Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Drudge has a good link to raw footage of the fighting in Fallujah.
When this battle started for some reason I kept thinking of the battle of Stalingrad in World War 2 and the street fighting there. It says something about our boys over there that we had so relatively few casualties. I know, I know, tell it to the mother who lost a son. But, Thank God.
The “Global Test” standard is likely to raise more questions than it answers because it is a threshold without a real specification, a probability without degree. It is analytically defective because the degree of risk one is willing to endure depends on the severity of the consequences. . . Yet standards do have a value in this context, provided they are not the pseudo-absolute ones implied by a “Global Test”. It is the test of reasonable action in the face of the best available information, the standard on which Eisenhower decided to launch Overlord in the middle of an Atlantic storm or which impelled Spruance to proceed to Point Luck in defense of Midway in ignorance of the exact whereabouts of the Japanese Fleet. It is no guaranty against mistakes. But it is a guaranty against paralysis.
In Lord of Rings, the plot revolves around an attempt by all parties to control Sauron’s ring of power. The ring is an item unique in all the world. Whomever controls that one item rules the world.
This plot device of unique item is fairly common in literature and movies. Hitchcock called it a McGuffin. Every character has to be looking for that unique item.
It’s not just fantasy items like magic rings and swords that get that treatment. Technology does too. Most James Bond movies feature some piece of technology so unique that control of it will lead to world domination.
All this would just be of interest to students of fiction, except that for a large section of the population the gut feel for how technology actually works comes from works of fiction. Most people in the contemporary world have no direct experience with researching, creating or manufacturing actual technology. They may use it but they don’t understand how it comes to be. It is very easy for people to think of technological items like nuclear reactors or computers in the same way as they see them portrayed in the movies.
It’s very clear from reading the ongoing debate about the extent of Saddam’s WMDs that most people have absolutely no idea of the technological issues involved. Most people, even major politicians and media figures talk about WMDs as if they were McGuffins. They act as if we expected to find a giant throbbing orb in an underground base under Baghdad that had WMD written on it. They think that WMDs were discrete objects or things that could be located and controlled.
Technology doesn’t work like that.
(crossposted on Flit(TM))
The Gap, or more formally the Non-Integrating Gap, is a concept at the core of Dr. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. But what is the Gap? This question comes to me every time I read a libertarian critic of the concept.
Gap countries are, by definition disconnected from the global rulesets that manage the Core, those states where a disturbingly large proportion of the world wants to get into. I say disturbingly because, all things being equal, there is really no reason for people socially acculturated and biologically specialized to warm climes to make their way in large numbers to nordic nations, but they do. Something pretty special must be attracting them while simultaneously repelling them from their ancient homelands. That something is clear after a bit of investigation, huge waves of horrifying violence interspersed with a daily brutality of individual denigration and lack of the normal rights to live out their lives in control of their own destiny.
You want to really anger a UN official? Tow his car. Short of that you can get away with anything.