The Daily Mail has an interesting article on the 9/11 widows prompted by a documentary on the subject.

Its a disturbing picture as account after account reveals lives in total turmoil.

I think its probably pretty hard for people who haven't had their lives ripped apart by something like what the 9/11 widows have gone through to understand how they feel, and perhaps more importantly, why they behave the way they do. Having experienced it myself and witnessed others who've gone through it, I can say that nothing surprises me. As the song says, "you don't know what you've got 'til its gone..."

There is this element of surprise, as it realization dawns that we have such an enormous psychic dependancy of those around us. Most people like to think of themselves as strong and independent, but when the struts that support your life are ripped away like this, you realize how unbelievably fragile we are. Our relationships are the foundations of our mental and emotional health.

It is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about the importance of family and why I tend towards an inverse philosophy--classically liberal on economic and policy issues, conservative on social issues. The invisible nature of our psychic infrastructure leads a lot of people to make wild assumptions about its strength and flexibility--no father, no problem is one such conceit that makes me shudder.

Its interesting to note that historically, the primary means of control of a conquered nation was to raze the social and familial structure. The men were killed and the woman and children were sold into slavery. The psychic devastation of having everything and everyone familiar ripped away from you leaves an empty shell--a perfect slave. Not surprisingly, the social engineers of our own generation realize that to remake society in their own image, they first have to break down the existing social order, which of course means destroying the traditional family.

The other reflection aroused in me by the article came from the excesses engaged in by some of the widows--the spending sprees, etc.. There is a temptation to attribute this to a lack of grieving, but from my own experience, people who have a big hole in their life to fill, look for all sorts of strange ways to fill it. Everything from internet obsession, alcohol and drugs, promiscuity and of course compulsive spending.

There is something very scary about all of this--something no one will discuss, probably because its not even generally recognized as a problem.

Death of a loved one is terrible under any and all circumstances, but mitigated by the existence of other close relationships. Most widows will tell you that they get an outpouring of support and condolence in the immediate aftermath of the death, which tapers off and then completely disappears after a year. This isn't that surprising, since the disruption of our more casual relationships takes correspondingly less time to recover from. Coworkers will want to share their grief for a month, buddies for six months, the accountant and lawyer--2 days to a week--leaving the widow to carry on by herself for years.

Modern western society has shifted from close relationships with extended family and life-long neighbors to increasingly temporary and casual relationships in which one may never reveal one's true self to anyone. Ex-wives and estranged children are often as close a relationship as some people ever get.

I am reminded of this by my mother, who reminds me that her generation and culture put a high premium on life-long friendships that transcend distance as well as time. She has friends that she regularly talks to and visits that have been around fifty years or more. I constrast this with neighbors of mine for eight years who recently moved. I am ashamed to admit that I haven't called or emailed them since they left. Its an out-of-sight, out-of-mind culture we live in.

The 9/11 widows elicit the observation that as a culture, we are particularly vunerable to psychic shock, particularly compared with other, more technologically primitive cultures. We have the technology to wreck wide-scale destruction on our enemies, but they are in fact much more psychically resilent and able to withstand such assaults because of close family and community ties. On the other hand, these "primitive" cultures can effect a equivilent amount of psychic damage to us with much less impressive physical assaults on our society and persons. Psychically at least, it is the Islamists who have the superior weapons.

Ultimately, the terrorists have realized something extremely important--they don't have to defeat our armies and weapon systems, they only have to defeat our psyches to create the proper slave mentality.

Oh, I wish I'd written this.

I've had private discussions trying to debunk the suitcase nuke myth--with mixed results. Richard Miniter gives it a shot.

Wiliam Bradford, wrote his recollections after 35 years as governor of the Plymouth colony. Plymouth was a utopian experiment and like modern Democrat socialist utopians, the colonists contemplated a collectivist approach to their economy. Fortunately for us, starvation had the effect of driving ideological fantasies from their minds and adopting instead the free-enterprise model that makes the U.S. the Great Satan that everybody would love to immigrate to.

All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other thing to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

I thought this might be a nice companion piece for Dave's post on Eutopia.

The blockbuster epic "300" (which I haven't seen yet...) is putting Iranian noses out of joint.

"American cultural officials thought they could get mental satisfaction by plundering Iran's historic past and insulting this civilization," he said.

"Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture.

"Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."

Daily newspaper Ayandeh-No carried the headline "Hollywood declares war on Iranians".

The paper said: "It seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has for long been the source of evil and modern Iranians' ancestors are the ugly murderous dumb savages you see in 300."

Three MPs in the Iranian parliament have also written to the foreign ministry to protest against the production and screening of this "anti-Iranian Hollywood film".

Iranians aren't big on history. There were similar complaints concerning "Alexander" when Greeks rolled over the Persians and on to empire. Another inconvenient historical event the Iranians don't like is the holocaust. Ahmadinejad called it a myth.

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to thousands of people in the Iranian city of Zahedan, according to a report on Wednesday from Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

"The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets," he said. "(It) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet."

This of course was shortly after he called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Those Iranians sure can dish it out, but they can't take it, can they?

Its more than a little silly to still be embarrassed over a 2,500 year old defeat, but a theocracy has God on its side and a defeat puts the lie to "Allah akbar"; our God is greater. Just as bad is the alternate exegesis--God has rejected the Persians as "unworthy".

I doubt "300" was a psyop, but the Iranian reaction sure has given everybody some good ideas about what buttons to push in Iran...

Campus shooting, Obama's ears, nappy-headed ho's, Reid's surrender, the Royal Navy playing ping-pong in Tehran; these are the foreground phantasmagoria. The plates are shifting for better or worse. Auden's The Fall Of Rome has a sense of these times:

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves...
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend...
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

I've often wondered why the Pentagon is in fact a pentagon. A pentagon isn't exactly an efficient geometric shape for a building.

We know why the Pentagon was built--the second world war required an extremely rapid construction of bureaucratic infrastructure for the war effort, and a 4 million square foot building was commissioned to be built in Arlington (there was no space in the capital for a building that large...).

It could also be no more than 4 stories tall because of the shortage of steel.

But why a pentagon?

It turns out that the initial site for the building was bounded by roads on five sides, and the building was designed to fit the site.

The Arlington Farm tract had a peculiar asymmetrical pentagon shape bound on five sides by roads or other divisions. Finally, guided by the odd shape of the plot, they designed an irregular pentagon. A sketch by Socrates Thomas Stathes, a young War Department draftsman, showed a square with a corner cut off, more or less matching the tract's shape. It was really two buildings, a five-sided ring surrounding a smaller one of the same shape.

All through the weekend, the architects refined the design. The interior of the outer ring was lined with 49 barracks-like wings, sticking in like the teeth of a comb. The smaller ring had 34 exterior wings, all pointing toward the outer ring. The wings were 50 feet wide and 160 feet long, separated from each other by 30-foot-wide open-air "light courts." Corridors connected the two rings on the ground and third floors. Only the most senior officials would have private offices. Allowing 100 square feet per worker, the building could hold 40,000 employees.

There were many problems with the irregular design. The pattern was awkward, and the routes between wings of the two buildings were circuitous. Lacking symmetry, with rows of wings sticking out, the building was frankly quite ugly. Yet, given the site, the pentagonal design had one overriding virtue, Stathes remembered more than 60 years later: "It fit."

Controversy emerged over the site at Arlington Farms (Robert E. Lee's former estate). The building blocked the view of Washington from the tomb of L'Enfant. Roosevelt was embarrassed at having promoted an ugly barracks-like structure for the Army-Navy on the Mall, and was loath to repeat the experience. Congress passed the appropriation, but Roosevelt had the site moved to near Hell's Bottom, which was still technicially within the purview of the legislation. There was not time to change the design, so the Pentagon shape was retained.

So now you and I both know how the Pentagon got its shape.

It all reminds me of the story of how the dimensions of the space shuttle were determined by the width of two horse's asses...

Unknown girl 1948-->

Back in the 1970s, I visited the Smithsonian with my father and passed through a display of 19th century machine tools. They were belt-driven from an overhead spindle turned by a steam engine. Mildly interesting until my father mentioned, "I used to work on machinery like this...."

I knew that Dad had trained as a machinist in Europe, but the display bore little resemblance to the modern lathes and milling machines in his shop.

"How old are you dad?"

It was my first awareness that my connection to the history books was in people I actually knew personally. People who had seen the first "flying machines", the first gasoline powered combustion engines. Dad was born in 1930, but its fairly common for machine tools to be used for decades before being replaced. Even the perceived "modern" machine tools I had worked on were often older than I was.

Years later, I realized I had become a link with the past as I had to adjust the color settings on the television to show my kids what black and white television looked like (they watched it that way the rest of the day...). Awesome technology from the 1980s are now amusing relics.

Yet its not just the technology that begins to look strange and out-of-place. People do as well. The Boat Lullabies has a fascinating collection of photographs tracing how one woman, likely born in the late 1930s, moved through the aging process and changing styles.

What will you look like in thirty years?

But he wasn't shot dead.

I enjoy reading Daniel Henninger but he had a major error in fact in today's print edition of the WSJ. He listed a littany of events that happened in 1968 and ended with this:

On Nov. 4 having absorbed all this, the people of the United States voted. They gave 43.3% of their vote to Richard Nixon and 42.7% to Hubert Humphrey. Alabama Gov. George Wallace got 13.5%. Four years later, George Wallace was shot dead while running for president. 1968 lasted a long time.

Wallace wound up paralyzed, not dead. He actually died in at the age of 79 in 1998. The online version has been corrected to omit the word dead. Maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan clued them in:

In Birmingham they love the governor Now we all did what we could do Now Watergate does not bother me Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth

The point of Hennigers column, "1968: The Long Goodbye" is that the sixties are dead. A younger generation wants to get off the psychedelic bus:

In 1968, Nicolas Sarkosy was 13 years old. John McCain was 32 and Hillary Clinton was 21. Barack Obama was 7. It is not beyond imagining that the precocious Messrs. Sarkozy and Obama were alert to events in 1968 but for the first wave of baby boomers just touching adulthood that year, it was the beginning of a strange journey.

I doubt Obama was keyed into those 1968 events. I was also 7 then; I don't know where he was, but I was a second grader in Valdosta Georgia. Our teacher conducted a class "vote" during the '68 presidential campaign. I cast the deciding vote for George Wallace. Not because it reflected my parents views (it didn't - but I didn't know at the time) I did it because that's who my friends voted for. My one and only time being a Dixiecrat.

Four years later I was pretty cognizant of politics. I stayed up to watch the election returns; but I didn't need to stay up late to see another George was going to recieve a pounding. It was the sixties that died in 1972 - not George Wallace. But it has been the Democrats that have been paralyzed ever since then.

UPDATE: Powerline makes additional corrections and comments.

Ted Kennedy has apparently received the largest advance in history to keep lying to us. OK, that is perhaps a little unfair. He's a Democrat, but he's not Bill or Hillary.

"I've been fortunate in my life to grow up in an extraordinary family and to have a front row seat at many key events in our nation's history," the 75-year-old Kennedy said in a statement. "I hope my reflections can contribute to a deeper understanding of many events in the history of this great country and to a more in-depth picture of an American family."

Bob Barnett, a Washington lawyer who represented Kennedy in the book auction, said he was "thrilled" with the deal for the book, which publishers expect will include details about Kennedy's personal life and his 45-year Senate career and the historic events he has witnessed.

"My sense is he's going to write his life as he lived it," Barnett said in an interview last night. "You will hear the [accounts] of these momentous events in the voice of the man who lived them."

The book is scheduled to be released in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the election of the senator's brother, President John F. Kennedy, and will cover the Kennedy administration, the assassinations of his brothers, the civil rights movement, and later events.

"It's going to be one of the most important memoirs of our time. He's been a seminal figure on the leading issues of post-World War II America," said Douglas Brinkley, a noted historian at Tulane University in Louisiana. "He's probably the most durable and interesting American politician that's had a sustained career, decade after decade, since Franklin Roosevelt."

I'd have to agree with the statement that Ted Kennedy is uniquely positioned to deliver some marvelous insights into important aspects of this country's history, but I wouldn't bet money that those insights will be in this book.

Democrats do lip service to the idea that we are all flawed human beings, especially when one of their public officials is in trouble, but as Bill and Hillary's biographies clearly demonstrate, the illusion of moral perfection must be maintained as far as possible. What is a Democrat without a sense of moral superiority?

Nevertheless a memoir should never be considered a definitive account of history, but it can be a valuable source. Here's hoping that the liberal lion will feel secure enough to let us see the warts.

…that modern liberalism and fascism are two peas in a pod. For you liberal readers, a bit of free education from Dictionary.com:

fas•cism [fash-iz-uh m] a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Hillary Care comes to mind - remember she would have made it a crime for doctors to work independently (Canada is beginning to throw off that burden but they seem to be well on the way to forcibly suppress opposition and criticism). And don’t forget the pillars of tolerance, our American Universities.

Old news to conservatives; but are some liberals getting it? Publisher’s Weekly, which leans a bit left, showed some surprise at liberal/fascist connections in their review of Jonah Goldberg’s new book “The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning”:

In this provocative and well-researched book, Goldberg probes modern liberalism's spooky origins in early 20th-century fascist politics…

He lays low such lights of liberal history as Margaret Sanger, apparently a radical eugenicist, and JFK, whose cult of personality, according to Goldberg, reeks of fascist political theater. Much of this will be music to conservatives' ears, but other readers may be stopped cold by the parallels Goldberg draws between Nazi Germany and the New Deal.

The author of this piece didn’t know the mother of the abortion movement was a radical eugenicist? Do they know she was racist too? The surprise Publisher’s Weekly shows is fascinating - they are supposedly in the business of reading books. If this is also news to other liberals, who somehow missed this during their university days, maybe they need to check that fascism definition again about suppression of opposition and criticism.

h/t Glenn Reynolds

The Democrats have done and said lots of things to annoy me over the years, but one of the most egregious was the assertion that our invasion of Iraq had isolated us and made us hated in the world.

As usual, they remove the salient context for their own political ends, which is, "hated by whom?"

It is good to be hated by some people. Would you really have wanted to good will of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia?

My parents were children during the second world war, but they remember the occupation of Germany and Austria, and I always found their pro-American attitudes somewhat counterintuitive--rather amazing really. I never heard even a lick of resentment and in fact, it was clear that they both considered the U.S. (with Canada and Australia) as "the promised land", with all the expectations and virtues associated with that biblical concept.

Part of it was economic, particularly in light of the post-war devastation, but the major attraction was the possibility of living in a "free country". My parents never really articulated what this meant, but over the years it became clear that what it meant to them was an opportunity to live in a country where the idea of freedom is sacred. Where the idea of freedom is so powerful that a country will go to war and sacrifice lives for the freedom of other people.

Other countries have good relations, but the U.S.A. elicits actual love.

That's easily seen from Bush's visit to former East bloc countries. Its not that they love Bush so much, but what he represents--the U.S.A. Freedom.

The reason is simple--while liberal pinheads like Dan Rather pontificate about speaking truth to power, the fine men and women of the U.S. military do it with their life's blood. Only two kinds of people are going to love the U.S. for the right reasons--the people who owe their freedom to it, and those who value freedom as much as we do. The powerful and those with a stake in the status quo, no matter how objectionable--the Jacques Chiracs and Gerhard Schröders of the world, are not going to be friendly to the U.S. when its busy speaking truth to power.

The roots of Americas machinery of freedom are explored in a new book by Michael Know Beran and excerpted in City Journal: Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

The new machinery of freedom, though Anglo-American in design, was universal in scope. At its core was the idea, as yet imperfectly realized, that all human beings possess a fundamental dignity. This was a truth that, Abraham Lincoln believed, was “applicable to all men and all times.” In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the Rhine and the Neva as on the Potomac and the Thames.

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, and in America, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a new philosophy of coercion.

It was founded on two ideas. The first: paternalism. Landowners in Russia and in the American South argued that their domestic institutions embodied the paternal principle: the bondsman had, in his master, a compassionate father to look after him, and thus was better off than the worker in the cruel world of free labor. In Germany, Prussian aristocrats sought to implement a paternal code designed to make the masses more subservient to the state. The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

The opposition of Democrats to the war in Iraq, and particularly the offensive rhetoric that deemed liberation immoral, simply demonstrates who the institutional opponents of the soul of America really are. Perhaps nothing emphasized that cynicism better than John Kerry's remarks about the Vietnam war.

Let me just say to the first part of your question with respect to Boat People and killing... everybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietman. There were reeducation camps, and they weren’t [garbled]. Nobody likes that kind of outcome, but I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those education camps who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.

Kerry's casual description of life under a repressive communist regime as "thriving" is chilling, and only underscores the cynicism of the Democrat establishment. No doubt blacks are also "thriving" under a regime of entitlement slavery and paternalist affirmative action.

The college Republicans at the University of Chicago are doing their bit today to give some sensitivity training to Lefties insensible of the murderous nature of Che Guevara. Snapped this shot in the foyer of the Goodspeed Hall this afternoon. I would assume the hammer and sickle cast its shadow. Bonus picture of May Day on campus.

Another answer to the pathetic bunch at MoveOn: "Because only Spartan women give birth to real men."

HT Hugh Hewitt