Ric Locke's Blog, page 6

eBook Formats

There are a lot of them, and figuring out what's what can be confusing. It can also be frustrating when the book you want is only available in a format your reader doesn't support.

Enter Calibre. Most eBook readers come with software that serves as a librarian and/or sorting utility as well as transferring new eBooks from the computer or Internet to the reader. Calibre does all that very smoothly and comprehensibly; in addition, if your reader is on its list (most are) you can simply tell it to download your new eBook regardless of format, and the program will convert it on the fly. You can also use it to manually convert among eBook formats — that's how I use it — with nifty optional features like sorting out the Table of Contents correctly, font size changes, page breaks before chapters, &ct. Transferring books to the reader is a little faster if they're already in native format, but with modern computers the difference is trivial.

You can also use it as an eBook reader on your computer. Most eBook formats are really (ssh! don't tell) HTML with stuff added or subtracted to make them proprietary, but reading a book in a browser gets you text all across the screen and sometimes odd fonts. Calibre's internal viewer simulates the display of your eBook reader, showing the same amount of text as it does in the same format, which is much more comfortable.

It also has some features I haven't used, such as accessing news sources with conversion on the fly to your eReader. If you want to read the newspaper but are tired of pages flopping across the subway car, you can apparently do that (as I say, I haven't tried, being Not Interested to the point of rejecting the notion).

Downsides: It's Free Software, meaning it was originally written for Linux. All that really means is that, in common with other software from similar sources, Windows users shouldn't leave it up all the time. Use it when needed and exit when done, and the Memory Eater won't lock up the computer for you. If you're actually running Linux or -nix you're golden, and yes, there's a Mac (OS X) version.

Highly recommended, with five gold stars. (Note: I have nothing to do with Calibre or its developers, except as a satisfied user.) Best of all, those of you with Nooks or Sonys no longer have an excuse not to buy Temporary Duty. Download and install Calibre, plug in your reader, and pay Amazon; a few minutes or seconds later, there's the .epub ready to read. I'd just about have to recommend it, now wouldn't I?

Government Says NO

That's what it's for. That's what a Government does, starting with the fundamental "no, you can't invade us and take our stuff". We've mostly formalized that as "Rule of Law", but that's what Law is, a list of Thou Shalt Nots.

It's useful if not taken too far. NO you can't rob people, NO you can't kill people at random, NO you can't drive 120 MPH in a school zone. A consistently applied set of ground rules creates an atmosphere of mutual trust among the People, who can then trade and interact with confidence.

Government bureaucrats know that their job is to say NO. They are also as competitive as any other bunch of human beings, and they seek status among their fellows by finding more and more reasons to perform their function, and by being more and more effective in their work. They also seek to get their relatives and friends on the gravy train, and those appointees seek to justify their employment by conspicuously performing their duties. Those duties involve saying NO, and whether or not any single one of them is effective at it, as the mass grows the NOs accumulate into blockages.

Moe Lane points out that one of the Democrats' "talking points" for the 2012 campaign is highlighting a modest job-creation agenda blocked by Republicans. What needs to be pointed out is that almost the entirety of that "job-creation agenda" has been focused on creating or saving (!) Government jobs. Every pendulous appendage (above or below the waist) thus employed immediately begins beavering away at his or her prime task, which is saying NO as often, as creatively, and as expansively as possible. The low-hanging fruit having been picked long ago, the NOs have to be applied to newly discovered imperatives: NO you can't disturb the desert lizards, NO you can't build that dam/pipeline/factory/power plant, NO you can't employ people without jumping through hoops…

It's estimated that regulation — Government saying NO in more and more detailed ways — costs the U. S. economy almost two trillion dollars a year. Every Government bureaucrat added is one more NO added to the list of things that aren't allowed, and a lot of those NOs mean even more cost in terms of lost employment and lost economic opportunity. Adding more Government employees doesn't stimulate the economy, it represses it. Every Government job "created or saved" means at least one, usually more, non-Government job lost or destroyed, and it's non-Government jobs that form the economy that pays for everything.

Republicans should say, early, often, and as loudly as possible, that Government employment isn't job creation, it's job destruction. However modest that agenda may be, anybody who wants to have jobs and prosperity should be blocking it at every possible turn.

Self-Publishing

Temporary Duty is now available from Amazon in Kindle format (with cover by Stoaty Weasel, yay!). As a result, I'm taking down all but the first seven chapters, which can be considered a "teaser". The downbeat ending can stay; it doesn't appear in the (self-) published book.

With Many Thanks to Stoaty Weasel

I hope to make it available in other formats soon, and am actively looking for options.

Thanks to everybody who's helped, from readers to copy editors.

Selfishness

Ilya Somin misses the point:

In a recent widely-cited Washington Post column, conservative commentator Michael Gerson claims that libertarians promote "a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness." The accusation that libertarians are really advocates of selfishness is a very common one. Googling "libertarianism + selfishness" yields 1.9 million hits, the majority of which are attacks on libertarianism similar to Gerson's.

So does Gerson, and part of the reason is that at least some libertarians embrace "selfishness" as a self-characterization. Leftoids, and collectivists in general, reduce the definition of "selfish" to "wanting to keep stuff". It is a fundamental of libertarianism that people who have stuff should be allowed to keep it, and that society should help them do so. If simply wanting to keep stuff is "selfish", libertarians are defiantly fine with that. It comes from the same impulse that gave us "Yankee Doodle" as an American anthem.

Generous people see the unfortunate and help them from their own resources. Collectivists (in which term I include "compassionate conservatives" as well as left-Liberals, Socialists, et. al.) want somebody else to help, so that they can guard their own stuff with miserly avidity. I've lost the link, which came via Norm Geras, but there is at least one prominent British Leftist who advocates frank acknowledgement of that motive. Leftoids and collectivists accuse others of "selfishness" as a way of deflecting the fact that they, themselves, are profoundly and destructively selfish and covetous.

Across most human societies, people who take stuff away from others are considered Bad ("robbers", "thieves", etc.). This is an obstacle to collectivists, who want to take stuff away from others (in order to Do Good, or so they loudly proclaim). Fortunately there's a loophole. It is a Good Thing to punish Bad People, and taking stuff away from them is a suitable punishment.The conclusion is obvious: define the people who have the stuff you want as Bad People. Taking stuff away from Bad People, to punish them for being Bad, is then virtuous — and, as a bonus, you get the stuff. Only a cynic would suggest that getting the stuff was the point in the first place.

Productive people inevitably have more stuff than the non-productive. It follows from the Sutton Rule that those who want stuff must take it from the productive. Since they must define the people who have the stuff they want as Bad People, collectivists must inevitably define the productive as Bad. Nobody wants to be included in the Bad People list, so they avoid being Bad (producers) and try to be Good (consumers). The society sinks into poverty, because nobody wants to be Bad.

This is especially pernicious in an industrial society. An industrial society requires concentrating stuff into big piles (the "means of production", or capital). The custodians of the big piles clearly have a lot of stuff, which is an irresistible magnet to the collectivist. Having a lot of stuff must therefore be defined as Bad ("rich"), so that the collectivists can help themselves to the stuff. When they do, the big piles go away — but all the stuff in an industrial society comes from production. If there are no big piles there are no means of production, therefore no production, therefore no stuff. The society sinks into poverty, with the collectivists shrieking all the way down that people who don't give them stuff are Bad. Poverty is increasing! We have to have more stuff to correct that! Take it from the Bad People!

Western societies are more productive than most (all?) others, and a good chunk of the reason for that is one of Christ's fundamental teachings. Christianity says that it is not virtuous to punish Bad People; that's God's job, and He doesn't need any help. (It may be necessary to make the society work properly, but it isn't virtuous.) A Christian has no justification for taking stuff away from Bad People to punish them, and that takes away the prime excuse for taking stuff. That teaching, however tenuously accepted, allowed Western society to accumulate big piles of stuff and use it to produce more stuff — wealth. Abandoning the principle allows collectivists to claim virtue because they take stuff from Bad People, which destroys the wealth-producing mechanisms the principle allowed.

Libertarians, who are often (though not universally) atheists, are attempting to define the Christian principle as a secular one. Taking stuff away from people is always a Bad Thing; it may be necessary, but it's still Bad, and should therefore be avoided when possible. Collectivists resist that attempt, wanting to Do Good with others' stuff while jealously guarding their own, and demanding that they be recognized as Good for taking stuff away from Bad People. Criticizing libertarians for "selfishness" is accusing them of not coughing up when the leftoids (liberals, "compassionate conservatives", et. al.) demand their stuff so they can selfishly conserve their own while Doing Good, and be defined as Good People for that. It is deeply and profoundly selfish, and the criticism is intended to deflect that judgement.

Boudreaux Needs a Big Pireau

The Corps of Engineers is going to open the Morganza Spillway. By the time you read this, they may already have done so. This is a big, big deal.

Left to themselves, rivers flowing through flat country change course all the time. There's a positive feedback mechanism: If a loop or bend starts, the water has to flow faster to get to the end in the same time, and "centrifugal force"[1] makes it faster on the outside of the loop. That erodes the outside bank and deposits sediment on the inside, and the loop grows bigger and bigger until the same effect at the "neck" of the loop wears through, whereupon the loop becomes an isolated slough and the river flows straight until the next loop starts to form.

Most of the middle part of the United States is relatively flat, largely because the Mississippi and its tributaries have eroded it down over the eons. The natural course of those rivers would be a series of growing and shrinking loops, with annual floods spreading over wide expanses of surrounding land. That's not convenient for the people living nearby. The loops increase the length, making barge traffic take longer, and an incredible amount of American commerce goes by barge up and down the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the rest of the system. Some of the most valuable farm land in America is found in the flood plains, where the river has deposited sediment in earlier epochs, and if the river changes course that farmland can disappear under water. That isn't the worst part, because a roughly equal amount of new land would then be exposed — but our land use patterns are based on fixed boundaries, and if the river takes a hundred acres away from one farmer and gives it to another, it causes all kinds of legal problems. Rivers are also commonly State or National boundaries, and that can be a big legal problem. There are already many places where the boundary isn't the river any more, it's where the river was at some earlier time.

That's especially important at a place called Old River. In a delta, which is by definition quite flat, rivers deposit sediment that eventually blocks their path, which results in the water seeking a new outlet. Every river delta has multiple mouths that switch off over time as the sediment builds. The channel that passes through Baton Rouge and New Orleans has been building up sediment for the entire time the country has been settled, and water had begun to flow via the Old River through the Atchafalaya, bypassing the settled areas. That process would naturally result in the Mississippi using a new mouth of its delta, 'way to the west of the main settlements, and that would be a financial problem verging on disaster, not just for the people of Baton Rouge and New Orleans but for the country as a whole. There are billions, possibly trillions, of dollars in capital infrastructure along the existing path — barge and ship terminals for everything from exported grain to imported LNG, and the support for those — that would be rendered worthless by the change in the river's course. At best they would all have to be rebuilt. At worst it might mean moving two major cities lock, stock, and liquor stores. Keynesians would rejoice, but that wouldn't just be a broken window, it'd be tearing down the shop and the city it's in.

So the Corps of Engineers built the Old River Control Structure, which forces the river to continue on its present path, and the Morganza Spillway, which is designed to relieve pressure on the Old River structure when conditions make it necessary. That has had all kinds of undesirable side effects. The major one, from the point of view of the engineers, is that the buildup of sediment has continued, requiring building higher and higher levees along the river banks. There are lots and lots of places where the river is considerably higher than the surrounding land, and if the levees ever break it'll be like popping a balloon — it's hard to tell just where the water would go, but it's certain that wherever it went it'd be expensive for lots of people. Another is environmental problems. In order to keep the river moving at all, and therefore transporting at least some of the sediment to the Gulf of Mexico instead of blocking traffic, more and more water has to be forced into the main channel, and that starves the rest of the delta of sediment. Looking at a time-lapse map of Louisiana can be eye-opening. Places that used to be dry land are now swamp; places that used to be swamp are now open channels, many of them to the Gulf, because there's no sediment to keep them built up. Not only is the land area of Louisiana shrinking at a remarkable rate, the simplification of the delta means if the water does start flowing it will move fast instead of slowing and spreading. Levees and spillways and control structures have turned into a Red Queen's race, with the engineers running as hard as they can to keep the present conditions in place.

Now we have major flooding in the entire Mississippi river system, and face Hobson's Choice: either let some of that water go where Nature would have put it long ago, or let several major cities along the rivers flood out completely. It's already been done further upstream, to the vocal displeasure of local land and business owners and Governments, but if the Corps of Engineers loses the race and the Mississippi goes to Morgantown the diversions in Illinois and northern Missouri will look like kids playing mud-pie.

Letting Baton Rouge and New Orleans turn into backwater (literally!) villages would be a big economic hit, but that would play out over some time. The immediate problem would be the oil industry. A vast amount of oil passes through South Louisiana because the network of delta channels allow easier access for tankers than is available in Houston, Orange/Port Arthur, or Mobile. There are refineries, storage tanks, pipeline facilities, tanker offloading ports, and a thousand thousand other bits scattered over the whole area that might get flooded, and parts of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be affected. Even shutting them down or curtailing operations to cope with the unexpected water will form a bottleneck that will make it harder to get fuel to the people who need it, and raise the prices. If they get destroyed the impact will be huge.

Greens will approve, because the new path would restore sediment deposition to an area that's been starved of it for years with huge impact on the ecosystem and habitat. I probably ought to cheer, because that would be very good for Texas, which is the only place even partly prepared to take up the slack. Overall, though, it would be a bad thing for everybody in the country, as the oil business, already suffering from natural, technical, and Governmental disasters, reels from the impact. Keep your eye on the news. Morganza is intended to relieve pressure on Old River, and the impact of opening Morganza is going to be big. If they ever talk about opening Old River, be prepared for the job of essentially rebuilding everything economically important in a triangle whose corners are approximately Lake Charles, Freeport MS, and Memphis. The idiom used in my childhood was "Katie, bar the door". In this case, though, Katie barred the door long ago, and is now trying to cope with battering rams.

[1] Yes, an oversimplification. It's useful as a first approximation.

Horror Stories

We have yet another breathless story of the Horror of Global Warming: it might cut the range of wifi signals! At least according to British bureaucrats, who suggest (of course) that they be given a few billion pounds to work out the details and perhaps ameliorate the problem.

Rubbish, on several levels. Communications engineers have a lot of problems, but heat isn't one of the show-stoppers. In electronics in general, the superstars are the ones who can take a half-inch square of stuff thinner than a fingernail, and write on it what would be, if it was characters, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad-Gita, with room left for personal notes; but the heroes are the ones who can wrap that scrap in black plastic and feed it enough power to run a floodlight without having it burn to a crisp. Heat is a normal hazard, and there are lots of ways to overcome it, or even make it work for you.

If you want to strike fear into the hearts of communications engineers, show them this:

Fear! Danger! It's Coming to Get You! (or at least your cable)

Yes, my friends, warmening may reduce the range of your wifi, at least 'til the engineers can pump a little more power into it and improve the processing, but "backhoe fade" can cut whole countries off the Internet. Cable people don't wake in the night from dreams of zombies. They hear, off in the middle distance, the sound of a big Diesel overlaid with voices: Shit, Leroy, just dig the damn hole. That there pipe's gotta be down there somewhere. (Or the equivalent in any of the tongues where Diggus Redneckus finds favorable habitat, which nowadays is anywhere on Earth.) AAAAAAAAARGH! There, there, dear, you just had a bad dream. I'll bring you something to help you sleep. — Better make it a Nembutal, honey.

Ms. Spelman of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) assures us that for a mere £1bn. or so, she and her dedicated fellows can find ways to ameliorate the problem. There have been a spate of these announcements over the past few years, all of them reporting in suitably horrified tones that some newly-discovered effect of TMPB[1] will kill us all unless we give them (the people making the report) lots and lots of money and the power to order people around.They seem to believe it will have the desired (by them) effect.

Sorry, Caroline. The difficulty is this: Even if we took your solemn pronouncements at face value, you are among the last people we would trust to solve the problem. There are others less qualified — the denizens of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro come to mind — but you aren't even on the first page of the Google search. Or the hundredth, for that matter. You belong firmly with the Millenialists, crouched around a cross on a windy hilltop waiting for the End of the World, and only their hypnotized Believers take those nutcases seriously enough to put them in charge.

[1]Too Many People Breathing, a.k.a. "carbon dioxide"

bin Laden and International Law

The correct answer is: "Why should we care?"

International law, as it stands, attempts to protect the privileges and immunities of people who should not be either privileged or immune. It is, on the whole, an attempt to codify the situation as it existed prior to the Thirty Years War: "Ach, Gottfried, it's just so damn boring around here. Let's go start a war. Killing off peasants will liven the place up a bit." Autocrats, dictators, and tyrants of all stripes, Governmental or private, can send their unconsidered minions off to do a bit of violence, and attackers and defenders alike end up killing off a bunch of gormless plebes, while the originators of the problem are protected from "assassination" or "targeting of leadership" according to International Law.

It ought to be the other way 'round, and as long as the notion of Constitutional amendments is floating around, I would support one obliging the Commander in Chief to do his utmost to discover the originators, planners, and inspirers of any attack on the United States and take them out first, rather than sending our goons to tangle with their goons in pointless, bloody violence.

The United States, and Western democracies in general, are well-nigh immune to reciprocal attacks. Oh, Presidents and Prime Ministers can get killed, no doubt about it — but in Western forms of Government officeholders are, to a close approximation, replaceable at will. When John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas we had a new President before nightfall, and although some of the policies of the American Government changed with the New Guy at the helm, the continuity of "the regime" was never in question in any way. Killing the President would piss everybody in the United States off, but at the end of that day there would be a President and a U. S. Government still doing business at the same stand. The same is true of the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and all the other countries of the Western world.

The same is most emphatically NOT true of our opponents. The ultimate authors of our current misfortunes can be found in two buildings, both locatable on Google Earth, with honorable mention to two others nearby the first. Taking any or all of them out would relieve the pressure on us enormously; "targeted killing" of the specific individuals presiding over those places would do as well or better, because the regimes involved revolve around those people, and (unlike with us) if reconstituted with new Supreme Leaders would end up working very differently. The same is true of Bashir al-Assad, Muammar al-Khadafi, Robert Mugabe, Little Kim, and a host of others whose regimes are deserving of the name because the kingpin is genuinely irreplaceable without major upheavals. Tyrants and dictators simply cannot have a "bench" of people prepared to leap into action if the star player sprains a frontal lobe, because if they did it would also constitute a pool of people both anxious and capable of hurrying the replacement process. Asssassinating one of them will inevitably cause major changes, where killing off a Western leader will get you disinvited to most social occasions but won't change anything material, certainly not in the short term.

In most cases, we don't have any severe beef with spear-carriers, grunts impressed (either sense) to do us hurt, or the ordinary householders and shopkeepers, and even when we do have a beef with them they're unlikely to have the capability to do much, but they're the ones who inevitably get wasted by "kinetic military action" while the planners and authors hide behind smarmy declarations of immunity under International Law. Bullshit. If a "regime" or other organization declares its intent to damage the United States or any other Western country, the management of that regime ought to be subject to change with prejudice and without notice.

If you want to end the War on Terror, take out Imam Khameini and the Council of Mullahs — a couple of 500-lb JADAMs would be plenty, with a little on-the-ground intelligence. It is very likely that Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz (minister of defence) and Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz (minister of Interior and, since 2009, second deputy prime minister) of Saudi Arabia would get the hint, but if they did not, we know where they are; it is certain that the Government of Iran would look quite different afterward. Better? Worse? For us, or for them? Who knows? More importantly, who gives a damn? We've tried all the "logical" avenues and all the "diplomatic" ones, to little or no avail. Time to shake the Magic 8-Ball and get a different card in the window. International Law be damned. Let's stop wasting grunts (theirs or ours) and start targeting kingpins. It might even encourage others.

Somewhere, John Lewis Cries

Decertification of public sector unions continues apace, even in such strongholds as California. The most visible case is Wisconsin, of course.

Throughout the sinistrosphere there is lamentation which occasionally spills over into comment in rightist blogs: "Unions gave us decent working conditions and good pay! This will take us back to child labor and sweatshops!" Well, probably not. What the whole contretemps illustrates is that unions were the wrong solution to a real problem.

To review: Industrialization required capital equipment, which was expensive. It was, in general, financed by people who were already rich and wanted to get richer. The capitalists had power, especially over workers, and as usual with people who have power they misused it. Unions were proposed and implemented as a countervailing power center — the workers' organization would have power which could counteract that of employers, resulting in better conditions for the workers. It all sounds very plausible, doesn't it?

That paradigm resulted in unionization across the industrialized world, and did provide at least some gains for workers — though, as is pointed out now and again, a lot of the gains attributed to unions can be explained just as well as the interests of employers. The problem is that it ignores the very abuse it was intended to counteract. Rule #3: Power attracts power-seekers. Union leaders acquired power and promptly began abusing it, while generating just enough benefit for the members to keep themselves in power. In general, setting up a power bloc to oppose another one is a bad idea because of this effect. It produces a sort of stasis between mirror-image powers that looks like "peace" but results in the people it's supposed to benefit scurrying below the lightning bolts being exchanged by the belligerents.

What works better is infiltration and subversion, and that works really well when one of the power blocs provides explicit methods to accommodate it. It was very early realized that there weren't nearly enough people who were rich enough to finance the Industrial Revolution out of existing resources; some other way of accumulating capital was necessary. As de Soto (the recent economist, not the old explorer) established, the real reservoir of wealth in any society is the widely-distributed small chunks of private capital: houses, cars, personal possessions of all sorts. In order to tap that source to finance the new factories, capitalists retreaded the notion of the "corporation". A corporation sells shares, uses the money to build capital facilities ("the means of production"), and distributes the profits to its owners, the ones who bought shares. It is, at root, what Marx was demanding — the workers have to own the means of production, because only they can afford them!

Suppose that, instead of being set up as mirror-image power blocs, the United (X) Workers had been organized as investment alliances, sort of like what we call today "mutual funds". Dues would be used to buy shares in the company, dividends and share-value growth would be used to finance workers' benefits, and soon or late the union's investments would result in an active voice in company policy. There were, at the time, templates for just that — the "fraternal organizations", the Moose Lodge and Odd Fellows and many others, existed primarily for just that purpose. By now, after a century or better of continuous investment, the unions, representing the workers, would either own or control most large companies. Marx's vision would be realized: the workers would own the means of production.

What we've had, instead, was union leaders cementing their power by weakening the corporate structure. Over most of the Western world, we really haven't added to our capital stock since WWII. Factories and the like have been financed by borrowing, because the tax structure established to keep union leaders in power well-nigh forbids capital formation on the ground that "capital" means "wealth", which has to be taken away to Benefit the Poor. That policy is coming back to bite us in the butt at the moment.

Repeating that mistake with public sector unions has, and can have, only horrific results for everyone except union leaders. As above, the whole point of a union is as a power bloc to oppose the power of employers — but in the public sector, the "employers" are the Government entities and the taxpayers who support them. A public sector union is an attempt to remove control of Government from "we the People" and transfer it to union leaders who are theoretically accountable only to their own union's members, and in practice can manipulate the system so as to be accountable to no one. That is becoming apparent to the most dedicated Leftist, and the less-dedicated are starting to take steps to correct the problem.

It is perhaps too much to ask that the process also include another look at private-sector unions, with a view to redirecting their efforts into avenues that would benefit the society we live in, but a fellow can dream.

Yay. Also Hooray, Boo-wah, etc.

Seals whacked Osama bin Laden, and America celebrates.

Ding dong the witch is dead. Hip hip hurrah!

<fx: Ric holds up miniature American flag on a stick, and waves it, once, before the camera>

This is not in any way to take anything away from the guys who pulled it off, including the cubicle dwellers back at Langley and elsewhere who patiently put all the pieces together. It's an amazing achievement, and they ought to drink free for the rest of their lives — not that the analysts will get to do that, or even be able to tell people they had anything to do with it. Remembering events almost exactly twenty-one years ago, the mechanics who made the helicopters work instead of going down with mechanical failures far from the objective also need to get some credit.

Nor is it an excess of sour grapes. If President Obama signed off on the operation — and he had to — he deserves kudos for doing something right. Had it gone wrong, it would've been another Operation Eagle Claw, and the President would be carrying the can for it.

But this is not a Superman comic or a Dick Tracy strip. Taking out the Villainous Kingpin will not cause the rest of Teh Organization to fall apart into a gaggle of ignorant, uncooperative goons to be rounded up by Our Boys in Blue. Osama bin Laden hasn't been anywhere near the center of operations since Tora Bora, if not a year before that. Al Qaeda will go on as before, perhaps with a martyr to inspire them, perhaps not. As Stacy says, "…anyone who thinks this means the whole struggle is over is self-identifying as a rube."

It is, perhaps, somewhat useful symbolically. But I have to disagree with Kate, and agree at least partially with Bene Diction. Islamists danced in the streets after 9/11/01; Americans are dancing in the streets at the death of the Bad Guy, out of the same emotions precisely. What it needs is an old-fashioned word: it's unseemly. From time to time we have to kill bad guys, and doing so is a success to be lauded and celebrated, but such celebrations ought to be kept low-key. Necessary evils remain evil.

Symbolic gestures can be useful. If this inspires another Islamist leader to echo Qaddafi — "I am afraid of the Americans" — it might be a good thing. If it inspires the Pakistani Government to wonder if playing both ends against the middle can be dangerous, especially if Americans are holding one of the ends, well and good. But its primary effect will be, as intended, on US politics. For the next year and a half, if you bitch about $5 gas or try to suggest that appointing the BPP to monitor election fairness is a bad idea, the response will be "But Obama got bin Laden, and Bush couldn't do that."

And the Correct Response is:

So the f* what?

The Sun will rise tomorrow, in a generally Easterly direction.

I am a racist.

Now: are you going to head up the Dulles access road on your way to the District tomorrow morning with the Sun at your back, because a racist said it'd be in your eyes?

No, because there's no connection between the two pronouncements. Sunrise is a matter of physics, and physics is the same whether the person talking about it is racist or not. The two things have nothing to do with one another.

News flash for all you leftoids, buttheads, and general assholes: It is perfectly possible to have opinions, even derogatory ones, about the policies, performance, personality, and personal and/or oral hygiene of Barack Obama whether or not the person emitting the opinion likes, hates, or cares one way or another what his melanin content might be. This was the whole point behind the ministry of Martin Luther King: the two have nothing to do with one another. If the point under discussion is character, skin color is irrelevant. If I don't like it that he's black, too — and I haven't said any such thing — the comment on policy, etc., still stands.

So when I express an objection and you holler "raaaaacist!" at me, my response is going to be, "Yah. So the f* what? Answer the objection, asshole." If you don't have an answer to the objection, you've got nothing and need to shut the f* up.

And if you're the one offering an objection and all you get for your trouble is "raaaaacist!" that's the correct approach, although if you're in a situation where politeness is a positive it might be better to say "what's that got to do with it?" or a nice, long-drawn-out "Aaaaaand…?" rather than "So the F* what?", which is maybe a little crude. Some variant of that is still the right response, though, especially since the "racer" almost certainly has no answer to the substantive objection — or even, in most cases, any useful degree of comprehension of it.