What we know

I think most of us think we know more than the good Lord gave us sense to believe. That goes double for intellectuals. And it should be manditorily stamped on the forehead of every politician.

Love and hope

New love songs are what keep me going, these days. That and kids.



Love, like hope, springs eternal.

Here's to love and hope.

Hope and humility

What should those who believe in economic freedom do about the stimulus?

Economic stimulus or opportunism?

Exactly what we do because we believe in economic freedom. Be humble. Let the marketplace of ideas sort this out (I can only hope).

More seriously than at any moment of my life I am considering that maybe I am wrong. About all of it.

Let's hope that's the case.

Who is to blame for freedom's retreat?

Freedom Beats a Global Retreat

This has actually been true for awhile, now. We just keep rationalizing an ugly direction. It's not a liberal thing. It's not a conservative thing. It is all of us.

And we are giving cover, and have been, for some time, to the repressive instincts of despotic regimes around the world.

Perhaps we are too foolish to ever face up.

If so, as my man from Nazareth said, we know where to go to pluck the beam.

Ignorance

I did not realize the extent to which I was an idiot in my youth. It took years and years of practice for me to perfect my stupidity. I am assured that I have not plumbed its depths.

Every day that I think my ignorance has reached its outer limits, I am reminded that my stupidity has no end.

Evidence for our faith

Bill Gates discusses the markets and his efforts to address critical public issues through his foundation.



If we need evidence for faith in people and markets to address our needs effectively, this is a good discussion. We are more capable than we give ourselves credit. We should have confidence in that fact.

"After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted"

David Grossman has a beautiful and poignant reflection, in the Washington Post, today, on the Gaza war and the need for peace and talk "to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted."

Israel must stop fanning the flames that will consume us

That very moving and honest piece in toto:

"Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster -- despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the one who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.

So, a month after the war began, in the midst of the wave of nationalist invective now sweeping Israel, it would not hurt to keep in mind that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin.

As both Israel and Hamas declared their own cease-fires, we Israelis rejoiced at how this campaign has rectified Israel's military failures in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. But we should listen to the voice that says that the Israel Defense Forces' achievements are not indubitable proof that Israel was right to set out on an operation of such huge proportions; they certainly do not justify the way our army pursued its mission. The IDF's success confirms only that Israel is much stronger than Hamas, and that under certain circumstances it can be very tough and cruel.

But as the magnitude of the killing and the devastation has become apparent to all, perhaps Israeli society will, for a brief moment, put its sophisticated mechanisms of repression and self-righteousness on hold. And then perhaps a lesson of some sort will be etched into the Israeli consciousness. Maybe then we will finally understand something deep and fundamental -- that our conduct here in this region has, for a long time, been flawed, immoral and unwise. Time and again, it fans the flames that are consuming us.

Of course, the Palestinians cannot be absolved of culpability for their errors and crimes. To do so would show contempt and condescension toward them, as if they were not rational adults responsible for their mistakes and oversights. True, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were in large measure "strangled" by Israel, but they, too, had other options, other ways of protesting, voicing and displaying their difficult plight. Firing thousands of rockets at innocent civilians in Israel was not their only choice. We must not forget that. We must not be forgiving of the Palestinians, as if it goes without saying that when they are in distress, their almost automatic response must be violence.

But even when the Palestinians act with reckless belligerence -- with suicide bombings and Qassam missiles -- Israel, which is many times stronger than they are, has tremendous power to control the level of violence in the conflict as a whole. As such, it can also have a profound influence on calming the conflict and extricating both sides from its cycle of destruction. This most recent military action indicates that there does not seem to be anyone in the Israeli leadership who grasps that, who fully appreciates this critical aspect of the dispute.

After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted. How can that day come if we do not understand that our military might cannot be our principal tool for establishing our presence here, across from and among the Arab nations? How can those days come if we do not grasp the gravity of the responsibility imposed on us by our multifarious, fateful ties and connections, past and future, with the Palestinian nation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and inside Israel itself?

When the clouds of smoke clear, when the politicians' declarations of comprehensive, decisive victory fade, when we realize what this operation has really achieved, when we see how large the gap is between those declarations and what we really need to know in order to live a normal life in this region, when we acknowledge that an entire nation eagerly hypnotized itself because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure its Lebanon malady -- then we can turn our attention to those who time and again have incited Israeli society's hubris and its exaltation of power. To those who have, for so many years, taught us to scorn belief in peace and hope for any change at all in our relations with the Arabs. To those who have persuaded us that the Arabs understand only force, and that we can speak to them only in that language.

Since we have spoken that way to them so often, and only that way, we have forgotten that there are other languages that can be used to communicate with other human beings, even enemies, even enemies as bitter as Hamas -- languages that are mother tongues to us, the Israelis, no less so than the language of the jet and the tank.

To talk to the Palestinians. That must be the central conclusion we reach from this last, bloody round of war. To talk even with those who do not recognize our right to exist here. Instead of ignoring Hamas now, we must take advantage of the new situation and enter into a dialogue to enable an accommodation with the Palestinian people as a whole. To talk, in order to understand that reality is not just the hermetically sealed story that we and the Palestinians have been telling ourselves for generations, the story that we are imprisoned within, no small part of which consists of fantasies, wishes and nightmares. To talk in order to devise, within this opaque, unhearing reality, an opportunity for speech, for that alternative -- so scorned and forlorn today -- for which, in the tempest of war, there is almost no place, no hope, no believers.

To talk as a well-considered strategy, to initiate dialogue, to insist on speech, to talk to the wall, to talk even if it seems fruitless. In the long term, this stubbornness may do far more for our future than hundreds of airplanes dropping bombs on a city and its people. To talk out of the understanding, born of the recent horrors we have seen, that the destruction we, each people in its own way, are able to cause one another is a huge and corrupting force. If we surrender to it and its logic, it will, in the end, destroy us all.

To talk, because what has taken place in Gaza over the past three weeks places before us in Israel a mirror that reflects a face that would horrify us were we to gaze on it for one moment from the outside, or if we were to see it on another nation. We would understand then that our victory is no real victory, and that the war in Gaza has not brought us any healing in that place where we desperately need a cure.

David Grossman is a leading Israeli novelist and peace activist. A version of this article first appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It was translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman."

This is a final word on this conflict, as far as I am concerned, save for the words that finally end the bloodshed. There is much practical security work that must be done to finally bring a peace. But words must come first.

Let us pray that pointless tragedy and the bonfire of their vanities will not continue to consume these foolish, foolish neighbors.

Warren Buffett on the economy

This is why I love this guy.

"SG: But there is debate about whether there should be fiscal stimulus, whether tax cuts work or not. There is all of this academic debate among economists. What do you think? Is that the right way to go with stimulus and tax cuts?

WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it and whether it’s more effective if you’re fighting a fire to be concentrating the water flow on this part or that part. You’re going to use every weapon you have in fighting it. And people, they do not know exactly what the effects are. Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it. What we do know is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hoover-like policies would be a mistake and we don’t know how effective in the short run we don’t know how effective this will be and how quickly things will right themselves. We do know over time the American machine works wonderfully and it will work wonderfully again.

SG: But are we creating new problems?

WB: Always."

Man, if there is any guy that I would love to have a beer with and pick his brain, this is the guy.

Warren, if you're out there, anytime you want to head out to a minor league ballgame and have some dinner and just gab about whatever, you give me a call and it's on me.

I bet the richest man in the world gets tired of picking up the tab all the time. And I swear to God a night of chit-chat with you would be worth it.

And it has not a lick to do with money.

A question of first principles

Jacob Weisberg has a valuable and insightful criticism of what I believe is an admirable and thoughtful quality on the part of President Obama: his grounded sense of pragmatism on questions of governance.

Obama's Big-Picture Problem

"In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama framed the issue in terms of simple efficacy. 'The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified,' he said. 'Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.'

This view is in keeping with Obama's non-ideological approach to politics. To most of those listening, it came across as an expression of our new president's unsentimental good sense. Yet on rereading the speech in the less euphoric light of the next day, that passage seemed insufficient as a governing philosophy. "Whatever works' is less a vision of the public sector's proper role than a placeholder for someone who has yet to figure out what he thinks that role should be.

Obama's pragmatic liberalism risks blurring execution with intention, means with ends. To take his illustrations, it is either up to the commonweal to provide a minimum income to retired people, to offer health insurance to everybody and to increase income equality—or it isn't. Most liberals would say these are legitimate responsibilities of government. Most conservatives would argue they aren't. On income security for the elderly, we've had a social consensus since the New Deal. On health care, a consensus may be emerging after decades of national ambivalence. When it comes to growing income inequality, a newer problem, there is no consensus. But Obama must decide what government's goals are before considering the subordinate questions of what works and how much we can afford.

Obama's vagueness about the federal role comes at a moment when clarity is especially needed. Our government is about to become bigger, more powerful and more expensive in order to deal with a sprawling economic crisis. Washington will take on responsibilities it hasn't shouldered in 75 years, such as directly alleviating unemployment and perhaps nationalizing banks. Many who would ordinarily reject such interventions on principle can justify them as misery relief, Keynesian stimulus or emergency management. But some see in the expansion something further-reaching—a redefinition of the government's relationship to markets transcending the current crisis.

A president facing this situation needs to know what's temporary and what's permanent, if only because of the tendency for the one to become the other. Urgent measures are liable to stick around long after the precipitating emergency is passed. There aren't many American homes left without electricity, but we retain a renamed version of the Rural Electrification Administration, a program created by Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to modernize a region of the country still afflicted by malaria, remains with us as well. Expanding government is easy, shrinking it nearly impossible.

On the broader question of what Washington should and shouldn't do, Obama remains hard to read. He inclines simultaneously toward activist government and limited government, which is a tension, though not a contradiction. He favors universal health coverage, but without government taking direct responsibility for it. He is poised to propose cutbacks in our most expensive entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, to ensure their survival. Language elsewhere in his Inaugural Address suggests that he sees government as a guarantor of opportunity rather than a provider of benefits, more Clinton's way than LBJ's.

But as he navigates the crisis, Obama would do well to figure out what he thinks about the fundamental question of government's responsibilities. He might begin by pondering some words of his role model, Abraham Lincoln, who in 1854 wrote, 'The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.' Obama's test of practicality comes after Lincoln's test of principle."

It is a wise observation for what looks, at this point, like equally wise, if ever imperfect, leadership from our new President.

I have some suggestions for the new President. I'm sure many people do.

The test of leadership that Barack Obama is likely to pass, I believe, is will he listen with an open heart and an open mind?

That is the test for all Americans, right now. It is the test of our faith in our liberal values, our independent consciences, and ourselves.

And it is a test that, every day, I grow more confident that we will pass.

Underestimating people

The older I get and the more I grow up, the more I get to know people, the more I really value the people in my life, the more I come to conclusion that I and all of us generally far underestimate the people in our lives, not overestimate them.

Especially as adults, I think we become scared, when people disappoint us, that the world is full of danger and people are not worthy of our trust.

But the older I get, the more I get to know people, the more I appreciate that most people really are doing their best, even when their best seems kind of lousy. Most people want to be challenged to be better, in my experience, as long as they can be respected for who they are, what they think, how they feel, and the unique person they are.

It's one of the most incredible opportunities that teaching offers me: the opportunity to get to know the unique and richly layered individuals that most people are, even when they aren't always making the choices that others might approve of or appreciate.

Most of the time we underestimate ourselves and one another, not overestimate one another. It's a shame.

Because there is so much goodness out there in the world.

Growing up and James and the Giant Peach

This year, I had the best New Year's experience of my life, I think. Instead of going out with my sister and her husband, exhausted and afraid I would hold back the party and prompt an all-too-early return home, I stayed in, drank Sam Adams, ate queso and chips, and watched one of my favorite kids' movies of all time, James and the Giant Peach.



It was one of my favorite New Year's for exactly the reason that it would seem so boring to other folks. It was nice to stay in and imagine what it would be like to have a wife and some kiddos and just enjoy a night in on New Year's Eve and give up childish things, as President Obama and First Corinthians might say.

I have to say that, for all of my reservations about President Obama's economic policies, I was really pleased with his focus on responsibility and growing up as a needed discussion within the culture in his inauguration speech. Too many of our political debates are focussed around self-righteous notions around what constitutes being good or right or ideologically or religiously pure and not nearly enough discussion of the very basic sentiment that I think Obama offered all Americans in that inauguration, both Congress and average Americans, and especially poor communities: learning to be grown-ups for our children. He did so without posturing and with a sincerity and an example that are both needed for that message to resonate.

As a young man looking to have a family and raise children, it was a message that was appropriate for this point in my life when this has been exactly my focus for the last couple of years. As soon as I get a girlfriend, first, of course.

At a personal level, this has been a theme of my life, as of late. And I have to say that I appreciate that I have finally taken seriously the need to straighten up and be a good example to my children long before I have them.

It's been the best part of being a teacher. Learning how important my example and my deeds, more than my words, are for young people, and especially for my children.

As I move into this new phase of my life, I realize just how important it is for me, as much as for anyone else, to put away childish things and be the father that I know I can be with a bit more maturity.

I'm looking forward to many more New Years' with family and quality kids' stories.

And that is something, I realize with experience, now, more than faith, that, for all of my concerns about choosing a career with more purpose than money, that money could never buy.

The limits of law

The Economist poses the conflict that most Americans must be concerned with, these days.

Law v Common Sense

"The relentless piling of law upon law—the federal register has 70,000 ever-changing pages—does not make for a more just society. When even the most trivial daily interactions are subject to detailed rules, individual judgment is stifled. When rule-makers seek to eliminate small risks, perverse consequences proliferate. Bureaucrats rip up climbing frames for fear that children may fall off and break a leg. So children stay indoors and get fat.

The direct costs of lawsuits are only one of the drawbacks of an over-legalistic society. Too many rules squeeze the joy out of life. Doctors who inflict dozens of unnecessary tests on patients to fend off lawsuits take less pride in their work. And although the legal system is supposed to be neutral, the scales are tilted in favour of whoever is in the wrong. Because the process is so expensive and juries are so unpredictable, blameless people often settle baseless claims to make them go away. The law is supposed to protect individuals from the state, but it often allows selfish individuals to harness the state’s power to settle private scores."

I am increasingly convinced that many people use the law as a weapon in on-going political and personal battles with which they will never be satisfied, no matter how little good or how much harm takes place to settle their scores.

My work is committed to the notion that much of our foolish and pitted conflict can end, with a recognition of the fallacy that ideology, religion, or any other ism or schism offers more answers than they do. And a commitment to resolution and to solving problems with a practical and empirical grounding and an honest commitment to liberty as the basis for lives of decency and goodwill.

As most classical liberal thinkers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries - John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton - argued, there are limits to the law's ability to promote the common good. And, as the Nazi and Soviet legacies attest, much bad that occurs in its name.

It is time to rethink this path to salvation.

What does a teacher make?

For those of us who needed a new editor for Christmas and got cheap deodorant instead. Apparently, more than my writing stinks.



And for everyone who has ever wanted to laugh out loud at a slamfest.



And Taylor Mali on what teachers make.



Two snaps and a head shake. Be nice if that came with cash.

Agreed

As much as I favor gay marriage, George Will (and Andrew Sullivan) are right. Democratic persuasion, not judicial fiat, is the way to handle this and virtually all important political matters.

Of Judges, By Judges, For Judges

It's time for Americans to grow up.

All of us.

Why pride is the deadliest sin

Clarence Page highlights the price of our pride on the drug war.

Our Drug War Next Door

"Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy.

Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, 'Don't even think about going into Juarez.'

Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels.

The tragedy is etched in daily news headlines. The same day I arrived, two Mexican police offers were ambushed, shot to death while sitting in their patrol car. Just another bloody day in Juarez.

Hardly a day goes by without a new Juarez horror story in the El Paso Times:

'Man found dead with hands severed.'

'Prominent Juarez lawyer, son, among four found dead Tuesday.'

'Man found shot to death in trash drum.'

'El Paso charities afraid to cross border.'

'Juarez area slayings top 20 in new year.'

Murders across Mexico more than doubled last year to more than 5,600. That's more than the total Americans lost so far in the Iraq war.

Most of those murders have been happening in border towns. More than 1,600 were killed in Juarez, Mexico's fourth largest city, with a population of 1.7 million. The bloodbath of unspeakable brutality includes kidnappings and decapitated bodies left in public places as a grisly form of advertising.

'There have already been 20 murders in Juarez this year,' Beto O'Rourke, a member of El Paso's city council, told me in a telephone interview this week as President-elect Barack Obama met with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Monday. 'That doesn't include the kidnappings and extortions. Ciudad Juarez is essentially a failed city at this point. They can't guarantee your safety.'

The situation is deteriorating so fast that 'Mexico is on the edge of abyss,' retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a drug czar under President Clinton, said.

'It could become a narco-state in the coming decade," he wrote in a recent report, and the result could be a 'surge of millions of refugees' crossing the U.S. border to escape.

Something drastic needed to be done, O'Rourke, a fourth-generation El Paso resident, decided. A proposed city council resolution called for more federal action on both sides of the border to reduce the flow of guns and drugs.

But it wasn't strong enough. O'Rourke pushed things further by adding 12 words: 'supporting an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.' The council passed it unanimously.

Yet even a bid to talk about drug legalization was too much for Mayor John Cook. He vetoed the bill, at least partly out of concern that Washington might not take the measure seriously with the drug legalization line in it.

Nevertheless, the controversy brought what has been rare American media attention to Mexico's crisis by turning it into radio and cable TV talk fodder. That's a start."

There is a reason pride is the deadliest sin. Because it causes more death.

It's time we rethink our pride.

Margaret Spellings, thinking for the rest of us

Is this the genius who finally saved public education?

Margaret Spellings - A Word To My Successor

She would have you believe that. But what would I know? I'm just one of those whining teachers who think that the No Child Left Behind Act, that she is always trumpeting, is a well-intentioned, fundamentally flawed effort to put responsibility for education and school improvement in the hands of lawmakers rather than teachers, principals, parents, and, especially, students.

And Margaret Spellings, in this piece, would have you think that she is outthunk all of us whiners on this one. As long as she and her successor have the power to enforce their wisdom. It's Plato's Republic, Spelling-style. I can feel the Education Secretary ripping me from my cave.

Thank goodness Margaret is there to think for me, huh?

Because that is what a good teacher is there for.

Good times

Memories of Washington, D.C. and the 9:30 club. One of the most chill, light-hearted birthday times I've ever had.



Thanks, Brandi.

The fruits of repression

At so many levels, this is the consequence of repression in lieu of liberal values and liberal education animating a culture.

Afghan held for sister's alleged ad hoc abortion

When you go to bed at night and thank your lucky stars that you live in a free country, the greater likelihood of avoiding this type of near-tragedy should be among the many reasons why.

Repression creates fear, not understanding or an appreciation for others or for the value of human life.

Free and open education, debate and discussion makes greater understanding possible.

For free societies to move forward, we need to honor this fact of our lives that liberal values have made possible.

It is time to end it

A fascinating history of the 100 year Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the current The Economist.

The hundred years' war in Palestine

The last portion of that history:

"In Lebanon three years ago, and today in Gaza, Hizbullah and Hamas seem to have invented a new military doctrine. Israel has deterred its enemies mainly by relying on a mighty conventional army to react with much greater force to any provocation. But non-state actors are harder to deter. Hizbullah and Hamas, armed by Iran with some modern weapons, can burrow inside the towns and villages of their own people while lobbing rockets at Israel’s. A state that yearns for a semblance of normality between its wars cannot let such attacks become routine. That is why today, as in the 1950s, Israel responds to pinpricks with punitive raids, each of which had the potential to flare into war. Israel’s operation in Gaza is designed not only to stop Hamas’s rockets but to shore up a doctrine on which Israel thinks its safety must still be based.

At Camp David in 2000 Israel and the Palestinians discovered that even with goodwill it is hard to agree terms. How to share Jerusalem? What to offer the refugees who will never go home? How can Israel trust that the land it vacates is not used, as Gaza has been, as a bridgehead for further struggle? But—and this is the fourth thing that keeps the battle alive—the two sides are seldom left alone to tackle these core issues.

For too long the conflict in Palestine was a hostage to the cold war. America was once neutral: it was Eisenhower who forced Israel out of Gaza (and Britain out of Egypt) after Suez. But America later recruited Israel as an ally, and this suited the Israelis just fine. It gave them the support of a superpower whilst relieving them of a duty to resolve the quarrel with the Palestinians, even though their own long-term well-being must surely depend on solving that conflict.

It may be no coincidence that some of the most promising peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians took place soon after the cold war ended. But now a new sort of geopolitical confrontation stalks the region, one that sets America against Iran, and the Islamist movements Iran supports against the Arab regimes in America’s camp. With Hamas inside Iran’s tent and Fatah in America’s, the Palestinians are now facing a paralysing schism.


Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, has been saying all week that, although Israel’s immediate aim is to stop the rocket fire and not to topple Hamas, there can be no peace, and no free Palestine, while Hamas remains in control. She is right that with Hamas in power in Gaza the Islamists can continue to wreck any agreement Israel negotiates with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Mr Abbas, along with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, may quietly relish Hamas being taken down a peg. Egypt is furious at Hamas’s recent refusal to renew talks with Fatah about restoring a Palestinian unity government.

There is a limit, however. Taking Hamas down a peg is one thing. But even in the event of Israel 'winning' in Gaza, a hundred years of war suggest that the Palestinians cannot be silenced by brute force. Hamas will survive, and with it that strain in Arab thinking which says that a Jewish state does not belong in the Middle East. To counter that view, Israel must show not only that it is too strong to be swept away but also that it is willing to give up the land—the West Bank, not just Gaza—where the promised Palestinian state must stand. Unless it starts doing that convincingly, at a minimum by freezing new settlement, it is Palestine’s zealots who will flourish and its peacemakers who will fall back into silence. All of Israel’s friends, including Barack Obama, should be telling it this."

Any decent person can understand Israel's sense of insecurity and impatience with this situation.

The challenge for Israel, Palestinians, and the world, at this point is that it is time to end it.

If they'll accept it.

Endgame in Gaza

If they'll accept it. If Palestinians will accept an Israeli enforced endgame.

I am completely open to idea that they might. And, frankly, I want this history of bloodshed between Israel and Palestine behind us as quickly as possible.

The big question is would/will Palestinians accept an Israeli enforced endgame.

The reason I am a skeptic (but a skeptic terribly sympathetic to the Israeli dilemna and not completely convinced that I would choose differently, unless I thought there was a better plan, which I think there might be/might have been) is because that big "if" makes all the difference, in the long run. If Palestinians will not accept an Israeli crushing of Hamas, I am concerned, then they will support stronger measures from those who promise to continue Hamas' legacy.

If they will accept a Hamas defeat as a signal of the need for a more comprehensive and long term peace (and a secondary, but important question, is whether these deaths are worth a short term dose of deterrence, another question that I am agnostic on, at this point) then I am open to being wrong on this matter.

But if this offensive stiffens the resolve of Palestinians, then it confirms my original concern, which is that this offensive, like the military effort in Iraq, ignores broader political matters with the belief that overwhelming force resolves political matters it is not capable of resolving.

As I heard about this offensive, my first thought was that if this was going to be effective, Israelis needed to work with moderate Palestinians to stage arrests and/or offensive military operations, ideally with the backing and support of international forces (all of which would increase the risk of spoiling the element of surprise, but which could be done covertly and have seriously increased the probability of long-term political as well as combat success of such an effort), and to build into that effort political negotiations for an independent Palestinian future to peel away provide hope to Palestinians that might support the likes of Hamas of a decent future for Palestinians while their hardliners are being corralled and crushed.

If this unilateral offensive, is effective and civilian deaths are minimized as much as possible, I'm open to it being an effective route to finally end Hamas' stranglehold over Gaza. I'm not sure that a short term deterrent effect is worth the lives of innocent Palestinians, but I am open to that, as well, given sufficient deterrence.

What I am not open to is ignoring the potential downsides, here, for future political efforts, which I think, at this point, are the only sustainable path to long term peace.

And if this operation creates any serious setbacks to a peace process, I think we should reconsider its wisdom, as precedent for future action as much as a matter of immediate concern.

The empirical consequences matter if we are to resolve this matter once and for all. It is not enough to wish or defend our policies into success.

We'll see what the future holds on this question.

Fallible individuals

Steve Chapman, of the Chicago Tribune, makes the quite cogent case for why no amount of regulation can ever make them go away.

The Empty Case For More Regulation

"So if regulators had been paying attention, they would have detected what was going on, right? After all, as one expert noted, Madoff was conspicuously unable to attract a lot of big institutions. 'There's no Harvard management, there's no Yale, there's no Penn ... no State of Texas or Virginia retirement system,' James Hedges IV of LJH Global Investments told Fortune magazine.

Why not? 'Because when you get to page two of your 30-page due diligence questionnaire,' said Hedges, 'you've already tripped eight alarms and said, 'I'm out of here.''

So you would think all this would have caught the eye of any regulators who were half-awake. But regulators, it turns out, were not oblivious to what was going on. Nor were they lacking in means to rein Madoff in.

In fact, as The Wall Street Journal reported the other day, the Securities and Exchange Commission had been suspicious of his methods for a long time. It had even heard in 2005 from a competing investment executive who drafted a 21-page report arguing that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

The government had actually investigated him -- not once or twice, but 'at least eight times in 16 years,' according to the Journal. Yet it 'never came close to uncovering' the operation, which may have begun as early as the 1970s.

So what makes anyone think that future bureaucrats, no matter how vast their authority, will be able to do better? Advocates of stricter regulation often talk as though the choice for protecting investors is between imperfect market mechanisms and foolproof government regulations. In fact, governments, like every other institution, are staffed by fallible individuals who can be fooled as easily as anyone else.

The call for more federal control overlooks inconvenient facts. The first is that con artists will often outfox regulators, if only because they have far more to gain from carrying off a fraud than civil servants have to gain from stopping it. If the SEC couldn't catch the brazen Madoff in eight tries, what suggests we should place greater faith in the ability of other agencies trying to monitor a vast network of financial companies?

Banks have been decimated by their purchase of mortgage-backed debt that has gone bad. But banks operate in one of the most heavily regulated sectors of the economy. The call for more intervention assumes that if one aspirin won't cure a case of pneumonia, two will.

And if America's weird aversion to regulation is the problem, how come banks in government-addicted Europe are in the same hole? 'By some measures, in fact, European banks exposed themselves to even higher levels of risky debt than American banks did,' the International Herald Tribune reported in October.

Federally imposed rules are no match for a mass outbreak of reckless abandon, and they're no substitute for individual prudence. A new burst of regulation would eventually confirm those truths, but the mess we're in should be lesson enough."

Often, a good number of those fallible individuals, most of us, I would venture, have to fail over and over and over again to ever learn a lesson. On this question, as with so many, that appears to be our fate.

As often, sadly, it is failure and not the lesson staring us in the face, which is our strongest teacher.

If only we are willing to learn.

Intellectually honest

The devil in Jonathan Freedland's details are not convincing to me, at this point. But his framing of the problem of trying to end Hamas through military force is strong, I think.

Israel has plenty of tactics for war, but none for peace

"All those involved, and most of those following the bloodshed in Gaza from afar, are sure who is in the right and who is in the wrong. They know who the innocent victims are and who are the wicked perpetrators. These certainties are held equally firmly by those who will be demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians in London today and those who plan to stage similar shows of support for Israel later this month.

Both sides see the conflict in moral terms. For supporters of the Palestinians, it could not be clearer. Israel is committing a war crime, killing people in their hundreds, hammering a besieged population from the sky (and soon perhaps on the ground too), claiming to aim only at Hamas but inevitably striking those civilians who get in the way.

Israel's cheerleaders are just as clear. Israel is the victim, hitting out now only belatedly and in self-defence. Its southern citizens have sat terrorised in bomb shelters, fearing the random rockets of Hamas, since 2005, longer than any society could tolerate without fighting back.

Both sides say they would have maintained the six-month ceasefire that had held - albeit imperfectly - until December 19 had the other side not broken it first. And who did break the deal first, Hamas with its rockets or Israel with its blockade? Both sides point at the other with equal vehemence, a Newtonian chain of claimed action and reaction that can stretch back to infinity.

So perhaps a more useful exercise - especially for those who long for an eventual peace with both sides living side by side - is not to ask whether the current action is legitimate, but whether it is wise."

This is the question Israel faces today. I'm far from convinced that this operation was either wise or worth the deaths of so many civilians.

The burden is on Israel, at this point, to demonstrate that the deaths of civilians was worth more than peace of mind for Israeli leaders.

If no real peace comes of this operation (which is very likely will not) or if conditions for peace are made worse, Israel needs to finally acknowledge that a military path is not a viable one to peace.

If an invasion resolves the matter (and I have very little confidence, as with Lebanon 2 years ago, that it will), those committed to a peace process, like myself, need to rethink our commitments.

In any case, if this military exercise does not end the bloodshed, the question of what is the next phase of this process should be resolved once and for all for the intellectually honest.

The question is how honest and honestly committed to peace will all of us be.

Likely outcome

Yassin Musharbash describes the likely outcome for the most recent Israeli offensive in the current Der Spiegel.

Is Israel Repeating Mistakes from the Past?

"Israel's anger is understandable. On Dec. 19, Hamas elected not to renew a fragile six-month-long cease-fire with Israel and began once again lobbing explosives at random across the border into Israel. Those rockets have killed four people this week. But the question remains: Is a vast military offensive of the kind we have seen this week the best way for Israel to proceed?

It is certainly risky. Most experts on asymmetrical warfare warn that it is virtually impossible to eliminate a group like Hamas -- with its military and social components -- merely with superior firepower. Furthermore, the offensive strains Israel's relations with its neighbors Jordan and Egypt -- bonds that have never been very tight. It also weakens the positions of those Palestinians who were in favor of a negotiated peace with Israel.

The last five days of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which have seen over 350 Palestinians killed and many more wounded, have highlighted the problems inherent in such an asymmetrical operation. Planes have targeted mosques because Israel thinks they are being used to cache weapons; apartment blocks where high-ranking Hamas members live have been destroyed, almost guaranteeing civilian casualties. The university was destroyed because it espoused the Hamas ideology. Each one of these targets presents a dilemma -- and the images they create are unhelpful to Israel. Indeed, the only targets that make sense are the smuggler tunnels under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

It is also unclear that the offensive brings Israel a single step closer to its ultimate goal of eliminating Hamas entirely. Indeed, the more intense the Israeli bombing campaign has become, the more Palestinian rockets have flown across the border into Israel. Hamas may be briefly weakened as its commanders are knocked off and its weapons depots destroyed. But, in the long run, it is difficult to see Hamas not benefiting the same way Hezbollah benefited from the 2006 war. Their aura as resistance fighters can only be strengthened.

Some have argued that the bombing campaign makes it clear to the Palestinians exactly what their support of Hamas can result in. Whether the demonstration of power will make Palestinians more interested in a peace deal with Israel, though, is doubtful.

It is always the case that, when the situation in the Middle East escalates, the world holds Israel to a different standard than its enemies. Israel, surrounded by enemies though it may be, is a democratic society based on the rule of law. Whereas nobody expects much from Hamas, one can hope that Israel would have more regard for civilian casualties. And one can hope that it would learn the lessons of the past.

Israel is currently considering a 48-hour cease-fire plan proposed by France. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said however that the country's leaders 'view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas,' according to the New York Times. Preparations are still being made for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Should it come to that, no one should be surprised if, in a few months, another investigative committee -- as happened after the 2006 Lebanon war -- comes to the conclusion that the conflict was a mistake.

This time, to be sure, the entire Israeli government was brought in to the decision-making process. But, in 2006, one of the primary criticisms was that Israel had not sufficiently defined its war aims before marching into southern Lebanon. 'War to the bitter end,' certainly doesn't sound any more precise."

Life is not fair for anyone. Least of all, the civilians in this conflict. The choices each player faces all have potentially deadly consequence. But the most recent option taken by Israelis has failed time and again, and as recently as 2006 in Lebanon. And, in each case, has likely made more workable solutions more difficult and needless tragedy even greater.

If Israel must learn this lesson the hard way, with significant Palestinian civilian casualties, there is little I can do about it. But, at some point, Israel must learn this lesson if she and moderate Palestinians are going end this madness.

I am tired of watching civilians die in a war not of their own making.

It is time to learn the right lessons.

Senseless tragedy

The assault on Gaza offers the best hope for peace

I would very much like this very nicely argued piece by Con Coughlin to be true. It would make life for everyone, including the Palestinians, so much easier, safer, and more decent.

I just don't think it is.

Here is the essence of the strongest argument I have read for the Israeli incursion:

"The challenge facing Israel in Gaza is not dissimilar to that which faced the US-led coalition two years ago in Iraq, when al-Qaeda supporters were threatening to undermine American efforts to transform the country into a functioning, Western-style democracy.

As with Hamas in Gaza, the al-Qaeda leadership in Iraq was seen by many as an interloper that had imposed its radical Islamic agenda on the reluctant Sunni Muslim population. The military surge devised by General David Petraeus succeeded in destroying al-Qaeda's operational effectiveness in Iraq, thereby allowing the Iraqi government to start taking responsibility for governing the country.

Israel needs to adopt a similar strategy in Gaza, not least because a large proportion of the civilian Palestinian population would dearly love to see an end to Hamas's unwelcome interference in their affairs.

Hamas's defenders like to point out that the movement owes its current dominance of the Palestinian political scene to its success in the 2005 Palestinian elections, when it won a clear majority. But many of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so more as a protest vote against the endemic corruption of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority than their desire to have an Islamic state imposed upon them. Once Hamas had won the election, it set about dismantling the Palestinians' fledgling democratic institutions, replacing them with an Iranian-style, autocratic administration that brooked no opposition.

Hamas's widespread unpopularity is not confined to the Palestinian territories. The movement's links to other radical Islamist groups in neighbouring states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon means that it attracts scant support from moderate, pro-Western states which regard it as a threat to their own survival. The Egyptian government, in particular, makes no secret of its disdain for Hamas.

In a year in which the new American President is expected to focus much of his energy on trying to resolve the outstanding conflicts in the Middle East, from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to Iran and Afghanistan, there is no place for an organisation such as Hamas, whose entire raison d'être appears to be simply to obstruct any effort to make the region a better place in which to live.

Israel has attracted much international criticism for the way it has set about trying to tackle the challenge posed by Hamas, but the world will be a better and safer place if Israel's own military surge in Gaza achieves the same level of success as the Americans did in Iraq."

Here's the problem.

Israel vis a vis Palestine is not America vis a vis Iraq. The hatred of Israel and its military is what gives political oxygen for Hamas' existence and efforts, to begin with, not just as an additional prop to their power. America was most certainly hated by Iraqis and Saddam Hussein did try to portray himself as their hero challenging American and Western hegemony in the world.

But the very plain fact is that Iraqis did not hate Americans in the same way that Palestinians have come to hate Israel and its military efforts. Israel, in the minds of most Palestinians, plays the same role as Saddam Hussein in the lives of Iraqis - an oppressor who has enforced his repression against their will and claims to self-determination - not the United States.

It would be lovely if Israel could claim to be a hero to the Palestinian people. But the Palestinian people very clearly, to anyone not trying to defend this most recent Israeli action, do not see Israel as any kind of hero. To the contrary, they view them, quite accurately, as a force that has killed and repressed many of their family and neighbors - for reasons that most decent people understand, even if they do not agree with the significant degree of tragedy and misery that have been imposed on the Palestinian people - and who control much of their lives without their voice or choosing. Palestinian terrorists are quite clearly the worse of the bad guys, in this scenario, and the Israelis are much more committed both to preserving life and to a genuine peace than most Palestinians, to be sure.

But that fact does not negate the very plain fact that most Palestinians would find the idea of a heroic Israeli military force liberating them from the clutches of the group they have often favored to fight back that same Israeli force as laughable, and ambivalent with much bitterness, at best.

I would love for a military solution to finally route out these brutal murderers that make up Hamas. There just is not such a solution, I do not believe.

And, in the meantime, not only do many innocent Palestinians die needlessly in such an operation. It sets the clock backwards, not forwards, by my lights, for a more likely and effective path to peace, since it engenders more bitterness and more determination on the part of Palestinians to destroy the Israeli enemy.

If Israelis prove me wrong on this count, I an open to being wrong. But if they do not, many more innocent civilians, including children, just died this Christmas inexplicably and counterproductively.

Senseless tragedy, especially the death of children, that accomplishes no real purpose that moves us forward, is the most tragic of all.

We have had quite enough senseless tragedy in Palestine and Israel.

It is time for it to end.

Tuna anyone?

Proof that pussies of the world are the ones who have fucked things up.

JUSTIN LONG in Hunger Relief by Justin Long

Nice people are constantly fucking shit up. If you don't believe me, ask Hamas. Or Hezbollah. Or Kim Jong Il. Or Mamoud Ahmadinejad. Or any real man, for that matter.

I would give all the pussies the assbeating of their life if I wasn't such a fuckin' pussy myself. Most days, I want to kick my own ass.

Thank God there are some real men in the world who know how to give the beat down to pussies who don't have the balls or the sense make the world a better place.

The Taliban.

Oh, and the Israeli Defense Forces. Welcome to the club, gentlemen.

Finally, Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi are going to get the beatdown they deserve.

And free sub sandwich deliveries and all the evil in the world will finally be defeated for good.

Tuna anyone?

Blame the pussies

Has Israel learned its lesson?

Jeff Jacoby has finally figured out that after 80 years of bloodshed, what Israel and the world must stop doing is working for peace and to once and for all defeat those bloody Palestinians and all the blather on the left about peace and a two-state solution.

Because for 80 years, by Jeff's logic, Israel has been a pussy. And they finally need to grow some balls and kill these motherfuckers once and for all.

Thanks, Jeff. I'm thinking a little testosterone is exactly what this conflict has been missing for 80 years.

With all those people dead over that long period of armed conflict, isn't it obvious that the problem has been that everyone, including Israel, has been too nice?

Only pussies and Europeans don't understand that killing these motherfuckers once and for all is exactly what is going to end all the bloodshed.

For the rest of us, it is really without question that the problem in the Middle East has been not nearly enough carnage.

Thank Allah Israel will finally be ending this whole mess soon.

And if it doesn't work, we'll do what we always do.

Blame the pussies who said so.

"Hamas is the cause of all wars"

One, of many, signs that children often know better than their elders.



We're going to need more honesty from people that the aggression and brutality are failed means of governing if we are going to turn the corner.

This little girl is a good start.