Well, create
a TV show where the Democrats
actually won in 2000. Wish Hillary would win, but fear that she won’t? Make
another TV show about
the first woman (a Democrat, naturally) to be President. Want the War on Terror
to end? Just write
the
history of the future and and have a future President (a woman) end it. Hate
George Bush, and wish he was gone? Then make

a movie about his assassination.

A few years ago left-wing bloggers embraced the term "reality-based
community", apparently as a response to the the "faith-based community". But
it’s increasingly looking like the left wing is actually hallucination-based.
It’s a pathological manifestation of teleology: they seem to believe that if
they just wish for something hard enough, it’ll happen.

Or maybe it’s voodoo, only using TV and film instead of little dolls.

IT HAS BECOME A TRITE LAMENT that 9/11 brought us together, and it’s a
shame that since then we’ve come apart. But 9/11 brought us together because
of two transitory emotions – sadness and rage. Once those emotions calmed
down, once our open wounds turned into scars, it was inevitable that our
differences would resurface.

When the flags came out in the aftermath of 9/11, they didn’t signify a
consensus on where we would go from there. They symbolized a consensus that we
were all in pain, all anguished. When the time came to move on, disagreements
inevitably (and not improperly) came regarding exactly how we should move on.

Even though a thorough review of 9/11, including both its lead-up and
aftermath, won’t provide an obvious path forward that everyone will agree on,
there are some valuable lessons we can draw from that awful day. Looking back,
we can clearly see the remorseless murderers that our enemies are – that
knowledge is instructive. And we can also see that they are numerous. That,
too, is important to take into account.

But the most important lesson we can take from 9/11 is this: We must take
every possible step to ensure never again.
Never again will we allow ourselves to feel the way we did that
day. Never again will we be so blind to storm clouds
as they gather. Never again will we choose to believe
comforting lies rather than disquieting truths.

9/11 didn’t bring us together. It’s true that in the immediate
aftermath of the event that we all felt sadness and rage. But not about the same
things.

Some of us felt sadness at the terrible loss of lives in New York and
Washington and Pennsylvania, and rage at the killers.

Others felt sadness at the terrible loss of life amongst those killed by
America and its puppets over the decades, in South America and "Palestine" and Viet Nam, and
rage at the blind self-centered Americans who had stood by without caring.

We were all anguished. Some of us were anguished because we feared that there
might be further and more devastating terrorist attacks against us. Others were
anguished because they feared that this might inspire an entirely new round of
bloody military aggression by America against innocent people around the world, and conversion of America into a police state.

We all saw clearly. But some of us were looking in a different direction.
Some of us clearly saw the remorseless and ruthless murderers behind the attack,
and knew that they were our mortal enemies who would attack us again if they
possibly could, no matter what we did. Others were looking inward, and saw what
they viewed as an ugly need for revenge amongst Americans.

We all vowed never again. Some of us vowed that we would do
whatever it took to make sure that the terrorists didn’t strike us again. Others
vowed that they would do whatever it took to make America stop doing all the
evil things that had inspired the attack in the first place.

The only consensus on 9/11 was that a terrible tragedy had occurred. There
was no consensus as to who was truly responsible. And that is why within
hours we began to hear, "Ask yourselves why they hate you." They knew that
America had brought this onto itself; deep down they knew that we deserved it.

We all knew that reform was needed. Some of us thought it was the
Arab/Islamic world which needed to reform. Others knew, deep down, that America
was the true problem. To try to force reform onto the Arab world would be to
renew the very mistakes which had caused the attack in the first place. And to
even make the attempt would inspire more and more young Arab men to become
terrorists against us, increasing the danger to us.

Some of us felt that the "root cause" of this war was Arab failure, and Arab
shame at their failure. The others knew that the "root cause" was American
failure, and America’s refusal to feel shame at its failure.

We were not united on 9/11 and we have not been united on any day since. But
that is not a weakness. If the people of America are ever 100% united on
anything whatever, I will know that the country I love has died.