Soviets Map Iraq

The map-makers at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square have done it again! This time, these heroes of socialist labor have come through with a map of Iraq.

Go check it out, gentle readers. But look while you can; Reynoldssia will be casting its lean and hungry look upon this place, seeking to expand the blogosphere revolution and further liberate (heh heh heh) fraternal blogospherist comrades from...something. Uphold the dictatorship of the blogospheriat!

You've got to admire effort such as this.

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A Dime's Worth of Difference

CNN reports that there's a move afoot to replace Franklin Roosevelt's visage on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan, however, does not agree with this move. In her denial of support, she stated that, "When our country chooses to honor a great president such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him and replace him with another."

Furthermore, Mrs. Reagan noted that she did not think President Reagan would have agreed with this either, and that she hoped the proposed legislation would be pulled.

Two points:
1. What's with the move to name everything after Ronald Reagan? If this keeps happening, the country's going to wind up looking a whole lot like Charleston, West Virginia, where every third or fourth thing you see has Senator Robert C. Byrd's name on it. (Including the local Ku Klux Klan membership roll...) President Reagan has an aircraft carrier, an airport, and lots of other places named for him. From time to time, I get the sneaking feeling that this is some sort of twisted loyalty test for some. Enh.

2. I've got a better idea: Rather than yank Franklin Roosevelt (who, while doing a lot of other things wrong, had the good sense to back Churchill, oppose Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini, and to pick Harry Truman instead of Henry Agard Wallace for VP) I propose we get rid of a really worthless president on the currency of the United States: John F. Kennedy on the half-dollar.

That is, of course, my opinion.

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Unfortunate News

The stalwarts at Right We Are! are closing their doors. This is unfortunate, because I did enjoy stopping by on a semi-regular basis to see what those two were up to.

Of course, the classic Vargas-style artwork adorning the website didn't hurt either.

There doesn't seem to be any indication of a planned return to operations, so it may be time to salute them for their contributions and move forward. Bah, I hate watching blogs close.

Respectful tip of the Wisconsin hat to the gals of Right We Are!.

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Miserable Failure

This is a case of partisan retaliation against some in the left who tinker with Google's results: Miserable Failure. See Ipse Dixit for more information.

You can go about your business. Move along, move along.

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CVN Charles de Gaulle

It appears that the French navy is having second thoughts about its flagship, the atomic-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. An un-verified account at strategypage.com indicates that the French are considering retiring the vessel, because of various problems.

Whether the report of French intentions is true or not, there are demonstrable problems with the vessel, and the article (which is probably a temporary one) goes through them. In brief:

1. It's expensive. Big deal. Make your economy something other than a revenue generator for a welfare state, and you'll be able to afford as many carriers as your European state will want.

2. CdG is slower than her half-century-old predecessors Foch and Clemenceau. Why that is, I haven't a clue. You'd think that a late 20th century atomic plant could provide enough raw shaft horsepower to outrun a 1950s (at best) steam plant, but apparently not. The difference in speed is significant; the Foch and her sister are reported by Warships1.com to be capable of 32 knots (a touch faster than Admiral Arleigh Burke, don't you know, but see n1) while CdG is only reported as being capable of 27 knots. Maybe CdG can run that speed longer than the Foch, but I'd be nervous about not having a fast ship.

3. Problems with the propeller design. Apparently, CdG's screws aren't working right (I think she either threw a blade or a screw proper at one point in trials) and so leftovers from the earlier CV program have been implemented.

4. Inadequate reactor shielding. Were he alive today, Admiral Rickover ("the kindly old gentleman"---of those three terms, only 'old' was supposed to be accurate) and in the service of the French navy, would have thrown an absolute fit. Per the article, the amount of leakage (be it particles or whatever; I'm not a nuc) is five times the allowable annual exposure to radiation. Good God! The appellation Hiroshima is supposed to apply to a city in Japan or to a Soviet ballistic missile submarine, not to a carrier in the West! This has been reported elsewhere to have been fixed, but the fact that it was a problem at all is troubling. I'm sorry for the poor guys who had to work next to that plant.

4. Problems with the deck design. Yes, like "It's too short to operate your AEW platform of choice." If memory serves, CdG had to have her deck lengthened (probably at considerable cost and effort) in order to operate the Grumman E-2 Hawkeyes delivered.

The blurb goes on to say that the French would like to get in on the new Royal Navy nuclear carrier program, and add a third unit to the order. That's not such a bad idea as long as the UK's shipwrights get the contract to build the thing and make money off of it. However, Glenn Reynolds tells of a further option that is a bad idea, namely joint Anglo-French operation of the completed vessels. Humbug to that, I say. [Tasteless joke about Mers-el-Kebir snipped.]

To make this a little more clear to American readers, the Charles de Gaulle is comparable in size to our Wasp-class LHDs, which are amphibious assault ships. It's worth noting that we don't try to use those vessels as aircraft carriers for the launching of conventional fixed-wing platforms.

And no, I don't hate the French navy. Once upon a time, they came to our assistance off the Virginia Capes at a place called Yorktown. They also had two pleasant-looking battleships, the Richeliu and Jean Bart.

Additional thanks to Emperor Misha I of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler for bringing this back to my attention. Some of the comments for that posting reveal other problems, but I'd prefer that Misha get the traffic for the works of his visitors. Go read.

n1 According to Shield of the Republic, a post-WWII history of the U.S. Navy, the "31-knot" moniker was derogatory in nature, because Burke's destroyer group, beset with mechanical or other operational difficulties, was supposed to be capable of more than that. The public, not knowing any different, thought it was a grand name and turned it into a positive. Admiral Burke was, by several accounts, a good man to work for on-balance, and I believe America's navy was well served by his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations.

UPDATE, 02 MARCH 2005: This has remained one of the more popular articles in the TCP archives. The strategypage link is now inoperative, but it appears that this article is more or less the "survivable" version of the report that I first commented upon. The current article makes no reference to a plan to retire the carrier, but I stand by my then-current reporting, because I distinctly recall seeing a sentence or two about it. The statement was accurate for 05 December 2003; whether it is accurate for 02 March 2005 is a completely different matter.

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Thanks to the Commissar

I've been examining my SiteMeter reports lately (classified due to embarrassing content) and I'm finding several things, none of which are good:

1. Traffic is dropping off dramatically. At this rate, I'll be reduced to trying cheap measures like Google tricks mentioning a certain hotel-chain heiress "socialite" who's got herself an infamous videocassette and a television show. That or talking about a certain "King of Pop" (to quote the words of an Iraqi torture-meister from Three Kings).

Well, I've got some integrity even in defeat, so I'll not mention either of those two in order to drive up the traffic.

2. Comrade Commissar's map of the blogosphere is generating the only significant amount of traffic to this site. For that, I'd like to thank him. On a side note, it appears that some folks are describing their particular "cities"; sooner or later I'll get around to telling everyone what the dreary city of Kountrypundsk is like.

3. Not necessarily SiteMeter-related, but my standing in the TLLB Ecosystem is collapsing. This is a bad thing. The need to create compelling content is problematic, and I'm going to have to address it. As Winnie-the-Pooh says, "Bother."

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A Blue State/Red State Stupid Question

I've been meaning to ask this for quite a while (i.e. more than three years) but have never really gotten around to it. So here goes:

Exactly who made the decision to switch the party-representative colors for State victories in the 2000 election?

If my (admittedly faulty) memory serves, the Republican Party was always signified with blue, and the Democratic Party was signified with red. Wiseacre observers could note that Labour in the United Kingdom was also symbolized by the color red, and usually make some crack about the two primary left-wing parties of the UK and US were linked to Communists.¹ Conversely, the Republican-voting States were supposed to be blue, somehow symbolizing the 'blue-blood' WASP sensibilities of the party as a whole.²

Of course, this was reversed for the 2000 election, and it's played havoc with my personal preferences in the matter. I liked being symbolized by blue. It's the primary color in Virginia's flag, and it's one of the colors of both my undergraduate and graduate institutions. Blue is, in a word, a favorite color.

Instead, I'm now stuck with red. Paul Begala writes some fatuous column about how the 'red' States stood for anger or something and how every State that voted for George W. Bush was a seething hotbed of intolerance, racism, oppression, hatred, and probably pet torture, and I thought it didn't apply.

Anyways. Three years on, the 'red State, blue State' thing is firmly embedded in the body politic, and I don't understand why. I'm a conservative, for crying out loud. I don't like change, especially when it comes "out of the blue" (no pun intended) and reverses a time-honored tradition.

Just about the time you get used to something, someone goes and changes it. That's probably a universalizable maxim, but recognizing that fact doesn't necessarily mean that I like or willingly accept that fact. Augh.

¹ Full disclosure: I made jokes along this line about it being highly appropriate for the Democrats to be symbolized by red, the official color of Communism.

² Or something like that; at the point where I heard the description, I wasn't particularly listening to what the other side had to say.

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Network Nitwittery

It appears that CNN has gone and done it again, demonstrating a marked inability on the part of its reporters to figure out what's important about a situation. From a transcript of coverage of the 46-0 Fedayeen loss recently:

[Walter] RODGERS: Once again, it shows that while the United States claims it controls the battlefield, it's actually the guerrillas who generally tend to dictate where the battles will be fought and that battlefield is constantly shifting.

Walt, Walt, Walt. A very simple principle for you: It doesn't matter if the battlefield constantly shifts at your will when you lose. It's not necessarily important to be the one who starts the fight. It is, however, of vital importance to be the one who wins the fight. When the other man is face down in the dirt and never getting back up again, that's when you determine who's the victor.

When you lose 46-0, you don't call that "control of the battlefield". (I'm tempted to call it "stupid".) If the Fedayeen are going to pick fights that end up like this, I'm willing to let them do that all they want.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Greyhawk over at Mudville Gazette; I suggest going there and reading the rest of his piece.

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The X-Quiz Result

Spurred on by John of Argghhh!!!'s post on the subject, I went and partook of Quizilla's bandwidth yet again. The result?

You are Professor Charles Xavier.

You are a very effective teacher, and you are very committed to those who learn from you. You put your all into everything you do, to some extent because you fear failure more than anything else. You are always seeking self-improvement, even in areas where there is nothing you can do to improve.


Which X-Men character are you most like?

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to John of Argghhh!!!, even if I have mysteriously disappeared from his blogroll.

NB: John, the Fonda-Clinton thing you've got is inaccurate at one level: Thirty-five years ago, Jane Fonda was close to being a babe. Hillary Clinton has never been a babe. She's always been, from the evidence I've seen, in the "If she were the last woman on Earth, the human race will shortly be extinct" category. Even thirty years ago, at the height of the left-wing feeding frenzy called 'Watergate', she was something to write home about as being a horror you've seen.

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Mrs. Claus, Part Deux

I have arrived: James Lileks and I were thinking about the same thing after watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I am of course filing suit for anger infringement.

Sayeth Lileks:

I also don't think Mrs. Claus should be played by Heidi Klum in a white-fur thong, stroked by buff oiled-up elves. Think of the children, I say. Think of the children.

The weird sound you hear is the laugh track of the two protagonists from Beavis and Butt-head, MTV's last gasp of socio-cultural relevance. Huh huh huh...cool. Mr. Lileks, I agree with Mister Green in saying that you're wrong. I, like Mister Green, couldn't find much complaint with a fur-clad Klum as Mrs. Claus, so long as I'm the Mr. Otherwise, of course, this is absolutely shocking and shouldn't even be conceived much less blogged about.¹

However, if Heidi Klum wanted to audition for the part, there'd be no objections from me. No objections whatsoever, your honor.

To close, the only acceptable Mrs. Claus that I've seen was on film was Elizabeth Mitchell's Carol Newman in Tim Allen's The Santa Clause 2. She was a babe, right up until the CGI got ahold of her. It's unfortunate that her latest series got cancelled/put on hiatus, but maybe she'll turn up elsewhere, preferably not in Kerry Weaver's shower.

¹ This is to be read with the manner, accent, and style of John Cleese, preferably in Fawlty Towers appearance.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Mister Green for the story.

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Students Against North Korea

Just when you thought the collection of stupid student groups might be subsiding:

I present to you proof of the opposite: Students for War.

These folks are, in their own words, "working to build support across America for military action against the murderous regime of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il."

As Don Imus says, "Jesus God Almighty!" I understand that college is a time when idealism trumps reality for a lot of people. The 1960s are a testament to that, and I do not particularly condemn the occurrence, so long as the student grows out of it.

However, the mindset of "54-40 Or Fight!" is dangerously inapplicable in the atomic age. I'm certain that anyone who's reading this will probably ask, "But Country Pundit, you didn't sweat military action against Iraq! What's the difference?" The answer is this: Atomic weapons and a billion people.

Saddam Hussein's best shot during the recent war was to fire off some antiquated Scud-type SRBM derivatives. What's the harm, barring a chemical or gas payload? Not too awful much unless he gets lucky. They're supposed to be closely related to the German V-2 of 1944---once upon a time (and therefore unattributable at this point) I heard a quip that the people a Scud was aimed at didn't have to worry about it hitting, but anyone else in the cardinal direction of the thing's flight path did.¹ An HE warhead only does so much damage, after all.

Change this around a bit: We're told that the NKs are working on missiles to carry their putative products of their strategic weapons program. That's Not Good. When a nation has atomic weapons, the bloody rules change. One doesn't barge in with bellicose rhetoric and great sweeps of visible efforts at changing public opinion. Furthermore, you don't do something that'll irritate a neighbor who has defended the North Koreans against Americans before, especially when that neighbor has atomic weapons as well. Correspondingly, you don't want either of those parties to be getting nervous about an impending American invasion.

My preferred model for dealing with this involves talking. A lot of talking. Winston Churchill's "jaw jaw is better than war war" applies here, because the NKs have nothing to lose if war comes, if I understand their mindset right. Their society's crumbling, the regime will be doomed in a war, and they can go down while taking lots of Americans, Japanese, or South Koreans if a missile commander gets the word. I don't want that to happen. I'd rather alter Captain Edward Jellico's famous dictum² and play slick, not stupid.

Yes, I said talk. I'd prefer to have my enemies asleep when and if it is deemed necessary to strike. That strike must be unequivocal, absolutely successful, and be the proverbial bolt from the blue. I would prefer the scenario constructed in Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor as a model. No noise, no nothing until it's time for Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush to address the nation and relate to us that the North Korean atomic weapons capability no longer exists.

These students for war could benefit from not tipping our hand. Admittedly, I doubt the Bush Administration is going to be swayed by a student movement, but the last thing we need to do is to keep this in public view. I'd almost want to trust the cold-eyed men at the Pentagon with this and thus sucker-punch the NKs. No sense giving their paranoia something to feed off of. In the words of Khan Noonien Singh, "Let them eat static..."

¹ This may be horribly inaccurate; the Scuds that I'm aware of at least managed to get near their theoretical targets, but I have no way of knowing the real-world accuracy/CEP of the thing.

² His famous dictum is "I don't want to talk about it. Get it done." The title for this is open for debate; arguably another one of his good remarks was ordering Roddenberry's fantasy LCDR Deanna Troi to dress like an officer instead of Julie Newmar. Not that there's anything wrong with dressing like Julie Newmar, but one would rather not see that on a serving officer whilst on duty.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Glenn Reynolds.

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The Joys of Blog 0002

Another out-of-the-blue link courtesy of N.Z. Bear's Ecosystem:

A site called DiVERSiONZ has seen fit to place me in their blogroll. Their tagline is "Daily Tours to News, Views, Issues & Amusements", and it's an interesting site.

I haven't quite yet nailed these folks down on the partisan landscape, but I'll comply with the Commissar's broad dictates and mention them, along with an eventual (read: today) linking on the right.

Thanks to the people over there.

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Why Arabs Don't Win Wars

Four years ago, long before we had any idea that a bunch of fanatics would make mine Mistel using Boeing airliners, Colonel Norvell De Atkine, U.S. Army (ret.) wrote a piece entitled "Why Arabs Lose Wars" for the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum.

There's no way I could possibly summarize this tightly-written and very interesting piece, so I'll cheat and reproduce the section headers:

False Starts

The Role of Culture

Information as Power

Education Problems

Officers vs. Soldiers

Decision-making and Responsibility

Combined Arms and Operations

Security and Paranoia

Indifference to Safety

This has both historical and contemporary value in understanding the nature of formal state forces that American forces may find themselves in conflict with in the near future. Some of it's downright creepy or weird, and other parts will leave you chuckling at the stupidity or incompetence of these guys, and will go a long way towards explaining why the Israelis always win. (Note: This does not reject the premise that they're the Chosen People who have a deal with the Man Upstairs. It probably confirms that premise, because it is utmost providence that the numerically superior Arab powers are so fundamentally stupid when it comes to making war.)

Read it, and enjoy.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to baldilocks, from whose sidebar I found this.

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